Steppenwolf (18 page)

I spent that evening sitting at home, wanting to read but unable to do so. I was afraid of the next day. It horrified me to think that I, an old, shy and sensitive misfit, should not only visit one of those dreary modern tea-dance places where they played jazz, but also, without yet being able to do a thing, put in an appearance on the dance floor among strangers. And I confess to laughing at myself and feeling ashamed at my own behaviour when, alone in the silence of my study, after winding up the gramophone and setting it in motion, I quietly rehearsed the steps of my foxtrot in my stockinged feet.

The next day in the Hotel Libra there was a small band playing, and tea and whisky were being served. I tried to bribe Hermione by offering her cakes; I tried inviting her to share a bottle of fine wine, but she would not relent.

‘You’re not here to enjoy yourself today. It’s a dancing lesson.’

I had to dance with her two or three times. In between dances she introduced me to the saxophonist, a swarthy, handsome young man of Spanish or South American origin who, so she said, could play every instrument and speak every language in
the world. This señor seemed to know Hermione very well and to be great friends with her. Standing in front of him were two saxophones of different sizes, which he played alternately while attentively and happily running his fiery black eyes over the people dancing. To my own amazement I felt something akin to jealousy of this harmless, good-looking musician, not the jealousy of a lover, since there was absolutely no question of love between me and Hermione, but rather the jealousy that troubles the mind of a friend. It seemed to me that he was not really worthy of the interest in, indeed reverence for him that she showed by singling him out so conspicuously for special favour. Pretty strange people I’m being expected to mix with, I reflected sullenly.

Then Hermione was invited to dance time and again. I remained sitting on my own at the tea table, listening to the music, the sort of music I had until now been unable to stand. Good God, I thought, I’m now being initiated into and expected to feel at home in a place like this, a world that is so strange and abhorrent to me, a world that until now I’ve taken such care to avoid and so profoundly despised as a world of layabouts and pleasure-seekers, this sleek, typecast world of marble-top tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial travellers! Feeling depressed, I gulped down my tea and stared at the semi-chic crowd on the dance floor. My eyes were drawn to two beautiful girls, both good dancers. Full of admiration and envy, I watched as they swept lithely and appealingly, gaily and confidently across the floor.

Then Hermione reappeared. She was dissatisfied with me. I wasn’t here to pull faces like that, she said, telling me off, or to sit at the tea table without budging. Would I mind stirring myself, please, and going for a dance? What did I mean, I didn’t know anyone? That was quite unnecessary. Weren’t there any girls there at all that I liked?

I pointed out the more beautiful one of the two to her, who happened to be standing close to us. With her short, strong blonde hair and her full, womanly arms she looked enchanting in her pretty little velvet skirt. Hermione insisted I should go immediately and ask her for a dance. I desperately tried to resist.

‘Don’t you see, I can’t!’ I said sadly. ‘Of course if I were a good-looking young chap, but a stiff old fogey like me who can’t even dance, well she’d just laugh at me!’

Hermione looked at me contemptuously.

‘And whether
I
laugh at you or not is, I suppose, all the same to you. What a coward you are! Anyone approaching a girl risks being laughed at, it’s the stake you pay to enter the game. So take the risk, Harry, and if the worst comes to the worst simply get laughed at. Otherwise I’ll lose all faith in your willingness to obey my commands.’

She didn’t relent. Having apprehensively got to my feet, I was walking towards the beautiful girl just as the music began again.

‘Actually, I’m not free,’ she said, looking at me curiously with her big fresh eyes, ‘but my partner seems to be caught up at the bar. All right, come on.’

Putting my arms around her, I danced the first few steps, still amazed that she hadn’t sent me packing. Then, having noticed already what a hopeless beginner I was, she took over the lead. She danced wonderfully well, and I was swept along by her momentum. Forgetting for a few moments all the rules I’d been taught, I simply drifted with the tide. I could feel the taut hips, the swift, supple knees of my partner and, looking into her youthful, radiant face, I confessed that today was the first time I had danced in my life. She smiled and encouraged me, responding with marvellous suppleness to the looks of delight in my eyes and my flattering remarks, not with words but with gentle, enchanting movements that brought us all the more enticingly close together. Holding her tight by my right hand just above the
waist, I joyfully and zealously followed the movements of her legs, her arms, her shoulders. To my amazement, I never once trod on her toes. When the music stopped we both stood there clapping until they played the dance once more and I, enamoured, again went through the ritual with zeal and devotion.

