Chapter Four: Beatrice
Without having seen my friend again, I traveled to St. at the end of the vacation. Both my parents came along and, with every possible care, handed me over to the protection of a boys’ boardinghouse kept by one of the teachers at the Gymnasium. They would have frozen with horror had they known what sort of things they were now letting me wander into.
The question was still whether in time I could become a good son and a useful citizen, or whether my nature was pressing toward other paths. My last attempt to be happy in the shadow of my father’s house and spirit had lasted a long time, had at times very nearly succeeded, and had in the end failed completely all the same.
The strange emptiness and isolation that I came to feel for the first time during the vacation after my confirmation (how well I was to know it later, that emptiness, that thin air!) did not pass so quickly. Leaving home went strangely easily; I was really ashamed that I was not sadder; my sisters cried for no reason; I could not. I was astonished at myself. I had always been a child of feeling, and at bottom a rather good child. Now I was completely changed. I behaved with total indifference toward the outer world and for days on end was busy with nothing but listening into myself and hearing the streams, the forbidden and dark streams, that rushed there underground in me. I had grown very fast, only in the last half year, and looked out into the world lanky, thin, and unfinished. The boy’s charm had vanished from me entirely; I felt myself that no one could love me like this, and I in no way loved myself either. I often longed greatly for Max Demian; but not seldom I hated him too and blamed him for the impoverishment of my life, which I bore like an ugly disease.
In our boardinghouse I was at first neither liked nor respected; they teased me at first, then drew back from me, and saw me as a sneak and an unpleasant oddball. I liked myself in the role, exaggerated it even further, and sulked my way into a solitude that from outside always looked like the most manly contempt for the world, while secretly I often succumbed to consuming fits of melancholy and despair. At school I could live off knowledge piled up at home; the class was somewhat behind my former one, and I fell into the habit of regarding the boys my own age, a little contemptuously, as children.
So it went on for a year and more; even the first visits home during vacations struck no new notes; I was glad to leave again.
It was the beginning of November. I had fallen into the habit of taking short, meditative walks in all weathers, during which I often enjoyed a kind of bliss, a bliss full of melancholy, contempt for the world, and contempt for myself. So one evening I was strolling in the damp, misty dusk through the outskirts of the town; the broad avenue of a public park lay completely deserted and invited me in; the path was thick with fallen leaves, in which I scuffed my feet with a dark voluptuousness; it smelled damp and bitter; the distant trees stepped out of the mists ghostly, huge, and shadowy.
At the end of the avenue I stopped, undecided, stared into the black leaves, and greedily breathed in the wet smell of decay and dying, which something in me answered and welcomed. Oh, how flat life tasted!
From a side path someone came along in a flapping cape coat; I was about to walk on when he called to me.
“Hello there, Sinclair!”
He came up; it was Alfons Beck, the oldest boy in our boardinghouse. I was always glad to see him and had nothing against him except that he was always ironic and avuncular with me, as with all the younger ones. He was reputed to be strong as a bear, was supposed to have the master of our boardinghouse under his thumb, and was the hero of many a Gymnasium rumor.
“What are you doing here?” he called out affably, in the tone the older boys used when they occasionally condescended to one of us. “Well, shall we bet you’re making up poems?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said gruffly, brushing him off.
He laughed, walked beside me, and chatted in a way I was no longer at all used to.
“You needn’t be afraid, Sinclair, that I wouldn’t understand that sort of thing. There’s something to it, when you walk like this in the fog in the evening, with autumn thoughts and so on; you like to write poems then, I know. About dying nature, naturally, and lost youth, which resembles it. See Heinrich Heine.”
“I’m not that sentimental,” I defended myself.
“Well, let it go! But in this weather, it seems to me, a man does well to look for a quiet place where there’s a glass of wine or something of the sort. Will you come along for a bit? I happen to be all alone.—Or would you rather not? I wouldn’t want to play your tempter, my friend, in case you’re a model boy.”
