Chapter Seven: Frau Eva

During the vacation I went once to the house in which Max Demian had lived with his mother years before. An old woman was walking in the garden; I spoke to her and learned that the house belonged to her. I asked about the Demian family. She remembered them well. But she did not know where they lived now. Sensing my interest, she took me into the house, searched out a leather album, and showed me a photograph of Demian’s mother. I could hardly remember her anymore. But now, when I saw the little portrait, my heart stopped beating.—That was my dream image! That was she, the tall, almost masculine figure of a woman, like her son, with features of motherliness, features of severity, features of deep passion, beautiful and alluring, beautiful and unapproachable, daemon and mother, fate and beloved. That was she!

It went through me like a wild miracle when I learned in this way that my dream image lived on earth! There was a woman who looked like that, who bore the features of my fate! Where was she? Where?—And she was Demian’s mother!

Soon afterward I set out on my journey. A strange journey! I traveled restlessly from place to place, following every whim, always searching for this woman. There were days when I met nothing but figures that reminded me of her, echoed her, resembled her, that lured me through the lanes of strange towns, through railroad stations, into trains, as in tangled dreams. There were other days when I saw how useless my searching was; then I sat idle somewhere in a park, in a hotel garden, in a waiting room, and looked into myself and tried to make the image come alive in me. But it had now grown shy and fleeting. I could never sleep; only on train journeys through unknown country did I nod off for a quarter of an hour at a time. Once, in Zurich, a woman ran after me, a pretty, somewhat brazen woman. I hardly saw her and walked on as if she were air. I would rather have died on the spot than have given another woman so much as an hour’s attention.

I felt that my fate was drawing me; I felt that fulfillment was near; and I was mad with impatience that I could do nothing toward it. Once at a station, in Innsbruck I believe, I saw at the window of a train just pulling out a figure that reminded me of her, and I was unhappy for days. And suddenly the figure appeared to me again one night in a dream; I woke with an ashamed and dreary sense of the senselessness of my hunt, and I went straight back home.

A few weeks later I enrolled at the university in H. Everything disappointed me. The lectures on the history of philosophy that I attended were just as insubstantial and factory-made as the doings of the young students. Everything was so much according to pattern, one did as the other did, and the heated merriment on the boyish faces looked so dismally empty and ready-made! But I was free; I had my whole day to myself, lived quietly and pleasantly within old walls outside the town, and had a few volumes of Nietzsche lying on my table. I lived with him, felt the loneliness of his soul, scented the fate that drove him relentlessly on, suffered with him, and was blissful that there had been someone who had gone his way so inexorably.

Late one evening I was strolling through the town in the gusting autumn wind and heard the student fraternities singing in the taverns. Tobacco smoke poured out in clouds from open windows, and with it, in a thick surge, the singing, loud and taut, but uninspired and lifelessly uniform.

I stood at a street corner and listened; from two taverns the punctually performed jollity of youth rang out into the night. Everywhere togetherness, everywhere huddling together, everywhere the unloading of fate and flight into the warm nearness of the herd!

Behind me two men walked slowly past. I heard a piece of their conversation.

“Isn’t it exactly like the young men’s house in an African village?” said one of them. “Everything fits; even tattooing is still in fashion. You see, that is young Europe.”

The voice sounded strangely admonishing to me—familiar. I followed the two of them down the dark lane. One of them was Japanese, small and elegant; under a streetlamp I saw his yellow, smiling face light up.

Then the other spoke again.

“Well, it’s probably no better with you in Japan. People who don’t run after the herd are rare everywhere. There are some here too.”

Every word went through me with joyful alarm. I knew the speaker. It was Demian.

Through the windy night I followed him and the Japanese man through the dark lanes, listened to their conversation, and relished the sound of Demian’s voice. It had its old tone; it had the old, beautiful assurance and calm; and it had the old power over me. Now everything was well. I had found him.

At the end of a street on the edge of town the Japanese man took his leave and unlocked a front door. Demian came back the way they had come; I had stopped and was waiting for him in the middle of the street. With a pounding heart I watched him come toward me, upright and supple, in a brown rubber raincoat, a thin cane hooked over his arm. Without changing his even stride, he came right up to me, took off his hat, and showed me his familiar bright face with the resolute mouth and the peculiar brightness on the broad forehead.

“Demian!” I cried.

He held out his hand to me.

