Chapter Two: Cain
Rescue from my torments came from a quite unexpected quarter, and along with it something new came into my life that has gone on working in me to this day.
A new pupil had recently entered our Latin school. He was the son of a well-to-do widow who had moved to our town, and he wore a mourning band around his sleeve. He was in a higher class than I and several years older, but I soon noticed him too, as everyone did. This curious pupil seemed to be much older than he looked; to no one did he give the impression of a boy. Among us childish youngsters he moved strange and finished, like a man, or rather like a gentleman. He was not popular; he took no part in games, still less in fights; only his self-assured and decided tone with the teachers pleased the others. His name was Max Demian.
One day it happened, as it did now and then at our school, that for some reason or other a second class was put into our very large schoolroom. It was Demian’s class. We little ones had Bible history, the big ones had to write a composition. While the story of Cain and Abel was being drummed into us, I kept looking over at Demian, whose face strangely fascinated me, and saw that clever, bright, uncommonly firm face bent attentively and intelligently over his work; he did not look at all like a pupil doing an assignment, but like a scholar pursuing problems of his own. I did not really find him pleasant; on the contrary, I had something against him; he was too superior and cool for me, too provokingly sure of himself in his whole being, and his eyes had the look of grown-ups—which children never like—a little sad, with flashes of mockery in it. Yet I had to keep looking at him, whether I liked him or not; but the moment he glanced at me once, I pulled my eyes back in alarm. When I think today about how he looked then as a schoolboy, I can say this: he was different from all the others in every respect, was wholly his own and bore the stamp of his person, and for that reason he stood out—yet at the same time he did everything he could not to stand out, carried and conducted himself like a prince in disguise who is among peasant boys and goes to every trouble to seem one of them.
On the way home from school he walked behind me. When the others had scattered, he caught up with me and said hello. Even this greeting, though he imitated our schoolboy tone in it, was so grown-up and polite.
“Shall we walk a little way together?” he asked in a friendly way. I was flattered and nodded. Then I described to him where I lived.
“Oh, there?” he said, smiling. “I know that house already. There’s a curious thing fixed over your front door; it interested me right away.”
At first I did not even know what he meant, and I was astonished that he seemed to know our house better than I did. There was, it is true, a sort of coat of arms as the keystone over the arch of the doorway, but over the years it had worn flat and been painted over many times; as far as I knew, it had nothing to do with us or our family.
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said shyly. “It’s a bird or something like that, it must be very old. They say the house belonged to a monastery once.”
“That may well be,” he nodded. “Take a good look at it sometime! Things like that are often quite interesting. I think it’s a sparrow hawk.”
We walked on; I was very self-conscious. Suddenly Demian laughed, as if something funny had occurred to him.
“Yes, I sat in on your lesson, you know,” he said briskly. “The story of Cain, who bore the mark on his forehead, wasn’t it? Do you like it?”
No, I had seldom liked anything at all of all the things we had to learn. But I did not dare say so; it was as if a grown-up were talking to me. I said I liked the story quite well.
Demian clapped me on the shoulder.
“You don’t need to put on an act for me, my friend. But the story really is quite curious; I think it’s much more curious than most of the others that come up in class. The teacher didn’t say much about it, of course, just the usual things about God and sin and so on. But I think—” he broke off, smiled, and asked: “But are you interested?”
“Well, then, I think,” he went on, “this story of Cain can be understood in a quite different way. Most of the things they teach us are no doubt quite true and right, but you can look at all of them differently from the way the teachers do, and then they usually make much better sense. With this Cain, for instance, and the mark on his forehead, you can’t really be satisfied with the way it’s explained to us. Don’t you think so too? That a man kills his brother in a quarrel can certainly happen, and that afterward he gets frightened and knuckles under is possible too. But that he should be specially decorated for his cowardice with a medal that protects him and strikes fear into everyone else is really very odd.”
“Of course,” I said, interested: the thing was beginning to grip me. “But how else are you supposed to explain the story?”
He slapped me on the shoulder.