Soon afterward we were sitting in a little tavern on the edge of town, drinking a dubious wine and clinking the thick glasses. At first I did not much like it; still, it was something new. But soon, unused to wine, I became very talkative. It was as if a window in me had been thrown open, and the world shone in—how long, how terribly long it had been since I had talked anything off my soul! I fell to letting my fancy run, and in the middle of it I treated him to the story of Cain and Abel!
Beck listened to me with pleasure—at last someone I was giving something to! He clapped me on the shoulder, he called me a devil of a fellow and a brilliant rascal, and my heart swelled high with the bliss of letting dammed-up needs to speak and confide pour out luxuriously, of being recognized and counting for something with an older boy. When he called me a brilliant rascal, the word ran into my soul like a sweet, strong wine. The world burned in new colors; thoughts flowed toward me from a hundred bold springs; spirit and fire blazed in me. We talked about teachers and classmates, and it seemed to me that we understood each other gloriously. We talked about the Greeks and about paganism, and Beck was determined to get me to confess to love affairs. There I could not join in. I had experienced nothing, nothing worth telling. And what I had felt, constructed, and imagined in myself sat burning in me, it is true, but even the wine had not loosened it or made it something I could tell. Beck knew much more about girls, and I listened to these tales feverishly. I learned unbelievable things there; things I had never thought possible stepped into flat reality and seemed a matter of course. Alfons Beck, at perhaps eighteen, had already gathered experience. Among other things, that girls were a funny business: all they wanted was to be flattered and courted, and that was all very nice, but not the real thing. With women there was more success to be hoped for. Women were much cleverer. Mrs. Jaggelt, for instance, who had the shop with the exercise books and pencils, you could talk to her, and the things that had already happened behind her counter would not go into any book.
I sat there deeply enchanted and dazed. Admittedly, I could not exactly have loved Mrs. Jaggelt—but all the same, it was unheard of. Springs seemed to be flowing there, at least for the older ones, of which I had never dreamed. There was a false ring to it, of course, and everything tasted smaller and more commonplace than, in my opinion, love had any right to taste—but all the same, it was reality, it was life and adventure; here beside me sat someone who had experienced it, to whom it seemed a matter of course.
Our talk had come down a little, had lost something. I was no longer the brilliant little fellow either; I was now only a boy listening to a man. But even so—compared with what my life had been for months and months, this was delicious, this was paradise. Besides, it was, as I only gradually began to feel, forbidden, very forbidden, from sitting in a tavern to what we were talking about. I, at any rate, tasted spirit in it, tasted revolution.
I remember that night with the greatest clarity. When the two of us, late, walked home past dimly burning gas lamps in the cool, wet night, I was drunk for the first time. It was not pleasant, it was extremely painful, and yet even that had something to it, a charm, a sweetness; it was rebellion and orgy, it was life and spirit. Beck looked after me gallantly, though he scolded me bitterly as a raw beginner, and he brought me home, half carrying me, where he managed to smuggle us both in through a hall window that had been left open.
But with sobering up, to which I woke in pain after a very short, deathlike sleep, a senseless anguish came over me. I sat up in bed; I still had my day shirt on; my clothes and shoes lay strewn about the floor and smelled of tobacco and vomit; and between headache, nausea, and a raging thirst a picture came before my soul that I had not looked in the eye for a long time. I saw home and my parents’ house, father and mother, sisters and garden, I saw my quiet bedroom at home, saw the school and the marketplace, saw Demian and the confirmation lessons—and all of it was bright, all of it was bathed in radiance, all of it was wonderful, divine, and pure, and all, all of it had—so I knew now—still belonged to me yesterday, only hours ago, had been waiting for me, and was now, only now, in this hour, sunk and cursed, belonged to me no longer, cast me out, looked at me with disgust! Everything dear and intimate that I had ever received from my parents, back to the farthest, most golden gardens of childhood, every kiss of my mother’s, every Christmas, every pious, bright Sunday morning at home, every flower in the garden—all of it was laid waste, all of it I had trampled underfoot! If constables had come now and bound me and led me to the gallows as the scum of the earth and a desecrator of the temple, I would have agreed, would have gone gladly, would have found it right and good.