“So there you are, Sinclair! I’ve been expecting you.”

“Did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t exactly know, but I was certainly hoping. I only saw you this evening; you’ve been following us the whole time, after all.”

“So you recognized me right away?”

“Of course. You’ve changed, it’s true. But you have the mark.”

“The mark? What mark?”

“We used to call it the mark of Cain, if you still remember. It’s our mark. You’ve always had it; that’s why I became your friend. But now it has grown clearer.”

“I didn’t know. Or actually I did. Once I painted a picture of you, Demian, and was astonished that it looked like me too. Was that the mark?”

“That was it. Good that you’re here now! My mother will be glad too.”

I was startled.

“Your mother? Is she here? But she doesn’t know me at all.”

“Oh, she knows about you. She’ll recognize you even without my telling her who you are.—You haven’t let me hear from you in a long time.”

“Oh, I often wanted to write, but I couldn’t. For some time now I’ve felt that I must find you soon. I’ve been waiting for it every day.”

He slipped his arm through mine and walked on with me. Calm went out from him and passed into me. Soon we were chatting as in the old days. We recalled our school days, the confirmation lessons, that unhappy meeting during the vacation too—only of the earliest and closest bond between us, the story with Franz Kromer, there was no talk even now.

Before we knew it we were in the midst of strange and portentous conversation. Taking up the talk between Demian and the Japanese man, we had spoken of student life and had come from there to other things that seemed to lie far off; yet in Demian’s words they joined into a close connection.

He spoke of the spirit of Europe and the signature of this age. Everywhere, he said, alliance and herd formation prevailed, but nowhere freedom and love. All this togetherness, from the student fraternity and the singing club up to the states, was a forced formation; it was a community born of fear, of dread, of embarrassment, and it was rotten and old within and close to collapse.

“Togetherness,” Demian said, “is a fine thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere isn’t that at all. It will arise anew, out of individuals knowing about one another, and for a while it will reshape the world. What there is of togetherness now is only herd formation. People flee to one another because they’re afraid of one another—the gentlemen by themselves, the workers by themselves, the scholars by themselves! And why are they afraid? You’re only afraid when you’re not at one with yourself. They’re afraid because they’ve never owned up to themselves. A community of nothing but people who are afraid of the unknown in themselves! They all feel that the laws they live by aren’t valid anymore, that they’re living by old tablets; neither their religions nor their morality, none of it is suited to what we need. For a hundred years and more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many grams of powder it takes to kill a man, but they don’t know how to pray to God; they don’t even know how to be cheerful for an hour. Just look at a students’ tavern like that! Or worse, a pleasure resort where the rich people go! Hopeless!—My dear Sinclair, nothing serene can come of all that. These people who band together so anxiously are full of fear and full of malice; no one trusts anyone else. They cling to ideals that are no longer ideals, and they stone anyone who sets up a new one. I sense that there will be conflicts. They will come, believe me, they’ll come soon! Of course they won’t ‘improve’ the world. Whether the workers kill their factory owners, or whether Russia and Germany shoot at each other, it will only mean a change of owners. But it won’t be in vain all the same. It will show up the worthlessness of present-day ideals; there will be a clearing away of Stone Age gods. This world as it is now wants to die, it wants to perish, and it will.”

“And what will become of us then?” I asked.

“Of us? Oh, perhaps we’ll perish along with it. People like us can be killed too, after all. Only that won’t be the end of us. Around what remains of us, or around those of us who survive it, the will of the future will gather. The will of mankind will show itself, which our Europe has for a time shouted down with its fairground of technology and science. And then it will turn out that the will of mankind is never and nowhere the same as that of present-day communities, of states and peoples, of associations and churches. Rather, what nature wants with man is written in individuals, in you and me. It was written in Jesus; it was written in Nietzsche. For these currents, which alone matter—and which can of course look different every day, there will be room when the present-day communities collapse.”

Late, we stopped in front of a garden by the river.

“This is where we live,” Demian said. “Come and see us soon! We’re very much expecting you.”

