-2

百度搜索 Steppenwolf 天涯 或 Steppenwolf 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

    It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated phenomenon, in his relation, for example, to the beois world, so that his symptoms may be traced to their source. Let us take as a starting point, si offers itself, his relation to the beoisie.

    To take his own view of the matter, the Steppenwolf stood entirely outside the world of vention, since he had her family life nor social ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the on run of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them. Deliberately, he looked down upon the ordinary man and roud that he was not one. heless his life in many aspects was thhly ordinary. He had money in the bank and supported poor relations. He was dressed respectably and inspicuously, even though without particular care. He was glad to live on good terms with the polid the tax collectors and other such powers. Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted to the little beois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and fort. It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices aravagances, as a queer fellenius, but he never had his domicile in those provinces of life where the beoisie had ceased to exist. He was not at ease with violent and exceptional persons or with criminals and outlaws, aook up his abode always among the middle classes, with whose habits and standards and atmosphere he stood in a staion, even though it might be one of trast a. Moreover, he had been brought up in a provincial and ventional home and many of the notions and much of the examples of those days had never left him. In theory he had nothing whatever against the servant class, yet in practice it would have been beyond him to take a servant quite seriously as his equal. He was capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or intellectual seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother, but as for theft and robbery, murder and rape, be would not have known how to deplore them otherwise than in a thhly beois manner.

    In this way he was always reising and affirming with one half of himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against and denied. Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved manner, he ore part of his soul loose from its ventionalities even after he had long sindividualised himself to a degree beyond its scope and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and beliefs.

    Now what we call "beois," when regarded as a always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a bala is the striving after a meaween the tless extremes and opposites that arise in human duct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately prehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. Oher hand, he  equally give himself up eo the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attai of momentary pleasures. The oh leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surreo God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surreo corruption. Now it is betweewo, in the middle of the road, that the beois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr ree to his owru. On the trary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his owy. He strives her for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready tod, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and fortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zohout violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that iy of life and feeling whi extreme life affords. A man ot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the beois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of iy he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does fort to pleasure, venieo liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner ing fire. The beois is sequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.

    It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he exists, aintain himself, and that qualities such as his  play no other role in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when anding natures are uppermost, the beois goes at oo the wall, he never goes under; i times he even appears to rule the world. How is this possible? her the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor on sense, nanization could avail to save it from destru. No medie in the world  keep a pulse beating that from the outset was so weak. heless the beoisie prospers. Why?

    The answer runs: Because of the Steppenwolves. In fact, the vital force of the beoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its normal members, but in those of its extremely numerous "outsiders" who by virtue of the extensiveness aicity of its ideals it  embrace. There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who share the life of the fold. Our Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic example. He who is developed far beyond the level possible to the beois, he who knows the bliss of meditation han the gloomy joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who despises law, virtue and on sense, is heless captive to the beoisie and ot escape it. And so all through the mass of the real beoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the call to unditioned life, were they not fasteo it by ses of their childhood and ied for the most part with its less intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation and service. For with the beoisie the opposite of the formula for the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.

    If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him distinct from the beois in the higher development of his individuality—for all extreme individuation turns against itself, i upon its owru. We see that he had in him strong impulses both to be a saint and a profligate; a he could not, owing to some weakness or iia, make the pluo the untrammelled realms of space. The parent stellation of the beoisie binds him with its spell. This is his pla the universe and this his bondage. Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the stro of them force their way through the atmosphere of the beois earth and attain to the ic. The others all resign themselves or make promises. Despising the beoisie, a belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil star in a quite siderable affli; and in this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free seek their reward in the unditioned and go down in splendor. They wear the thorn  and their number is small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the beoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary a a sn world, humor. The lone wolves who know no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge fedy has been denied and who ever break through the starry space, who feel themselves summohither a ot survive in its atmosphere—for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough aiough, a way of recilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something beois in it, although the true beois is incapable of uanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and many-faceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the beois, too, in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (or for any other of the unditioo affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the beois. Humor alohat magnifit discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short edy are yet as ri gifts as in affli, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of humaehin the rays of its prism. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law ao stand above it, to have possessions as though "one possessed nothing," to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of aed worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor aloo make efficacious.

    And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and resources iy, iing this magic draught in the sultry mazes of his hell, his rescue would be assured. Yet there is much lag. The possibility, the hope only are there. Whoever loves him and takes his part may wish him this rescue. It would, it is true, keep him forever tied to the beois world, but his suffering would be bearable and productive. His relation to the beois world would lose its seality both in its love and in its hatred, and his boo it would cease to cause him the tinual torture of shame.

    To attain to this, or, perhaps it may be, to be able at least to dare the leap into the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look at himself. He must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and plumb its depths. The riddle of his existence would then be revealed to him at on all its gelessness, and it would be impossible for him ever after to escape first from the hell of the flesh to the forts of a seal philosophy and then back to the blind y of his wolfishness. Man and wolf would then be pelled tnise one another without the masks of false feeling and to look one araight in the eye. Then they would either explode and separate forever, and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they would e to terms in the dawning light of humor.

    It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter alternative. It is possible that he will learn one day to know himself. He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may enter the Immortals. He may find in one of ic theaters the very thing that is o free his ed soul. A thousand such possibilities await him. His fate brings them on, leaving him no choice; for those outside of the beoisie live imosphere of these magic possibilities. A mere nothing suffices—and the lightning strikes.

    And all this is very well known to the Steppenwolf, even though his eye may never fall on this fragment of his inner biography. He has a suspi of his allotted pla the world, a suspi of the Immortals, a suspi that he may meet himself face to face; and he is aware of the existence of that mirror in which he has such bitter o look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear.

    For the close of our study there is left one last fi, a fual delusion to make clear. All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things prehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respeg author should not omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as may be in his power. If I say "above" or "below," that is already a statement that requires explanation, sin above and a below exist only in thought, only as abstras. The world itself knows nothing of above or below.

    So too, to e to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fi. When Harry feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to sist of two hostile and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if eared to accept without scrutiny this lie which he ied for himself and believes in, and tried tard him literally as a two-fold being and a Steppenwolf, and so designated him, it was merely in the hope of being more easily uood with the assistance of a delusion, which we must now endeavor to put in its true light.

    The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which Harry tries to make his destiny more prehensible to himself is a very great simplification. It is a f of the truth to suit a plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that tradi which this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds in himself a human being, that is to say, a world of thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this he finds within himself also a wolf, that is to say, a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature. In spite of this apparently clear division of his beiween two spheres, hostile to one another, he has knoy moments now and thehe man and the wolf for a short while were reciled with one another. Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment of his life, any si, art the man had in it and art the wolf, he would find himself at on a dilemma, and his whole beautiful wolf-theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so vely simple that his being  be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so plex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry sists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyones does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

    We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rid plex anism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications—and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men tard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment reizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderers voice as his own, is at the  moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles bato the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and ns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspi of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at ohe majority puts them under lod key, calls sce to aid, establishes sania and protects humanity from the y of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and iing person. Iy, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a stellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of iances and potentialities. It appears to be a y as imperative as eating and breathing for everyoo be forced tard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

    The delusios simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate achievement, we find this ary  with apparently whole and single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, si offers (ht offer) the greatest possibilities of representing the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by lodging eae in an undeniable body, singly, separately and ond for all. An artless esthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes his appearanmistakably as a separate and siity. Only from afar and by degrees the suspi dawns here and there that all this is perhaps a cheap and superficial esthetic philosophy, and that we make a mistake in attributing treat dramatists those magnifit ceptions of beauty that e to us from antiquity. These ceptions are not native to us, but are merely picked up at sed hand, and it is in them, with their on sour the visible body, that the in of the fi of an ego, an individual, is really to be found. There is no trace of such a notion in the poems of a India. The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of inations. And in modern times there are poems, in which, behind the veil of a  with individuality and character that is scarcely, indeed, ihors mind, the motive is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes this must resolve ond for all not tard the characters of such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a higher unity, in my opinion, of the poets soul. If "Faust" is treated in this way, Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and the rest form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed. When Faust, in a line immortalized among sasters and greeted with a shudder of astonishment by the Philistine, says: "Two souls, alas, do dwell within my breast!" he has fotten Mephisto and a whole crowd of other souls that he has in his breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but tless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The a Asiatiew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga a teique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many ges: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.

    If we sider the Steppenwolf from this standpoint it will be clear to us why he suffered so muder his ludicrous dual personality. He believes, like Faust, that two souls are far too many for a single breast and must tear the breast asuhey are on the trary far too few, and Harry does shog violeo his poor soul when he endeavors to apprehend it by means of so primitive an image. Although he is a most cultivated person, he proceeds like a savage that ot t further than two. He calls himself part wolf, part man, and with that he thinks .he has e to an end and exhausted the matter. With the "man" he packs ihing spiritual and sublimated or even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all that is instinctive, savage and chaotic. But things are not so simple in life as in our thoughts, nor sh and ready as in our poor idiotiguage; and Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this niggardly wolf-theory. He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul to the "man" which are a long way from being human, and parts of his being to the wolf that long ago have left the wolf behind.

    Like all men Harry believes that he knows very well what man is a does not know at all, although in dreams and other states not subject to trol he often has his suspis. If only he might not fet them, but keep them, as far as possible at least, for his own. Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspis to the trary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the as). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narroerilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Betweewo forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute. "Man," whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary beois promise. ventios and baain of the more naked instincts, a little sciousness, morality aialization is called for, and a modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even thought necessary. The "man" of this cordat, like every other beois ideal, is a promise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zoweewo of them. For this reason the beois today burns as heretid hangs as criminals those to whom he erects mos tomorrow.

    That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distand with terrible agonies aasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the moomorrow—all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected. What, however, he calls the "man" in himself, as opposed to the wolf, is to a great extent nothing else than this very same average man of the beois vention.

    As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs of loneliness. But as for striving with assurance, in respoo that supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows too well that it leads to still greater sufferings, to proscription, to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even though the e of immortality lies at the journeys end, he is still unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these deaths. Though the goal of manhood is better known to him than to the beois, still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved tet that the desperate ging to the self and the desperate ging to life are the surest way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip ones self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them. When he worships his favorites among the immortals, Mozart, perce, he always looks at him in the long run through beois eyes. His tendency is to explain Mozarts perfected being, just as a saster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the oute of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indiffereo the ideals of the beois, and of his patiender that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the beois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to been, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.

    This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the body is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. He would like either to overe the wolf and bee wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolfs life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry ever turn back again and bee wholly wolf, and could he do so he would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a creature of manifold plexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolfs breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same fetfulness as the man who sings: "If I could be a child once more!" He who seally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innod the in of things, and has quite fotten that these blessed children are beset with flid plexities and capable of all suffering.

    There is, in fao way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innod no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innoce, to the ued and to God leads on, not baot back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem, unhappy Steppenwolf. You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and plicate your plexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether sciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the fi within limitation, the separatiod, the pangs of being born ever ahe return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.

    We are not dealing here with man as he is known to eid statistics, as he is seen thronging the streets by the million, and of whom no more at  be made than of the sand of the sea or the spray of its waves. We are not ed with the few millions less or more. They are a sto-trade, nothing else. No, we are speaking of man in the highest sense, of the end of the long road to true manhood, of kingly men, of the immortals. Genius is not so rare as we sometimes think; nor, certainly, so frequent as may appear from history books or, indeed, from the neers. Harry has, we should say, genius enough to attempt the quest of true manhood instead of disc pitifully about his stupid Steppenwolf at every difficulty entered.