So that was what I looked like inside! I, who went about despising the world! I, who was proud in spirit and thought Demian’s thoughts along with him! That was what I looked like, scum and a filthy pig, drunk and soiled, loathsome and vile, a savage beast overwhelmed by hideous urges! That was what I looked like, I who came from those gardens where everything was purity, radiance, and sweet tenderness, I who had loved the music of Bach and beautiful poems! With disgust and indignation I could still hear my own laughter, a drunken, uncontrolled laughter that broke out in fits and starts, silly. That was I!
In spite of everything, though, it was almost a pleasure to suffer these torments. For so long I had crept along blind and dull, for so long my heart had sat silent and impoverished in a corner, that even these self-accusations, this horror, this whole hideous feeling of the soul was welcome. It was feeling, after all; flames were rising, after all; a heart was quivering in it, after all! Confused, I felt in the midst of misery something like liberation and spring.
Meanwhile, seen from outside, I was going steadily downhill. My first drunkenness was soon no longer the first. There was a great deal of drinking and horseplay at our school; I was one of the very youngest of those who took part, and soon I was no longer someone tolerated, a little one, but a ringleader and a star, a famous, daredevil frequenter of taverns. Once again I belonged wholly to the dark world, to the devil, and in this world I was thought a splendid fellow.
And all the while I felt miserable. I lived on in a self-destructive orgy, and while among my companions I passed for a leader and a devil of a fellow, for a damnably dashing and witty young man, I had deep within me a frightened soul fluttering with anxiety. I still remember that once tears came to my eyes when, leaving a tavern on a Sunday morning, I saw children playing in the street, bright and merry, with freshly combed hair and in their Sunday clothes. And while, among the puddles of beer on the dirty tables of low taverns, I amused and often shocked my friends with unheard-of cynicisms, in my hidden heart I had reverence for everything I mocked, and inwardly I lay weeping on my knees before my soul, before my past, before my mother, before God.
That I never became one with my companions, that I remained lonely among them and could therefore suffer so, had a good reason. I was a tavern hero and a scoffer after the heart of the coarsest, I showed wit and showed courage in my ideas and speeches about teachers, school, parents, church—I could stand up to dirty jokes too, and even ventured one myself now and then—but I was never there when my companions went to girls; I was alone and full of a glowing longing for love, a hopeless longing, while by my talk I ought to have been a hardened rake. No one was more vulnerable, no one more bashful than I. And when every so often I saw the young girls of the town walking ahead of me, pretty and neat, bright and graceful, they were wonderful, pure dreams to me, a thousand times too good and pure for me. For a time I could not even go into Mrs. Jaggelt’s stationery shop anymore, because I blushed when I looked at her and thought of what Alfons Beck had told me about her.
The more I knew myself to be constantly lonely and different even in my new company, the less I could get free of it. I really no longer know whether the boozing and swaggering ever actually gave me pleasure; and I never got so used to drinking that I did not feel painful consequences every time. It was all like a compulsion. I did what I had to, because otherwise I had no idea at all what to do with myself. I was afraid of long solitude, afraid of the many tender, bashful, heartfelt moods to which I always felt inclined, afraid of the tender thoughts of love that came to me so often.
One thing I lacked most of all—a friend. There were two or three schoolmates I liked very much to see. But they belonged to the good boys, and my vices had long been no secret to anyone. They avoided me. To all of them I was a hopeless gambler whose ground was giving way under his feet. The teachers knew a great deal about me; I had been severely punished several times; my eventual expulsion from the school was something people were waiting for. I knew it myself; for a long time I had no longer been a good pupil but scraped and cheated my way laboriously through, with the feeling that this could not go on much longer.
