Chapter Eight: The Beginning of the End

I had managed to get permission to stay in H. for the summer semester as well. Instead of in the house, we were now almost always in the garden by the river. The Japanese, who by the way had fairly and squarely lost the wrestling match, had gone, and the Tolstoy man was missing too. Demian kept a horse and rode day after day with perseverance. I was often alone with his mother.

At times I wondered at the peacefulness of my life. I had been used for so long to being alone, to practicing renunciation, to struggling laboriously with my torments, that these months in H. seemed to me like a dream island on which I was allowed to live, at ease and enchanted, only among beautiful, pleasant things and feelings. I sensed that this was the prelude to that new, higher community we thought of. And every now and then a deep sadness came over me in the midst of this happiness, for I knew well that it could not last. It was not my lot to breathe in abundance and comfort; I needed torment and being driven. I felt: one day I would wake from these beautiful images of love and stand alone again, quite alone, in the cold world of the others, where for me there was only solitude or struggle, no peace, no life shared with others.

Then I nestled with double tenderness into the nearness of Frau Eva, glad that my fate still bore these beautiful, quiet features.

The summer weeks passed quickly and easily; the semester was already drawing to its close. The parting would soon be at hand; I must not think of it, and I did not, but clung to the beautiful days like a butterfly to a honeyed flower. This had been my time of happiness, the first fulfillment of my life and my reception into the fellowship—what would come then? I would fight my way through again, suffer longing, have dreams, be alone.

On one of these days this premonition came over me so strongly that my love for Frau Eva suddenly flared up painfully. My God, how soon, and I would no longer see her, no longer hear her firm, good step through the house, no longer find her flowers on my table! And what had I achieved? I had dreamed and rocked myself in comfort instead of winning her, instead of fighting for her and tearing her to me forever! Everything she had ever said to me about true love came back to me, a hundred fine, admonishing words, a hundred soft enticements, promises perhaps—what had I made of them? Nothing! Nothing!

I planted myself in the middle of my room, gathered my whole consciousness together, and thought of Eva. I wanted to collect the powers of my soul in order to make her feel my love, in order to draw her to me. She must come and long for my embrace; my kiss must burrow insatiably into her ripe lips of love.

I stood and strained myself until I grew cold from my fingers and feet inward. I felt that power was going out from me. For a few moments something in me drew together firm and tight, something bright and cool; for a moment I had the sensation that I was carrying a crystal in my heart, and I knew that this was my self. The cold rose up to my chest.

When I woke from the terrible strain, I felt that something was coming. I was exhausted to death, but I was ready to see Eva come into the room, burning and enraptured.

Hoofbeats came hammering up the long street, sounded near and hard, suddenly stopped. I sprang to the window. Below, Demian was getting off his horse. I ran down.

“What is it, Demian? Nothing has happened to your mother, has it?”

He did not listen to my words. He was very pale, and sweat ran from both sides of his forehead down over his cheeks. He tied the reins of his overheated horse to the garden fence, took my arm, and walked down the street with me.

“Have you heard anything yet?”

I had heard nothing.

Demian pressed my arm and turned his face to me with a dark, pitying, strange look.

“Yes, my boy, now it’s starting. You knew about the great tension with Russia—”

“What? Is there going to be war? I never believed it.”

He spoke softly, although there was no one anywhere near.

“It hasn’t been declared yet. But there will be war. You can count on it. I haven’t bothered you with the matter since then, but since that time I’ve seen new signs three times. So it won’t be the end of the world, or an earthquake, or a revolution. It will be war. You’ll see how it strikes home! It will be a delight to people; even now everyone is looking forward to the fighting. That’s how flat life has become for them.—But you’ll see, Sinclair, this is only the beginning. Perhaps it will be a great war, a very great war. But that too is only the beginning. The new is beginning, and the new will be horrible for those who cling to the old. What will you do?”

I was dismayed; it all still sounded strange and improbable to me.

“I don’t know—and you?”

He shrugged.

“As soon as they mobilize, I’ll report. I’m a lieutenant.”

“You? I didn’t know a word about that.”

