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In the short interval betweeime that I got to know Maria and the Fancy Dress Ball I was really happy; a I never had the feeling that this was my release and the attai of felicity. I had the distinct impression, rather, that all this relude and a preparation, that everything ushing eagerly forward, that the gist of the matter was to e.I was now so profit in dang that I felt quite equal to playing my part at the Ball of which everybody was talking. Hermine had a secret. She took the greatest care not to let out what her e was to be. I would reize her soon enough, she said, and should I fail to do so, she would help me; but beforehand I was to know nothing. She was not in the least inquisitive to know my plans for a fancy dress and I decided that I should not wear a e at all. Maria, when I asked her to go with me as my partner, explaihat she had a cavalier already and a ticket too, in fact; and I saw with some disappoihat I should have to attend the festivity alo was the principal Fancy Dress Ball of the town, anized yearly by the Society of Artists in the Globe Rooms.
During these days I saw little of Hermine, but the day before the Ball she paid me a brief visit. She came for her ticket, which I had got for her, and sat quietly with me for a while in my room. We fell into a versation so remarkable that it made a deep impression on me.
"Youre really doing splendidly," she said. "Dang suits you. Anyone who hadnt seen you for the last four weeks would scarcely know you."
"Yes," I agreed. "Things havent gone so well with me for years. Thats all your doing, Hermine."
"Oh, not the beautiful Marias?"
"No. She is a present from you like all the rest. She is wonderful."
"She is just the girl you need, Steppenwolf—pretty, young, light hearted, an expert in love and not to be had every day. If you hadnt to share her with others, if she werent always merely a fleeting guest, it would be another matter."
Yes, I had to cede this too.
"And so have you really got everything you want now?"
"No, Hermi is not like that. What I have got is very beautiful and delightful, a great pleasure, a great solation. Im really happy—"
"Well then, what more do you want?"
"I do want more. I am not tent with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite."
"To be unhappy in fact? Well, youve had that and to spare, that time when you couldnt go home because of the razor."
"No, Hermi is something else. That time, I grant you, I was very unhappy. But it was a stupid unhappihat led to nothing."
"Why?"
"Because I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it all the same. The unhappihat I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for."
"I uand that. There we are brother and sister. But what have you got against the happihat you have found now with Maria? Why arent you tent?"
"I have nothing against it. Oh, no, I love it. Im grateful for it. It is as lovely as a sunny day in a wet summer. But I suspect that it t last. This happiness leads to nothiher. It gives tent, but tent is no food for me. It lulls the Steppenwolf to sleep and satiates him. But it is not a happio die for."
"So its necessary to be dead, Steppenwolf?"
"I think so, yes. My happiness fills me with tent and I bear it for a long while yet. But sometimes when happiness leaves a moments leisure to look about me and long for things, the longing I have is not to keep this happiness forever, but to suffer once again, only more beautifully and less meanly than before. I long for the sufferings that make me ready and willing to die."
Hermine looked tenderly in my eyes with that dark look that could so suddenly e into her face. Lovely, fearful eyes! Pig her words one by one and pieg them together, and speaking slowly and so low that it was an effort to hear her, she said:
"I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always orack of what is great aernal, never tent with the trivial ay. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your ne them. And all that you onew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and h destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and goo pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate?"
I nodded again and again.
"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a fortable room where people are quite tent with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—the heroid the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints—is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to a high standard, to expect muyself and do great things. I could have played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has been hard enough. That is how things have goh me. For a while I was insolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I, must in the end be in the right, and if life sed my beautiful dreams, so I argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong headed. But that did not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my neighbors and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and then I saw you. And I khat my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life ay that were wrong. It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his moneys sake, or to bee some kind e, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was more material and moral and with you more spiritual—but it was the same road. Do you think I t uand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dang floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I uand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the ohat has been and the ohat is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, a you must go to the wall. You are much too exag and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily tented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants musistead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours—"
She looked down and fell into meditation.
"Hermine," I cried tenderly, "sister, how clearly you see! A you taught me the fox trot! But how do you mean that people like us with a dimension too many ot live here? What brings it about? Is it only so in our days, or was it so always?"
"I dont know. For the honor of the world, I will suppose it to be in our time only—a disease, a momentary misfortune. Our leaders strain every nerve, and with success, to get the war going, while the rest of us, meanwhile, dahe fox trot, earn money a chocolates—in such a time the world must indeed cut a pure. Let us hope that other times were better, and will be better again, richer, broader and deeper. But that is o us noerhaps it has always been the same—"
"Always as it is today? Always a world only for politis, profiteers, waiters and pleasure-seekers, and not a breath of air for men?"
"Well, I dont know. Nobody knows. Anyway, it is all the same. But I am thinking now of your favorite of whom you have talked to me sometimes, and read me, too, some of his letters, of Mozart. How was it with him in his day? Who trolled things in his times and ruled the roost and gave the tone and ted for something? Was it Mozart or the business people, Mozart or the average man? And in what fashion did he e to die and be buried? And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the same and always will be, and what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fiions, is all nothing but a swindle ied by the sasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied fiven number of years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death."
"Nothing else?"
"Yes, eternity."
"You mean a name, and fame with posterity?"
"No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?"
"No, of course not."
"Then it isnt fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the sasters. No, it isnt fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too mud have a dimension too many could not trive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were ernity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The musiozart belongs there and the poetry of yreat poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records <tt>.99liｂ?t>it or hands it down to posterity. Iy there is no posterity."
"You are right."
