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Just as the gramophone ihe esthetid intellectual atmosphere of my study and just as the Ameri dances broke in as strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully tended garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and dreaded and disiing influences upon my life that, till now, bad been so sharply marked off and so deeply secluded. The Steppenwolf treatise, and Hermioo, were right in their doe of the thousand souls. Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones; making clamorous demands and creating fusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. The feacities and pursuits in which I had happeo be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in faothing more than a most refined and educated specialist iry, musid philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrand gave the label of Steppenwolf.Meanwhile, though cured of an illusion, I found this disiion of the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing adventure. On the trary, it was often exceedingly painful, often almost intolerable. Often the sound of the gramophone was truly fiendish to my ears in the midst of surroundings where everything was tuo so very different a key. And many a time, when I danced my oep in a stylish restaurant among pleasure seekers and elegant rakes, I felt that I was a traitor to all that I was bound to hold most sacred. Had Hermi me for one week alone I should have fled at once from this wearisome and laughable traffig with the world of pleasure. Hermine, however, was always there. Though I might not see her every day, I was all the same tinually under her eye, guided, guarded and seled—besides, she read all my mad thoughts of rebellion and escape in my face, and smiled at them.
As the destru of all that I had called my personality went on, I began to uand, too, why it was that I had feared death so horribly in spite of all my despair. I began to perceive that this ignoble horror in the face of death art of my old ventional and lyiehe late Herr Haller, gifted writer, student of Mozart and Goethe, author of essays upoaphysics of art, upon genius and tragedy and humanity, the melancholy hermit in a cell encumbered with books, was given over bit by bit to self-criticism and at every point was found wanting. This gifted and iing Herr Haller had, to be sure, preached reason and humanity and had protested against the barbarity of the war; but he had not let himself be stood against a wall and shot, as would have been the proper sequence of his way of thinking. He had found some way of aodating himself; one, of course, that was outwardly reputable and noble, but still a promise and no more. He was, further, opposed to the power of capital a he had industrial securities lying at his bank and spent the i from them without a pang of sce. And so it was all through. Harry Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself out finely as an idealist and ner of the world, as a melancholy hermit and growling prophet. At bottom, however, he was a beois who took exception to a life like Hermines and was munoyed over the nights thrown away in a restaurant and the money squahere, and had them on his sce. Instead of longing to be freed and pleted, he longed, on the trary, most early to get back to those happy times when his intellectual trifling had been his diversion and brought him fame. Just so those neer readers—whom he despised and sed—loo get back to the ideal time before the war, because it was so much more fortable than taking a lesson from those who had gohrough it. Oh, the devil, he made one sick, this Herr Haller! A I g to him all the same, or to the mask of him that was already falling away, g to his coquetting with the spiritual, to his beois horror of the disorderly and actal (to which death, too, belonged) and pared the new Harry—the somewhat timid and ludicrous dilettante of the dans—sfully and enviously with the old one in whose ideal and lying portrait he had since discovered all those fatal characteristics which had upset him that night so grievously in the professors print of Goethe. He himself, the old Harry, had been just such a beois idealization of Goethe, a spiritual champion whose all-too-noble gaze shoh the un of elevated thought and humanity, until he was almost overe by his own nobleness of mind! The devil! Now, at last, this fine picture stood badly in need of repairs! The ideal Herr Haller had been lamentably dismantled! He looked like a dignitary who had fallen among thieves—with his tattered breeches—and he would have shown sense if he had studied now the r?le that his rags appointed him, instead of wearing them with an air of respectability and carrying on a whining preteo lost repute.
I was stantly finding myself in the pany of Pablo, the musi, and my estimate of him had to be revised if only because Hermine liked him so mud was so eager for his pany. Pablo had left ohe impression of a pretty y, a little beau, and somewhat empty at that, as happy as a child for whom there are no problems, whose joy is to dribble into his toy trumpet and who is kept quiet with praises and chocolate. Pablo, however, was not ied in my opinions. They were as indifferent to him as my musical theories. He listened with friendly courtesy, smiling as he always did; but he refrained all the same from any actual reply. Oher hand, in spite of this, it seemed that I had aroused his i. It was clear that he put himself out to please me and to show me good-will. Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill humor, over one of these fruitless attempts at versation he looked in my face with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it, he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuffbox. It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was coe in the powder. Hermiold me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret els. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for indug sleep, fettiiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love.