Joyfully I walked the long way home through the night, which had grown cool. Here and there students on their way home were making a racket and staggering through the town. I had often felt the contrast between their comical kind of merriment and my solitary life, often with a feeling of deprivation, often with mockery. But never before had I felt as I did today, with calm and secret strength, how little it concerned me, how distant and vanished this world was for me. I remembered officials of my hometown, dignified old gentlemen who clung to the memories of their semesters spent in taverns as to keepsakes of a blissful paradise, and who made a cult of the vanished “freedom” of their student years, such as poets or other romantics otherwise devote to childhood. The same everywhere! Everywhere they looked for “freedom” and “happiness” somewhere behind them, out of sheer fear that they might be reminded of their own responsibility and admonished about their own way. For a few years there was boozing and carousing, and then you crept under cover and became a serious gentleman in the civil service. Yes, it was rotten, rotten among us, and this student foolishness was less foolish and less bad than a hundred other things.

But when I had reached my remote lodgings and was looking for my bed, all these thoughts had flown, and my whole mind hung waiting on the great promise this day had given me. As soon as I liked, tomorrow even, I was to see Demian’s mother. Let the students hold their drinking bouts and tattoo their faces, let the world be rotten and wait for its downfall—what did it matter to me! I was waiting only for my fate to come toward me in a new image.

I slept soundly until late in the morning. The new day dawned for me as a solemn holiday, such as I had not known since the Christmas celebrations of my boyhood. I was full of the deepest restlessness, but without any fear. I felt that an important day had dawned for me; I saw and felt the world around me transformed, waiting, full of meaning and solemn; even the softly falling autumn rain was beautiful, still, and festive, full of grave and joyful music. For the first time the outer world rang purely together with my inner one—then it is a holiday of the soul; then it is worth living. No house, no shop window, no face in the street disturbed me; everything was as it had to be, but wore not the empty face of the everyday and familiar; it was nature waiting, standing reverently ready for fate. That was how I had seen the world as a little boy on the mornings of the great holidays, on Christmas Day and at Easter. I had not known that this world could still be so beautiful. I had grown used to living inward and to resigning myself to the fact that I had simply lost the sense for what was out there, that the loss of the shining colors was inevitably bound up with the loss of childhood, and that in a sense one had to pay for the freedom and manhood of the soul by renouncing this lovely glow. Now I saw with delight that all this had only been buried and darkened, and that it was possible, even as one who had become free and had renounced a child’s happiness, to see the world shine and to taste the heartfelt thrills of a child’s seeing.

The hour came when I found again the garden on the edge of town where I had said goodbye to Max Demian the night before. Hidden behind tall, rain-gray trees stood a small house, bright and inviting, tall flowering plants behind a great glass wall, dark walls of rooms with pictures and rows of books behind gleaming windows. The front door led straight into a small, warmed hall; a silent old maidservant, in black with a white apron, showed me in and took my coat.

She left me alone in the hall. I looked around, and at once I was in the middle of my dream. High on the dark wooden wall, over a door, there hung under glass in a black frame a picture I knew well, my bird with the golden-yellow sparrow hawk’s head, swinging itself out of the shell of the world. I stood still, deeply moved—my heart was as glad and as sore as if at this moment everything I had ever done and lived through were coming back to me as answer and fulfillment. Quick as lightning I saw a host of pictures run past my soul: my father’s house at home with the old stone coat of arms over the archway, the boy Demian drawing the coat of arms, myself as a boy, entangled in fear in the evil spell of my enemy Kromer, myself as a youth, painting the bird of my longing at the quiet table in my little room at school, my soul caught confused in the net of its own threads—and everything, everything up to this moment rang out in me again, was affirmed in me, answered, approved.

With eyes grown wet I stared at my picture and read in myself. Then my gaze sank down: beneath the picture of the bird, in the open door, stood a tall woman in a dark dress. It was she. I could not say a word. From a face that, like her son’s, was without time or age and full of ensouled will, the beautiful, venerable woman smiled at me kindly. Her look was fulfillment; her greeting meant homecoming. Silently I held out my hands to her. She took them both in firm, warm hands.

“You are Sinclair. I knew you at once. Welcome!”

Her voice was deep and warm; I drank it like sweet wine. And now I looked up into her still face, into the black, unfathomable eyes, at the fresh, ripe mouth, at the free, princely forehead that bore the mark.

“How glad I am!” I said to her, and kissed her hands. “I believe I’ve been on the way my whole life long—and now I’ve come home.”

She smiled like a mother.

“One never comes home,” she said kindly. “But where friendly paths run together, the whole world looks like home for an hour.”