"The pious," she went oatively, "after all know most about this. That is why they set up the saints and what they call the union of the saints. The saints, these are the true men, the younger brothers of the Savior. We are with them all our lives long in every good deed, in every brave thought, in every love. The union of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the kingdom oher side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death. There you will find yoethe again and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher, Philip of Neri and all. There are many saints who at first were sinners. Even sin be a way to saintliness, sin and vice. You will laugh at me, but I often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding. Ah, Harry, we have to stumble, through so much dirt and humbug before we reae. And we have no oo guide us. Our only guide is our homesiess."
With the last words her voice had sunk again and now there was a stillness of pea the room. The sun was setting; it lit up the gilt lettering on the bay books. I took Hermines head in my hands and kissed her on the forehead and leaned my cheek to hers as though she were my sister, and so we stayed for a moment. And so I should have liked best to stay and to have go no more that day. But Maria had promised me this night, the last before the great Ball.
But on my way to join Maria I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine had said. It seemed to me that it was not, perhaps, her own thoughts but mine. She had read them like a clairvoyant, breathed them in and given them back, so that they had a form of their own and came to me as something new. I articularly thankful to her for having expressed the thought of eternity just at this time. I , for without it I could not live aher could I die. The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had aernal value and the substance of wh></a>ich was divine had been given bae today by this friend of mine who taught me dang.
I was forced to recall my dream of Goethe and that vision of the old wiseacre when he laughed so inhumanly and played his joke on me in the fashion of the immortals. For the first time I uood Goethes laughter, the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions and misuandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of spad eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innoce, so to speak, and its transformation again into space.
I went to meet Maria at the place where we usually dined. However, she had not arrived, and while I sat waiting at the table in the quiet and secluded restaurant, my thoughts still ran on the versation I had had with Hermine. All these thoughts that had ariseween her and me seemed so intimate and well known, fashioned from a mythology and an imagery so entirely my own. The immortals, living their life in timeless space, enraptured, re-fashioned and immersed in a crystalliernity like ether, and the cool starry brightness and radiant serenity of this world outside the earth—whence was all this so intimately known? As I reflected, passages of Mozarts Cassations, of Bachs Well-tempered Clavier came to my mind and it seemed to me that all through this music there was the radiance of this cool starry brightness and the quivering of this clearness of ether. Yes, it was there. In this music there was a feeling as of time frozen into space, and above it there quivered a never-ending and superhuman serenity, aernal, divine laughter. Yes, and how well the aged Goethe of my dreams fitted in too! And suddenly I heard this fathomless laughter around me. I heard the immortals laughing. I sat entranced. Entranced, I felt for a pencil in my waistcoat pocket, and looking for paper saw the wine card lying oable. I tur over and wrote on the back. I wrote verses and fot about them till one day I discovered them in my pocket. They ran:
THE IMMORTALS
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Asds to us lifes fevered surge,
Wealths excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death meals on the gallows verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers hands, usurers hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales iid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatg war and lovely art,
Deg out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasures way,
Rising for eaewborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you ever more residing
Ihers star translumined ice
Know not day nht nor times dividing,
Wear ne nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and l<q></q>ascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that cirg go,
ging not our day fht;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in ht
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Then Maria came and after a cheerful meal I apanied her to our little room. She was lovelier that evening, warmer and more intimate than she had ever been. The love she gave me was so tehat I felt it as the most plete abandon. "Maria," said I, "you are as prodigal today as a goddess. Dont kill us both quite. Tomorrow after all is the Ball. Whom have you got for a cavalier tomorrow? Im very much afraid it is a fairy prince who will carry you off and I shall never see you any more. Your love tonight is almost like that of good lovers who bid each other farewell for the last time."
She put her lips close to my ear and whispered:
"Dont say that, Harry. Any time might be the last time. If Hermiakes you, you will e no more to me. Perhaps she will take you tomorrow."
Never did I experiehe feeling peculiar to those days, that strange, bitter-sweet alternation of mood, more powerful<s></s>ly than on that night before the Ball. It was happihat I experiehere was the loveliness of Maria and her surrehere was the sweet and subtle sensuous joy of inhaling and tasting a hundred pleasures of the sehat I had only begun to know as an elderly man. I was bathed i joy like a rippling pool. Ahat was only the shell. Within all was signifit and teh fate, and while, love-lost and tender, I was busied with the little sweet appealing things of love and sank apparently without a care in the caress of happiness, I was scious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on at breakneck speed, rag and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for the precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the mation of death. Just as a short while before I had started aside in fear from the easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love a a dread of Marias beauty that laughingly offered itself, so now I felt a dread of death, a dread, however, that was already scious of its approag ge into surrender and release.
Even while we were lost in the silent and deep preoccupation of our love and belonged more closely than ever we had to one another, my soul bid adieu to Maria, and took leave of all that she had meant to me. I had learned from her, once more before the end, to fide myself like a child to lifes surface play, to pursue a fleeting joy, and to be both child a in the innoce of sex, a state that (in earlier life) I had only known rarely and as an exception. The life of the senses and of sex had nearly always had for me the bitter apa of guilt, the sweet but dread taste of forbidden fruit that puts a spiritual man on his guard. Now, Hermine and Maria had showhis garden in its innoce, and I had been a guest there and thankfully. But it would sooime to go on farther. It was too agreeable and too warm in this garden. It was my destiny to make another bid for the of life in the expiation of its endless guilt. An easy life, an easy love, an easy death—these were not for me.
From what the girls told me I gathered that for the Ball day, or in e with it, quite unusual delights aravagances were on foot. Perhaps it was the climax, and perhaps Marias suspi was correct. Perhaps this was our last night together and perhaps the m would bring a new unwinding of fate. I was aflame with longing and breathless with dread; I g wildly to Maria; and there flared within me a last burst of wild desire...
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