There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves. This was the way he took with me then. It was like a bad dream. Over filth and stickiness, over broken beer glasses and nights talked away in cynicism, I see myself crawling, a spellbound dreamer, restless and tormented, along an ugly and unclean road. There are dreams like that, in which, on the way to the princess, you get stuck in puddles of muck, in back alleys full of stench and refuse. So it was with me. In this not very refined way it was my lot to become lonely and to put between myself and childhood a locked gate of Eden with mercilessly shining guards. It was a beginning, an awakening of homesickness for myself.
I was still frightened and felt my nerves jump when, alarmed by letters from the master of my boardinghouse, my father appeared in St. for the first time and unexpectedly confronted me. When he came the second time, toward the end of that winter, I was already hard and indifferent, let him scold, let him plead, let him remind me of my mother. In the end he was very angry and said that if I did not change, he would have me driven out of the school in shame and disgrace and put me in a reformatory. Let him! When he left that time, I felt sorry for him, but he had achieved nothing; he had found no way to reach me anymore, and for moments I felt that it served him right.—
What became of me was all the same to me. In my strange and not very pretty way, with my tavern sitting and my swaggering, I was at war with the world; this was my form of protest. I was ruining myself in the process, and at times the matter looked to me something like this: if the world had no use for people like me, if it had no better place, no higher tasks for them, then people like me would simply go to ruin. Let the world bear the loss.
The Christmas vacation that year was very cheerless. My mother was shocked when she saw me again. I had grown even more, and my gaunt face looked gray and ravaged, with slack features and inflamed rims around the eyes. The first fuzz of a mustache and the spectacles I had recently begun to wear made me even more of a stranger to her. My sisters shrank back and giggled. Everything was dismal. Dismal and bitter, the talk with my father in his study; dismal, greeting the few relatives; dismal above all, Christmas Eve. For as long as I had been alive that had been the great day in our house, the evening of festivity and love, of gratitude, of the renewal of the bond between my parents and me. This time everything was only oppressive and embarrassing. As always, my father read the Gospel of the shepherds in the field, “keeping watch over their flock,” as always my sisters stood radiant before their table of presents, but my father’s voice sounded joyless, and his face looked old and pinched, and my mother was sad, and to me everything was equally painful and unwelcome, presents and good wishes, Gospel and Christmas tree. The gingerbread smelled sweet and gave off thick clouds of sweeter memories. The fir tree was fragrant and told of things that no longer were. I longed for the end of the evening and of the holidays.
It went on like this all winter. Only recently I had been sternly warned by the masters’ council and threatened with expulsion. It would not last much longer. Well, for all I cared.
I had a special grudge against Max Demian. I had not seen him all this time. At the beginning of my school days in St. I had written to him twice but had received no answer; for that reason I had not visited him during the vacations either.
In the same park where I had run into Alfons Beck in the fall, it happened, in early spring, just as the thorn hedges were beginning to turn green, that a girl caught my eye. I had gone walking alone, full of disgusting thoughts and worries, for my health had grown bad, and besides I was constantly short of money, owed sums to classmates, had to invent necessary expenses so as to get something from home again, and had let bills for cigars and similar things run up in several shops. Not that these worries went very deep—if one of these days my time here came to an end and I drowned myself or was put in the reformatory, then these few trifles would not matter anymore either. But still I lived constantly eye to eye with such unlovely things, and suffered from it.
On that spring day in the park I met a young lady who attracted me very much. She was tall and slender, elegantly dressed, and had a clever, boyish face. I liked her at once; she belonged to the type I loved, and she began to occupy my fantasies. She was probably hardly much older than I, but much more finished, elegant and well defined, already almost entirely a lady, but with a touch of high spirits and boyishness in her face that I liked enormously.
