CHAPTER FOUR
BEATRICE
When vacation was over, I went to St.— without having seen my friend again. Both my parents came with me and entrusted me with all possible care to a boy’s boarding house run by a teacher at the high school. They would have frozen with horror had they known the kind of life they were letting me wander into.
The question was still whether I would, with time, turn into a good son and useful citizen, or whether my nature was pushing me onto other paths. My last attempt to be happy under the shadow of the parental house and its spirit had lasted a long time—for a while it had almost succeeded, but now it had finally and completely failed.
The strange emptiness and isolation I had come to feel for the first time the summer after my confirmation (and oh, how well I got to know it later—this emptiness, this thin air!) did not pass away so quickly. I found it oddly easy to leave home—I was a little ashamed of not being sadder, in fact; my sisters cried inconsolably, but I couldn’t. I was amazed at myself. I had always been a sensitive child who expressed his feelings—a good boy, when it came down to it. Now I had completely changed. I acted with total indifference toward the outside world and spent days at a time attending only to myself, listening to the dark, forbidden, underground currents rushing and roaring inside me. I had shot up very quickly in the past six months and looked lanky, skinny, and immature. Everything boyishly lovable about me had disappeared; I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either. I missed Max Demian much of the time, and desperately wished he were there, but I not infrequently hated him too and held him responsible for the impoverishment of my life that I accepted as an ugly disease.
At first I was neither liked nor respected in our student boarding house; the other boys teased me and then left me alone, having decided I was a weird, distant, unpleasant sort. I took pleasure in this identity and even exaggerated it, grumbling my way into a solitude that looked like manly superiority and contempt on the outside while secretly I suffered constant fits of depression and despair. At school I got by for a while on what I had already studied back home—the class was a bit behind where we had been—and I got into the habit of viewing the other students my age with a certain contempt, as children.
It went on like that for over a year. Nothing changed on my first few visits home, and I was always glad to go back to school.
Then it was early November. Whatever the weather, I would take little intellectual walks, which often gave me a kind of pleasure that was full of melancholy, scorn for the world, and contempt for myself as well. That was how I felt one evening as I strolled through the city in the damp, misty twilight. The wide avenue of a public park was completely deserted, and inviting; as I walked down the lane, thickly covered with fallen leaves, I shoveled my feet around in the leaves with a dark, voluptuous desire. It smelled wet and bitter; distant trees loomed up eerily out of the mist, tall and shadowy.
I stopped at the end of the avenue, not knowing what to do next. I stared down at the dark vegetal mass and greedily breathed in the wet smell of death and decay, which something inside me responded to and welcomed. Oh, how insipid the taste of life was!
Someone approached down a side path, his coat billowing in the wind. I wanted to keep walking, but he called my name.
“Hallo, Sinclair!”
He came up to me. It was Alfons Beck, the oldest student at our boarding house. I always enjoyed seeing him and had nothing against him except that he always treated me in an avuncular, ironic way, the same as he did everyone younger than him. He was said to be as strong as a bear, he had the teacher who ran our boarding house under his thumb, and he was the hero of numerous high-school rumors.
“And what brings you here?” he called out affably, in the tone that bigger kids liked to take when they condescended to talk to one of us. “Writing a poem, I bet.”
“Never occurred to me,” I snapped back.
He laughed out loud and walked next to me, chatting. I had completely forgotten what that felt like.
“Don’t think I wouldn’t understand, Sinclair. I know how it is, when you’re taking a walk like this in the evening mist, with autumn thoughts, you want to write poems, I know. Poems about dying nature, of course, and the lost youth it’s a symbol of. Heinrich Heine and all that.”
“I’m not that sentimental,” I defended myself.
“All right, never mind! Anyway, in weather like this it does you good to find a nice quiet place with a glass of wine or something along those lines. You want to come with me? I happen to be all alone at the moment. — Or would you rather not? I don’t want to lead you astray if you’re planning to be a model schoolboy.”
Soon we were sitting in a small pub at the edge of town, drinking a dubious wine and clinking our thick glasses together. I didn’t like it very much at first, but still it was something new. Soon though, not used to drinking wine, I started talking my head off. It was as though a window had opened inside me, and the world was shining in—how long, how terribly long it had been since I’d said anything I really felt! I started to give my imagination free rein, and before I knew it I was telling Beck the story of Cain and Abel.