One day I met him ireet he quay aur oo apahis time I succeeded at last in making him talk.
"Herr Pablo," I said to him as he played with his slender ebony and silver walking stick, "you are a friend of Hermines and that is why I take an i in you. But I t say you make it easy to get on with you. Several times I have attempted to talk about music with you. It would have ied me to know your thoughts and opinions, whether they tradicted mine or not, but you have disdaio make me even the barest reply."
He gave me a most amiable smile and this time a reply was accorded me.
"Well," he said with equanimity, "you see, in my opinion there is no point at all in talking about music. I alk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musi, not a professor, and I dont believe that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that."
"Ihen what does it depend on?"
"On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the iy of whie is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the plete works of Bad Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hobbr>?</abbr>ld of my mouthpied play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. Thats the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitd faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music."
"Very good, Herr Pablo. But there is not only sensual music. There is spiritual also. Besides the music that is actually played at the moment, there is the immortal music that lives on eve is not actually being played. It happen to a man to lie alone in bed and to call to mind a melody from the Magic Flute or the Matthew Passion, and then there is music without anybody blowing into a flute or passing a bow across a fiddle."
"Certainly, Herr Haller. Yearning and Valencia are recalled every night by many a lonely dreamer. Even the poorest typist in her office has the latest oep in her head and taps her keys in time to it. You are right. I dont grudge all those lonely persons their mute music, whether its Yearning or the Magic Flute or Valencia. But where do they get their lonely and mute musi? They get it from us, the musis. It must first have been played and heard, it must have got into the blood, before any o home in his room think of it and dream of it."
"Granted," I said coolly, "all the same it wont do to put Mozart and the latest fox trot on the same level. And it is not one and the same thing whether you play people divine aernal music or cheap stuff of the day that is fotten tomorrow."
When Pablo observed from my tohat I was gettied, he at o on his most amiable expression and toug my arm caressingly he gave an unbelievable softo his voice.
"Ah, my dear sir, you may be perfectly right with your levels. I have nothing to say to your putting Mozart and Haydn and Valencia on what levels you please. It is all oo me. It is not for me to decide about levels. I shall never be asked about them. Mozart, perhaps, will still be played in a hundred years and Valencia in two will be played no more—we well leave that, I think, in Gods hands. God is good and has the span of all our days in his hands and that of every waltz and fox trot too. He is sure to do what is right. We musis, however, we must play our parts acc to our duties and ifts. We have to play what is actually in demand, and we have to play it as well and as beautifully and as expressively as ever we ."
With a sigh I gave it up. There was ing past the fellow.
At many moments the old and the new, pain and pleasure, fear and joy were quite oddly mixed with one another. Now I was in heaven, now in hell, generally in both at ohe old Harry and the new lived at one moment in bitter strife, at the in peace. Many a time the old Harry appeared to be dead and doh, to have died and been buried, and then of a sudden there he was again, giving orders and tyrannizing and tradictory till the little new young Harry was silent for very shame a himself be pushed to the wall. At other times the young Harry took the old by the throat and squeezed with all his might. There was many a groan, many a death struggle, many a thought of the razor blade.
Often, however, suffering and happiness broke over me in one wave. One suent was when a few days after my first public exhibition of dang, I went into my bedroom at night and to my indescribable astonishment, dismay, horror and entment found the lovely Maria lying in my bed.