“Yes, it was one of my adaptations. You know I’ve never liked to stand out on the surface and have always done rather too much, if anything, to be correct. In a week, I think, I’ll already be in the field—”

“For God’s sake—”

“Now, my boy, you mustn’t take it sentimentally. At bottom it won’t be any pleasure for me to order rifle fire on living people, but that will be beside the point. Each of us is going to be caught up in the great wheel now. You too. You’ll certainly be called up.”

“And your mother, Demian?”

Only now did I remember again what had happened a quarter of an hour before. How the world had changed! I had gathered all my strength to conjure up the sweetest image, and now fate suddenly looked at me anew out of a threatening, horrifying mask.

“My mother? Oh, we needn’t worry about her. She’s safe, safer than anyone in the world is today.—You love her so much?”

“You knew, Demian?” He laughed brightly and quite freely.

“Little boy! Of course I knew. No one has ever yet called my mother Frau Eva without loving her. By the way, how was it? You called her or me today, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I called——I called for Frau Eva.”

“She felt it. She suddenly sent me away; she said I must go to you. I had just been telling her the news about Russia.”

We turned back and spoke little more; he untied his horse and mounted.

Only up in my room did I feel how exhausted I was, by Demian’s message and still more by the strain before it. But Frau Eva had heard me! I had reached her heart with my thoughts. She would have come herself—if not——How strange all this was, and how beautiful at bottom! Now a war was to come. Now what we had talked about so often was to begin to happen. And Demian had known so much of it in advance. How strange that the stream of the world was no longer to run past us somewhere—that now it was suddenly going right through our hearts, that adventure and wild fates were calling us, and that now or soon the moment had come when the world needed us, when it wanted to transform itself. Demian was right; it was not to be taken sentimentally. The only curious thing was that I was now to live through the so lonely business of “fate” together with so many, with the whole world. Well, then!

I was ready. In the evening, when I walked through the town, every corner was roaring with the great excitement. Everywhere the word “war”!

I came to Frau Eva’s house; we had supper in the summerhouse. I was the only guest. No one said a word about war. Only late, shortly before I left, Frau Eva said: “My dear Sinclair, you called me today. You know why I didn’t come myself. But don’t forget: you know the call now, and whenever you need someone who bears the mark, then call again!”

She rose and went ahead through the twilight of the garden. Tall and princely, the mysterious woman walked between the silent trees, and over her head the many stars glimmered small and delicate.

I am coming to the end. Things took their swift course. Soon there was war, and Demian, strangely unfamiliar in uniform with the silver-gray greatcoat, went away. I took his mother back home. Soon I too took leave of her; she kissed me on the mouth and held me for a moment against her breast, and her great eyes burned close and steady into mine.

And everyone had become like brothers. They meant the fatherland and honor. But it was fate into whose unveiled face they all looked for a moment. Young men came out of barracks and climbed into trains, and on many faces I saw a mark—not ours—a beautiful and dignified mark that meant love and death. I too was embraced by people I had never seen, and I understood it and returned it gladly. It was an intoxication in which they did it, not the will of fate, but the intoxication was holy; it came from their all having cast this short, rousing look into the eyes of fate.

It was already almost winter when I went to the front.

At first, despite the sensations of the shooting, I was disappointed by everything. I had often thought before about why a human being is so extremely seldom able to live for an ideal. Now I saw that many, indeed all people are capable of dying for an ideal. Only it must not be a personal, not a free, not a chosen ideal; it had to be one shared and taken over.

In time, though, I saw that I had underestimated people. However much the service and the common danger put them into uniform, I still saw many, living and dying, come magnificently close to the will of fate. Many, very many had, not only in the attack but at all times, that firm, distant, somewhat possessed look that knows nothing of goals and means complete surrender to the tremendous. Let these men believe and think whatever they liked—they were ready, they were usable, out of them a future could be formed. And however rigidly the world seemed set on war and heroism, on honor and other old ideals, however distant and improbable every voice of apparent humanity sounded, all that was only the surface, just as the question of the outward and political aims of the war remained only surface. In the depths something was coming into being. Something like a new humanity. For I could see many, and more than one of them died at my side—to whom the insight had come through feeling that hatred and rage, killing and destroying, were not tied to their objects. No, the objects, like the aims, were wholly accidental. The primal feelings, even the wildest, were not directed at the enemy; their bloody work was only a radiation of what was inside, of the soul divided against itself, which wanted to rage and kill, destroy and die, in order to be born anew. A gigantic bird was fighting its way out of the egg, and the egg was the world, and the world had to go to ruin.

