Demian
to the person of my friend. Looking forward to my confirmation, which
was explained to us as being our solemn admission into the community
of the Church, the thought presented itself imperatively to me that
the value of this half-year’s religious instruction did not lie for
me in what I had learned in class, but rather in Demian’s presence and
influence. It was not into the Church that I was ready to be received,
but into something else, into an order of ideas and of personalities
which surely existed somewhere or other on earth, and of which I felt
my friend was the representative or messenger.
I tried to repress this thought. In spite of everything, I earnestly
intended to go through the ceremony of confirmation with a certain
dignity, and the new notions I was forming seemed scarcely compatible
with this. Yet do what I would, the idea was there, and gradually
identified itself with the approaching religious ceremony. I was ready
to celebrate it in a different fashion from the other confirmation
candidates. For me it would mean admission into a world of ideas, with
which I had become acquainted through Demian.
In those days it happened that I had another discussion with him; it
was just before a lesson. My friend was wrapped up in himself and took
little pleasure in my talk, which was perhaps rather precocious and
bombastic.
“We talk too much,” he said with unwonted gravity. “Wise speeches have
no value at all, absolutely none. You only escape from yourself. To
escape from yourself is a sin. You should be able to creep right into
yourself, like a tortoise.”
We entered the schoolroom immediately after. The lesson began. I took
pains to listen, and Demian did not disturb me in my effort. After a
while I began to feel something peculiar at my side where his place
was, a sort of emptiness or coolness or something like that, as if his
seat had suddenly become vacant. The feeling became oppressive and I
turned round.
There I saw my friend sitting, upright and in his customary attitude.
But he looked quite different from usual. Something I did not know
went out from him, enveloped him. I thought his eyes were closed,
until I saw he held them open. But they were stiff as if gazing within
or directed to an object a great way off. He sat there perfectly
motionless; he seemed not to be breathing and his mouth was as if
carved out of wood or stone. His face was white, uniformly white, as
stone. His brown hair showed more signs of life than did any other
feature. His hands lay before him on the desk, without life, as still
as inanimate objects, like stones or fruit, white and motionless, yet
not relaxed, but as if controlling the secret springs of a powerful
life force.
The sight made me tremble. He is dead, I thought. I almost said it out
loud. But I knew he was not dead. Mesmerized, I hung on his look; my
eyes were riveted to this white, stone mask. I felt it was the real
Demian. The Demian who was in the habit of walking and talking with me,
that was only one side of him, a half. Demian, who from time to time
played a part, who accommodated himself to circumstances out of mere
complacence. But the real Demian looked like this, with just this look
of stone, prehistorically old, like an animal, beautiful and cold, dead
yet secretly full of fabulous life force. And around him this still
emptiness, this infinite ethereal space, this lonely death!
“Now he has quite retired into himself,” I felt with a shudder. Never
had I been so isolated. I had no part in him, he was unattainable, he
was further from me than if he had been on the most distant isle in the
world.
I scarcely understood why no one besides myself noticed it. I thought
that everyone would have to remark him, that everyone would shudder.
But no one gave him any attention. He sat like a picture and, as I
could not prevent myself from thinking, as stiff as a strange idol.
A fly settled on his forehead, moved slowly down over his nose and
lips--not a muscle, not a nerve in his face twitched.
Where, where was he now? What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Was
he in heaven or in hell?
It was impossible for me to question him. When I saw him at the end of
the lesson living and breathing again, when his glance met mine, was he
as he formerly had been? Where did he come from? Where had he been? He
seemed tired. His face had its normal color, his hands moved again,
but his brown hair was lustreless and fatigued, as it were.
In the days following I practised a new exercise in my bedroom several
times. I sat stiffly on a chair, kept my eyes fixed, and held myself
perfectly motionless. I waited to see how long I could maintain this
attitude, and what the sensation would be like. However, I merely got
very tired, and suffered from a violent twitching of the eyelids.
The confirmation took place soon after, of which no important
recollections remain with me.
Everything was now quite changed. Childhood fell about me in ruins. My
parents used to look at me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had
become quite strange in their conduct towards me. A disillusionment
falsified and weakened the old sentiments and pleasures, the garden was
without fragrance, the wood was no longer inviting, the world around
me seemed like a clearance-sale of old articles, insipid and without
charm, books were merely paper, music a noise. The leaves fall thus
from a tree in autumn, the tree feels it not, rain drips on it, sun
comes and frost, and the life in it recedes slowly into the narrowest
and most inward recess. The tree is not dying. It is waiting.
It was decided that after the holidays I should go to another school,
leaving home for the first time. My mother meanwhile approached me
with especial tenderness, a sort of preliminary good-bye, endeavoring
to charm me with a love from which I should go with homesickness and
unforgetfulness in my heart. Demian had gone away. I was alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
BEATRICE
Without having seen my friend again, I traveled at the end of the
holidays to St. ----. Both my parents came with me, and handed me over
with all possible care to the protection of a master of the school, in
whose house I was to board. They would have been numb with horror, had
they only known to what sort of fate they were leaving me.