I had never succeeded in approaching a girl I was in love with, and I did not succeed with this one either. But the impression was deeper than any before, and the influence of this infatuation on my life was tremendous.
Suddenly I again had an image standing before me, a lofty and revered image—ah, and no need, no urge in me was so deep and fierce as the wish to revere and worship! I gave her the name Beatrice, for I knew of Beatrice, without having read Dante, from an English painting of which I had kept a reproduction. There she was an English Pre-Raphaelite figure of a girl, very long-limbed and slender, with a narrow, long head and spiritualized hands and features. My beautiful young girl did not quite resemble her, though she too showed that slenderness and boyishness of form that I loved, and something of the spiritualized, ensouled quality of the face.
I never spoke a single word to Beatrice. Yet at that time she had the deepest influence on me. She set up her image before me, she opened a sanctuary to me, she made me a worshiper in a temple. From one day to the next I stayed away from the drinking bouts and nightly prowls. I could be alone again, I liked reading again, I liked going for walks again.
The sudden conversion earned me plenty of mockery. But now I had something to love and worship, I had an ideal again, life was full again of premonition and bright, mysterious twilight—that made me impervious. I was at home with myself again, if only as the slave and servant of a revered image.
I cannot think of that time without a certain emotion. Again I tried, with the most heartfelt effort, to build myself a “bright world” out of the ruins of a period of life that had collapsed; again I lived wholly in the single desire to put away the dark and evil in me and to dwell entirely in the light, on my knees before gods. Still, this present “bright world” was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer a flight back to crawl under my mother’s wing and into an irresponsible safety; it was a new service, invented and demanded by myself, with responsibility and self-discipline. The sexuality from which I suffered and from which I was forever and ever on the run was now to be transfigured in this holy fire into spirit and devotion. There must be nothing dark anymore, nothing ugly, no nights spent groaning, no pounding heart before lewd pictures, no listening at forbidden doors, no lustfulness. Instead of all that I set up my altar, with the image of Beatrice, and in consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods. The share of life that I withdrew from the dark powers I brought as a sacrifice to the bright ones. My goal was not pleasure but purity, not happiness but beauty and spirituality.
This cult of Beatrice changed my life completely. Only yesterday a precocious cynic, I was now a temple servant, with the aim of becoming a saint. I not only put away the wretched life I had grown used to, I tried to change everything, tried to bring purity, nobility, and dignity into everything, thought of it in eating and drinking, speech and dress. I began the morning with cold sponge baths, which at first I had to force myself to take. I behaved seriously and with dignity, carried myself upright, and made my walk slower and more dignified. To onlookers it may have looked comical—inside me it was nothing but divine service.
Of all the new exercises in which I sought expression for my new state of mind, one became important to me. I began to paint. It started with the fact that the English picture of Beatrice I owned did not resemble that girl enough. I wanted to try to paint her for myself. With an entirely new joy and hope I gathered together in my room—I had recently been given one of my own—fine paper, paints, and brushes, and set out palette, glass, porcelain dishes, pencils. The fine tempera colors in little tubes that I had bought delighted me. There was a fiery chromium oxide green among them that I believe I can still see as it first lit up in the little white dish.
I began with caution. To paint a face was hard; I wanted to try other things first. I painted ornaments, flowers, and little imaginary landscapes, a tree by a chapel, a Roman bridge with cypresses. Sometimes I lost myself entirely in this playful activity, was as happy as a child with a box of paints. But at last I began to paint Beatrice.
Some sheets were complete failures and were thrown away. The more I tried to imagine the face of the girl I met now and again in the street, the less it would come. At last I gave that up and simply began to paint a face, following my fancy and the promptings that arose of themselves from what had been begun, from the paint and the brush. It was a dreamed face that came out of it, and I was not dissatisfied with it. Still, I went on with the attempt at once, and each new sheet spoke a little more clearly, came closer to the type, though by no means to reality.
