I was now, as I perceived, that good-looking and ardent boy whom I had
seen making so eagerly for love's door. I was living a bit of myself
only—a bit that in my actual life and being had not been expressed to a
tenth or a thousandth part, and I was living it to the full. I was
watching it grow unmolested by any other part of me. It was not
perturbed by the thinker, nor tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed
by the poet, the visionary or the moralist. No—I was nothing now but the
lover and I breathed no other happiness and no other suffering than
love. Irmgard had already taught me to dance and Ida to kiss, and it was
Emma first, the most beautiful of them all, who on an autumn evening
beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown breasts to kiss and the cup of
passion to drink.
I lived through much in Pablo's little theater and not a
thousandth part can be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved
were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave
what she alone knew how to take. Much love, much happiness, much
indulgence, and much bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share.
All the love that I had missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden
during this hour of dreams. There were chaste and tender blooms, garish
ones that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust,
inward reverie, glowing melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I
found women who were only to be taken by storm and those whom it was a
joy to woo and win by degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if
but for a moment, the voice of sex had called me, a woman's glance
kindled me or the gleam of a girl's white skin allured me, emerged again
and all that had been missed was made good. All were mine, each in her
own way. The woman with the remarkable dark brown eyes beneath flaxen
hair was there. I had stood beside her for a quarter of an hour in the
corridor of an express and afterwards she often appeared in my dreams.
She did not speak a word, but what she taught me of the art of love was
unimaginable, frightful, deathly. And the sleek, still Chinese, from the
harbor of Marseilles, with her glassy smile, her smooth dead-black hair
and swimming eyes—she too knew undreamed-of things. Each had her secret
and the bouquet of her soil. Each kissed and laughed in a fashion of
her own, and in her own peculiar way was shameful and in her own
peculiar way shameless. They came and went. The stream carried them
towards me and washed me up to them and away. I was a child in the
stream of sex, at play in the midst of all its charm, its danger and
surprise. And it astonished me to find how rich my life—the seemingly so
poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf—had been in the opportunities
and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled before them. I
had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget them. But here
they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one missing. And now
that I saw them I gave myself up to them without defence and sank down
into the rosy twilight of their underworld. Even that seduction to which
Pablo had once invited me came again, and other, earlier ones which I
had not fully grasped at the time, fantastic games for three or four,
caught me up in their dance with a smile. Many things happened and many
games, best unmentioned, were played.
When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of
allurement and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent. I was
equipped, far gone in knowledge, wise, expert—ripe for Hermine. She rose
as the last figure in my populous mythology, the last name of an
endless series; and at once I came to myself and made an end of this
fairy tale of love; for I did not wish to meet her in this twilight of a
magic mirror. I belonged to her not just as this one piece in my game
of chess—I belonged to her wholly. Oh, I would now so lay out the pieces
in my game that all was centered in her and led to fulfillment.
SteppenWolf