Of all the surprises that Hermine had prepared for me this was the most violent. For I had not a moments doubt that it was she who had sehis bird of paradise. I had not, as usually, been with Hermihat evening. I had been to a recital of old church musi the Cathedral, a beautiful, though melancholy, excursion into my past life, to the fields of my youth, the territory of my ideal self. Beh the lofty Gothic of the church whose ed vaulting swayed with a ghostly life in the play of the sparse lights, I heard pieces by Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Bad Haydn. I had gohe old beloved way once more. I had heard the magnifit voice of a Bach singer with whom, in the old days when we were friends, I had enjoyed many a memorable musical occasion. The notes of the old music with its external dignity and sanctity had called to life all the exalted entment ahusiasm of youth. I had sat in the lofty choir, sad and abstracted, a guest for an hour of this noble and blessed world whice had been my home. During a Haydhe tears had e suddenly to my eyes. I had not waited for the end of the cert. Dropping the thought I had had of seeing the singer again (what evenings I had once spent with the artists after such certs) and stealing away out of the Cathedral, I had wearily paced the dark and narrow streets, where here and there behind the windows of the restaurants jazz orchestras were playing the tunes of the life I had now e to live. Oh, what a dull maze of error I had made of my life!
For long during this nights walk I had reflected upon the signifiy relation to musid not for the first time reized this appealing and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German spirit. In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to aent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedieo the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless. Instead of playing his part as truly and holy as he could, the German intellectual has stantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted musid so the German spirit, carousing in musi wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home iy. We are strao it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own Germay, in our history and politid public opinion, has been so lamentable a one. Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for oo be seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing but esthetid intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended, however, in resignation, in surreo destiny. The generals and the captains of industry were quite right. There was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning. With a curse, I came back to the razor.
So, full of thoughts and the echoes of the music, my heart weighed down with sadness and the longing of despair for life ay and sense and all that was irretrievably lost, I had got home at last; climbed my stairs; put on the light in my sitting room; tried in vain to read; thought of the appoi whipelled me to drink whisky and da the Cecil Bar on the following evening; thought with malid bitterness not only of myself, but of Hermioo. She might have the best and ki iions and she might be a wonderful person, but she would have doer all the same to let me perish instead of drawing me down into this strange, dazzling, dizzying world of hers where I would always remain a stranger and where my real self pined and wasted away.
And so I had sadly put out the light and taken myself to my bedroom and sadly begun to undress; and then I was surprised by an unaced smell. There was a faint aroma of st, and looking round I saw the lovely Maria lying in my bed, smiling and a little startled, with large blue eyes.
"Maria!" I said. And my first thoughts were that my landlady would give me notice when she knew of it.
"Ive e," she said softly. "Are you angry with me?"
"No, no. I see Hermine gave you the key. Isnt that it?"
"Oh, it does make you angry. Ill go again."
"No, lovely Maria, stay! Only, just tonight, Im very sad. I t be jolly tonight. Perhaps tomorrow Ill be better again."
I was bending over her and she took my head in her large firm hands and drawing it down gave me a long kiss. Then I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hands and asked her to speak low in case we were heard, and looked at her beautiful full rounded face that lay sely and wonderfully on my pillow like a large flower. She drew my hand slowly to her lips and laid it beh the clothes on her warm and evenly breathing breast.
"You doo be jolly," she said. "Hermiold me that you had troubles. Any one uand that. Tell me, then, do I please you still? The other day, when we were dang, you were very mu love with me."
I kissed her eyes, her mouth and ned breasts. A moment ago I had thought of Hermih bitterness and reproaow I held her gift in my hands and was thankful. Marias caresses did not harm the wonderful music I had heard that evening. They were its worthy fulfillment. Slowly I drew the clothes from her lovely body till my kisses reached her feet. When I lay down beside her, her flower face smiled back at me omnist and bountiful.
During this night by Marias side I did not sleep much, but my sleep was as deep and peaceful as a childs. Aween sleeping I drank of her beautiful warm youth and heard, as we talked softly, a number of curious tales about her life and Hermines. I had never known much of this side of life. Only iheatrical world, occasionally, in earlier years had I e across similar existences—women as well as men who lived half for art and half for pleasure. Now, for the first time, I had a glimpse into this kind of life, remarkable alike for its singular innod singular corruption. These girls, mostly from poor homes, but too intelligent and too pretty to give their whole lives to some ill-paid and joyless way of gaining their living, all lived sometimes on casual work, sometimes on their charm and easy virtue. Now and then, for a month or two, they sat at a typewriter; at times were the mistresses of well-to-do men of the world, receiving pocket money and presents; lived at times in furs and motorcars, at other times in attics, and though a good ht under some circumstances ihem to marry, they were not at all eager for it. Many of them had little ination for love and gave themselves very unwillingly, and then only for money and at the highest price. Others, and Maria was one of them, were unusually gifted in love and uo do without it. They lived solely for love and besides their official and lucrative friends had other love affairs as well. Assiduous and busy, care-ridden and light-hearted, intelligent ahoughtless, these butterflies lived a life at once childlike and raffiné; indepe, not to be bought by every one, finding their at in good lud fiher, in love with life a ging to it far less than the beois, always ready to follow a fairy prio his castle, always certain, though scarcely scious of it, that a difficult and sad end was in store for them.