    It is as much a matter for surprise and sorrow that men of such possibilities should fall ba Steppenwolves and "Two souls, alas!" as that they reveal so often that pitiful love for the beoisie. A man who  uand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and hell of humanity ought not to live in a world ruled by "on sense" and democrad beois standards. It is only from cowardice that he lives in it; and when its dimensions are too cramping for him and the beois parlor too fining, he lays it at the wolfs door, and refuses to see that the wolf is as often as not the best part of him. All that is wild in himself he calls wolf and siders it wicked and dangerous and the bugbear of all det life. He ot see, even though he thinks himself an artist and possessed of delicate perceptions, that a great deal else exists in him besides and behind the wolf. He ot see that not all that bites is wolf and that fox, dragon, tiger, ape and bird of paradise are there also. And he ot see that this whole world, this Eden and its maions of beauty and terror, of greatness and meanness, of strength and tenderness is crushed and imprisoned by the wolf legend just as the real man in him is crushed and imprisoned by that sham existehe beois.

    Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit aables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distin thaween edible and inedible, enths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enting flowers and hew down the rees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all. And sider all that he imputes to "man"! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean—while to the wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself its master, is set down all that is strong and noble.

    Now we bid Harry good-bye and leave him to go on his way alone. Were he already among the immortals—were he already there at the goal to which his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would look back to all this ing and going, all this indecision and wild zig-zag trail. With what a mixture of encement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf.

    When I had read to the end it came to my mind that some weeks before I had written one night a rather peculiar poem, likewise about the Steppenwolf. I looked for it in the pile of papers on my cluttered writing table, found it, and read:

    The Wolf trots to and fro,

    The world lies deep in snow,

    The raven from the birch tree flies,

    But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,

    The roe—she is so dear, so sweet—

    If such a thing I might surprise

    In my embrace, my teeth would meet,

    What else is there beh the skies?

    The lovely creature I would so treasure,

    A myself deep oehigh,

    I would drink of her red blood full measure,

    Then howl till the night went by.

    Even a hare I would not despise;

    Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.

    Is everything to be denied

    That could make life a little bright?

    The hair on my brush is getting grey.

    The sight is failing from my eyes.

    Years ago my dear mate died.

    And now I trot and dream of a roe.

    I trot and dream of a hare.

    I hear the wind of midnight howl.

    I cool with the snow my burning jowl,

    And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.

    So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more a less of me than I did myself. And both these pictures of myself, my dispirited and halting poem and the clever study by an unknown hand, equally afflicted me. Both were right. Both gave the unvarruth about my shiftless existence. Both showed clearly how unbearable and untenable my situation was. Death was decreed for this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested existenless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he underwent a ge and passed over to a self, new and undisguised. Alas! this transition was not unknown to me. I had already experie several times, and always in periods of utmost despair. On each occasion of this terribly uprooting experience, my self, as it then was, was shattered tments. Each time deep-seated powers had shaken aroyed it; each time there had followed the loss of a cherished and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me no more. Once, I had lost my profession and livelihood. I had had to forfeit the esteem of those who before had touched their caps to me. , my family life fell in ruins ht, when my wife, whose mind was disordered, drove me from house and home. Love and fidence had ged of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbors saw me go with pitying s. It was then that my solitude had its beginning. Years of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a certain serenity and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to the practice of abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation. But this mold, too, was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted and ent. A whirl of travel drove me afresh over the earth; fresh sufferings were heaped up, and fresh guilt. And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, receded by this hateful vad stillness, this deathly stri and loneliness and uedness, this waste ay hell of lovelessness and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more.

    It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in spiritual growth ah, but with it went an increased loneliness, an increasing chill of severand estra. Looked at with the beois eye, my life had been a tinuous dest from one shattering to the hat left me more remote at every step from all that was normal, permissible ahful. The passing years had stripped me of my calling, my family, my home. I stood outside all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in unceasing and bitter flict with public opinion and morality; and though I lived in a beois setting, I was all the same an utter strao this world in all I thought a. Religion, try, family, state, all lost their value a nothing to me any more. The pomposity of the sces, societies, and arts disgusted me. My views and tastes and all that I thought, ohe shining adors of a gifted and sought-after person, had run to seed in  and were looked at askance. Granting that I had in the course of all my painful transmutations made some invisible and unatable gain, I had had to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life was harsher, more difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to wish to tinue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the smoke izsches harvest song.

    Oh, yes, I had experienced all these ges and transmutations that fate reserves for her difficult childreicklish ers. I khem only too well. I khem as well as a zealous but unsuccessful sportsman knows the stands at a shoot; as an old gambler on the Exge knows each stage of speculation, the scoop, the weakening market, the break and bankruptcy. Was I really to live through all this again? All this torture, all this pressing need, all these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness of my own self, the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death. Wasnt it better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings and to quit the stage? Certainly, it was simpler aer. Whatever the truth of all that was said itle book oeppenwolf about "suicides," no one could forbid me the satisfa of invoking the aid of coal gas or a razor or revolver, and so sparing myself this repetition of a process whose bitter agony I had had to drink often enough, surely, and to the dregs. No, in all sce, there was no power in the world that could prevail with me to gh the mortal terror of another enter with myself, to faother reanisation, a new ination, when at the end of the road there was no peace or quiet—but forever destroying the self, in order to rehe self. Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you please, call it an infamous and ignominious escape; still, any escape, even the most ignominious, from this treadmill of suffering was the only thing to wish for. No stage was left for the noble and heroic heart. Nothing was left but the simple choice between a slight and swift pang and an unthinkable, a dev and endless suffering. I had played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put honor before fort, and heroism before reason. There was an end of it!

    Daylight was dawning through the window pahe leaden, infernal daylight of a rainy winters day, when at last I got to bed. I took my resolution to bed with me. At the very last, however, on the last verge of sciousness in the moment of falling asleep, the remarkable passage ieppenwolf pamphlet which deals with the immortals flashed through me. With it came the enting recolle that several times, the last quite retly, I had felt near enough to the immortals to share in one measure of old music their cool, bright, austere a smiling wisdom. The memory of it soared, sho, then died away; and heavy as a mountain, sleep desded on my brain.

    I woke about midday, and at ohe situation, as I had disenta, came bae. There lay the little book on my night stand, and my poem. My resolution, too, was there. After the nights sleep it had taken shape and looked at me out of the fusion of my youth with a calm and friendly greeting. Haste makes no speed. My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had grown slowly to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose  breath would bring it to the ground.

    I had in my medie chest an excellent means of stilling pain—an unusually strong tincture of laudanum. I indulged very rarely in it and often refrained from using it for months at a time. I had recourse to the drug only when physical pain plagued me beyond endurance. Unfortunately, it was of no use in putting ao myself. I had proved this some years before. Once when despair had again got the better of me I had swallowed a big dose of it—enough to kill six men, a had not killed me. I fell asleep, it is true, and lay for several hours pletely stupefied; but then to my frightful disappoi I was half awakened by violent vulsions of the stomad fell asleep once more. It was the middle of the  day when I woke up in ear in a state of dismal sobriety. My empty brain was burning and I had almost lost my memory. Apart from a spell of insomnia and severe pains iomao trace of the poison was left.

    This expedient, then, was no good. But I put my resolution in this way: the ime I felt that I must have recourse to the opium, I might allow myself to use big means instead of small, that is, a death of absolute certainty with a bullet or a razor. Then I could be sure. As for waiting till my fiftieth birthday, as the little book wittily prescribed—this seemed to me much too long a delay. There were still two years till then. Whether it were a year hence or a month, were it even the following day, the door stood open.

    I ot say that the resolution altered my life very profoundly. It made me a little more indifferent to my afflis, a little freer in the use of opium and wine, a little more inquisitive to know the limits of endurance, but that was all. The other experiences of that evening had a stronger after-effect. I read the Steppenwolf treatise through again many times, now submitting gratefully to an invisible magi because of his wise duy destiny, now with s and pt for its futility, and the little uanding it showed of my actual disposition and predit. All that was written there of Steppenwolves and suicides was very good, no doubt, and very clever. It might do for the species, the type; but it was too wide a mesh to catch my own individual soul, my unique and unexampled destiny.

    What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the halluation, or vision, of the church wall. The annou made by the dang illuminated letters promised much that was hi ireatise, and the voices of that strange world had powerfully aroused my curiosity. For hours I pondered deeply over them. On these occasions I was more and more impressed by the warning of that inscription—"Not for everybody!" and "For madmen only!" Madman, then, I must certainly be and far from the mold of "everybody" if those voices reached me and that world spoke to me. In heavens name, had I not long ago beee from the life of everybody and from normal thinking and normal existence? Had I not long ago given ample margin to isolation and madness? All the same, I uood the summons well enough in my innermost heart. Yes, I uood the invitation to madness and the jettison of reason and the escape from the clogs of vention in surreo the unbridled surge of spirit and fantasy.

    One day after I had made one more vain search through streets and squares for the man with the signboard and prowled several times past the wall of the invisible door with watchful eye, I met a funeral procession in St. Martins. While I was plating the faces of the mourners who followed the hearse with halting step, I thought to myself, "Where in this town or in the whole world is the man whose death would be a loss to me? And where is the man to whom my death would mean anything?" There was Erica, it is true, but for a long while we had lived apart. We rarely saw one another without quarreling and at the moment I did not even know her address. She came to see me now and then, or I made the jouro her, and sih of us were lonely, difficult people related somehow to one another in soul, and siess of soul, there was a liween us that held in spite of all. But would she not perhaps breathe more freely if she heard of my death? I did not know. I did not kher how far my own feeling for her was to be relied upon. To know anything of such matters one o live in a world of practical possibilities.

    Meanwhile, obeying my fancy, I had fallen in at the rear of the funeral procession and jogged along behind the mouro the cemetery, an up-to-date set-up all of crete, plete with crematorium and what not. The deceased iion was not however to be cremated. His coffin was set down before a simple hole in the ground, and I saw the clergyman and the other vultures and funaries of a burial establishment going through their performao which they endeavored to give all the appearance of great ceremony and sorrow and with such effect that they outdid themselves and from pure ag they got caught in their own lies and ended by being ic. I saw how their black professional robes fell in folds, and ains they took to work up the pany of mourners and to force them to bend the knee before the majesty of death. It was labor in vain. Nobody wept. The deceased did not appear to have been indispensable. Nor could anyoalked into a pious frame of mind; and when the clergyman addressed the paedly as "dear fellow-Christians," all the silent faces of these shop people and master bakers and their wives were turned down in embarrassment and expressed nothing but the wish that this unfortable funight soon be over. When the end came, the two foremost of the fellow-Christians shook the clergymans hand, scraped the moist clay in which the dead had been laid from their shoes at the  scraper and without hesitation their faces again showed their natural expression; and then it was that one of them seemed suddenly familiar. It was, so it seemed to me, the man who had carried the signboard and thrust the little book into my hands.

    At the moment when I thought I reized him he stopped and, stooping down, carefully turned up his black trousers, and then walked away at a smart pace with his umbrella clipped under his arm. I walked after him, but when I overtook him and gave him a nod, he did not appear tnize me.

    "Is there no show tonight?" I asked with an attempt at a wink such as two spirative each other. But it was long ago that such pantomime was familiar to me. Indeed, living as I did, I had almost lost the habit of speech, and I felt myself that I only made a silly grimace.

    "Show tonight?" he growled, and looked at me as though he had never set eyes on me before. "Go to the Black Eagle, man, if thats what you want."

    And, in fact, I was no longer certain it was he. I was disappointed and feeling the disappoi I walked on aimlessly. I had no motives, no iives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was ing to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial. I swore that none of these death-vultures should stand at my grave, with cassod seal Christian murmurings. Ah, look where I might and think what I might, there was no cause for rejoig and nothing beed me. There was nothing to charm me or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, e to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this! How had this paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstru of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair.