More and more I grew used to drawing lines with a dreaming brush and filling surfaces that had no model, that arose out of playful groping, out of the unconscious. At last one day, almost unconsciously, I finished a face that spoke to me more strongly than the earlier ones. It was not that girl’s face; it was long since no longer meant to be. It was something else, something unreal, but no less precious. It looked more like a youth’s head than a girl’s face; the hair was not pale blond like my pretty girl’s, but brown with a reddish tinge; the chin was strong and firm, but the mouth red as a flower; the whole somewhat stiff and masklike, but impressive and full of secret life.
When I sat before the finished sheet, it made a strange impression on me. It seemed to me a kind of image of a god or a sacred mask, half male, half female, without age, as strong-willed as it was dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive. This face had something to tell me; it belonged to me; it made demands on me. And it resembled someone, I did not know whom.
For a while now the portrait accompanied all my thoughts and shared my life. I kept it hidden in a drawer; no one was to get hold of it and be able to mock me with it. But as soon as I was alone in my little room, I took the picture out and kept company with it. In the evening I pinned it to the wallpaper over the bed facing me, looked at it until I fell asleep, and in the morning my first glance fell on it.
It was just at that time that I began to dream a great deal again, as I had always done as a child. It seemed to me I had had no dreams for years. Now they came back, an entirely new kind of images, and again and again the painted portrait appeared in them, living and speaking, friendly to me or hostile, sometimes twisted into a grimace and sometimes infinitely beautiful, harmonious, and noble.
And one morning, as I woke from such dreams, I suddenly recognized it. It looked at me so fabulously familiarly; it seemed to be calling my name. It seemed to know me, like a mother; it seemed to have been turned toward me since the beginning of time. With a pounding heart I stared at the sheet, at the thick brown hair, the half-womanly mouth, the strong forehead with the strange brightness (it had dried that way of its own accord), and nearer and nearer I felt in me the recognition, the finding again, the knowing.
I jumped out of bed, planted myself before the face, and looked at it from very close, straight into the wide-open, greenish, staring eyes, of which the right one stood a little higher than the other. And all at once this right eye twitched, twitched slightly and delicately, but clearly, and with this twitch I recognized the picture…
How could I have found it out so late! It was Demian’s face.
Later I often compared the sheet with Demian’s real features as I found them in my memory. They were not the same at all, though similar. But all the same it was Demian.
Once, on an early summer evening, the sun shone slantwise and red through my window, which faced west. The room was growing dim. Then I had the idea of pinning the portrait of Beatrice, or of Demian, to the window frame and looking at it as the evening sun shone through. The face blurred without outlines, but the reddish-rimmed eyes, the brightness on the forehead, and the fiercely red mouth glowed deep and wild out of the surface. I sat facing it for a long time, even after it had gone out. And gradually a feeling came to me that this was not Beatrice and not Demian, but—myself. The picture did not resemble me—nor was it meant to, I felt—but it was what made up my life; it was my inner self, my fate or my daemon. That was how my friend would look, if I ever found one again. That was how my beloved would look, if I ever had one. That was how my life would be, and so my death; this was the sound and rhythm of my fate.
In those weeks I had begun some reading that made a deeper impression on me than anything I had read before. Even later I have seldom experienced books in that way, perhaps only Nietzsche. It was a volume of Novalis, with letters and aphorisms, many of which I did not understand and all of which nonetheless attracted me and spun themselves around me unspeakably. One of the sayings now came to my mind. I wrote it with my pen under the portrait: “Fate and temperament are names for one concept.” That I had now understood.
The girl I called Beatrice I still met often. I felt no stirring anymore when I did, but always a gentle accord, an intuition full of feeling: you are bound up with me, but not you, only your image; you are a piece of my fate.