“Quite simply! What was there first, what the story started from, was the mark. There was a man who had something in his face that frightened other people. They didn’t dare to touch him; he impressed them, he and his children. But perhaps, or rather certainly, it wasn’t really a mark on his forehead, like a postmark; life is seldom as crude as that. Much more likely it was something uncanny and barely perceptible, a little more intelligence and boldness in his look than people were used to. This man had power; people shied away from this man. He had a ‘mark.’ You could explain it however you liked. And ‘people’ always want whatever is comfortable for them and proves them right. People were afraid of the children of Cain; they had a ‘mark.’ So the mark was explained not as what it was, a mark of distinction, but as the opposite. They said that the fellows with this mark were uncanny, and so they were. People with courage and character always seem very uncanny to other people. That a breed of fearless and uncanny people was going around was very uncomfortable, and so they hung a nickname and a fable on this breed, to take revenge on it, to get some little compensation for all the fear they had gone through.—Do you understand?”
“Yes—that is—then Cain wouldn’t have been wicked at all? And the whole story in the Bible wouldn’t really be true at all?”
“Yes and no. Such old, ancient stories are always true, but they aren’t always recorded and aren’t always explained the way they ought to be. In short, I think Cain was a splendid fellow, and they hung this story on him only because they were afraid of him. The story was simply a rumor, the kind of thing people gossip about, and it was quite true insofar as Cain and his children really did bear a kind of ‘mark’ and were different from most people.”
I was very astonished.
“And then you think the part about the killing isn’t true either?” I asked, deeply stirred.
“Oh yes, it is! That’s true, certainly. The strong one had struck down a weak one. Whether it was really his brother, you can doubt. It isn’t important; after all, all men are brothers. So a strong man killed a weak one. Maybe it was a heroic deed, maybe not. But in any case the other weak ones were now full of fear; they complained a great deal, and when you asked them, ‘Why don’t you simply kill him too?’ they didn’t say, ‘Because we’re cowards,’ but they said, ‘You can’t. He has a mark. God has marked him!’ That’s roughly how the swindle must have come about.—Well, I’m keeping you. Goodbye, then!”
He turned into the Altgasse and left me alone, more bewildered than I had ever been. He was hardly gone before everything he had said seemed quite unbelievable to me! Cain a noble man, Abel a coward! The mark of Cain a distinction! It was absurd, it was blasphemous and wicked. Where did that leave God? Had he not accepted Abel’s sacrifice, did he not love Abel?—No, nonsense! And I suspected that Demian had wanted to make fun of me and trip me up. He was a devilishly clever fellow, all right, and he could talk, but like that—no—
All the same, I had never thought so much about any story, from the Bible or anywhere else. And for a long time I had never forgotten Franz Kromer so completely, for hours, for a whole evening. At home I read the story through once more, as it stood in the Bible; it was short and plain, and it was quite crazy to look for a special, secret meaning in it. Any murderer could declare himself God’s favorite that way! No, it was nonsense. The only nice thing was the way Demian could say such things, so lightly and prettily, as though it all went without saying, and with those eyes besides!
Something, to be sure, was not in order with me, was in fact in great disorder. I had lived in a bright and clean world, I had myself been a kind of Abel, and now I was stuck so deep in the “other,” had fallen and sunk so far, and yet at bottom it was not so very much my fault! What about that, then? Yes, and now a memory flashed up in me that for a moment almost took my breath away. On that evil evening when my present misery had begun, there had been the business with my father; for a moment I had seen through him and his bright world and wisdom all at once, as it were, and despised them! Yes, then I myself, who was Cain and bore the mark, had imagined that this mark was no disgrace, that it was a distinction, and that by my wickedness and my misfortune I stood higher than my father, higher than the good and the pious.
It was not in this form, as a clear thought, that I experienced the thing at the time, but all of this was contained in it; it was only a flaring up of feelings, of strange stirrings, which hurt and yet filled me with pride.