    Passing by the Library I met a young professor of whom in earlier years I used occasionally to see a good deal. When I last stayed iown, some years before, I had even been several times to his house to talk Oriental mythology, a study in which I was then very muterested. He came in my dire walking stiffly and with a short-sighted air and only reized me at the last moment as I assing by. In my lamentable state I was half-thankful for the cordiality with which he threw himself on me. His pleasure in seeing me became quite lively as he recalled the talks we had had together and assured me that he owed a great deal to the stimulus they had given him and that he often thought of me. He had rarely had such stimulating and productive discussions with any colleague since. He asked how long I had been iown (I lied and said "a few days") and why I had not looked him up. The learned man held me with his friendly eye and, though I really found it all ridiculous, I could not help enjoying these crumbs of warmth and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a starved dog. Harry, the Steppenwolf, was moved to a grin. Saliva collected in his parched throat and against his will he bowed down to se. Yes, zealously piling lie upon lie, I said that I was only here in passing, for the purpose of research, and should of course have paid him a visit but that I had not been feeling very fit. And when he went on to invite me very heartily to spend the evening with him, I accepted with thanks a my greetings to his wife, until my cheeks fairly ached with the unaced efforts of all these forced smiles and speeches. And while I, Harry Haller, stood there ireet, flattered and surprised and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellows kindly, shhted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what a funny, crazy, disho fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and curse the whole world one moment and, the , to be falling all over myself in the eagerness of my respoo the first amiable greeting of the first good ho fellow who came my way, to be wallowing like a sug-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and friendly esteem. Thus stood the two Harrys, her playing a very pretty part, ainst the worthy professor, mog one another, watg one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in such predits, the eternal questioed itself whether all this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a on depravity, or whether this seal egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and two-faess of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the Steppenwolves. And if this nastiness was on to men in general, I could rebound from it with renewed energy into hatred of all the world, but if it ersonal frailty, it was good occasion for an y of hatred of myself.

    While my two selves were thus locked in flict, the professor was almost fotten; and when the oppressiveness of his presence came suddenly bae, I made haste to be relieved of it. I looked after him for a long while as he disappeared into the distance along the leafless aveh the good-natured and slightly ic gait of an ingenuous idealist. Withihe battle raged furiously. Meically I bent and u my stiffened fingers as though to fight the ravages of a secret poison, and at the same time had to realize that I had been nicely framed. Round my neck was the invitation for 8:30, with all its obligations of politeness, of talking shop and of plating anothers domestic bliss. And so home—in wrath. Ohere, I poured myself out some brandy and water, swallowed some of my gout pills with it, and, lying on the sofa, tried to read. No sooner had I succeeded in losing myself for a moment in Sophias Journey from Memel to Saxony, a delightful old book of the eighteenth tury, than the invitation came over me of a sudden and reminded me that I was her shaved nor dressed. Why, in heavens name, had I brought all this on myself? Well, get up, so I told myself, lather yourself, scrape your  till it bleeds, dress and show an amiable disposition towards your fellow-men. And while I lathered my face, I thought of that sordid hole in the clay of the cemetery into whie unknown person had been lowered that day. I thought of the pinched faces of the bored fellow-Christians and I could not even laugh. There in that sordid hole in the clay, I thought, to the apa of stupid and insincere ministrations and the no less stupid and insincere demeanor of the group of mourners, in the disf sight of all the metal crosses and marble slabs and artificial flowers of wire and glass, ended not only that unknown man, and, tomorrow or the day after, myself as well, buried in the soil with a hypocritical show of sorrow—no, there and so ended everything; all our striving, all our culture, all our beliefs, all our joy and pleasure in life—already sid soon to be buried there too. Our whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable names on m stones; and the mourners who stood round affeg a pretence of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions whice were holy, or at least to utter o-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a pany round a grave. As I raged on like this I cut my  in the usual plad had to apply a caustic to the wound; and even so there was my  collar, scarce put on, to ge again, and all this for an invitation that did not give me the slightest pleasure. A a part of me began play-ag again, calling the professor a sympathetic fellow, yearning after a little talk and intercourse with my fellow men, reminding me of the professors pretty wife, promptio believe that an evening spent with my pleasant host and hostess would be iy positively cheering, helpio clap some court plaster to my , to put on my clothes and tie my tie well, aly putting me, in fact, far from my genuine desire of staying at home. Whereupon it occurred to me—so it is with every one. Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and exge a few more or less insincere pliments with him, without really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on versations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all pulsory, meical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by maes; and i is this never-ceasing maery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and reizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary mae and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track. Let no ohink that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I s and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of my personal misery. But now that I have e so far, and standing as I do oreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into bottomless darkness, I should d and I should lie if I preteo myself or to others that that mae still revolved for me and that I was still obedient to the eternal childs play of that charming world.

    On all this the evening before me afforded a remarkable entary. I paused a moment in front of the house and looked up at the windows. There he lives, I thought, and carries on his labors year by year, reads and annotates texts, seeks for analogies betweeern Asiatid Indian mythologies, and it satisfies him, because he believes in the value of it all. He believes iudies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution. He has not been through the war, nor is he acquainted with the shattering of the foundations of thought by Einstein (that, thinks he, only s the mathematis). He sees nothing of the preparations for the  war that are going on all round him. He hates Jews and unists. He is a good, unthinking, happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in fact, he is much to be envied. And so, pulling myself together, I ehe house. A maid in cap and apron opehe door. Warned by some premonition, I noticed with care where she laid my hat and coat, and was then shown into a warm and well-lighted room and requested to wait. Instead of saying a prayer or taking a nap, I followed a wayward impulse and picked up the first thing I saw. It ced to be a small picture in a frame that stood on the round table leaning ba its paste-board support. It was an engraving and it represehe poet Goethe as an old man full of character, with a finely chiseled fad a genius mane. her the renowned fire of his eyes nor the lonely and tragic expressioh the courtly whitewash was lag. To this the artist had given special care, and he had succeeded in bining the elemental force of the old man with a somerofessional make-up of self-discipline and righteousness, without prejudice to his profundity; and had made of him, all in all, a really charming old gentleman, fit to adorn any drawing room. No doubt this portrait was no worse than others of its description. It was much the same as all those representations by careful craftsmen of saviors, apostles, heroes, thinkers and statesmen. Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a certaiious virtuosity. In any case, and whatever the cause, this empty and self-satisfied presentation of the aged Goethe shrieked at me at once as a fatal discord, exasperated and oppressed as I was already. It told me that I ought o have e. Here fine Old Masters and the Nations Great Ones were at home, not Steppenwolves.

    If only the master of the house had e in now, I might have had the luck to find some favorable opportunity for finding my way out. As it was, his wife came in, and I surreo fate though I sted danger. We shook hands and to the first discord there succeeded nothing but new ohe lady plimented me on my looks, though I knew only too well how sadly the years had aged me since our last meeting. The clasp of her hand on my gouty fingers had reminded me of it already. Then she went on to ask after my dear wife, and I had to say that my wife had left me and that we were divorced. We were glad enough when the professor came ioo gave me a hearty wele and the awkward edy came to a beautiful climax. He was holding a neer to which he subscribed, an an of the militarist and jingoist party, and after shaking hands he poio it and ented on a paragraph about a namesake of mine—a publicist called Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten patriot—who had been making fun of the Kaiser and expressing the view that his own try was no less responsible for the outbreak of war than the enemy nations. There was a man for you! The editor had given him his deserts and put him in the pillory. However, when the professor saw that I was not ied, we passed to other topics, and the possibility that this horrid fellow might be sitting in front of them did not eveely occur to either of them. Yet so it was, I myself was that horrid fellow. Well, why make a fuss and upset people? I laughed to myself, but gave up all hope now of a pleasant evening.

    I have a clear recolle of the moment when the professor spoke of Haller as a traitor to his try. It was then that the horrid feeling of depression and despair which had been mounting in me and growing stronger and stronger ever sihe burial se deo a dreary deje. It rose to the pitch of a bodily anguish, arousing within me a dread and suffog foreboding. I had the feeling that something lay in wait for me, that a daalked me from behind. Fortuhe annouhat dinner was oable supervened. We went into the dining room, and while I racked my brains again and again for something harmless to say, I ate more than I was aced to do a myself growing more wretched with every moment. Good heavens, I thought all the while, why do we put ourselves to such exertions? I felt distinctly that my hosts were not at their ease either and that their liveliness was forced, whether it was that I had a paralyzing effe them or because of some other and domestic embarrassment. There was not a question they put to me that I could answer frankly, and I was soon fairly entangled in my lies and wrestling with my  every word. At last, for the sake of ging the subject, I began to tell them of the funeral which I had witnessed earlier in the day. But I could not hit the right note. My efforts at humor fell entirely flat and we were more tha odds. Withihe Steppenwolf bared his teeth in a grin. By the time we had reached dessert, silence had desded on all three of us.

    We went back to the room we had e from to ihe aid of coffee and ac. There, however, my eye fell once more on the magnate of poetry, although he had been put on a chest of drawers at one side of the room. Uo get away from him, I took him once more in my hands, though warning voices were plainly audible, and proceeded to attack him. I was as though obsessed by the feeling that the situation was intolerable and that the time had e either to warm my hosts up, to carry them off their feet and put them in tuh myself, or else t about a final explosion.

    "Let us hope," said I, "that Goethe did not really look like this. This ceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished pany, ah the maerior what a world of charmiimentality! Certainly, there is much to be said against him. I have a good deal against his venerable pomposity myself. But to represent him like this—no, that is going too far."

    The lady of the house finished p out the coffee with a deeply wounded expression and then hurriedly left the room; and her husband explaio me with mingled embarrassment and reproach that the picture of Goethe beloo his wife and was one of her dearest possessions. "And even if, objectively speaking, you are right, though I dont agree with you, you need not have been so outspoken."

    "There you are right," I admitted. "Unfortunately it is a habit, a viine, always to speak my mind as much as possible, as indeed Goethe did, too, in his better moments. In this chaste drawing room Goethe would certainly never have allowed himself to use an eous, a genuine and unqualified expression. I sincerely beg your wifes pardon and your own. Tell her, please, that I am a saniad now, if you will allow me, I will take my leave."

    To this he made objes in spite of his perplexity. He eve back to the subject of our former discussions and said once more how iing and stimulating they had been and how deep an impression my theories about Mithras and Krishna had made on him at the time. He had hoped that the present occasion would have been an opportunity to rehese discussions. I thanked him for speaking as he did. Unfortunately, my i in Krishna had vanished and also my pleasure in learned discussions. Further, I had told him several lies that day. For example, I had been many months iown, and not a few days, as I had said. I lived, however, quite by myself, and was no longer fit for det society; for in the first place, I was nearly always in a bad temper and afflicted with the gout, and in the sed place, usually drunk. Lastly, to make a  slate, and not to go away, at least, as a liar, it was my duty to inform him that he had grievously insulted me that evening. He had endorsed the attitude taken up by a reaary paper towards Hallers opinions; a stupid bull-necked paper, fit for an officer on half-pay, not for a man of learning. This bad fellow and rotten patriot, Haller, however, and myself were one and the same person, and it would be better for our try and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peastead of heading wildly with a blind obsession for a new war. And so I would bid him good-bye.

    With that I got up and took leave of Goethe and of the professor. I seized my hat and coat from the rack outside ahe house. The wolf in me howled in gleeful triumph, and a dramatic struggle between my two selves followed. For it was at once clear to me that this disagreeable evening had much more signifie than for the indignant professor. For him, it was a disillusio and a petty e. For me, it was a final failure and flight. It was my leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world, and a plete triumph for the Steppenwolf. I was sent flying aen from the field, bankrupt in my own eyes, dismissed without a shred of credit or a ray of humor to e. I had taken leave of the world in which I had once found a home, the world of vention and culture, in the manner of the man with a weak stomach who has given up pork. In a rage I went on my way beh the street lamps, in a rage and sito death. What a hideous day of shame and wretess it had been from m to night, from the cemetery to the se with the professor. For what? And why? Was there any sense in taking up the burden of more such days as this or of sitting out any more such suppers? There was not. This very night I would make an end of the edy, go home and cut my throat. No more tarrying.

    I paced the streets in all dires, driven on by wretess. Naturally it was stupid of me to bespatter the drawing-room ors of the worthy folk, stupid and ill-mannered, but I could not help it; and even now I could not help it. I could not bear this tame, lying, well-mannered life any longer. And si appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either, since my own pany had bee so unspeakably hateful and nauseous, since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way out was left me? There was none. I thought of my father and mother, of the sacred flame of my youth loinct, of the thousand joys and labors and aims of my life. Nothing of them all was left me, not eveanothing but agony and nausea. Never had the ging to mere life seemed so grievous as now.