She was saying what I had felt on my way to her. Her voice, and her words too, were very like her son’s, and yet quite different. Everything was riper, warmer, more natural. But just as Max long ago had given no one the impression of a boy, so his mother did not look at all like the mother of a grown son, so young and sweet was the breath over her face and hair, so firm and unlined was her golden skin, so blooming her mouth. More regal still than in my dream she stood before me, and her nearness was the happiness of love; her look was fulfillment.

This, then, was the new image in which my fate showed itself to me, no longer stern, no longer isolating, no, ripe and full of joy! I made no resolutions, took no vows—I had come to a goal, to a high point on the way, from which the road ahead showed itself wide and glorious, striving toward lands of promise, shaded by the treetops of happiness close at hand, cooled by the nearby gardens of every delight. Let it go with me as it would, I was blissful to know that this woman was in the world, to drink her voice and breathe her nearness. Whether she became mother to me, beloved, goddess—if only she was there! if only my way was near to hers!

She pointed up at my sparrow hawk picture.

“You never gave our Max a greater joy than with this picture,” she said thoughtfully. “Nor me either. We had been waiting for you, and when the picture came, we knew that you were on your way to us. When you were a little boy, Sinclair, my son came home from school one day and said: There’s a boy there who has the mark on his forehead; he must become my friend. That was you. You haven’t had it easy, but we trusted you. Once, when you were home for the vacation, you met Max again. You were about sixteen then. Max told me about it—”

I broke in: “Oh, that he told you that! It was my most wretched time, back then!”

“Yes, Max said to me: now Sinclair has the hardest part ahead of him. He’s making one more attempt to escape into the common life; he’s even become a tavern crony; but it won’t work. His mark is veiled, but it burns him in secret.—Wasn’t that so?”

“Oh yes, that’s how it was, exactly. Then I found Beatrice, and then at last a guide came to me again. His name was Pistorius. Only then did it become clear to me why my boyhood was so bound to Max, why I couldn’t get free of him. Dear lady—dear mother, back then I often thought I would have to take my own life. Is the way so hard for everyone?”

She passed her hand over my hair, light as air.

“It is always hard to be born. You know, the bird has a hard time getting out of the egg. Think back and ask yourself: was the way really so hard?—only hard? Wasn’t it beautiful too? Would you have known a more beautiful one, an easier one?”

I shook my head.

“It was hard,” I said as if in my sleep, “it was hard until the dream came.”

She nodded and looked at me piercingly.

“Yes, one must find one’s dream; then the way becomes easy. But there is no everlasting dream; each is replaced by a new one, and one must not try to hold on to any.”

I was deeply startled. Was that already a warning? Was that already a fending off? But no matter, I was ready to let her guide me and not to ask about the goal.

“I don’t know,” I said, “how long my dream is to last. I wish it were eternal. Under the picture of the bird my fate received me, like a mother, and like a beloved. I belong to it and to no one else.”

“As long as the dream is your fate, so long you should stay faithful to it,” she confirmed gravely.

A sadness seized me, and the ardent wish to die in this enchanted hour. I felt the tears—how endlessly long it had been since I had wept!—welling up irresistibly in me and overwhelming me. I turned violently away from her, stepped to the window, and looked out with blind eyes over the potted flowers.

Behind me I heard her voice; it sounded composed and yet was as full of tenderness as a cup filled to the brim with wine.

“Sinclair, you are a child! Your fate loves you, after all. One day it will belong to you wholly, just as you dream it, if you stay faithful.”

I had mastered myself and turned my face to her again. She gave me her hand.

“I have a few friends,” she said, smiling, “a very few, very close friends, who call me Frau Eva. You too shall call me that, if you like.”

She led me to the door, opened it, and pointed into the garden. “You’ll find Max out there.”

Under the tall trees I stood dazed and shaken, more awake or more dreaming than ever, I did not know which. The rain dripped gently from the branches. I walked slowly into the garden, which stretched a long way along the bank of the river. At last I found Demian. He was standing in an open summerhouse, stripped to the waist, practicing boxing in front of a small punching bag hung up there.

I stopped in astonishment. Demian looked magnificent; the broad chest, the firm, manly head, the raised arms with their taut muscles were strong and capable; the movements came out of hips, shoulders, and wrists like playing springs.

“Demian!” I cried. “What are you doing there?”

He laughed cheerfully.

“I’m practicing. I’ve promised my little Japanese friend a wrestling match; the fellow is as quick as a cat, and of course just as treacherous. But he won’t get the better of me. It’s a very small humiliation I owe him.”