It still hung in the balance whether I should become with time a good
son and a useful citizen, or whether my nature would break out in other
directions. My last attempt to be happy under the roof of my father’s
house and the spirit prevailing there had lasted for a considerable
period, and at times had almost succeeded, only in the end to fail
completely.
The curious emptiness and isolation which I had begun to feel for
the first time in the holidays after my confirmation (how I learned
to know it later, this emptiness, this thin atmosphere) did not pass
immediately. The parting from home was for me peculiarly easy. I was
really rather ashamed of not being sadder--my sisters wept without
reason, I could not. I was astonished at myself. I had always been
an emotional child, and at bottom, tolerably good. Now I was quite
changed. I was completely indifferent towards the outside world. For
days together my sole occupation was hearkening to my inner self,
listening to the flood of dark, forbidden instincts which roared
subterraneously within me. I had grown very quickly in that last
half-year, and appeared lanky, thin and immature. The amiability of
boyhood had completely disappeared from my character; I realized myself
that it was impossible to like me thus, and I by no means loved myself.
I had often a great longing for Max Demian; on the other hand, I hated
him not seldom, and looked upon him as responsible for the moral
impoverishment of my life, to which I resigned myself as to a sort of
nasty disease.
In the beginning I was neither liked nor respected in our school
boarding house. First they ragged me, then kept out of my way, looking
upon me as a rotter and an eccentric character; I was pleased with
myself and I even overplayed my part, withdrawing into my solitary
self, growling occasional cynicisms. Superficially I appeared to
despise the world in most manly fashion, whereas in reality I was
secretly consumed by melancholy and despair. In school I could fall
back on a knowledge amassed at home. The form I was in was not so
advanced as the same form in the school I had just left, and so I
acquired the habit of despising my school contemporaries, regarding
them as mere children.
This attitude lasted a year and longer. My first holiday visits at home
brought no change, I went gladly away again.
It was in the beginning of November. I had formed the habit of taking
short, meditative walks in all kinds of weather, during which I often
experienced a sort of joy, a joy full of melancholy, contempt of the
world and contempt of self. I was sauntering thus one evening through
the damp, foggy twilight in a suburb of the town. The broad drive of a
public park stood completely deserted, inviting me to enter. The road
lay thick with fallen leaves, into which I dug voluptuously with my
feet. It smelt damp and bitter; in the distance the trees stood up tall
and shadowy, ghostlike in the fog.
At the end of the drive I stood still and undecided, staring into the
black foliage, scenting eagerly the damp odor of decomposition and
death, which seemed to be in harmony with my own mood. Oh, how insipid
life tasted!
A man, with the collar of his raincoat blowing about him, came out of a
side path. I was just going on when he called to me.
“Hello, Sinclair!”
It happened to be Alphonse Beck, the senior boy of the house. I was
always glad to see him and had nothing against him, except that he
always treated me as he did all the younger boys, in an ironical and
grandfatherly manner. He passed for being as strong as a bear, was
said to have great influence on the house master, and was the hero of
many school stories.
“What are you doing here?” he asked affably, in the tone the seniors
always used when they condescended on occasion to talk to us.
“Composing verse, I bet?”
“Shouldn’t dream of it,” I disclaimed gruffly.
He laughed, came up to me, and we chatted together in a manner to which
I had not been accustomed for some time past.
“You needn’t be afraid, Sinclair, that I shouldn’t understand. I know
the feeling, when one goes for a walk on a foggy evening--the thoughts
autumn inspires in one. And one writes poetry about dying nature, of
course, and spent youth; which is very much like it. Read Heinrich
Heine?”
“I am not so sentimental,” I said in self-defense.
“Oh, all right. But in this weather, I think, it does a man good to
find a quiet place where one can take a glass of wine or something. Are
you coming with me for a bit? I happen to be quite alone. Or wouldn’t
you care to? I wouldn’t like to lead you astray, old man, if you are
one of those model boys.”
A little while after we sat clinking our thick glasses in a little
tavern in the suburbs, drinking wine of a doubtful quality. At first
I wasn’t much pleased, still it was rather a novelty for me. But
unaccustomed to wine, I soon became talkative. It was as if a window
had been flung open within me, and the world shining in--for how long,
how terribly long, had I not eased my heart by talking. I gave full
play to my imagination, and once started, I related the story of Cain
and Abel.
Beck listened to me with pleasure--someone at last, to whom I was
giving something! He clapped me on the shoulder, told me I was
the devil of a good fellow and a clever rascal. How I reveled in
communicating my opinions, as I relieved myself of all the pent-up
thought of the past months! My heart swelled with pride at finding my