    I rested a moment in a tavern in an outlying part of the town and drank some brandy and water; then to the streets once more, with the devil at my heels, up and doweep and winding streets of the Old Town, along the avenues, across the station square. The thought of going somewhere took me into the station. I sed the time tables on the walls; drank some wine and tried to e to my sehen the specter that I went in dread of came ill I saw it plain. It was the dread of returning to my room and ing to a halt there, faced by my despair. There was no escape from this moment though I walked the streets for hours. Sooner or later I should be at my door, at the table with my books, on the sofa with the photograph of Erica above it. Sooner or later the moment would e to take out my razor and cut my throat. More and more plainly the picture rose before me. More and more plainly, with a wildly beati, I felt the dread of all dreads, the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death. Although I saw no other way out, although nausea, agony and despair threateo engulf me; although life had no allurement and nothing to give me either of joy or hope, I shuddered all the same with an unspeakable horror of a gaping wound in a ned mans flesh.

    I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful specter. Suppose that today cowardice won a victory over despair, tomorrow and each succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-pt. It was merely taking up and throwing down the kill at last it was done. Better today then. I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It wao live. I renewed my fitful wanderings through the town, making maours not to return to the house which I had always in my mind and always deferred. Here and there I came to a stop and lingered, drinking a glass or two, and then, as if pursued, ran around in a circle whose ter had the razor as a goal, a death. Sometimes from utter weariness I sat on a bench, on a fountains rim, or a curbstone and wiped the sweat from my forehead and listeo the beating of my heart. Then on again in mortal dread and an intense yearning for life.

    Thus it was I found myself late at night in a distant and unfamiliar part of the town; and there I went into a public house from which there came the lively sound of dance music. Over the entrance as I went in I read "The Black Eagle" on the old signboard. Within I found it was a free night—crowds, smoke, the smell of wine, and the clamor of voices, with dang in a room at the back, whence issued the frenzy of music. I stayed in the nearer room where there were  simple folk, some of them poorly dressed, whereas behind in the dance hall fashionable people were also to be seen. Carried forward by the crowd, I soon found myself he bar, wedged against a table at which sat a pale and pretty girl against the wall. She wore a thin dance-frock cut very low and a withered flower in her hair. She gave me a friendly and observant look as I came up and with a smile moved to one side to make room for me.

    "May I?" I asked and sat down beside her.

    "Of course, you may," she said. "But who are you?"

    "Thanks," I replied. "I ot possibly go home, ot, ot. Ill stay here with you if youll let me. No, I t go bae."

    She nodded as though to humor me, and as she nodded I observed the curl that fell from her temple to her ear, and I saw that the withered flower was a camellia. From within crashed the musid at the buffet the waitresses hurriedly shouted their orders.

    "Well, stay here then," she said with a voice that forted me. "Why t you go home?"

    "I t. Theres something waiting for me there. No, I t—its thtful."

    "Let it wait then and stay here. First wipe ylasses. You  see nothing like that. Give me your handkerchief. What shall we drink? Burgundy?"

    While she wiped my glasses, I had the first clear impression of her pale, firm face, with its clear grey eyes and smooth forehead, and the short, tight curl in front of her ear. Good-naturedly and with a touockery she began to take me in hand. She ordered the wine, and as she ked her glass with mine, her eyes fell on my shoes.

    "Good Lord, wherever have you e from? You look as though you had e from Paris on foot. Thats no state to e to a dan."

    I answered "yes" and "no," laughed now and then, a her talk. I found her charming, very muy surprise, for I had always avoided girls of her kind and regarded them with suspi. And she treated me exactly in the way that was best for me at that moment, and so she has sihout an exception. She took me under her wing just as I needed, and mocked me, too, just as I needed. She ordered me a sandwid told me to eat it. She filled my glass and bade me sip it and not drink too fast. Then she ended my docility.

    "Thats fine," she said to ence me. "Youre not difficult. I wouldnt miing its a long while since you have had to obey anyone."

    "Youd wi. How did you know it?"

    "Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. Theres nothing like it if youve been without it too long. Isnt it so, ylad to do as I tell you?"

    "Very glad. You know everything."

    "You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what it is thats waiting for you at home and what you dread so much. But you know that for yourself. We  talk about it, eh? Silly business! Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and hell have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough."

    "Oh," I cried, "if only it were so simple. Ive bothered myself enough with life, God knows, and little use it has been to me. To hang oneself is hard, perhaps. I dont know. But to live is far, far harder. God, how hard it is!"

    "Youll see its childs play. Weve made a start already. Youve polished ylasses, eaten something and had a drink. Now well go and give your shoes and trousers a brush and then youll dance a shimmy with me."

    "Now that shows," I cried in a fluster, "that I was right! Nothing could grieve me more than not to be able to carry out any and of yours, but I  dano shimmy, nor waltz, nor polka, nor any of the rest of them. Ive never danced in my life. Now you  see it isnt all as easy as you think."

    Her bright red lips smiled and she firmly shook her waved and shingled head; and as I looked at her, I thought I could see a resemblao Rosa Kreisler, with whom I had been in love as a boy. But she had a dark plexion and dark hair. I could not tell of whom it was she reminded me. I knew only that it was of someone in my early youth and boyhood.

    "Wait a bit," she cried. "So you t danot at all? Not even a oep? A you talk of the trouble youve taken to live? You told a fib there, my boy, and you shouldnt do that at ye. How  you say that youve taken any trouble to live when you wont even dance?"

    "But if I t—Ive never learned!"

    She laughed.

    "But you learned reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and Frend Latin and a lot of other things? I dont miing you were ten or twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could as well. Perhaps youve even got your doctors degree and know ese or Spanish. Am I right? Very well then. But you couldnt find the time and money for a few dang lessons! No, indeed!"

    "It was my parents," I said to justify myself. "They let me learn Latin and Greek and all the rest of it. But they did me learn to da wasnt the thing with us. My parents had never dahemselves."

    She looked at me quite coldly, with real pt, and again something in her face reminded me of my youth.

    "So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? Theyre dead a long while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I dont believe you were such a model child), what have you been doing with yourself all these years?"

    "Well," I fessed, "I scarcely know myself—studied, played music, read books, written books, traveled—"

    "Fine views of life, you have. You have always dohe difficult and plicated things and the simple ones you havent even learned. No time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, Im not your mother. But to do as you do and then say youve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far."

    "Dont se," I implored. "It isnt as if I didnt know I was mad."

    "Oh, dont make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman, Professor. Youre not half mad enough to please me. It seems to me youre much too clever in a silly way, just like a professor. Have another roll. You  tell me some more later."

    She got another roll for me, put a little salt and mustard on it, cut a piece for herself and told me to eat it. I did all she told me except da did me a prodigious lot of good to do as I was told and to have some oting by me who asked me things and ordered me about and scolded me. If the professor or his wife had done so an hour or two earlier, it would have spared me a lot. But no, it was well as it was. I should have missed much.

    "Whats your name?" she asked suddenly.

    "Harry."

    "Harry? A babyish sort of name. And a baby you are, Harry, in spite of your few grey hairs. Youre a baby and you need some oo look after you. Ill say no more of dang. But look at your hair! Have you no wife, no sweetheart?"

    "I havent a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but she doesnt live here. I dont see her very often. We do on very well."

    She whistled softly.

    "You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what  in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of your wits? Down on your luck? Lost at cards?"

    This was not easy to explain.

    "Well," I began, "you see, it was really a small matter. I had an invitation to dinner with a professor—Im not one myself, by the way—and really I ought not to have gone. Ive lost the habit of being in pany and making versation. Ive fotten how its done. As soon as I ehe house I had the feeling something would g, and when I hung my hat on the peg I thought to myself that perhaps I should want it soohan I expected. Well, at the professors there icture that stood oable, a stupid picture. It annoyed me—"

    "What sort of picture? Annoyed you—why?" she broke in.

    "Well, it icture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know. But it was not in the least as he really looked. That, of course, nobody  kly. He has been dead a hundred years. However, some artist of today had painted his portrait as he imagined him to have been and prettified him, and this picture annoyed me. It made me perfectly sick. I dont know whether you  uand that."

    "I uand all right. Dont you wo on."

    "Before this in any case I didnt see eye to eye with the professor. Like nearly all professors, he is a great patriot, and during the war did his bit in the way of deceiving the public, with the best iions, of course. I, however, am opposed to war. But thats all oo tinue my story, there was not the least need for me to look at the picture—"

    "Certainly not."

    "But in the first place it made me sorry because of Goethe, whom I love very dearly, and then, besides, I thought—well, I had better say just how I thought, or felt. There I was, sitting with people as one of themselves and believing that they thought of Goethe as I did and had the same picture of him in their minds as I, and there stood that tasteless, false and sickly affair and they thought it lovely and had not the least idea that the spirit of that picture and the spirit of Goethe were exact opposites. They thought the picture splendid, and so they might for all I cared, but for me it ended, ond for all, any fidence, any friendship, any feeling of affinity I could have for these people. In any case, my friendship with them did not amount to very much. And so I got furious, and sad, too, when I saw that I was quite aloh no oo uand me. Do you see what I mean?"

    "It is very easy to see. A? Did you throw the picture at them?"

    "No, but I was rather insulting ahe house. I wao go home, but—"

    "But youd have found no mummy there to fort the silly baby or scold it. I must say, Harry, you make me almost sorry for you. I never knew such a baby."

    So it seemed to me, I must own. She gave me a glass of wio drink. In fact, she was like a mother to me. In a glimpse, though, now and then I saw how young aiful she was.

    "And so," she began again, "Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and youre very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose. But the artist who adoethe too, and makes a picture of him, has nht to do it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else—because you dont like it. You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house. If you had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor—laugh and be doh it. If you were out of your senses, youd smash the picture in their faces. But as youre only a little baby, you run home and want to hang yourself. Ive uood your story very well, Harry. Its a funny story. You make me laugh. But dont drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped. Otherwise youll get hot. But you have to be told everything—like a little child."

    She admonished me with the look of a severe governess of sixty.

    "Oh, I know," I said tentedly. "Only tell me everything."

    "What shall I tell you?"

    "Whatever you feel like telling me."

    "Good. Then Ill tell you something. For an hour Ive been saying thou to you, and you have been saying you to me. Always Latin and Greek, always as plicated as possible. When a girl addresses you intimately and she isnt disagreeable to you, then you should address her in the same way. So now youve learned something. And sedly—for half an hour Ive known that youre called Harry. I know it because I asked you. But you dont care to know my name."

    "Oh, but indeed—Id like to know very much."

    "Youre too late! If we meet again, you  ask me again. Today I shant tell you. And now Im going to dance."

    At the first sign she made of getting up, my heart sank like lead. I dreaded her going and leaving me alone, for then it would all e back as it was before. In a moment, the old dread and wretess took hold of me like a toothache that has passed off and then es back of a sudden and burns like fire. Oh, God, had I fotten, then, what was waiting for me? Had anything altered?

    "Stop," I implored, "dont go. You  dance of course, as much as you please, but dont stay away too long. e back again, e back again."

    She laughed as she got up. I expected her to be taller. She was slender, but not tall. Again I was reminded of some one. Of whom? I could not make out.

    "Youre ing back?"

    "Im ing back, but it may be half an hour or an hour, perhaps. I want to tell you something. Shut your eyes and sleep for a little. Thats what you need."