He put on his shirt and coat.

“You’ve already been to see my mother?” he asked.

“Yes. Demian, what a glorious mother you have! Frau Eva! The name suits her perfectly; she’s like the mother of all beings.”

He looked thoughtfully into my face for a moment.

“You know her name already? You can be proud, my boy! You’re the first she’s ever told it to in the very first hour.”

From that day on I went in and out of the house like a son and brother, but also like a lover. When I shut the gate behind me, indeed, as soon as I saw the tall trees of the garden rise up in the distance, I was rich and happy. Outside was “reality”; outside were streets and houses, people and institutions, libraries and lecture halls—but here inside was love and soul; here the fairy tale and the dream lived. And yet we by no means lived shut off from the world; in thought and conversation we often lived right in the midst of it, only on a different field; we were separated from the majority of people not by boundaries but only by a different way of seeing. Our task was to represent an island in the world, perhaps a model, but in any case the announcement of another possible way to live. I, who had been lonely so long, came to know the community that is possible between people who have tasted complete solitude. Never again did I long to go back to the tables of the happy, to the feasts of the merry; never again did envy or homesickness come over me when I saw the togetherness of others. And slowly I was initiated into the secret of those who bore “the mark.”

We who bore the mark might rightly seem strange to the world, even mad and dangerous. We were awakened ones, or ones awakening, and our striving was toward an ever more complete wakefulness, while the striving and pursuit of happiness of the others went toward binding their opinions, their ideals and duties, their lives and happiness ever more closely to those of the herd. There too was striving; there too was strength and greatness. But while, as we saw it, we who were marked represented nature’s will toward the new, the individual, and the future, the others lived in a will to persist. For them mankind—which they loved as we did—was something finished that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all on our way, whose image no one knew, whose laws were written nowhere.

Besides Frau Eva, Max, and me, there belonged to our circle, nearer or farther, a number of seekers of very different kinds. Some of them followed special paths, had set themselves separate goals, and clung to particular opinions and duties; among them were astrologers and cabalists, also a follower of Count Tolstoy, and all sorts of delicate, shy, vulnerable people, adherents of new sects, practitioners of Indian exercises, vegetarians, and others. With all of these we really had nothing in common spiritually except the respect each of us granted the other’s secret dream of life. Others were closer to us, who pursued mankind’s search for gods and new wish images in the past, and whose studies often reminded me of those of my Pistorius. They brought books with them, translated texts from ancient languages for us, showed us pictures of ancient symbols and rites, and taught us to see how the whole stock of ideals that mankind had possessed so far consisted of dreams of the unconscious soul, dreams in which mankind groped after the intimations of its future possibilities. So we ran through the marvelous, thousand-headed tangle of gods of the ancient world up to the dawning of the Christian turn. The confessions of the solitary devout became known to us, and the transformations of religions from people to people. And from everything we gathered there emerged for us the critique of our time and of present-day Europe, which with tremendous efforts had created mighty new weapons for mankind, but had in the end fallen into a deep and at last screaming desolation of the spirit. For it had gained the whole world only to lose its soul in the bargain.

Here too there were believers and confessors of particular hopes and doctrines of salvation. There were Buddhists who wanted to convert Europe, and disciples of Tolstoy, and other creeds. We in the inner circle listened and accepted none of these doctrines except as symbols. We who were marked felt no concern for the shaping of the future. To us every creed, every doctrine of salvation, seemed dead and useless in advance. And we felt this alone to be our duty and our fate: that each of us should become so wholly himself, should do such justice to the working seed of nature in him and live so at its will, that the uncertain future would find us ready for anything and everything it might bring.