Beck listened with delight. Finally, someone to whom I had something to give! He clapped me on the shoulder, he called me a devil of a fellow, and my heart swelled with pleasure: I could finally let myself go, indulge in the need to talk and communicate that had been pent up for so long, and feel acknowledged by someone older, like I was worth something. When he called me a brilliant little bastard, what he said sank into my soul like sweet, strong wine. The world shone in new colors—thoughts came to me from a hundred mischievous sources—wit and fire blazed up within me. We talked about our teachers and classmates, and it seemed to me we understood each other splendidly. We talked about the Greeks, and paganism, and Beck insisted on turning the conversation to confessions of amorous adventures. Here I had nothing to contribute. I had not had any adventures, nothing worth telling. And what I had felt, had built up in my imagination, burned within me but the wine did not free it or enable me to talk about it. Beck knew a lot more about girls than I did, and I listened passionately to his fairy-tale stories. What I learned was unbelievable: things I had never thought possible entered ordinary reality and seemed obvious, normal. Alfons Beck, eighteen years old or so, had already acquired quite a store of experience. Among other things, that girls always want nothing but chivalry and attention, which is fine as far as that goes but not the real thing. You could get farther with women. They were much more reasonable. Frau Jaggelt, for example, who ran the store that sold pencils and notebooks for school—you could really talk to her, and as for what’s gone on behind the counter in her store, no book in the world could describe everything.
I sat there in a trance, stupefied. Not that I could ever love Frau Jaggelt—but still, this was incredible news. It seemed that, at least for older people, there were wellsprings of pleasure that I had never dreamed of. At the same time I heard a false note in his stories—it all seemed narrower and pettier than true love would feel, in my opinion—and yet it was reality, it was life and adventure, and sitting right next to me was someone who had lived it, to whom it seemed perfectly natural.
Our conversation had sunk to a lower level somehow; it had lost something. I was no longer the brilliant little fellow either, just a boy listening to a man’s stories. But even so—compared to what my life had been for months and months, this was delicious, it was paradise. It was also, I gradually started to feel, very much against the rules: the whole thing, from sitting in a pub to what we were talking about. At least for me it was a real taste of rebellion, of spirit.
I remember that night very clearly. When the two of us started home late, past the dully burning gas lamps in the cool wet night, I was drunk for the first time. It did not feel pleasant—it was excruciating, actually—but still, there was something about it: sweet excitement, rebellion, spirited life. Beck took good care of me, even while griping about what a total beginner I was, and he brought me home, half carrying me, and managed to smuggle us into the house through an open hall window.
But after a short dead sleep, I woke up to a headache, sobriety, and terrible sadness. I sat up in bed, still wearing my shirt from the day before, with my other clothes and shoes lying around on the floor and stinking of smoke and vomit. Between headache, nausea, and unspeakable thirst, an image rose up in my soul that I had not seen for a long time: I saw my parents’ house, my hometown, Father and Mother, my sisters, the garden; I saw my quiet, comfortable bedroom, the school and the market square, saw Demian and our confirmation classes—all of it flooded with bright light, radiant, all of it wonderful, godly, and pure, and I now knew that everything, everything, had still belonged to me the day before, just a few hours ago, had been waiting for me for return, but now, only now in this moment, it had sunk forever under the waves, was cursed, was no longer mine. It had thrown me out and now looked upon me with disgust! Everything I had so profoundly loved, everything back to the most distant, golden garden of childhood my parents had given me—every kiss from Mother, every Christmas, every bright, pious Sunday morning at home, every flower in the garden—it was all laid to waste, I had trampled it all under my feet! If a band of henchmen had come at that moment and bound me hand and foot, leading me to the gallows as a scapegoat, a desecrator of the temple, I would have gone uncomplainingly, even gladly, gone and found it only just and right.
So that’s how I looked on the inside! I, who went around despising the world, proud in spirit, and pretending to think Demian’s thoughts along with him! I was a pig, like scum, drunk and filthy, disgusting and low, a wild animal taken unawares and overpowered by hideous urges. I, who had come from the garden where everything was purity and radiance and blessèd tenderness, who had loved beautiful poetry and Bach, now looked like that inside. I could still hear my laugh ringing in my ears—drunk and out of control, bursting out in idiotic stops and starts—and it filled me with outrage and disgust. That was me!