When I thought it over—how oddly Demian had spoken of the fearless and the cowardly! How strangely he had interpreted the mark on Cain’s forehead! How strangely his eye, his curious grown-up’s eye, had shone as he did! And it shot vaguely through my mind:—isn’t he himself, this Demian, a kind of Cain? Why does he defend him if he doesn’t feel himself to be like him? Why does he have that power in his look? Why does he speak so scornfully of the “others,” of the fearful, who are after all the pious and the ones well pleasing to God?
I could come to no end with these thoughts. A stone had fallen into the well, and the well was my young soul. And for a long, very long time this business of Cain, the killing, and the mark was the point from which all my attempts at knowledge, doubt, and criticism set out.
I noticed that the other pupils, too, were much taken up with Demian. I had told no one anything about the story of Cain, but he seemed to interest others as well. At least many rumors about the “new boy” went around. If I only remembered them all now, each would throw a light on him, each would bear interpreting. All I still remember is that the first word was that Demian’s mother was very rich. It was also said that she never went to church, and that the son didn’t either. They were Jews, someone claimed to know, but they might also be secret Mohammedans. Then there were tall tales about Max Demian’s strength. What was certain was that he had terribly humiliated the strongest boy in his class, who had challenged him to fight and called him a coward when he refused. Those who were there said that Demian had merely taken him by the back of the neck with one hand and squeezed hard; then the boy had gone pale, and afterward he had slunk away and been unable to use his arm for days. For one whole evening it was even said that he was dead. Everything was asserted for a while, everything believed, everything was exciting and marvelous. Then for a while people had had enough. But not much later new rumors arose among us pupils, which had it that Demian was on intimate terms with girls and “knew everything.”
Meanwhile my business with Franz Kromer went on along its inevitable course. I could not get free of him, for even if he left me in peace for days in between, I was still bound to him. He lived on with me in my dreams like my shadow, and what he did not do to me in reality my imagination made him do in those dreams, in which I became his slave entirely. I lived in those dreams—I was always a strong dreamer—more than in reality; I lost strength and life to those shadows. Among other things, I often dreamed that Kromer was mistreating me, that he spat on me and knelt on me, and, what was worse, that he was leading me into grave crimes—or rather not leading me into them, but simply forcing me through his powerful influence. The most terrible of these dreams, from which I woke half mad, contained a murderous attack on my father. Kromer sharpened a knife and put it in my hand; we stood behind the trees of an avenue and lay in wait for someone, I did not know whom; but when someone came along and Kromer told me with a squeeze on my arm that this was the one I had to stab, it was my father. Then I woke up.
With all these things on my mind I did still think of Cain and Abel, but hardly anymore of Demian. When he first came near me again, it was, curiously enough, in a dream as well. That is, I dreamed again of being mistreated and violated, but instead of Kromer it was Demian this time who knelt on me. And—this was quite new and made a deep impression on me—everything that I had suffered from Kromer in torment and with resistance I suffered gladly from Demian, with a feeling that held as much rapture as fear. I had this dream twice; then Kromer took his place again.
What I lived through in these dreams and what in reality I have long been unable to separate exactly. In any case, my wretched relationship with Kromer took its course, and it did not by any means come to an end when I had at last paid off the debt to the boy, all from petty thefts. No, now he knew about these thefts, for he always asked me where the money came from, and I was more in his power than ever. He often threatened to tell my father everything, and then my fear was hardly as great as my deep regret that I had not done so myself from the start. Yet, miserable as I was, I did not regret everything, at least not always, and sometimes I thought I felt that everything had to be as it was. A doom hung over me, and it was useless to try to break through it.
My parents presumably suffered not a little from this state of things. An alien spirit had come over me; I no longer fitted into our family community, which had been so intimate, and for which a raging homesickness often came over me, as for lost paradises. I was treated, especially by my mother, more like a sick person than like a wrongdoer, but how things really stood I could best see from the behavior of my two sisters. In this behavior, which was very considerate and yet made me endlessly miserable, it was clearly expressed that I was a kind of possessed creature, more to be pitied than scolded for my condition, but in whom evil had nonetheless taken up its seat. I felt that they were praying for me, differently than usual, and I felt the futility of that praying. I often felt a burning longing for relief, a craving for a real confession, and yet I also sensed in advance that I would not be able to tell and explain everything properly to either my father or my mother. I knew that they would take it kindly, that they would spare me a great deal, even pity me, but not entirely understand, and that the whole thing would be looked on as a kind of derailment, when it was in fact fate.