During that wonderful first night and the days that followed Maria taught me much. She taught me the charming play and delights of the senses, but she gave me, also, new uanding, new insight, new love. The world of the dand pleasure resorts, the emas, bars and hotel louhat for me, the hermit ahete, had always about it something trivial, forbidden, and degrading, was for Maria and Hermine and their panions the world pure and simple. It was her good nor bad, her loved nor hated. In this world their brief and eager lives flowered and faded. They were at home in it and knew all its ways- They loved a champagne or a special dish at a restaurant as one of us might a poser or poet, and they lavished the same enthusiasm and rapture aion oest craze in dances or the seal cloying song of a jazz singer as one of us ozsche or Hamsun. Maria talked to me about the handsome saxophone player, Pablo, and spoke of an Ameri song that he had sung them sometimes, and she was so carried away with admiration and love as she spoke of it that I was far more moved and impressed than by the ecstasies of any highly cultured person over artistic pleasures of the rarest and most distinguished quality. I was ready to enthuse in sympathy, be the song what it might. Marias loving words, her fond and tender looks tore large gaps in the bulwark of my esthetics. There was to be sure a beauty, one and indivisible, small a, that seemed to me, with Mozart at the top, to be above all dispute and doubt, but where was the limit? Hadnt we all as oisseurs and criti our youth been ed with love for works of art and for artists that today we regarded with doubt and dismay? Hadnt that happeo us with Liszt and Wagner, and, to many of us, even with Beethoven? Wasnt the blossoming of Marias childish emotiohe song from America just as pure aiful an artistic experiend exalted as far beyond doubt as the rapture of any academic big-wig over Tristan, or the ecstasy of a ductor over the Ninth Symphony? And didnt this agree remarkably well with the views of Herr Pablo and prove him right?
Maria too appeared to love the beautiful Pablo extremely.
"He certainly is a beauty," said I. "I like him very much too. But tell me, Maria, how you have a fondness for me as well, a tiresome old fellow with no looks, who even has grey hairs and doesnt play a saxophone and doesnt sing any English love songs?"
"Dont talk so horribly," she scolded. "It is quite natural. I like you too. You, too, have something nice about you that endears you and marks you out. I wouldnt have you different. One oughtnt to talk of these things and want them ated for. Listen, when you kiss my ney ear, I feel that I please you, that you like me. You have a way of kissing as though you were shy, and th<q></q>at tells me: You please him. He is grateful to you for being pretty. That gives me great, great pleasure. And then again with another man its just the opposite that pleases me, that he kisses me as though he thought little of me and ferred a favor."
Again we fell asleep and again I woke to find my arm still about her, my beautiful, beautiful flower.
And this beautiful flower, strao say, tio be heless the gift that Hermine had made me. Hermine tio stand in front of her and to hide her with a mask. Then suddenly the thought of Eritervened—my distant, angry love, my poor friend. She was hardly less pretty than Maria, even though not so blooming; and she was more strained, and not so richly endowed itle arts of making love. She stood a moment before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.