My longing for Max Demian grew powerful again. I knew nothing of him, nothing for years. A single time I had run into him during a vacation. I see now that I have suppressed this brief encounter in my notes, and I see that it was out of shame and vanity. I must make up for it.
So, once during a vacation, when I was strolling through my hometown with the blasé and always somewhat tired face of my tavern days, swinging my walking stick and looking into the old, unchanged, despised faces of the philistines, my former friend came toward me. Hardly had I seen him when I flinched. And quick as lightning I had to think of Franz Kromer. If only Demian had really forgotten that story! It was so unpleasant to have this obligation toward him—really a silly children’s story, but all the same an obligation…
He seemed to be waiting to see whether I would greet him, and when I did, as calmly as possible, he gave me his hand. That was his handshake again! So firm, warm, and yet cool, a man’s!
He looked attentively into my face and said: “You’ve grown up, Sinclair.” He himself seemed to me quite unchanged, as old, as young as ever.
He joined me; we took a walk and talked about nothing but trivial things, nothing about the old days. It occurred to me that I had once written to him several times without getting an answer. Oh, if only he had forgotten that too, those stupid, stupid letters! He said nothing about it.
At that time there was as yet no Beatrice and no portrait; I was still in the midst of my wild time. Outside the town I invited him to come into a tavern with me. He came along. Boastfully I ordered a bottle of wine, poured, clinked glasses with him, and showed myself very familiar with the drinking customs of students, and also emptied the first glass in one draft.
“You go to taverns a lot?” he asked me.
“Oh, yes,” I said lazily, “what else is there to do? In the end it’s still the most fun.”
“You think so? Could be. There’s something very fine about it, of course—intoxication, the Bacchic! But I find that with most people who sit in taverns a lot, that’s been entirely lost. It seems to me that running to taverns is something downright philistine. Yes, for one night, with burning torches, for a real, beautiful intoxication and frenzy! But again and again like this, one little glass after another, surely that isn’t the real thing? Can you picture Faust, say, sitting at a regulars’ table evening after evening?”
I drank and looked at him with hostility.
“Well, not everyone is a Faust,” I said curtly.
He looked at me, somewhat taken aback.
Then he laughed with his old freshness and superiority.
“Well, why argue about it? In any case, the life of a drunkard or a libertine is presumably more alive than that of the irreproachable citizen. And then—I read this once—the life of the libertine is one of the best preparations for the mystic. It’s always people like Saint Augustine, after all, who become seers. He too was a man of pleasure and a man about town before.”
I was suspicious and had no wish to let him lecture me. So I said in a blasé way: “Yes, each to his own taste! To be honest, I have no interest at all in becoming a seer or anything of the kind.”
Demian flashed a knowing look at me from his slightly narrowed eyes.
“My dear Sinclair,” he said slowly, “it wasn’t my intention to say anything unpleasant to you. Besides—to what end you are drinking your glasses of wine now, neither of us knows, after all. That in you which makes your life knows it already. It’s so good to know that: that inside us there is someone who knows everything, wants everything, does everything better than we ourselves.—But forgive me, I have to go home.”
We took a brief leave of each other. I stayed sitting there in a very bad mood, drank my bottle to the bottom, and found, when I wanted to leave, that Demian had already paid for it. That annoyed me even more.
My thoughts now stopped again at this little incident. They were full of Demian. And the words he had said in that inn outside the town came back up in my memory, strangely fresh and not lost.—“It’s so good to know that inside us there is someone who knows everything!”
I looked at the picture, which hung at the window and had gone completely dark. But I could still see the eyes glowing. That was Demian’s look. Or it was the look of the one who was inside me. The one who knows everything.
How I longed for Demian! I knew nothing of him; he was out of my reach. I knew only that he was presumably studying somewhere and that after he had finished at the Gymnasium his mother had left our town.