When the dance was over, all too soon, the beautiful girl in velvet withdrew and suddenly Hermione, who had been watching us, was standing next to me.

‘Have you noticed something?’ she asked, laughing appreciatively. ‘Have you discovered that women’s legs aren’t table legs? Well, good for you! You can do the foxtrot now, thank God. Tomorrow we’ll make a start on the Boston, then in three weeks’ time there’s a masked ball in the Globe Rooms.’

There was a break in the dancing now and we had returned to our seats. Señor Pablo, the good-looking young saxophonist, came over too and, after nodding to us, sat down next to Hermione. He seemed to be very good friends with her, but I must admit I didn’t take to the man at all that first time we were together. He was handsome, undeniably so, both in looks and stature, but that apart I couldn’t detect any great merit in him. Even his supposed multilingualism turned out to be no great achievement since he didn’t really speak at all, just words like ‘please’, ‘thanks’, ‘indeed’, ‘certainly’, ‘hello’ and the like, though he did, it is true, know these in several languages. No, he didn’t say a thing, our Señor Pablo, and he didn’t exactly seem to think a great deal either, this handsome caballero. His business was playing the saxophone in the jazz band, and he seemed to fulfil his professional obligations with love and passion. When the band was playing he would sometimes clap his hands all of a sudden or indulge in other outbursts of enthusiasm, such as loudly breaking into song with words like ‘oh oh oh oh, ha ha, hello!’ Otherwise, however, he clearly lived only in order to appeal to women, to sport the latest fashions in collars and ties, and also
to wear lots of rings on his fingers. In his case, conversation took the form of sitting at our table, smiling at us, looking at his wristwatch and rolling cigarettes, at which he was highly skilled. Behind his dark, handsome, half-cast eyes and under his black locks there lurked no secret romance, no problems, no thoughts. When observed at close quarters, this good-looking exotic demigod turned out to be nothing more than a happy and somewhat spoiled boy who was agreeably well mannered. I talked to him about his instrument and about tone colours in jazz. He must have realized that in matters musical I was an old hand, appreciative and knowledgeable, but he didn’t respond. While I, out of politeness to him or actually to Hermione, embarked on a sort of theoretical justification of jazz on musical grounds, he just smiled his harmless smile as if oblivious to me and the effort I was making. I suppose he was totally ignorant of the fact that there had been other kinds of music before jazz and apart from it. He was nice, nice and well behaved, his large, vacant eyes smiling sweetly, but there seemed to be nothing that he and I had in common. Nothing that might be important or sacred to him could also be so to me; we came from opposite ends of the earth; there wasn’t a word in our respective languages that we shared. (Subsequently, however, Hermione told me something remarkable. She said that after this conversation Pablo had asked her, whatever she did, to take real care in her dealings with ‘that chap’ because he was, as he put it, so very unhappy. And when she asked what made him think this he had said: ‘Poor, poor chap. Look at his eyes! Can’t laugh, he can’t.’)

When black-eyed Pablo had taken leave of us and the music started up again, Hermione got to her feet. ‘You could dance with me again now, Harry. Or have you had enough?’

Now, when dancing with her too, I was lighter, freer on my feet and more cheerful, though not as carefree and unselfconscious as with the other girl. Hermione got me to lead and, as
light and gentle as a petal, adjusted her movements to suit mine. With her too I now discovered and experienced all those beautiful sensations, as her body from time to time closed on me, from time to time retreated. She too had the scent of woman and love about her; her dance too was a gentle, intimate song, the sweetly alluring song of sex, yet I was unable to respond to all this freely and serenely, could not totally forget myself and surrender. I was far too close to Hermione. She was a companion to me, a sister, a kindred spirit. She was like me and like my boyhood friend Hermann, the dreamer and poet who had so enthusiastically shared in my intellectual and spiritual pursuits and escapades.