I know that some will not believe that a child not yet eleven could feel in this way. I am not telling my story to them. I am telling it to those who know human beings better. The grown-up who has learned to turn part of his feelings into thoughts misses these thoughts in the child and so supposes that the experiences are not there either. But only seldom in my life have I lived and suffered as deeply as I did then.
Once, on a rainy day, my tormentor had ordered me to the Burgplatz, and there I stood waiting and scuffing my feet in the wet chestnut leaves that were still falling and falling from the black, dripping trees. I had no money, but I had put aside two pieces of cake and had them with me so that I could at least give Kromer something. I had long been used to standing like this in some corner or other waiting for him, often for a very long time, and I accepted it the way people accept what cannot be changed.
At last Kromer came. He did not stay long today. He gave me a couple of jabs in the ribs, laughed, took the cake from me, even offered me a damp cigarette, which I did not take, however, and was friendlier than usual.
“Oh yes,” he said as he was leaving, “before I forget—you could bring your sister along next time, the older one. What’s her name, anyway?”
I did not understand at all and gave no answer either. I only looked at him in bewilderment.
“Don’t you get it? You’re to bring your sister.”
“Yes, Kromer, but I can’t. I’m not allowed to, and she wouldn’t come along anyway.”
I was prepared for this to be just another piece of harassment and a pretext. That was how he often did it: demanded something impossible, frightened me, humiliated me, and then gradually let himself be bargained with. Then I had to buy myself free with a little money or other gifts.
This time he was quite different. At my refusal he hardly got angry at all.
“Well, all right,” he said offhandedly, “you’ll think it over. I’d like to get to know your sister. It’ll work out one of these days. You just take her along on a walk, and then I’ll come by. Tomorrow I’ll whistle for you, then we’ll talk it over again.”
When he was gone, something of the meaning of his demand suddenly dawned on me. I was still entirely a child, but I knew from rumors that boys and girls, when they were somewhat older, could do certain mysterious, indecent, and forbidden things with each other. And now I was supposed to—it suddenly became quite clear to me how monstrous it was! My resolve never to do it was fixed at once. But what would happen then, and how Kromer would take revenge on me, I hardly dared think. A new torment was beginning for me; it had not been enough yet.
Disconsolate, I walked across the empty square, my hands in my pockets. New torments, new slavery!
Then a fresh, deep voice called to me. I was startled and began to run. Someone ran after me; a hand took hold of me gently from behind. It was Max Demian.
I gave myself up.
“It’s you?” I said uncertainly. “You gave me such a fright!”
He looked at me, and never had his look been more that of a grown-up, of someone superior who saw right through you, than now. We had not spoken to each other for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said in his polite and yet very decided manner. “But listen, you mustn’t let yourself be frightened like that.”
“Well, it can happen, can’t it.”
“So it seems. But look: if you jump like that in front of someone who hasn’t done anything to you, that someone starts to think. It surprises him, it makes him curious. That someone thinks to himself that you’re strangely jumpy, and he goes on thinking: people are only like that when they’re afraid. Cowards are always afraid; but I don’t think you’re really a coward. Are you? Oh, of course you’re no hero either. There are things you’re afraid of; there are people you’re afraid of, too. And that’s something you should never have. No, you should never be afraid of people. You’re not afraid of me, are you? Or are you?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“Right, you see. But there are people you’re afraid of?”
“I don’t know… Leave me alone, what do you want from me?”
He kept pace with me—I had walked faster, with thoughts of escape—and I felt his look from the side.