I searched out all my memories of Max Demian, back to my story with Kromer. How much of what he had once said to me rang out again, and all of it still had meaning today, was urgent, concerned me! Even what he had said at our last, so unpleasant meeting about the libertine and the saint suddenly stood bright before my soul. Wasn’t that exactly how it had gone with me? Hadn’t I lived in drunkenness and filth, in stupor and lostness, until with a new impulse of life the very opposite had come alive in me, the desire for purity, the longing for the holy?
So I went on following my memories; it had long since grown dark, and outside it was raining. In my memories, too, I heard it raining; it was the hour under the chestnut trees when he had once questioned me about Franz Kromer and guessed my first secrets. One after another they came up, talks on the way to school, the confirmation lessons. And at last my very first meeting with Max Demian came back to me. What had it been about, now? I did not get it at once, but I took my time; I was completely absorbed in it. And now it came back, that too. We had been standing in front of our house after he had told me his opinion about Cain. Then he had spoken of the old, worn coat of arms that sat over our front door, in the keystone that widened from bottom to top. He had said that it interested him and that one ought to pay attention to such things.
That night I dreamed of Demian and of the coat of arms. It kept changing; Demian held it in his hands; often it was small and gray, often enormous and many-colored, but he explained to me that it was still always one and the same. In the end, though, he forced me to eat the coat of arms. When I had swallowed it, I felt with tremendous terror that the swallowed bird of the coat of arms was alive in me, filling me and beginning to devour me from within. Full of mortal fear, I started up and woke.
I came fully awake; it was the middle of the night, and I heard the rain coming into the room. I got up to close the window, and as I did so I stepped on something light-colored that lay on the floor. In the morning I found that it was my painted sheet. It lay on the floor in the wet and had buckled into ridges. I put it to dry between sheets of blotting paper in a heavy book. When I looked at it again the next day, it was dry. But it had changed. The red mouth had faded and grown somewhat narrower. It was now exactly Demian’s mouth.
I now set about painting a new sheet, the bird of the coat of arms. What it actually looked like I no longer knew clearly, and some of it, as I knew, could no longer be made out well even from close up, since the thing was old and had often been painted over. The bird stood or sat on something, perhaps on a flower, or on a basket or nest, or on the top of a tree. I did not trouble about that and began with what I had a clear idea of. Out of an obscure need I began at once with strong colors; the bird’s head on my sheet was golden yellow. I went on with it as the mood took me and finished the thing in a few days.
Now it was a bird of prey, with a sharp, bold sparrow hawk’s head. Half its body was stuck in a dark globe of the world, out of which it was working its way up as out of a giant egg, against a background of blue sky. The longer I looked at the sheet, the more it seemed to me to be the many-colored coat of arms as it had appeared in my dream.
It would not have been possible for me to write a letter to Demian, even if I had known where to send it. But I decided, in the same dreamlike intuition with which I did everything at that time, to send him the picture with the sparrow hawk, whether it reached him or not. I wrote nothing on it, not even my name, trimmed the edges carefully, bought a large paper envelope, and wrote my friend’s former address on it. Then I sent it off.
An examination was approaching, and I had to work harder than usual for school. The teachers had taken me back into their good graces since I had suddenly changed my disgraceful ways. I was probably not a good pupil even now, but neither I nor anyone else still remembered that half a year before my expulsion from the school as a punishment had seemed likely to everyone.
My father now wrote to me again more in the tone of the old days, without reproaches or threats. But I had no urge to explain to him or anyone how the change in me had come about. It was a coincidence that this change agreed with the wishes of my parents and teachers. This change did not bring me to the others, brought me closer to no one, made me only lonelier. It was aimed somewhere, toward Demian, toward a distant fate. I did not know it myself, for I was standing in the middle of it. It had begun with Beatrice, but for some time now I had been living with my painted sheets and my thoughts of Demian in so entirely unreal a world that I had lost even her completely from sight and from thought. I could not have said a word to anyone about my dreams, my expectations, my inner transformation, not even if I had wanted to.
But how could I have wanted to?