“Ah, yes,” he said, and smiled the more. “You’re quite right. But wait a moment, for I really must tell you what it was made me sit here for a bit.”
He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had often noticed with pleasure.
“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is here—the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s little habits and tasks.”
“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a house with araucarias. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still I’m the son of a mother and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so here I sat me down then and there; and I look into this quiet little garden of order and rejoice that such things still are.”
He wanted to get up, but found it difficult; and he did not repulse me when I offered him a little help. I was silent, but I submitted just as my aunt had done before me to a certain charm the strange man could sometimes exercise. We went slowly up the stairs together, and at his door, the key in his hand, he looked me once more in the eyes in a friendly way and said: “You’ve come from business? Well, of course, I know little of all that. I live a bit to one side, on the edge of things, you see. But you too, I believe, interest yourself in books and such matters. Your aunt told me one day that you had been through the Gymnasium and were a good Greek scholar. Now, this morning I came on a passage in Novalis. May I show it you? It would delight you, I know.”
He took me into his room, which smelt strongly of tobacco, and took out a book from one of the heaps, turned the leaves and looked for the passage.
“This is good too, very good,” he said, “listen to this: ‘A man should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high estate.’ Fine! Eighty years before Nietzsche. But that is not the sentence I meant. Wait a moment, here I have it. This: ‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
He had got hold of me now. I was interested; and I stayed on a short while with him; and after that we often talked when we met on the stairs or in the street. On such occasions I always had at first the feeling that he was being ironical with me. But it was not so. He had a real respect for me, just as he had for the araucaria. He was so convinced and conscious of his isolation, his swimming in the water, his uprootedness, that a glimpse now and then of the orderly daily round—the punctuality, for example, that kept me to my office hours, or an expression let fall by a servant or tramway-conductor—acted on him literally as a stimulus without in the least arousing his scorn. At first all this seemed to me a ridiculous exaggeration, the affectation of a gentleman of leisure, a playful sentimentality. But I came to see more and more that from the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them. He took off his hat to our charwoman, a worthy