‘I know,’ she said afterwards when I spoke of this. ‘You don’t need to tell me. I do mean to make you fall in love with me one day, but there is no rush. For the time being we will remain companions. We are two people hoping to become close friends because we have recognized each other for what we are. Let’s now learn from one another, play with one another. I’ll show you my little theatre, I’ll teach you to dance, to experience a bit of happiness and foolishness, and you’ll reveal your ideas to me and some of your knowledge.’

‘Ah, Hermione, there’s not much to reveal. It’s clear you know far more than me. What a remarkable person you are, lass. There’s nothing about me you don’t understand, you’re a step ahead of me in every respect. Can I possibly mean anything to you? Surely you must find me boring?’

Her eyes darkening, she looked down at the ground.

‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that. Think of the evening when you first came across me and I became your companion. You had been living a tormented life, isolated from others; you were washed up, desperate. Why do you think I was able to understand you then, to recognize you for what you were?’

‘Why, Hermione? Tell me.’

‘Because I am like you. Because I’m just as lonely as you and
just as incapable as you are of loving and taking life, my fellow human beings or myself seriously. There are always a few people like this, as you know, who make the highest possible demands on life and have a hard time coming to terms with the stupidity and coarseness of it.’

‘You, you!’ I cried, deeply amazed. ‘I understand you, my friend, I understand you as no one else does. And yet you are a mystery to me. You haven’t the slightest difficulty in coping with life; you have this admirable reverence for the little things, the minor enjoyments it offers; you have mastered the art of living to such a degree. How can you suffer at the hands of life? How can you despair?’

‘I don’t despair, Harry. But, suffering at the hands of life, oh yes, that’s something I’m experienced at. You are amazed that I’m not happy since I can, after all, dance and am well versed in the superficial aspects of life. And I, dear friend, am amazed that you are so disappointed with life since you, after all, feel at home with precisely the things that life at its finest and most profound has to offer: things of the mind, the arts, ideas. That’s why we attracted one another, that’s why we are kindred spirits. I’m going to teach you to dance, to play, to smile and still not to be satisfied. And I’m going to learn from you how to think and know things, and still not be satisfied. Don’t you know that we are both children of the devil?’

‘So we are, yes. The devil – that’s our intellectual faculty, our mind – and we are its unfortunate children. We have fallen away from nature and are now left dangling in the void. But now I’m reminded that in the Steppenwolf tract that I told you about there is a passage explaining that it is only a figment of Harry’s imagination when he thinks he possesses two souls or consists of two personalities. Every human being, it says there, is made up of ten, of a hundred, of a thousand souls.’

‘I like that very much,’ Hermione exclaimed. ‘In you, for
instance, the intellectual faculty is very highly developed, but on the other hand, when it comes to all sorts of little skills needed in life, you are backward. Harry the thinker is a hundred years old, but Harry the dancer is barely half a day old as yet. He is the one we now need to foster, and all his tiny little brothers who are just as small, stupid and ungrown-up as he is.’

She looked at me with a smile on her face, then, in a changed tone of voice, quietly asked:

‘And how did you like Maria, then?’

‘Maria? Who is that?’

‘She’s the one you were dancing with, a beautiful girl, a very beautiful girl. As far as I could tell you fell for her a bit.’

‘Do you know her, then?’

‘Oh yes, we know each other really well. Do you care that much about her?’

‘I liked her, and I was glad that she showed so much consideration for my attempts at dancing.’

‘Well, if that’s all there is to it! You ought to court her a bit, Harry. She is very pretty, and such a good dancer. And you have fallen for her too, haven’t you? I think you’ll be successful.’

‘Oh, I’ve no ambitions in that direction.’

‘Now there you are telling a bit of a lie. I know, of course, that somewhere or other in this wide world you’ve got a lover. You see her once every six months, and then only to fall out with her. It’s very sweet of you, wanting to remain faithful to this strange girlfriend, but forgive me if I can’t take the whole affair quite so seriously. And anyway, I have my suspicions that you treat love in general as a terribly serious matter. You may do that, for all I care, go on loving in your idealized fashion as much as you like, it’s your business. My business is to see to it that you learn to master life’s little, simple skills and games a bit better. In that sphere I am your teacher, and I’ll be a better teacher for you than your ideal beloved was, you can depend on that! What you’re
desperately in need of after all this time, Steppenwolf, is to sleep with a good-looking girl again.’