“Suppose for a moment,” he began again, “that I mean well by you. In any case you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’d like to do an experiment with you; it’s fun, and you can learn something from it that’s very useful. Now pay attention!—I sometimes try my hand at an art called mind reading. There’s no witchcraft in it at all, but if you don’t know how it’s done, it looks quite peculiar. You can surprise people a great deal with it.—Well, let’s give it a try. So, I like you, or I’m interested in you, and now I’d like to find out what it looks like inside you. I’ve already taken the first step toward that. I frightened you—so you’re easily frightened. So there are things and people you’re afraid of. Where can that come from? There’s no need to be afraid of anyone. If you fear someone, it comes from having granted that someone power over you. You’ve done something bad, for instance, and the other one knows it—then he has power over you. Get it? It’s clear enough, isn’t it?”
I looked helplessly into his face, which was serious and clever as always, and kind too, but without any tenderness; it was rather stern. Justice or something like it was in it. I did not know what was happening to me; he stood before me like a magician.
“Have you understood?” he asked once more.
I nodded. I could not say anything.
“I told you it looks funny, mind reading, but it’s all quite natural. I could also tell you fairly exactly, for example, what you thought about me that time I told you the story of Cain and Abel. Well, that doesn’t belong here. I also think it possible that you’ve dreamed about me once. But let’s leave that! You’re a clever boy; most of them are so stupid! I like to talk now and then with a clever boy I trust. That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes. Only I don’t understand at all—”
“Let’s stick to our amusing experiment! So we’ve found: the boy S. is easily frightened—he’s afraid of someone—he probably has a secret with this other person that’s very uncomfortable for him.—Is that about right?”
As in a dream I gave way to his voice, to his influence. I only nodded. Wasn’t a voice speaking there that could come only from myself? That knew everything? That knew everything better and more clearly than I did myself?
Demian clapped me hard on the shoulder.
“So it’s right. I thought as much. Now just one more question: do you know the name of the boy who went off from here a while ago?”
I was violently startled; my secret, now touched, curled back painfully inside me; it did not want to come out into the light.
“What boy? There wasn’t any boy here, only me.”
He laughed.
“Go on, say it!” he laughed. “What’s his name?”
I whispered: “Do you mean Franz Kromer?”
He nodded to me, satisfied.
“Bravo! You’re a quick one; we’ll be friends yet. But now I have to tell you something: this Kromer, or whatever his name is, is a bad lot. His face tells me he’s a scoundrel! What do you think?”
“Oh yes,” I sighed, “he’s bad, he’s a Satan! But he mustn’t know anything! For God’s sake, he mustn’t know anything. Do you know him? Does he know you?”
“Don’t worry! He’s gone, and he doesn’t know me—not yet. But I’d quite like to get to know him. He goes to the elementary school?”
“Yes.”
“Which class?”
“The fifth.—But don’t tell him anything! Please, please don’t tell him anything!”
“Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you.—I suppose you don’t feel like telling me a little more about this Kromer?”
“I can’t! No, leave me alone!”
He was silent for a while.
“Too bad,” he said then; “we could have carried the experiment further. But I don’t want to torment you. But you do know, don’t you, that your fear of him isn’t right? A fear like that ruins us completely; you have to get rid of it. You have to get rid of it if you’re going to turn into a proper fellow. Do you understand?”
“Of course, you’re quite right… but it can’t be done. You don’t know…”
“You’ve seen that I know a few things, more than you would have thought.—Do you owe him money, by any chance?”
“Yes, that too, but that’s not the main thing. I can’t say, I can’t!”
“So it wouldn’t help if I gave you as much money as you owe him?—I could easily give it to you.”
“No, no, that’s not it. And I beg you: don’t tell anyone about it! Not a word! You’ll make me miserable!”
“You can rely on me, Sinclair. You’ll tell me the secrets you two share someday later on—”
“Never, never!” I cried vehemently.
“Just as you like. I only mean that perhaps you’ll tell me more sometime later. Only of your own free will, of course. You don’t think I’ll do the same as Kromer himself does?”
“Oh no—but you don’t know anything about it!”