For this was clear to the feelings of all of us, spoken and unspoken: that a new birth and a collapse of the present were near and could already be felt. Demian sometimes said to me: “What is coming is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is an animal that has lain bound for an endlessly long time. When it gets free, its first movements won’t be the gentlest. But the ways and detours don’t matter, as long as the true need of the soul comes to light, which people have been lying away and drugging again and again for so long. Then our day will come; then we’ll be needed, not as leaders or new lawgivers—we won’t live to see the new laws—but rather as the willing, as those who are ready to go along and to stand where fate calls. Look, all people are ready to do the incredible when their ideals are threatened. But no one is there when a new ideal, a new, perhaps dangerous and uncanny stirring of growth comes knocking. The few who are there then and go along will be us. That is what we are marked for—as Cain was marked to arouse fear and hatred and to drive the mankind of his day out of a narrow idyll into dangerous distances. All the people who have had an effect on the course of mankind, all without exception, were capable and effective only because they were ready for fate. That holds for Moses and Buddha; it holds for Napoleon and for Bismarck. Which wave a man serves, from which pole he is governed, is not his to choose. If Bismarck had understood the Social Democrats and adjusted himself to them, he would have been a clever gentleman, but not a man of fate. So it was with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Loyola, with all of them! You always have to think of it biologically, in terms of evolution! When the upheavals on the surface of the earth threw the water animals onto land and land animals into the water, it was the specimens ready for fate that could carry out the new and unheard-of and save their species by new adaptations. Whether these were the same specimens that had stood out before in their species as conservative and preserving, or rather the oddballs and revolutionaries, we don’t know. They were ready, and so they could save their species over into new developments. That we know. That’s why we want to be ready.”

Frau Eva was often present at such conversations, but she did not join in them in this way herself. For each of us who expressed his thoughts she was a listener and an echo, full of trust, full of understanding; it seemed as if all the thoughts came from her and returned to her. To sit near her, to hear her voice now and then, and to share in the atmosphere of ripeness and soul that surrounded her was happiness for me.

She sensed at once whenever some change, some clouding or renewal, was under way in me. It seemed to me as if the dreams I had in my sleep were inspirations from her. I often told them to her, and they were understandable and natural to her; there was no strangeness she could not follow with clear feeling. For a time I had dreams that were like replicas of our daytime conversations. I dreamed that the whole world was in turmoil and that I, alone or with Demian, was waiting tensely for the great fate. The fate remained veiled, but somehow it bore the features of Frau Eva—to be chosen or rejected by her, that was fate.

Sometimes she would say with a smile: “Your dream isn’t complete, Sinclair; you’ve forgotten the best part—” and it might happen that it came back to me then and I could not understand how I could have forgotten it.

At times I grew discontented and tormented by desire. I thought I could no longer bear to see her beside me without taking her in my arms. She noticed that too at once. Once, when I had stayed away for several days and then came back distraught, she took me aside and said: “You should not give yourself up to wishes you don’t believe in. I know what you wish. You must be able to give these wishes up, or else wish them wholly and rightly. Once you are able to ask in such a way that you are entirely certain of fulfillment within yourself, then fulfillment is there too. But you wish, and then regret it again, and are afraid as you do. All that has to be overcome. I’ll tell you a fairy tale.”

And she told me of a youth who was in love with a star. He stood by the sea, stretched out his hands, and worshiped the star; he dreamed of it and turned his thoughts toward it. But he knew, or thought he knew, that a star cannot be embraced by a human being. He held it to be his fate to love a heavenly body without hope of fulfillment, and out of this thought he built a whole poem of a life of renunciation and silent, faithful suffering that was to improve and purify him. But all his dreams went to the star. Once he stood again by night beside the sea, on the high cliff, and looked into the star and burned with love for it. And in a moment of the greatest longing he leaped and hurled himself into the void, toward the star. But in the very moment of leaping he thought, quick as lightning: it’s impossible, after all! There he lay on the shore below, shattered. He had not known how to love. Had he had, in the moment he leaped, the strength of soul to believe firmly and surely in fulfillment, he would have flown upward and been united with the star.

“Love must not beg,” she said, “nor demand either. Love must have the strength to come to certainty within itself. Then it is no longer drawn but draws. Sinclair, your love is drawn by me. Once it draws me, I will come. I don’t want to give presents; I want to be won.”

But another time she told me another fairy tale. There was a lover who loved without hope. He withdrew entirely into his soul and thought he would burn up with love. The world was lost to him; he no longer saw the blue sky and the green forest; the brook did not murmur for him; the harp did not sound for him; everything had sunk away, and he had become poor and wretched. But his love grew, and he would much rather die and go to ruin than give up possessing the beautiful woman he loved. Then he felt how his love had burned up everything else in him, and it became powerful and drew and drew, and the beautiful woman had to follow; she came; he stood with arms spread wide to draw her to him. But when she stood before him, she was entirely transformed, and with a shudder he felt and saw that he had drawn the whole lost world to himself. She stood before him and gave herself to him; sky and forest and brook, everything came toward him in new colors, fresh and glorious, belonged to him, spoke his language. And instead of merely winning a woman, he had the whole world at his heart, and every star in the sky glowed in him and sparkled joy through his soul.—He had loved, and in doing so had found himself. But most people love in order to lose themselves in it.

