When the dark-eyed young man had taken his leave of us and the music began again, Hermine stood up. “Now you might have another dance with me. Or don’t you care to dance any more?”
With her, too, I danced more easily now, in a freer and more sprightly fashion, even though not so buoyantly and more self-consciously than with the other. Hermine had me lead, adapting herself as softly and lightly as the leaf of a flower, and with her, too, I now experienced all these delights that now advanced and now took wing. She, too, now exhaled the perfume of woman and love, and her dancing, too, sang with intimate tenderness the lovely and enchanting song of sex. And yet I could not respond to all this with warmth and freedom. I could not entirely forget myself in abandon. Hermine stood in too close a relation to me. She was my comrade and sister—my double, almost, in her resemblance not to me only, but to Herman, my boyhood friend, the enthusiast, the poet, who had shared with ardour all my intellectual pursuits and extravagances.
“I know,” she said when I spoke of it. “I know that well enough. All the same, I shall make you fall in love with me, but there’s no use hurrying. First of all we’re comrades, two people who hope to be friends, because we have recognised each other. For the present we’ll each learn from the other and amuse ourselves together. I show you my little stage, and teach you to dance and to have a little pleasure and be silly; and you show me your thoughts and something of all you know.”
“There’s little there to show you, Hermine, I’m afraid. You know far more than I do. You’re a most remarkable person—and a woman. But do I mean anything to you? Don’t I bore you?”
She looked down darkly to the floor.
“That’s how I don’t like to hear you talk. Think of that evening when you came broken from your despair and loneliness, to cross my path and be my comrade. Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognise you and understand you?”
“Why, Hermine? Tell me!”
“Because it’s the same for me as for you, because I am alone exactly as you are, because I’m as little fond of life and men and myself as you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.”
“You, you!” I cried in deep amazement. “I understand you, my comrade. No one understands you better than I. And yet you’re a riddle. You are such a past-master at life. You have your wonderful reverence for its little details and enjoyments. You are such an artist in life. How can you suffer at life’s hands? How can you despair?”
“I don’t despair. As to suffering—oh, yes, I know all about that! You are surprised that I should be unhappy when I can dance and am so sure of myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things in it that are the deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the devil?”
“Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. And that reminds me of something. In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you about, there is something to the effect that it is only a fancy of his to believe that he has one soul, or two, that he is made up of one or two personalities. Every human being, it says, consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.”
“I like that very much,” cried Hermine. “In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is.”
She looked at me, smiling; and then asked softly in an altered voice:
“And how did you like Maria, then?”
“Maria? Who is she?”
“The girl you danced with. She is a lovely girl, a very lovely girl. You were a little smitten with her, as far as I could see.”
“You know her then?”
“Oh, yes, we know each other well. Were you very much taken with her?”
“I liked her very much, and I was delighted that she was so indulgent about my dancing.”
“As if that were the whole story! You ought to make love to her a little, Harry. She is very pretty and such a good dancer, and you are in love with her already, I know very well. You’ll succeed with her, I’m sure.”
“Believe me, I have no such aspiration.”
“There you’re lying a little. Of course, I know that you have an attachment. There is a girl somewhere or other whom you see once or