In front of the farmstead we had occupied I stood guard one night in early spring. A slack wind blew in fitful gusts; armies of clouds rode across the high Flemish sky, somewhere behind them an inkling of the moon. All day I had been restless; some worry or other was troubling me. Now, at my dark post, I thought with intensity of the images of my life so far, of Frau Eva, of Demian. I stood leaning against a poplar and stared into the moving sky, whose secretly flickering brightnesses soon turned into great, welling sequences of pictures. From the strange thinness of my pulse, from the insensitivity of my skin to wind and rain, from the sparkling inner wakefulness, I sensed that a guide was near me.

In the clouds a great city could be seen, out of which millions of people streamed and spread in swarms over wide landscapes. Into their midst stepped a mighty divine figure, sparkling stars in her hair, as big as a mountain range, with the features of Frau Eva. Into her the columns of people disappeared as into a gigantic cave, and were gone. The goddess crouched down on the ground; the mark on her forehead shone bright. A dream seemed to have power over her; she closed her eyes, and her great face twisted in pain. Suddenly she cried out aloud, and out of her forehead sprang stars, many thousands of shining stars, which swung in glorious arcs and half circles across the black sky.

One of the stars came roaring with a bright sound straight toward me and seemed to be looking for me.—Then it burst with a roar into a thousand sparks; I was lifted up and thrown back to the ground; thundering, the world collapsed on top of me.

They found me near the poplar, covered with earth and with many wounds.

I lay in a cellar; guns rumbled over me. I lay in a wagon and jolted over empty fields. Mostly I slept or was unconscious. But the deeper I slept, the more intensely I felt that something was drawing me, that I was following a power that was master over me.

I lay in a stable on straw; it was dark; someone had stepped on my hand. But my inner self wanted to go on; it drew me away more strongly. Again I lay on a wagon, and later on a stretcher or a ladder; more and more strongly I felt myself ordered somewhere; I felt nothing but the urge to get there at last.

Then I was at my goal. It was night; I was fully conscious; a moment before I had felt the pull and urge in me powerfully. Now I lay in a hall, bedded on the floor, and felt that I was where I had been called to. I looked around; right next to my mattress lay another, and someone on it, who leaned forward and looked at me. He had the mark on his forehead. It was Max Demian.

I could not speak, and he too could not or would not. He only looked at me. On his face lay the glow of a lamp that hung on the wall above him. He smiled at me.

For an endlessly long time he kept looking into my eyes. Slowly he brought his face closer to mine, until we almost touched.

“Sinclair!” he said in a whisper.

I gave him a sign with my eyes that I understood him.

He smiled again, almost as if in pity.

“Little boy!” he said, smiling.

His mouth was now very close to mine. Softly he went on speaking.

“Do you still remember Franz Kromer?” he asked.

I winked at him, and was even able to smile.

“Little Sinclair, listen! I’ll have to go away. Perhaps you’ll need me again someday, against Kromer or something else. If you call me then, I won’t come riding so crudely on a horse or by train. You will have to listen within yourself, and then you’ll notice that I am inside you. Do you understand?—And one more thing! Frau Eva said that if things ever went badly for you, I was to give you the kiss from her that she gave me to take along… Close your eyes, Sinclair!”

Obediently I closed my eyes; I felt a light kiss on my lips, on which there was always a little blood that would never grow less. And then I fell asleep.

In the morning I was woken; I was to have my wounds dressed. When at last I was properly awake, I turned quickly toward the next mattress. A stranger lay on it whom I had never seen.

The dressing hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes, when I find the key and climb all the way down into myself, to where the images of fate slumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over the black mirror, and I see my own image, which now wholly resembles Him, Him, my friend and guide.