    I made room for her to pass. Her skirt brushed my knees and she looked, as she went, in a little pocket mirror, lifted her eyebroowdered her ; then she disappeared into the dance hall. I looked rourange faces, smoking men, spilled beer on marble-tops, clatter and clamor everywhere, the dance musi my ear. I was to sleep, she had said. Ah, my good child, you know a lot about my sleep that is shyer than a weasel! Sleep in this hurly-burly, sitting at a table, amidst the clatter of beer steins! I sipped the wine and, taking out a cigar, looked round for matches, but as I had after all no ination to smoke, I put down the cigar oable in front of me. "Shut your eyes," she had said. God knows where the girl got her voice; it was so deep and good and maternal. It was good to obey such a voice, I had found that out already. Obediently I shut my eyes, leaned my head against the wall and heard the roar of a hundred mingled noises surge around me and smiled at the idea of sleep in such a place. I made up my mind to go to the door of the dance hall and from there catch a glimpse of my beautiful girl as she danced. I made a movement to go, the at last how unutterably tired out I was from my hours of wandering and remained seated; and, thereupon I fell asleep as I had been told. I slept greedily, thankfully, and dreamed more lightly and pleasantly than I had for a long while.

    I dreamed that I was waiting in an old-fashioned anteroom. At first I knew no more than that my audience was with some Excellency or other. Then it came to me that it was Goethe who was to receive me. Unfortunately I was not there quite on a personal call. I orter, and this worried me a great deal and I could not uand how the devil I had got into such a fix. .Besides this, I set by a scorpion that I had seen a moment before trying to climb up my leg. I had shaken myself free of the black crawli, but I did not know where it had got to  and did not dare make a grab after it.

    Also I was not very sure whether I had been announced by a mistake to Matthisson instead of to Goethe, and him again I mixed up in my dream with Bürger, for I took him for the author of the poem to Molly. Moreover I would have liked extremely to meet Molly. I imagined her wonderful, tender, musical. If only I were not here at the orders of that cursed neer office. My ill-humor over this increased until by degrees<s>?99ｌｉｂ?</s> it extended even to Goethe, whom I suddenly treated to all manner of refles and reproaches. It was going to be a lively interview. The scorpion, however, dangerous though he was and hidden no doubt somewhere within an ine, was all the same not so bad perhaps. Possibly he might eveoken something friendly. It seemed to me extremely likely that he had something to do with Molly. He might be a kind of messenger from her—or an heraldic beast, dangerously aifully emblematic of woman and sin. Might not his name perhaps be Vulpius? But at that moment a fluhrew open the door. I rose a in.

    There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic breast, sure enough, was the corpulent star of some Order. Not for a moment did he relax his anding attitude, his air of giving audience, and of trolling the world from that museum of his at Weimar. Indeed, he had scarcely looked at me before with a nod and a jerk like an old raven he began pompously: &quot;Now, you young people have, I believe, very little appreciation of us and our efforts.&quot;

    &quot;You are quite right,&quot; said I, chilled by his ministerial glance. &quot;We young people have, indeed, very little appreciation of you. You are too pompous for us, Excellency, too vain and pompous, and not ht enough. That is, no doubt, at the bottom of it—not ht enough.&quot;

    The little old ma his erect head forward, and as his hard mouth with its official folds relaxed in a little smile and became entingly alive, my heart gave a sudden bound; for all at ohe poem came to my mind—&quot;The dusk with folding wing&quot;—and I remembered that it was from the lips of this man that the poem came. Indeed, at this moment I was entirely disarmed and overwhelmed and would have chosen of all things to kneel before him. But I held myself ered heard him say with a smile: &quot;Oh, so you accuse me of not being ht? What a thing to say! Will you explain yourself a little more fully?&quot;

    I was very glad io do so.

    &quot;Like all great spirits, Herr vohe, you have clearly reised ahe riddle and the hopelessness of human life, with its moments of transdehat sink again to wretess, and the impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost of many days enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent longing for the realm of the spirit iernal and deadly war with the equally ardent and holy love of the lost innoce of nature, the whole frightful suspense in vad uainty, this nation to the trahat ever be valid, that is ever experimental and dilettantish; in short, the utter lack of purpose to which the human state is o its ing despair. You have known all this, yes, and said as much over and ai you gave up your whole life to preag its opposite, giving utterao faith and optimism and spreading before yourself and others the illusion that our spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf ear to those that plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that told the truth of despair, and not in yourself only, but also i ahoven. Year after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating knowledge and colleg objects, writiers and gathering them in, as though in your old age you had found the real way to discover the eternal in the momentary, though you could only mummify it, and to spiritualise nature though you could only hide it with a pretty mask. This is why we reproach you with insiy.&quot;

    The old bigwig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.

    Then to my surprise, he asked, &quot;You must have a strong obje, then, to the Magic Flute of Mozart?&quot;

    And before I could protest, he went on:

    &quot;The Magic Flute presents life to us as a wondrous song. It honors our feelings, tra, as they are, as somethiernal and divi agrees her with Herr vo nor with Herr Beethoven. It preaches optimism and faith.&quot;

    &quot;I know, I know,&quot; I cried in a rage. &quot;God knows why you hit of all things on the Magic Flute that is dearer to me than anything else in the world. But Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He did not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly and to exalted dignity as you did. He did not think himself so important! He sang his divine melodies and died. He died young—poor and misuood—&quot;

    I lost my breath. A thousand things ought to have been said in ten words. My forehead began to sweat.

    Goethe, however, said very amiably: &quot;It may be unfivable that I lived to be eighty-two. My satisfa on that at was, however, less than you may think. You are right that a great longing for survival possessed me tinually. I was in tinual fear of death and tinually struggling with it. I believe that the struggle against death, the unditional and self-willed determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men. My eighty-two years showed just as clusively that we must all die in the end as if I had died as a schoolboy. If it helps to justify me I should like to say this too: my nature had much of the child in it, its curiosity and love for idleness and play. Well, and so it went on and on, till I saw that sooner or later there must be enough of play.&quot;

    As he said this, his smile was quite ing—a dht roguish leer. He had grown taller and his erect bearing and the strained dignity of his face had disappeared. The air, too, around us was ning with melodies, all of them songs of Goethes. I heard Mozarts &quot;Violets&quot; and Schuberts &quot;Again thou fillest brake and vale&quot; quite distinctly. And Goethes face was rosy and youthful, and he laughed; and now he resembled Mozart like a brother, now Schubert, and the star on his breast was posed entirely of wild flowers. A yellow primrose blossomed luxuriantly in the middle of it.

    It did not altogether suit me to have the old gentleman avoid my questions and accusations in this sportive manner, and I looked at him reproachfully. At that he bent forward and brought his mouth, which had now bee quite like a childs, close to my ear and whispered softly into it: &quot;You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an act of time. It sists, I dont mind telling you in fidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, o too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. Iy, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.&quot;

    And ihere was no saying another serious word to the man. He capered joyfully and nimbly up and down and made the primrose shoot out from his star like a rocket and then he made it shrink and disappear. While he flickered to and fro with his daeps and figures, it was borne in upohat he at least had not ed learning to dance. He could do it wonderfully. Then I remembered the scorpion, or Molly, rather, and I called out to Goethe: &quot;Tell me, is Molly there?&quot;

    Goethe laughed aloud. He went to his table and opened a drawer; took out a handsome leather or velvet box, and held it open under my eyes. There, small, faultless, and gleaming, lay a diminutive effigy of a womans leg on the dark velvet, an enting leg, with the knee a little bent and the foot pointing downwards to end in the dai of toes.

    I stretched out my hand, for I had quite fallen in love with the little leg and I wao have it, but just as I was going to take hold of it with my finger and thumb, the little toy seemed to move with a tiny start and it occurred to me suddenly that this might be the scorpion. Goethe seemed to read my thought, and even to have wao cause this deep timidity, this hectic struggle between desire and dread. He held the provoking little scorpion close to my fad watched me start forward with desire, then start back with dread; and this seemed to divert him exceedingly. While he was teasih the charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once more, very, very old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and his withered graybeards face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with abysmal old-mans humor.

    When I woke I had fotten the dream; it did not e bae till later. I had slept for nearly an hour, as I hought I could possibly have do a café table with the musid the bustle all rouhe dear girl stood in front of me with one hand on my shoulder.

    &quot;Give me two or three marks,&quot; she said. &quot;Ive spent something in there.&quot;

    I gave her my purse. She took it and was soon back again.

    &quot;Well, now I  sit with you for a little and then I have to go. I have an e.&quot;

    I was alarmed.

    &quot;With whom?&quot; I asked quickly.

    &quot;With a man, my dear Harry. He has invited me to the Odéon Bar.&quot;

    &quot;Oh! I didnt think you would leave me alone.&quot;

    &quot;Then you should have invited me yourself. Someone has got in before you. Well, theres good money saved. Do you know the Odéon? Nothing but champager midnight. Armchairs like at a club, Negro band, very smart.&quot;

    I had never sidered all this.

    &quot;But let me invite you,&quot; I eed her. &quot;I thought it was an uood thing, now that weve made friends. Invite yourself wherever you like. Do, please, I beg you.&quot;

    &quot;That is nice of you. But, you see, a promise is a promise, and Ive given my word and I shall keep it and go. Dont worry any more over that. Have another drink of wiheres still some itle. Drink it up and then go fortably home and sleep. Promise me.&quot;

    &quot;No, you know thats just what I t do—go home.&quot;

    &quot;Oh—you—with your tales! Will you never be doh yoethe?&quot; (The dream about Goethe came bae at that moment.) &quot;But if you really t go home, stay here. There are bedrooms. Shall I see about one for you?&quot;

    I was satisfied with that and asked where I could find her again? Where did she live? She would not tell me. I should find her in one place or another if I looked.

    &quot;Maynt I invite you somewhere?&quot;

    &quot;Where?&quot;

    &quot;Where and when you like.&quot;

    &quot;Good. Tuesday for di the old Francis. First flood-bye.&quot;

    She gave me her hand. I noticed for the first time how well it matched her voice—a beautiful hand, firm and intelligent and good-natured. She laughed at me when I kissed it.

    Then at the last moment she turned once more and said: &quot;Ill tell you something else—about Goethe. What you felt about him and finding the picture of him more than you could put up with, I often feel about the saints.&quot;

    &quot;The saints? Are you sious?&quot;

    &quot;No, Im nious, Im sorry to say. But I was ond shall be again. There is no time now to be religious.&quot;

    &quot;No time. Does it ime to be religious?&quot;

    &quot;Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You t be religious in ear and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.&quot;

    &quot;Yes, I uand. But what was that you said about the saints?&quot;

    &quot;Well, there are many saints Im particularly fond of—Stephen, St. Francis and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Savior and the Virgin—such utterly lying and false and silly pictures—and I  put up with them just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of those sweet and silly Saviors or St. Francises and see how other people find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Savior and it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Savior or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the inal, and that the Savior Himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reprodus. I dont say this to justify you in your ill temper and rage with the picture of Goethe. Theres no justification. I say it simply to show you that I  uand you. You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but youre human beings like the rest of us, aoo, have our dreams and fancies. I noticed, for example, learned sir, that you felt a slight embarrassment when it came to telling me yoethe story. You had to make a great effort to make your ideas prehensible to a simple girl like me. Well, and so I wao show you that you  have made su effort. I uand you all right. And now Ive finished, and your place is in bed.&quot;

    She went away and an old house porter took me up two flights of stairs. But first he asked me where my luggage was, and when he heard that I hadnt any, I had to pay down what he called &quot;sleep money.&quot; Theook me up an old dark staircase to a room upstairs a me alohere was a bleak woodeead, and on the wall hung a saber and a colored print of Garibaldi and also a withered wreath that had once figured in a club festival. I would have given much for pyjamas. At any rate there was water and a small towel and I could wash. Then I lay down on the bed in my clothes, and leaving the light on, gave myself up to my refles. So I had settled ats with Goethe. It lendid that he had e to me in a dream. And this wonderful girl—if only I had known her name! All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had e down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good aiful and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that ed me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was throwhrough which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozehed once more, and sleepily spread its weak and tiny wings. Goethe had been with me. A girl had bidde and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to me of the saints and showhat even when I had outdone myself in absurdity I was not alone. I was not an inprehensible and ailing exception. There were people akin to me. I was uood. Should I see her again? Yes, for certain. She could be relied upon. &quot;A promise is a promise.&quot;

    And before I knew, I was asleep once more and slept four or five hours. It had goen when I woke. My clothes were all creases. I felt utterly exhausted. And in my head was the memory of yesterdays half-fotten <bdo></bdo>horror; but I had life, hope and happy thoughts. As I returo my room I experienothing of that terror that this return had had for me the day before. Oairs above the araucaria I met the &quot;aunt,&quot; my landlady. I saw her seldom but her kindly nature always delighted me. The meeting was not very propitious, for I was still u and unbed after my night out, and I had not shaved. I greeted her and would have passed on. As a rule, she always respected my desire to live alone and unobserved. Today, however, as it turned out, a veil between me and the outer world seemed to be torn aside, a barrier fallen. She laughed and stopped.