“Nothing at all. I’m only thinking about it. And I’ll never do it the way Kromer does, you can believe me. After all, you don’t owe me anything.”
We were silent for a long time, and I grew calmer. But Demian’s knowledge became more and more of a riddle to me.
“I’m going home now,” he said, and pulled his loden coat more tightly around him in the rain. “There’s just one thing I’d like to say to you again, since we’ve gotten this far—you ought to get rid of that fellow! If there’s no other way, then kill him! It would impress me and please me if you did. I’d help you, too.”
I grew afraid all over again. The story of Cain suddenly came back to me. It began to seem uncanny to me, and I began to cry softly. There was too much that was uncanny around me.
“All right, then,” Max Demian smiled. “Just go home! We’ll manage it. Although killing him would be the simplest. In such things the simplest is always the best. You’re not in good hands with your friend Kromer.”
I came home, and it seemed to me that I had been away for a year. Everything looked different. Between me and Kromer there stood something like a future, something like hope. I was no longer alone! And only now did I see how terribly alone I had been with my secret for weeks and weeks. And at once I remembered what I had thought through several times: that a confession to my parents would bring me relief and yet would not wholly set me free. Now I had almost confessed, to someone else, a stranger, and a premonition of deliverance came wafting toward me like a strong fragrance!
All the same, my fear was far from overcome, and I was still prepared for long and terrible reckonings with my enemy. All the more curious it seemed to me that everything passed off so quietly, so wholly secretly and calmly.
Kromer’s whistle outside our house did not come, for a day, two days, three days, a whole week. I did not dare believe it at all, and inwardly I lay in wait to see whether he would not suddenly, just when you no longer expected him at all, be standing there again after all. But he was gone and stayed gone! Distrustful of my new freedom, I still did not really believe in it. Until at last I happened to meet Franz Kromer. He was coming down the Seilergasse, straight toward me. When he saw me he flinched, twisted his face into an ugly grimace, and without further ado turned back so as not to have to meet me.
For me that was an unheard-of moment! My enemy was running away from me! My Satan was afraid of me! Joy and surprise went through me and through me.
During those days Demian showed himself once again. He was waiting for me outside the school.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good morning, Sinclair. I just wanted to hear how you’re getting on. Kromer leaves you in peace now, doesn’t he?”
“Did you do that? But how? How? I don’t understand it at all. He’s stayed away completely.”
“That’s good. If he should ever come back again—I don’t think he will, but he is a nervy fellow—just tell him to remember Demian.”
“But how does it all fit together? Did you pick a fight with him and give him a thrashing?”
“No, I don’t much like doing that. I simply talked to him, the same as with you, and in doing so I was able to make it clear to him that it’s to his own advantage to leave you in peace.”
“Oh, you didn’t give him money, did you?”
“No, my boy. You’d already tried that way yourself.”
He got away, however hard I tried to question him, and I was left behind with the old uneasy feeling toward him, a strange mixture of gratitude and shyness, of admiration and fear, of affection and inner resistance.
I made up my mind to see him again soon, and then I meant to talk with him more about all of it, about the Cain business too.
It did not come to that.
Gratitude is not at all a virtue I believe in, and to demand it of a child would seem wrong to me. So I am not especially surprised at my own utter ingratitude, which I showed toward Max Demian. Today I believe with certainty that I would have been made sick and ruined for life if he had not freed me from Kromer’s clutches. Even then I felt this liberation to be the greatest experience of my young life—but the liberator himself I ignored as soon as he had performed the miracle.
The ingratitude, as I said, does not seem curious to me. What does seem strange to me is only the lack of curiosity I showed. How was it possible that I could go on living calmly for a single day without coming closer to the mysteries with which Demian had brought me into contact? How could I hold back the desire to hear more about Cain, more about Kromer, more about mind reading?