And so iender beauty of the night many pictures of my life rose before me who for so long had lived in a poor pictureless vaow, at the magic touch of Eros, the source of them ened up and flowed iy. For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how throhe soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and stellations. My childhood and my mother showed in a teransfiguration like a distant glimpse over mountains into the fathomless blue; the litany of my friendships, beginning with the legendary Herman, soul-brother of Hermine, rang out as clear as trumpets; the images of many women floated by me with ahly fragrance like moist sea flowers on the surface of the water, women whom I had loved, desired and sung, whose love I had seldom won and seldom striven to win. My wife, too, appeared. I had lived with her many years and she had taught me radeship, strife and resignation. In spite of all the shortings of our life, my fiden her remained untouched up to the very day when she broke out against me aed me without warning, sick as I was in mind and body. And now, as I looked back, I saw how deep my love and trust must have been for her betrayal to have inflicted so deep and lifelong a wound.
These pictures—there were hundreds of them, with names and without—all came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night of love, and I knew again, what in my wretess I had fotten, that they were my lifes possession and all its worth. Iructible and abiding as the stars, these experiehough fotten, could never be erased. Their series was the story of my life, their starry light the undying value of my being. My life had bee weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappihat led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been for all its wretess a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might, the kernel of this life of mine was had purpose and character and turned not on trifles, but oars.
Time has passed and much has happened, much has ged; and I only remember a little of all that passed that night, a little of all we said and did in the deep tenderness of love, a few moments of clear awakening from the deep sleep of loves weariness. That night, however, for the first time since my downfall gave me back the uing radiany own life and made me reize ce as destiny once more ahe ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opehere were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only t<samp>?</samp>o snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every human life?
In the m, after we had shared breakfast, I had to smuggle Maria from the house. Later in the same day I took a little room in a neighb quarter which was designed solely for our meetings.
True to her duties, Hermine, my dang mistress, appeared and I had to learn the Boston. She was firm and inexorable and would not release me from a single lesson, for it was decided that I was to attend the Fancy Dress Ball in her pany. She had asked me for money for her e, but she refused to tell me anything about it. To visit her, or even to know where she lived, was still forbidden me.
This time, about three weeks before the Fancy Dress Ball, was remarkable for its wonderful happiness. Maria seemed to me to be the first woman I had ever really loved. I had always wanted mind and culture in the women I had loved, and I had never remarked that even the most intellectual and, paratively speaking, educated woman never gave any respoo the Logos in me, but rather stantly opposed it. I took my problems and my thoughts with me to the pany of women, and it would have seemed to me utterly impossible to love a girl for more than an hour who had scarcely read a book, scarcely knew what reading was, and could not have distinguished Tschaikovsky from Beethoven. Maria had no education. She had no need of these circuitous substitutes. Her problems all sprang directly from the senses. All her art and the whole task she set herself lay irag the utmost delight from the senses she had been endowed with, and from her particular figure, her color, her hair, her voice, her skiemperament; and in employing every faculty, every curve and line and every softest modeling of her body to find responsive perceptions in her lovers and to jure up in them an answering quiess of delight. The first shy dance I had had with her had already told me this much. I had caught the st and the charm of a brilliant and carefully cultivated sensibility and had been ented by it. Certainly, too, it was no act that Hermihe all-knowing, introduced me to this Maria. She had the st and the very significe of summer and of roses.
It was not my fortuo be Marias only lover, nor even her favorite one. I was one of many. Often she had no time for me, often only an hour at midday, seldom a night. She took no money from me. Hermine saw to that. She was glad of presents, however, and when I gave her, perhaps, a new little purse of red lacquered leather there might be two or three gold pieces i. As a matter of fact, she laughed at me over the red purse. It was charming, but a bargain, and no longer in fashion. In these matters, about which up to that time I was as little learned as in any language of the Eskimos, I learned a great deal from Maria. Before all e<bdo>..</bdo>lse I learhat these playthings were not mere idle trifles ied by manufacturers and dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the trary, a little or, rather, a big world, authoritative aiful, many sided, taining a multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love, refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and st to the dang show, fr to cigarette case, from waist-buckle to handbag. This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan. All were the plastic material of love, of magid delight. Each was a messenger, a smuggler, a on, a battle cry.
I often wondered who it was whom Maria really loved. I think she loved the young Pablo of the saxophone, with his melancholy black eyes and his long, white, distinguished, melancholy hands. I should have thought Pablo a somewhat sleepy lover, spoiled and passive, but Maria assured me that though it took a long time to wake him up he was then more strenuous and forward and virile than prize fighter or riding master.