    &quot;You have been on a spree, Mr. Haller. You were not in bed last night. You must be pretty tired!&quot;

    &quot;Yes,&quot; I said, and was forced to laugh too. &quot;There was something lively going on last night, and as I did not like to shock you, I slept at an hotel. My respect for the repose and dignity of your house is great. I sometimes feel like a fn body in it.&quot;

    &quot;You are poking fun, Mr. Haller.&quot;

    &quot;Only at myself.&quot;

    &quot;You ought not to do that even. You ought not to feel like a fn body in my house. You should live as best pleases you and do as best you . I have had before now many exceedingly respectable tenants, jewels of respectability, but not one has been quieter or disturbed us less than you. And now—would you like some tea?&quot;

    I did not refuse. Tea was brought me in her drawing room with the old-fashioned pictures and furniture, and we had a little talk. In her friendly way she elicited this and that about my life and thoughts without actually asking questions and listeteo my fessions, while at the same time she did not give them more importahan an intelligent and motherly woman would to the peccadilloes of mealked, too, of her nephew and she showed me in a neighb room his latest hobby, a wireless set. There the industrious young ma his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied sce whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always knout to better use than in this ret and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety and religious topics were not unwele to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to a India, and that sce had merely brought a small fra of this fato general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal faown to that a knowledge was, I said, the uy of time. This sce had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this &quot;discovery,&quot; also, and then the iors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made—and perhaps very soon—that there were floating round us not only the pictures as of the tra present in the same way that musi Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more servian than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distras and useless activities. But instead of embarking on these familiar topics with my ary bitterness and s for the times and for sce, I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, a together for an hour or so and drank our tea with much tent.

    It was for Tuesday evening that I had ihe charming and remarkable girl of the Black Eagle, and I was a good deal put to it to know how to pass the time till then; and when at last Tuesday came, the importany relation to this unknown girl had bee alarmingly clear to me. I thought of nothing but her. I expected everything from her. I was ready to lay everything at her feet. I was not in the least in love with her. Yet I had only to imagihat she might fail to keep the appoi, or fet it, to see where I stood. Then the world would be a desert once more, one day as dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretess would surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of silence except the razor. And these few days had not made me think any the more fondly of the razor. It had lost none of its terror. This was ihe hateful truth: I dreaded to cut my throat with a dread that crushed my heart. My fear was as wild and obstinate as though I were the healthiest of men and my life a paradise. I realised my situation recklessly and without a single illusion. I realised that it was the unendurable tensioween inability to live and inability to die that made the unknown girl, the pretty dancer of the Black Eagle, so important to me. She was the one window, the oiny crack of light in my black hole of dread. She was my release and my way to freedom. She had to teach me to live or teach me to die. She had to touch my deadened heart with her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch of life it would either leap again to flame or subside in ashes. I could not imagine whence she derived these powers, what the source of her magic was, in what secret soil this deep meaning she had for me had grown up; nor did it matter. I did not care to know. There was no lohe least importane in any knowledge or perception I might have. I was just in that lihat I was overstocked, for the ignominy under which I suffered lay just in this—that I saw my own situation so clearly and was so very scious, too, of hers. I saw this wretch, this brute beast of a Steppenwolf as a fly in a web, and saw too the approag decision of his fate. Entangled and defenceless he hung in the web. The spider was ready to devour him, and further off was the resg hand. I might have made the most intelligent arating remarks about the ramifications and the causes of my sufferings, my siess of soul, my general bedevilment of neurosis. The meism was transparent to me. But what I needed was not knowledge and uanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and resolution, a aion, impulse and impetus.

    Although during the few days of waiting I never despaired of my friend keeping her word, this did not prevent my being in a state of acute suspense when the day arrived. Never in my life have I waited more impatiently for a day to end. And while the suspense and impatience were almost intolerable, they were at the same time of wonderful be to me. It was unimaginably beautiful and new for me who for a long while had been too listless to await anything or to find joy in anything—yes, it was wonderful to be running here and there all day long iless ay and intense expectation, to be anticipating the meeting and the talk and the oute that the evening had in store, to be shaving and dressing with peculiar care (new lineie, new laces in my shoes). Whoever this intelligent and mysterious girl might be and however she got into this relation to myself was all one. She was there. The miracle had happened. I had found a human being once more and a new i in life. All that mattered was that the miracle should go on, that I should surrender myself to this magic power and follow this star.

    Unfettable moment when I saw her once more! I sat in the old-fashioned and fortable restaurant at a small table that I had quite unnecessarily engaged by telephone, and studied the menu. In a tumbler were two orchids I had bought for my new acquaintance. I had a good while to wait, but I was sure she would e and was no litated. And then she came. She stopped for a moment at the cloakroom and greeted me only by an observant and rather quizzical glance from her clear gray eyes. Distrustful, I took care to see how the waiter behaved towards her. No, there was nothing fidential, no lack of distance. He was scrupulously respectful. Ahey knew each other. She called him Emil.

    She laughed with pleasure when I gave her the orchids.

    &quot;Thats sweet of you, Harry. You wao make me a present, didnt you, a sure what to choose. You werent quite sure you would be right in making me a present. I might be insulted, and so you chose orchids, and though theyre only flowers, theyre dear enough. So I thank you ever so much. And by the way Ill tell you now that I wont take presents from you. I live on men, but I wont live on you. But how you have altered! No one would know you. The other day you looked as if you had been cut down from a gallows, and now youre very nearly a man again. And now-have you carried out my orders?&quot;

    &quot;What orders?&quot;

    &quot;Youve never fotten? I mean, have you learhe fox trot? You said you wished nothier than to obey my ands, that nothing was dearer to you than obeying me. Do you remember?&quot;

    &quot;Indeed I do, and so it shall be. I meant it.&quot;

    &quot;A you havent learo da?&quot;

    &quot; that be done so quickly—in a day or two?&quot;

    &quot;Of course. The fox trot you  learn in an hour. The Boston in two. The tango takes longer, but that you dont need.&quot;

    &quot;But now I really must know your name.&quot;

    She looked at me for a moment without speaking.

    &quot;Perhaps you  guess it. I should be so glad if you did. Pull yourself together and take a good look at me. Hasnt it ever occurred to you that sometimes my face is just like a boys? Now, for example.&quot;

    Yes, now that I looked at her face carefully, I had to admit she was right. It was a boys face. And after a moment I saw something in her face that reminded me of my own boyhood and of my friend of those days. His name was Herman. For a moment it seemed that she had turned into this Herman.

    &quot;If you were a boy,&quot; said I in amazement, &quot;I should say your name was Herman.&quot;

    &quot;Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in womans clothing,&quot; she said, joking.

    &quot;Is your name Hermine?&quot;

    She nodded, beaming, delighted at my guess. At that moment the waiter brought the food and we began to eat. She was as happy as a child. Of all the things that pleased and charmed me about her, the prettiest and most characteristic was her rapid ges from the deepest seriouso the drollest merriment, and this without doing herself the least violence, with the facility of a gifted child. Now for a while she was merry and chaffed me about the fox trot, trod on my feet uhe table, enthusiastically praised the meal, remarked on the care I had taken dressing, though she also had many criticisms to make on my appearance.

    Meanwhile I asked her: &quot;How did you mao look like a boy and make me guess your name?&quot;

    &quot;Oh, you did all that yourself. Doesnt your learning reveal to you that the reason why I please you and mean so much to you is because I am a kind of looking glass for you, because theres something ihat answers you and uands you? Really, we ought all to be such looking glasses to each other and answer and correspond to each other, but such owls as you are a bit peculiar. On the slightest provocation they give themselves over to the stra notions that they  see nothing and read nothing any longer in the eyes of other men and then nothing seems right to them. And then when an owl like that after all finds a face that looks bato his and gives him a glimpse of uanding—well, then hes pleased, naturally.&quot;

    &quot;Theres nothing you dont know, Hermine,&quot; I cried in amazement. &quot;Its exactly as you say. A youre so entirely different from me. Why, youre my opposite. You have all that I lack.&quot;

    &quot;So you think.,&quot; she said shortly, &quot;and its well you should.&quot;

    And now a dark cloud of seriousness spread over her face. It was indeed like a magic mirror to me. Of a sudden her face bespoke seriousness and tragedy and it looked as fathomless as the hollow eyes of a mask. Slowly, as though it were dragged from her word for word, she said:

    &quot;Mind, dont fet what you said to me. You said that I was to and you and that it would be a joy to you to obey my ands. Dont fet that. You must know this, my little Harry—just as something in me corresponds to you and gives you fidence, so it is with me. The other day when I saw you e in to the Black Eagle, exhausted and beside yourself and scarcely in this world any longer, it came to me at ohis man will obey me. All he wants is that I should and him. And thats what Im going to do. Thats why I spoke to you and why we made friends.&quot;

    She spoke so seriously from a deep impulse of her very soul that I scarcely liked to ence her. I tried to calm her down. She shook her head with a frown and with a pelling look went on: &quot;I tell you, you must keep your word, my boy. If you dont youll regret it. You will have many ands from me and you will carry them out. Nies and agreeable ohat it will be a pleasure to you to obey. And at the last you will fulfill my last and as well, Harry.&quot;

    &quot;I will,&quot; I said, half giving in. &quot;What will your last and be?&quot;

    I guessed it already—God knows why.

    She shivered as though a passing chill went through her and seemed to be waking slowly from her trance. Her eyes did not release me. Suddenly she became still more sinister.

    &quot;If I were wise, I shouldnt tell you. But I wont be wise, Harry, not for this time. Ill be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and fet it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life ah, little brother, and before we begin the game Im going to lay my cards oable.&quot;

    How beautiful she looked, how uhly, when she said that! Cool and clear, there swam in her eyes a scious sadness. These eyes of hers seemed to have suffered all imaginable suffering and to have acquiesced in it. Her lips spoke with difficulty and as though something hihem, as though a keen frost had numbed her face; but between her lips at the ers of her mouth where the tip of her tongue showed at rare intervals, there was but sweet sensuality and inward delight that tradicted the expression of her fad the tone of her voice. A short lock hung dowhe smooth expanse of her forehead, and from this er of her forehead whence fell the lock of hair, her boyishness welled up from time to time like a breath of life and cast the spell of a hermaphrodite. I listened with an eager ay a as though dazed and only half aware.

    &quot;You like me,&quot; she went on, &quot;for the reason I said before, because I have broken through your isolation. I have caught you from the very gates of hell and wakened you to a new life. But I want more from you—much more. I want to make you fall in love with me. No, dont interrupt me. Let me speak. You like me very much. I  see that. And yrateful to me. But youre not in love with me. I mean to make you fall in love with me, and it is part of my calling. It is my living to be able to make men fall in love with me. But mind this, I dont do it because I find you exactly captivating. Im as little in love with you as you with me. But I need you as you do me. You need me now, for the moment, because youre desperate. Youre dying just for the lack of a push to throw you into the water and bring you to life again. You need me to teach you to dand to laugh and to live. But I need you, not today—later, for something very important aiful too. When you are in love with me I will give you my last and and you will obey it, and it will be the better for both of us.&quot;

    She pulled one of the brourple green-veined orchids up a little in the glass and bending over stared a moment at the bloom.