Despite everything, it was almost pleasurable to suffer these torments. I had crept around blind and numb for so long, my heart cowering poor and miserable in the corner, that even this self-hatred, this horror, this whole horrible feeling in my soul was welcome. At least I felt something! The embers still flickered with some kind of fire, a heart still beat in there! I was confused to feel something like liberation and springtime in the middle of all my misery.
Meanwhile, to the outside world, things went downhill with me in a hurry. My first binge was soon only the first of many. A lot of drinking and running wild went on in our school, and I was one of the very youngest students to join in; before long I was no longer merely a tolerated novice but a ringleader, a star of the scene: a notorious, reckless barfly. Once again I belonged entirely to the dark world—to the devil—and in that world I was considered a splendid fellow.
At the same time, I felt miserable. I was living in a self-destructive riot of sensuality, and while my schoolmates saw me as a leader, a devil of a fellow and a damned sharp and clever guy, deep inside me hid a timid soul fluttering with fear. I can still recall how tears came to my eyes once when I left a bar on a Sunday afternoon and saw children playing in the street, bright and happy, with freshly combed hair, in their Sunday clothes. And the whole time that I was entertaining and often shocking my friends with my monstrous cynicism at the dirty tables of cramped pubs between puddles of beer, in my heart of hearts I still respected what I was mocking. On the inside I kneeled in tears before my soul, before my past and my mother, before God.
I never felt truly one with my companions—I was still lonely when I was with them, and that was why I suffered so. There was good reason for this: I was a barroom hero, a scoffer to satisfy the roughest of the rough; I showed spirit and courage in what I thought and said about our teachers, school, parents, church; I could take the dirtiest jokes and even offer a few of my own—but I never went along with my buddies to see girls. I was alone, and full of a burning longing for love—a hopeless longing even while I talked like a hardened libertine. No one was more fragile, more full of shame, than I was. And every now and then, when I saw the young girls from good families walking down the street, pretty and clean, light and cheerful, they seemed like wonderful, pure dreams, a thousand times too good and pure for me. For a long time I couldn’t set foot in Frau Jaggelt’s stationery store either, because I turned red when I looked at her and remembered what Alfons Beck had told me.
The more I realized how lonely and different I would always be in my new circle too, the harder it became for me to break free of it. I don’t know anymore if all that drinking and showing off ever brought me any real pleasure; I also never learned to hold my liquor well enough to avoid suffering painful consequences the next day. It was all like some kind of compulsion. I did what I had to do because I had no idea what else I could try. I was afraid of spending so much time alone, and anxiously ashamed of the warm, shy moods I so often felt, the tender thoughts of love that so often came over me.
What I missed most was a friend. There were two or three schoolmates I enjoyed seeing, but they were good, well-behaved students, and my vices were long since common knowledge. So they avoided me. Everyone saw me as a reckless daredevil, on thin ice. My habits were no secret to the teachers either, and I was often seriously punished; it was generally expected that I would be kicked out of school before long. I knew it myself—I had stopped being a good student a long time ago—but I laboriously scraped by and conned my way through, with a feeling that it could not go on like this much longer.
• • •
There are many ways in which the god can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves. This was the path he took with me. It was like a bad dream. I see myself under the spell of some kind of dream, crawling restless and tormented through the dirt and sticky muck, through broken beer glasses and nights spent cynically chattering away—an ugly and unclean path. There are dreams like that, where on the way to a princess you stay stuck in a pool of shit, or a stinking back street full of filth. That’s how it was with me. It was given to me to grow lonely in this undignified way, and to place between myself and my childhood the gates of Eden, closed forever and watched over by implacable, radiant guards. It was a new beginning, and the awakening of a hopeless longing for my former self.
Still I was startled and I shook with fear the first time my father turned up unexpectedly in St.—, alarmed by my host’s letters from the boarding house. When he visited again, around the end of that winter, I was already hard and indifferent, and I let him scold me, plead with me, appeal to my memories of Mother as much as he wanted. By the end he was utterly enraged and said that if I didn’t change he would let me be kicked out of school in disgrace and send me to reform school. Well, let him! When that second visit ended and he left, I felt bad for him, but he had accomplished nothing—he could no longer find a way to reach me, and sometimes I felt that it served him right.