In this way I got to know mas about this person and that, jazz musis, actors and many of the women and girls and men of our circle. I saw beh the surface of the various alliances aies and by degrees (though I had been su erao this world) I was drawn in and treated with fidence. I learned a good deal about Hermioo. It was of Herr Pablo, however, of whom Maria was fond, that I saw the most. At times she, too, availed herself of his secret drugs and was forever pr these delights for me also; and Pablo was always most markedly on the alert to be of servie. Once he said to me without more ado: "You are so very unhappy. That is bad. One shouldnt be like that. It makes me sorry. Try a mild pipe of opium." My opinion of this jolly, intelligent, childlike and, at the same time, unfathomable person gradually ged. We became friends, and I often took some of his specifics. He looked on at my affair with Maria with some amusement. Once he eained us in his room oop floor of an hotel in the suburbs. There was only one chair, so Maria and I had to sit on the bed. He gave us a drink from three little bottles, a mysterious and wonderful draught. And then when I had got into a very good humor, he proposed, with beaming eyes, to celebrate a love y for three. I deed abruptly. Such a thing was inceivable to me. heless I stole a gla Maria to see how she took it, and though she at once backed up my refusal I saw the gleam in her eyes and observed that the renunciation cost her sret. Pablo was disappointed by my refusal but not hurt. "Pity," he said. "Harry is too morally minded. Nothing to be done. All the same it would have been so beautiful, so very beautiful! But Ive got another idea." He gave us each a little opium to smoke, and sitting motionless with open eyes we all three lived through the ses that he suggested to us while Maria trembled with delight. As I felt a little unwell after this, Pablo laid me on the bed and gave me some drops, and while I lay with closed eyes I felt the fleeting breath of a kiss on each eyelid. I took the kiss as though I believed it came from Maria, but I knew very well it came from him.
And one evening he surprised me still more. ing to me in my room he told me that he wenty frand would I oblige him? Iurn he offered that I instead of him should have Maria for the night.
"Pablo," I said, very much shocked, "you dont know what you say. Barter for a woman is ted among us as the last degradation. I have not heard your proposal, Pablo."
He looked at me with pity. "You dont want to, Herr Harry. Very good. Youre always making difficulties for yourself. Dont sleep tonight with Maria if you would rather not. But give me the money all the same. You shall have it back. I have urgent need of it."
"What for?"
"Fostino, the little sed violin, you know. He has been ill for a week and theres no oo look after him. He hasnt a sou, nor have I at the moment."
From curiosity and also partly to punish myself, I went with him to Agostino. He took milk and medie to him in his attid a wretched o was. He made his bed and aired the room and made a most professional press for the fevered head, all quickly aly and effitly like a good siurse. The same evening I saw him playing till dawn iy Bar.
I often talked at length and iail about Maria with Hermine, about her hands and shoulders and hips and her way of laughing and kissing and dang.
"Has she shown you this?" asked Hermine on one occasion, describing to me a peculiar play of the tongue in kissing. I asked her to show it me herself, but she was most ear in her refusal. "That is for later. I am not your love yet."
I asked her how she was acquainted with Marias ways of kissing and with mas as well that could be known only to her lovers.
"Oh," she cried, "were friends, after all. Do you think wed have secrets from one another? I must say youve got hold of a beautiful girl. Theres no one like her."
"All the same, Hermine, Im sure you have some secrets from each other, or have you told her everything you know about me?"
"No, thats another matter. Those are things she would not uand. Maria is wonderful. You are fortunate. But between you ahere are things she has not a notion of. Naturally I told her a lot about you, much more than you would have liked at the time. I had to win her for you, you see. But her Maria nor anyone else will ever uand you as I uand you. Ive learned something about you from her besides, for shes told me all about you as far as she knows you at all. I know you nearly as well as if we had ofteogether."
It was curious and mysterious to know, when I was with Maria again, that she had had Hermine in her arms just as she had me ... New, i and plicated relations rose before me, new possibilities in love and life; and I thought of the thousand souls of the Steppenwolf treatise.
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