    &quot;You wont find it easy, but you will do it. You will carry out my and and—kill me. There—ask no more.&quot;

    When she came to the end her eyes were still on the orchid, and her face relaxed, losing its strain like a flower bud unfolding its petals. In an instant there was an enting smile on her lips while her eyes for a moment were still fixed and spellbound. Then she gave a shake of her head with its little boyish lock, took a sip of water, and realizing of a sudden that we were at a meal fell to eating again with appetite and enjoyment.

    I had heard her uny unication clearly word for word. I had even guessed what her last and was before she said it and was horrified no longer. All that she said sounded as ving to me as a decree of fate. I accepted it without protest. A in spite of the terrifying seriousness with which she had spoken I did not take it all as fully real and serious. While part of my soul drank in her words and believed in them, another part appeased me with a nod and took hat Hermioo, for all her wisdom ah and assurance, had her fantasies and twilight states. Scarcely was her last word spoken before a layer of uy and iuality settled over the whole se.

    All the same I could not get back to realities and probabilities with the same lightness as Hermine.

    &quot;And so I shall kill you one day?&quot; I asked, still half in a dream while she laughed, and attacked her fowl with great relish.

    &quot;Of course,&quot; she nodded lightly. &quot;Enough of that. It is time to eat. Harry, be an angel and order me a little more salad. Havent you any appetite? It seems to me youve still to learn all the things that e naturally to other people, even the pleasure of eating. So look, my boy, I must tell you that this is the celebration of the duck, and when you pick the tender flesh from the bos a festal occasion and you must be just as eager and glad at heart and delighted as a lover when he unhooks his lady love for the first time. Dont you uand? Oh, youre a sheep! Are you ready? Im going to give you a piece off the little bone. So open your mouth. Oh, what a fright you are! There he goes, squinting round the room in case any one sees him taking a bite from my fork. Dont be afraid, yal son, I wont make a sdal. But its a poor fellow who t take his pleasure without asking other peoples permission.&quot;

    The se that had gone before became more and more unreal. I was less and less able to believe that these were the same eyes that a moment before had been fixed in a dread obsession. But in this Hermine was like life itself, one moment succeeding to the  and not oo be foreseen. Now she was eating, and the dud the salad, the sweet and the liqueur were the important thing, and each time the plates were ged a neter begahough she played at being a child she had seen through me pletely, and though she made me her pupil there and then in the game of living for each fleeting moment, she seemed to know more of life than is known to the wisest of the wise. It might be the highest wisdom or the merest artlessness. It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment. Was I to believe that this happy child with her hearty appetite and the air of a gourmet was at the same time a victim of hysterical visions who wished to die? or a careful calculating woman who, unmoved herself, had the scious iion of making me her lover and her slave? I could not believe it. No, her surreo the moment was so simple and plete that the fleeting shadows and agitation to the very depths of the soul came to her han every pleasurable impulse and were lived as fully.

    Though I saw Hermine only for the sed time that day, she knew everything about me and it seemed to me quite impossible that I could ever have a secret from her. Perhaps she might not uand everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire. This too, however, en to question. Probably it would give her as little trouble as the rest. And anyway, what was there left of my spiritual life? Hadnt all that goo atoms and lost its m<df</dfn>eaning? As for the rest, my more personal problems and s, I had no doubt that she would uand them all. I should very sooalking to her about the Steppenwolf and the treatise and all the rest of it, though till now it had existed for myself alone and never beeioo a single soul. Indeed, I could not resist the temptation of beginning forthwith.

    &quot;Hermine,&quot; I said, &quot;araordinary thing happeo me the other day. An unknown man gave me a little book, the sort of thing youd buy at a fair, and inside I found my whole story and everything about me. Rather remarkable, dont you think?&quot;

    &quot;What was it called,&quot; she asked lightly.

    &quot;Treatise oeppenwolf!&quot;

    &quot;Oh, Steppenwolf is magnifit! And are you the Steppenwolf? Is that meant for you?&quot;

    &quot;Yes, its me. I am one who is half-wolf and half-man, or thinks himself so at least.&quot;

    She made no answer. She gave me a searg look in the eyes, then looked at my hands, and for a moment her fad expression had that deep seriousness and sinister passion of a few minutes before. Making a guess at her thoughts I felt she was w whether I were wolf enough to carry out her last and.

    &quot;That is, of course, your own fanciful idea,&quot; she said, being serene once more, &quot;or a poetical one, if you like. But theres something in it. Youre no wolf today, but the other day when you came in as if you had fallen from the moon there was really something of the beast about you. It is just what struck me at the time.&quot;

    She broke off as though surprised by a sudden idea.

    &quot;How absurd those words are, such as beast a of prey. One should not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but theyre much mht than men.&quot;

    &quot;How do you mean—right?&quot;

    &quot;Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a puma iraffe. You t help seeing that all of them are right. Theyre never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and how to behave themselves. They dont flatter and they dont intrude. They dont pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky. Dont you agree?&quot;

    I did.

    &quot;Animals are sad as a rule,&quot; she went on. &quot;And when a man is sad—I dont mean because he has a toothache or has lost some money, but because he sees, for on a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in ear—he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but mht and more beautiful than usual. Thats how it is, and thats how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.&quot;

    &quot;Well, Hermine, and what do you think about this book with a description of me in it?&quot;

    &quot;Oh, I t always be thinking. Well talk about it aime. You  give it to me to read one day. Or, no, if I ever start reading again, give me one of the books youve written yourself.&quot;

    She asked for coffee and for a while seemed absent minded and distraught. Then she suddenly beamed and seemed to have found the clue to her speculations.

    &quot;Hullo,&quot; she cried, delighted, &quot;now Ive got it!&quot;

    &quot;What have you got?&quot;

    &quot;The fox trot. Ive been thinking about it all the evening. Now tell me, have you a room where we two could danetimes? It doesnt matter if its small, but there mustnt be anybody underh to e up and play hell if his ceiling rocks a bit. Well, thats fine, you  learn to da home.&quot;

    &quot;Yes,&quot; I said in alarm, &quot;so much the better. But I thought music was required.&quot;

    &quot;Of course its required. Youve got to buy that. At the most it wont cost as much as a course of lessons. You save that because Ill give them myself. This way we have the music whenever we like and at the end we have the gramophone in the bargain.&quot;

    &quot;The gramophone?&quot;

    &quot;Of course. You  buy a small one and a few dance records—&quot;

    &quot;Splendid,&quot; I cried, &quot;and if y it off and teach me to dahe gramophone is yours as an honorarium. Agreed?&quot;

    I brought it out very pat, but scarcely from the heart. I could not picture the detested instrument in my study among my books, and I was by no means reciled to the dang either. It had been in my mind that I might try how it went for a while, though I was vihat I was too old and stiff and would never learn now. But to pluo it all at once seemed a bit too much. As an old and fastidious oisseur of music, I could feel my ge rising against the gramophone and jazz and modern dance-music. It was more than any one could ask of me to have dauhat were the latest rage of America let loose upon the sanctum where I te with Novalis and Jean Paul and to be made to dao them. But it was not any one who asked it of me. It was Hermine, and it was for her to and, and for me to obey. Of course, I obeyed.

    We met at a café on the following afternoon. Hermine was there before me, drinking tea, and she pointed with a smile to my name which she had found in a neer. It was one of the reaary jingo papers of my own distri which from time to time violently abusive refereo me were circulated. During the war I had been opposed to it and, after, I had from time to time seled quiet and patiend humanity and a criticism that began at home; and I had resisted the nationalist jingoism that became every day more pronounced, more insane and urained. Here, then, was atack of this kind, badly written, in part the work of the editor himself and in part stolen from articles of a similar kind in papers of similar tendeo his own. It is on knowledge that no one writes worse than these defenders of decrepit ideas. No one plies his trade with less of ded stious care. Hermine had read the article, and it had informed her that Harry Haller was a noxious i and a man who disowned his native land, and that it stood to reason that no good could e to the try so long as such persons and such ideas were tolerated and the minds of the young turo seal ideas of humanity instead of to revenge by arms upon the hereditary foe.

    &quot;Is that you?&quot; asked Hermine, pointing to my name. &quot;Well, youve made yourself some enemies and no mistake. Does it annoy you?&quot;

    I read a few lihere was not a single line of stereotyped abuse that had not been drummed into me for years till I was sid tired of it.

    &quot;No,&quot; I said, &quot;it doesnt annoy me. I was used to it long ago. Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rog himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that thereihe only possible means of avoiding the  war. They dont five me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade maghe politis, the papers. Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie uhe ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles ot annoy me any lohey often sadden me all the same. Two-thirds of my trymehis kind of neer, read things written in this tone every m and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peaind aer feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war ain, the  war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Any one could prehend it and reach the same clusion after a moments refle. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the  war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the  holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the worlds fusion and wiess—look you, nobody wants to do that. And so theres no stopping it, and the  war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day. It has paralysed me since I k, and brought me to despair. I have no try and no ideals left. All that es to nothing but decorations for the gentlemen by whom the  slaughter is ushered in. There is no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human import, to bother ones head with thoughts of goodness—for two or three men who do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches, meetings in publid in private, that make the opposite their daily endeavor and succeed in it too.&quot;

    Hermine had listetentively.

    &quot;Yes,&quot; she said now, &quot;there youre right enough. Of course, there will be another war. One doeso read the papers to know that. And of course one  be sad about it, but it isnt any use. It is just the same as when a man is sad to think that one day, in spite of his utmost efforts to prevent it, he will iably die. The war against death, dear Harry, is always a beautiful, noble and wonderful and glorious thing, and so, it follows, is the war against war. But it is always hopeless and quixotic too.&quot;

    &quot;That is perhaps true,&quot; I cried heatedly, &quot;but truths like that—that we must all soon be dead and so it is all one and the same—make the whole of life flat and stupid. Are we then to throw everything up and renouhe spirit altogether and all effort and all that is human a ambition and money rule forever while we await the  mobilization lass of beer?&quot;

    Remarkable the look that Hermine now gave me, a look full of amusement, full of irony and roguishness and fellow feeling, and at the same time so grave, so wise, so unfathomably serious.

    &quot;You shant do that,&quot; she said in a voice that was quite maternal. &quot;Your life will not be flat and dull even though you know that your war will never be victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something good and ideal and to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No—we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for deaths sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then shtly. Youre a child, Harry. Now, do as I tell you and e along. Weve a lot to get dooday. I am not going to bother myself any more today about the war or the papers either. What about you?&quot;

    Oh, no, I had no wish to.

    We went together—it was our first walk iown—to a music shop and looked at gramophones. We turhem on and off and heard them play, and when we had found ohat was very suitable and nid cheap I wao buy it. Hermine, however, was not for such rapid transas. She pulled me bad I had to go off with her in search of another shop and there, too, look at and listen to gramophones of every shape and size, from the dearest to the cheapest, before she finally agreed to return to the first shop and buy the mae we first thought of.

    &quot;You see,&quot; I said, &quot;it would have been as simple to have taken it at once.&quot;

    &quot;Think so? And then perhaps tomorrow we should have seen the very same one in a shop window at twenty francs less. And besides, its fun buying things and you have to pay for your fun. Youve a lot to lear.&quot;

    We got a porter to carry the purchase home.

    Hermine made a careful iion of my room. She ehe stove and the sofa, tried the chairs, picked up the books, stood a long while in front of the photograph of Erica. ut the gramophone on a chest of drawers among piles of books. And now my instru began. Hermiurned on a fox trot and, after showihe first steps, began to take me in hand. I trotted obediently around with her, colliding with chairs, hearing her dires and failing to uand them, treading ooes, and being as clumsy as I was stious. After the sed dance she threw herself on the sofa and laughed like a child.

