Hermine looked tenderly in my eyes with that dark look that could so suddenly come into her
face. Lovely, fearful eyes! Picking her words one by one and piecing 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 on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the
trivial and petty. 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 neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and
revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has
been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to 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 comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking,
coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him—the
heroic and 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 much of myself 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 gone with me. For a
while I was inconsolable 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 scorned 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 knew that
my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality
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 money's sake, or to become some kind of drudge, 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 can't understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your
loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand 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 one that has been and the one that 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, and yet you
must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily
contented 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 music instead 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! And yet you taught me the fox trot!
But how do you mean that people like us with a dimension too many cannot live here? What
brings it about? Is it only so in our days, or was it so always?"
"I don't 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 next war
going, while the rest of us, meanwhile, dance the fox trot, earn money and eat chocolates—in
such a time the world must indeed cut a poor figure. Let us hope that other times were better, and
will be better again, richer, broader and deeper. But that is no help to us now. And perhaps it has
always been the same—"
"Always as it is today? Always a world only for politicians, profiteers, waiters and pleasureseekers,
and not a breath of air for men?"
"Well, I don't 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 controlled things in his times and ruled the roost
and gave the tone and counted for something? Was it Mozart or the business people, Mozart or
the average man? And in what fashion did he come 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 fine emotions, is all nothing
but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied
for a given 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 isn't fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn't fame. It is
what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too
much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another
air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this
is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great 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 it or hands it down
to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity."
The collary is "Reality bites. Be happy with what you can achieve in the legislature."