My love for Frau Eva seemed to me to be the only content of my life. But every day she looked different. Sometimes I believed I felt with certainty that it was not her person toward which my being was drawn and striving, but that she was only a symbol of my inner self and wanted only to lead me deeper into myself. Often I heard words from her that sounded to me like answers of my unconscious to burning questions that stirred me. Then again there were moments when I burned beside her with sensual desire and kissed objects she had touched. And gradually sensual and nonsensual love, reality and symbol, slid over each other. Then it happened that I would think of her at home in my room, with quiet intensity, and believe I felt her hand in mine and her lips on mine. Or I was with her, looked into her face, talked with her, and heard her voice, and yet did not know whether she was real and not a dream. I began to sense how one can possess a love lastingly and immortally. I came to a new insight while reading a book, and it was the same feeling as a kiss from Frau Eva. She stroked my hair and smiled her ripe, fragrant warmth at me, and I had the same feeling as when I had made some progress within myself. Everything that was important and fate for me could take on her form. She could transform herself into any of my thoughts, and each of them into her.

I had dreaded the Christmas holidays, which I spent with my parents, because I thought it must be a torment to live away from Frau Eva for two weeks. But it was no torment; it was glorious to be at home and think of her. When I came back to H., I stayed away from her house for two more days in order to enjoy this certainty and independence from her physical presence. I also had dreams in which my union with her was accomplished in new, allegorical ways. She was a sea into which I flowed and emptied. She was a star, and I myself was on my way to her as a star, and we met and felt ourselves drawn to each other, stayed together, and turned blissfully around each other for all time in near, resounding circles.

I told her this dream when I first visited her again.

“The dream is beautiful,” she said quietly. “Make it come true!”

In early spring there came a day I have never forgotten. I stepped into the hall; a window stood open, and a mild current of air rolled the heavy scent of hyacinths through the room. Since no one was to be seen, I went up the stairs to Max Demian’s study. I knocked lightly on the door and went in without waiting for an answer, as I was used to doing.

The room was dark, the curtains all drawn. The door to a small adjoining room, where Max had set up a chemistry laboratory, stood open. From there came the bright, white light of the spring sun shining through rain clouds. I thought no one was there and drew back one of the curtains.

Then I saw Max Demian sitting on a stool near the curtained window, huddled and strangely changed, and like lightning a feeling went through me: you’ve lived through this once before! His arms hung motionless, his hands in his lap; his face, bent slightly forward, with open eyes, was sightless and dead; in the pupil a small, glaring reflection of light gleamed lifelessly, as in a piece of glass. The pale face was sunk in itself and without any expression but that of a tremendous rigidity; it looked like an ancient animal mask on the portal of a temple. He did not seem to breathe.

Memory sent a shudder over me—so, exactly so, I had seen him once before, many years ago, when I was still a little boy. The eyes had stared inward like that, the hands had lain lifeless side by side like that, a fly had walked across his face. And back then, perhaps six years before, he had looked just as old and as timeless; not a line in his face was different today.

Overcome by a fear, I went softly out of the room and down the stairs. In the hall I met Frau Eva. She was pale and seemed tired, which was something I did not know in her; a shadow flew across the window; the glaring white sun had suddenly vanished.

“I was with Max,” I whispered quickly. “Has something happened? He’s asleep, or sunk in himself, I don’t know; I saw him like that once before.”

“You didn’t wake him?” she asked quickly.

“No. He didn’t hear me. I went right out again. Frau Eva, tell me, what’s the matter with him?”

She passed the back of her hand across her forehead.

“Don’t be alarmed, Sinclair; nothing will happen to him. He has withdrawn. It won’t last long.”

She stood up and went out into the garden, although it was just beginning to rain. I sensed that I was not to come with her. So I walked up and down in the hall, smelled the intoxicatingly fragrant hyacinths, stared at my bird picture over the door, and breathed in with oppression the strange shadow that filled the house that morning. What was this? What had happened?

Frau Eva soon came back. Raindrops hung in her dark hair. She sat down in her armchair. Weariness lay over her. I stepped beside her, bent over her, and kissed the drops out of her hair. Her eyes were bright and still, but the drops tasted to me like tears.