    &quot;Oh! how stiff you are! Just ght ahead as if you were walking. Theres not the least o exert yourself. Why, I should think you have made yourself positively hot, havent you? No, lets rest five minutes! Dang, dont you see, is every bit as easy as thinking, when you  do it, and much easier to learn. Now you  uand why people wohe habit of thinking and prefer calling Herr Haller a traitor to his try and waiting quietly for the  war to e along.&quot;

    In an hour she was gone, assurihat it would go better ime. I had my own thoughts about that, and I was sorely disappointed over my stupidity and clumsiness. It did not seem to me that I had learned anything whatever and I did not believe that it would go better ime. No, one had t certain qualities to dang that I was entirely without, gaiety, innoce, frivolity, elasticity. Well, I had always thought so.

    But there, the ime it did in fact go better. I even got some fun out of it, and at the end of the lesson Hermine annouhat I was now profit in the fox trot. But when she followed it up by saying that I had to dah her the  day at a restaurant, I was thrown into a panid resisted the idea with vehemence. She reminded me coolly of my oath of obediend arranged a meeting for tea on the following day at the Balael.

    That evening I sat in my room and tried to read; but I could not. I was in dread of the morrow. It was a most horrible thought that I, an elderly, shy, touchy k, was to frequent one of those moders of jazz music, a thé dansant, and a far more horrible thought that I was to figure there as a dahough I did not in thbbr>藏书网</abbr>e least know how to dance. And I own I laughed at myself a shame in my own eyes when alone in the quiet of my study I turned on the mae and softly in stoged feet went through the steps of my dance.

    A small orchestra played every other day at the Balael and tea and whisky were served. I made an attempt at bribing Hermine, I put cakes before her and proposed a bottle of good wine, but she was inflexible.

    &quot;Youre not here for your amusement today. It is a dang lesson.&quot;

    I had to dah her two or three times, and during an interval she introduced me to the saxophone player, a dark and good-looking youth of Spanish or South Ameri in, who, she told me, could play on all instruments and talk every language in the world. This se?or appeared to know Hermine well and to be on excellent terms with her. He had thones of different sizes in front of him which he played on by turns, while his darkly gleaming eyes scrutihe dancers and beamed with pleasure. I was surprised to feel something like jealousy of this agreeable and charming musi, not a lovers jealousy, for there was no question of love between Hermine and me, but a subtler jealousy of their friendship; for he did not seem to me so emily worthy of the i, and even reverence, with which she so spicuously distinguished him. I apparently was to meet some queer people, I thought to myself in ill humor. Then Hermine was asked to dance again, and I was left aloo drink tea and listen to the music, a kind of music that I had ill that day known how to endure. Good God, I thought, so now I am to be initiated, and made to feel at home in this world of idlers and pleasure seekers, a world that is utterly strange and repugnant to me and that to this day I have always carefully avoided and utterly despised, a smooth and stereotyped world of marble-topped tables, jazz music, cocottes and ercial travelers! Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of sed-rate elegawo beautiful girls caught my eye. They were both good dancers. I followed their movements with admiration and envy. How elastic, how beautiful and gay aain their steps!

    Soon Hermine appeared once more. She was not pleased with me. She scolded me and said that I was not there to wear such a fad sit idling at tea tables. I was to pull myself together, please, and dance. What, I knew no ohat was not necessary. Were there, then, no girls there who met with my approval?

    I pointed out one of the two, and the more attractive, who happe the moment to be standing near us. She looked enting in her pretty velvet dress with her short luxuriant blonde hair and her rounded womanly arms. Hermine insisted that I should go up to her forthwith and ask her to dance. I shrank ba despair.

    &quot;Indeed, I ot do it,&quot; I said in my misery. &quot;Of course, if I were young and good-looking—but for a stiff old hack like me who t dance for the life of him—she would laugh at me!&quot;

    Hermine looked at me ptuously.

    &quot;And that I should laugh at you, of course, doesnt matter. What a coward you are! Every one risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl. Thats always at stake. So take the risk, Harry, and if the worst e to the worst let yourself be laughed at. Otherwise its all up with my belief in your obedience....&quot;

    She was obdurate. I got up automatically and approached the youy just as the music began again.

    &quot;As a matter of fact, Im engaged for this one,&quot; she said and looked me up and down with her large clear eyes, &quot;but my partner seems to have got stra the bar over there, so e along.&quot;

    I grasped her and performed the first steps, still in amazement that she had not sent me about my business. She was not long in taking my measure and in taking charge of me. She danced wonderfully and I caught the iion. I fot for the moment all the rules I had stiously learned and simply floated along. I felt my partaut hips, her quid pliant knees, and looking in her young and radiant face I owo her that this was the first time in my life that I had ever really danced. She smiled encement and replied to my ented gaze and flattering words with a wonderful plianot of words, but of movements whose soft entment brought us more closely and delightfully in touch. My right hand held her waist firmly and I followed every movement of her feet and arms and shoulders with eager happiness. Not oo my astonishment, did I step on her feet, and when the music stopped, we both stood where we were and clapped till the dance layed again; and then with a lovers zeal I devoutly performed the rite once more.

    When, too soon, the dance came to an end, my beautiful partner i disappeared and I suddenly saw Hermianding near me. She had been watg us.

    &quot;Now do you see?&quot; she laughed approvingly. &quot;Have you made the discovery that womens legs are not table legs? Well, bravo! You know the fox trot now, thank the Lord. Tomorrow well get on to the Boston, and in three weeks theres the Masked Ball at the Globe Rooms.&quot;

    We had takes for the interval when the charming young Herr Pablo, with a friendly nod, sat down beside Hermine. He seemed to be very intimate with her. As for myself, I must own that I was not by any means delighted with the gentleman at this first enter. He was good-looking, I could not deny, both of fad figure, but I could not discover what further advantages he had. Even his linguistic aplishments sat very lightly on him—to su extent, ihat he did not speak at all beyond uttering such words as please, thanks, you bet, rather and hallo. These, certainly, he knew in several languages. No, he said nothing, this Se?or Pablo, nor did he even appear to think much, this charming caballero. His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to devote himself with love and passion. Often during the course of the music he would suddenly clap with his hands, or permit himself other expressions of enthusiasm, such as, singing out &quot;O O O, Ha Ha, Hallo.&quot; Apart from this, however, he fined himself to beiiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number s on his fingers. His manner of eaining us sisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watd in rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark aiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romano problems, no thoughts. Closely looked at, this beautiful demigod of love was no more than a plat and rather spoiled young man with pleasant manners. I talked to him about his instrument and about tone colors in jazz musid he must have seen that he was fronted by one who had the enjoyment of a oisseur for all that touched on music. But he made no response, and while I, in pliment to him, or rather, to Hermine, embarked upon a musily justification of jazz, he smiled amiably upon me and my efforts. Presumably, he had not the least idea that there was any music but jazz or that any music had ever existed before it. He leasant, certainly, pleasant and polite, and his large, vat eyes smiled most charmingly. Between him and me, however, there appeared to be nothing whatever in on. Nothing of all that erhaps, important and sacred to him could be so for me as well. We came of trasted races and spoke languages in whio two words were akin. (Later, heless, Hermiold me a remarkable thing. She told me that Pablo, after a versation about me, had said that she must treat me very nicely, for I was so very unhappy. And when she asked what brought him to that clusion, he said: &quot;Poor, poor fellow. Look at his eyes. Doesnt know how to laugh.&quot;)

    When the dark-eyed young man had taken his leave of us and the music began again, Hermiood up. &quot;Now you might have another dah me. Or dont you care to dany more?&quot;

    With her, too, I danced more easily now, in a freer and more sprightly fashion, even though not so buoyantly and more self-sciously than with the other. Hermine had me lead, adapting herself as softly and lightly as the leaf of a flower, and with her, too, I now experienced all these delights that now advanced and now took wing. She, too, now exhaled the perfume of woman and love, and her dang, too, sang with intimate tenderhe lovely and enting song of sex. A I could not respond to all this with warmth and freedom. I could irely fet myself in abandon. Hermiood in too close a relation to me. She was my rade and sister—my double, almost, in her resembla to me only, but to Herman, my boyhood friend, the enthusiast, the poet, who had shared with ardor all my intellectual pursuits aravagances.

    &quot;I know,&quot; she said when I spoke of it. &quot;I know that well enough. All the same, I shall make you fall in love with me, but theres no use hurrying. First of all were rades, two people who hope to be friends, because we have reised each other. For the present well each learn from the other and amuse ourselves together. I show you my little stage, and teach you to dand to have a little pleasure and be silly; and you show me your thoughts and something of all you know.&quot;

    &quot;Theres little there to show you, Hermine, Im afraid. You know far more than I do. Youre a most remarkable person—and a woman. But do I mean anything to you? Dont I bore you?&quot;

    She looked down darkly to the floor.

    &quot;Thats how I dont like to hear you talk. Think of that evening when you came broken from your despair and loneliness, to y path and be my rade. Why was it, do you think, I was able tnise you and uand you?&quot;

    &quot;Why, Hermiell me!&quot;

    &quot;Because its the same for me as for you, because I am aloly as you are, because Im as little fond of life and men and myself as you are and  put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life a ot e to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.&quot;

    &quot;You, you!&quot; I cried in deep amazement. &quot;I uand you, my rade. No one uands you better than I. A youre a riddle. You are such a past master at life. You have your wonderful reverence for its little details and enjoyments. You are su artist in life. How  you suffer at lifes hands? How  you despair?&quot;

    &quot;I dont despair. As to suffering—oh, yes, I know all about that! You are surprised that I should be unhappy when I  dand am so sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that are the deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is ere drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dand play and smile, and still not be happy. And yoing to teach me to think and to know a not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?&quot;

    &quot;Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. And that reminds me of something. Ieppenwolf treatise that I told you about, there is something to the effect that it is only a fancy of his to believe that he has one soul, or two, that he is made up of one or two personalities. Every human being, it says, sists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.&quot;

    &quot;I like that very much,&quot; cried Hermine. &quot;In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. Its he we want t on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is.&quot;

    She looked at me, smiling; and then asked softly in an altered voice:

    &quot;And how did you like Maria, then?&quot;

    &quot;Maria? Who is she?&quot;

    &quot;The girl you danced with. She is a lovely girl, a very lovely girl. You were a little smitten with her, as far as I could see.&quot;

    &quot;You know her then?&quot;

    &quot;Oh, yes, we know each other well. Were you very much taken with her?&quot;

    &quot;I liked her very much, and I was delighted that she was so indulgent about my dang.&quot;

    &quot;As if that were the whole story! You ought to make love to her a little, Harry. She is very pretty and such a good dancer, and you are in love with her already, I know very well. Youll succeed with her, Im sure.&quot;

    &quot;Believe me, I have no such aspiration.&quot;

    &quot;Now youre lying a little. Of course, I know that you have an attat. There is a girl somewhere or other whom you see once or twice a year in order to have a quarrel with her. Of course, its very charming of you to wish to be true to this estimable friend of yours, but you must permit me not to take it so very seriously. I suspect you of taking love frightfully seriously. That is your own affair. You  love as much as you like in your ideal fashion, for all I care. All I have to worry about is that you should learn to know a little more of the little arts and lighter sides of life. In this sphere, I am your teacher, and I shall be a better ohan your ideal love ever was, you may be sure of that! Its high time you slept with a pretty girl again, Steppenwolf.&quot;

    &quot;Hermine,&quot; I cried in torment, &quot;you have only to look at me, I am an old man!&quot;

    &quot;Youre a child. You were too lazy to learn to daill it was nearly too late, and in the same way you were too lazy to learn to love. As for ideal and tragic love, that, I dont doubt, you  do marvellously—and all honor to you. Now you will learn to love a little in an ordinary human way. We have made a start. You will soo to go to a ball, but you must know the Boston first, and well begin on that tomorrow. Ill e at three. How did you like the music, by the way?&quot;

    &quot;Very mudeed.&quot;

    &quot;Well, theres aep forward, you see. Up to now you couldnt stand all this dand jazz music. It was too superficial and frivolous for you. Now you have seen that theres o take it seriously and that it  all the same be very agreeable and delightful. And, by the way, the whole orchestra would be nothing without Pablo. He ducts it and puts fire into it.&quot;

百度搜索 Steppenwolf 天涯 或 Steppenwolf 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.