It is hardly comprehensible, and yet it is so. I suddenly saw myself untangled from demonic nets, saw the world lying bright and joyful before me again, no longer fell prey to attacks of fear and choking palpitations. The spell was broken; I was no longer a tormented soul in damnation; I was a schoolboy again as always. My nature sought to regain its balance and quiet as quickly as possible, and so it took pains above all to push the great mass of ugly and threatening things away from itself, to forget them. Wonderfully fast the whole long story of my guilt and my terrors slipped from my memory, apparently without leaving any scars or traces.
That I tried just as quickly to forget my helper and rescuer, on the other hand, I understand today as well. From the vale of tears of my damnation, from my terrible slavery to Kromer, I fled with all the urges and powers of my damaged soul back to where I had once been happy and content: into the lost paradise that was opening again, into the bright world of father and mother, to my sisters, to the fragrance of purity, to Abel’s being well pleasing to God.
The very day after my short talk with Demian, when I was at last wholly convinced that I had won back my freedom and no longer feared any relapse, I did what I had so often and so longingly wished to do—I confessed. I went to my mother, showed her the little savings box with its damaged lock, filled with game counters instead of money, and told her how long I had, through my own fault, been chained to a wicked tormentor. She did not understand everything, but she saw the box, she saw the change in my eyes, heard the change in my voice, felt that I was well again, that I had been given back to her.
And now, with lofty feelings, I celebrated the feast of my readmission, the return of the prodigal son. My mother took me to my father, the story was told again, questions and exclamations of astonishment came thick and fast, both my parents stroked my head and breathed freely after long oppression. Everything was glorious, everything was as in the stories, everything resolved itself into wonderful harmony.
Into this harmony I now fled with a true passion. I could not get enough of having my peace again and my parents’ trust; I became a model boy at home, played with my sisters more than ever, and at prayers I sang the dear old hymns along with the others with the blissful feelings of one redeemed and converted. It came from the heart; there was no lie in it.
And yet things were not at all in order! And here is the point from which alone my forgetfulness toward Demian is truly explained to me. It was to him I should have confessed! The confession would have turned out less decorative and touching, but more fruitful for me. As it was, I clung with all my roots to my former paradise of a world; I had come home and been taken back into grace. But Demian in no way belonged to that world, did not fit into it. He too, differently from Kromer, but still—he too was a tempter; he too linked me to the second world, the wicked, bad world, and I wanted to have nothing more to do with that, ever. I could not and would not now give Abel up and help glorify Cain, now, when I had just become an Abel again myself.
So much for the outer connection. But the inner one was this: I had been delivered from the hands of Kromer and the devil, but not by my own strength and effort. I had tried to walk the paths of the world, and they had been too slippery for me. Now that the grip of a friendly hand had rescued me, I ran back without another glance to either side into my mother’s lap and the shelter of a protected, pious, gentle childhood. I made myself younger, more dependent, more childish than I was. I had to replace my dependence on Kromer with a new one, for I was not able to walk alone. So, in my blind heart, I chose dependence on Father and Mother, on the old, beloved “bright world,” which I already knew was not the only one. Had I not done that, I would have had to hold to Demian and entrust myself to him. That I did not do so seemed to me at the time a justified mistrust of his disconcerting ideas; in truth it was nothing but fear. For Demian would have demanded more of me than my parents demanded, much more; with prodding and admonition, with mockery and irony, he would have tried to make me more independent. Ah, that I know today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a human being than to go the way that leads him to himself!
Nevertheless, about half a year later, I could not resist the temptation, and on a walk I asked my father what one should think of the fact that some people declared Cain to be better than Abel.
He was very surprised and explained to me that this was a view that lacked all novelty. It had cropped up as early as the time of the first Christians and had been taught in sects, one of which called itself the “Cainites.” But of course this mad doctrine was nothing other than an attempt by the devil to destroy our faith. For if one believed in Cain’s being right and Abel’s being wrong, then it followed that God had been mistaken, and so that the God of the Bible was not the true and only God but a false one. And in fact the Cainites had taught and preached something of the kind; but this heresy had long since vanished from mankind, and he only wondered that a schoolmate of mine could have heard anything about it. Nevertheless he earnestly admonished me to give up such thoughts.