“Shall I go and look in on him?” I asked in a whisper.

She smiled faintly.

“Don’t be a little boy, Sinclair!” she admonished aloud, as if to break a spell in herself. “Go now, and come back later; I can’t talk with you now.”

I went and walked away from house and town toward the mountains; the slanting, thin rain came toward me; the clouds drove by low under a heavy pressure, as if in fear. Down below there was hardly any wind; up high it seemed to be storming; several times the sun broke for moments, pale and glaring, out of the steely gray of the clouds.

Then a loose yellow cloud came drifting across the sky; it piled up against the gray wall, and within a few seconds the wind shaped out of the yellow and the blue a picture, a gigantic bird that tore itself free of the blue confusion and vanished into the sky with wide wingbeats. Then the storm became audible, and rain mixed with hail clattered down. A short clap of thunder, improbable and frightening in its sound, crashed over the lashed landscape; immediately afterward a glimpse of sun broke through again, and on the nearby mountains above the brown forest the pale snow shone wan and unreal.

When I came back after hours, wet and windblown, Demian himself opened the front door for me.

He took me up with him to his room; a gas flame was burning in the laboratory; papers lay about; he seemed to have been working.

“Sit down,” he invited me; “you must be tired; it was dreadful weather; anyone can see you’ve been out in it properly. Tea will be here in a minute.”

“Something is up today,” I began hesitantly; “it can’t just be that little thunderstorm.”

He looked at me searchingly.

“Did you see something?”

“Yes. For a moment I saw a picture clearly in the clouds.”

“What kind of picture?”

“It was a bird.”

“The sparrow hawk? Was it? Your dream bird?”

“Yes, it was my sparrow hawk. It was yellow and gigantic and flew into the blue-black sky.”

Demian drew a deep breath.

There was a knock. The old maidservant brought tea.

“Help yourself, Sinclair, please.—I don’t suppose you saw the bird by chance?”

“By chance? Does one see such things by chance?”

“All right, no. It means something. Do you know what?”

“No. I only feel that it means an upheaval, a step in fate. I think it concerns all of us.”

He paced violently up and down.

“A step in fate!” he cried aloud.

“I dreamed the same thing last night, and my mother had a premonition yesterday that said the same.—I dreamed I was climbing a ladder, up a tree trunk or a tower. When I was at the top, I saw the whole country; it was a great plain, with towns and villages, burning. I can’t tell it all yet; it isn’t all clear to me yet.”

“Do you take the dream as being about yourself?” I asked.

“About myself? Of course. No one dreams what doesn’t concern him. But it doesn’t concern me alone, you’re right there. I distinguish fairly precisely between the dreams that show me movements in my own soul and the others, very rare ones, in which the fate of all mankind is intimated. I’ve seldom had such dreams, and never one of which I could say that it had been a prophecy and had come true. The interpretations are too uncertain. But this I know for sure: I dreamed something that doesn’t concern me alone. For the dream belongs with others, earlier ones, that I had and that it continues. These are the dreams, Sinclair, from which I have the premonitions I’ve already spoken to you about. That our world is pretty rotten, we know; that would be no reason yet to prophesy its downfall or anything of the kind. But for several years I’ve had dreams from which I conclude, or feel, or however you like—from which, then, I feel that the collapse of an old world is drawing near. At first they were quite faint, distant premonitions, but they’ve grown steadily clearer and stronger. As yet I know nothing more than that something great and terrible is on the way, something that concerns me too. Sinclair, we are going to live through what we have sometimes talked about! The world wants to renew itself. There’s a smell of death. Nothing new comes without death.—It’s more terrible than I had thought.” Frightened, I stared at him.

“Can’t you tell me the rest of your dream?” I asked shyly.

He shook his head.

“No.”

The door opened, and Frau Eva came in.

“So here you are sitting together! Children, you’re surely not going to be sad?”

She looked fresh and not at all tired anymore. Demian smiled at her; she came to us like a mother to frightened children.

“We aren’t sad, Mother; we’ve only been puzzling a little over these new signs. But it doesn’t matter. Suddenly what wants to come will be there, and then we’ll find out what we need to know.”

But my heart was heavy, and when I said goodbye and walked alone through the hall, the scent of the hyacinths seemed to me withered, flat, and like a corpse’s. A shadow had fallen over us.