As for what would become of me, I couldn’t care less. In my odd and unpleasant way, sitting in bars and acting full of myself, I was fighting against the world—it was my form of protest. In the process I only wore myself out, but I sometimes saw it like this: If the world has no use for people like me, if it can find no better place or higher task for them, then so much for us. But it would be the world’s loss.
Christmas vacation that year was anything but happy. My mother was horrified when she saw me again—I had grown even taller, and my scrawny face looked gray and wasted, with slack features and inflamed rings around my eyes. The first hints of a moustache, and the glasses I had recently started to wear, made me look even less like the boy she knew. My sisters kept their distance, giggling. It was painful. The conversation with Father in his study was painful, and bitter; the greetings of a few relatives, painful; Christmas Eve, especially painful. For as long as I could remember, that had been the great day in our house—the night of festivity and love, of gratitude, of renewing the bonds between myself and my parents. This time it was all depressing, even embarrassing. As usual my father read the Gospel passage about the shepherds “keeping watch over their flock by night”; as usual my sisters stood beaming with delight next to the table with their presents on it; but my father’s voice sounded unhappy, and his face looked old and pinched, and my mother was sad, and to me the whole thing seemed embarrassing and unnecessary: the presents and the Christmas wishes, the Gospel and the tree. The gingerbread smelled delicious and gave off thick clouds of even more delicious memories. The tree smelled and told of things that no longer existed. I longed for the evening, and the holiday, to come to an end.
It went on like that all winter. I had recently been given a severe warning by the teachers’ council and threatened with expulsion. It would not be long now. Well, fair enough.
I especially resented Max Demian. I had not seen him again during this whole period; I had written to him twice, when I had started school at St.—, but not received an answer. That was why I did not go to see him during vacation.
• • •
At the start of spring, when the thorny hedges were just starting to turn green, I happened to notice a girl in the park where I had run into Alfons Beck the previous fall. I was taking a walk by myself, full of unsavory thoughts, and worried: my health had taken a turn for the worse, and aside from that I was constantly short of money, owed my classmates money, and had let my tabs in various stores, for cigars and such things, get quite large. I had to invent unavoidable expenses to get my parents to send me more from home. Not that I felt any of these worries very deeply—if my time here was about to come to an end, and I was about to either drown myself or get sent to reform school, these trivial details would never matter. Still, I was constantly living face to face with unpleasant things, and I suffered from it.
That spring day in the park, I saw a young lady I found very attractive. She was tall and thin, elegantly dressed, and with an intelligent boy’s face. I liked her right away—she was the type I loved, and she soon began to fill my imagination. She was probably not that much older than me but was much more polished, elegant, and clearly defined, almost a lady already, but with a hint of exuberance and boyishness in her face that I liked enormously.
I had never yet managed to approach a girl I had fallen for, and I failed with this one too. But she made a deeper impression on me than any other girl ever had, and the effect this infatuation had on my life was powerful.
Suddenly I had an image before me again—a high and noble image I respected, and oh, how I wanted to worship and adore! There was nothing I thirsted for more deeply and strongly. I named her Beatrice, because without having read Dante I already knew about Beatrice from an English painting I had a reproduction of. It showed an English Pre-Raphaelite female figure, long-limbed and slender, with a long, thin face and spiritual hands and features. My beautiful girl from the park didn’t look exactly like her, but she too had the same slender boyishness of form that I liked, as well as some of the same refined or soulful quality in her face.
I never said a single word to Beatrice. And yet, she had the deepest possible influence on me at that time. She held up an image before my eyes, showed me something sacred, turned me into a worshipper in a temple. Overnight I was finished with drinking and staying out late. I was able to spend time alone again; again I could enjoy reading and going for walks.
This sudden conversion earned me more than my fair share of mockery, needless to say. But I didn’t care: I had something to love and adore—I had an ideal, and life was again full of promise and mysterious colors in the twilight. I felt comfortable with myself, although only as a slave beholden to an honored image.
I cannot think back to that time without feeling moved. What I was trying to do, as sincerely and fervently as I knew how, was rebuild another “world of light” from the rubble of a shattered period of my life; my whole life was centered around the desire to throw off everything dark and evil in myself, to dwell completely in the light, on my knees before the gods. At least this time the “world of light” was my own creation, to some extent. I was no longer running away, back to Mother and a sense of security without any responsibility; now I was serving something new, invented and summoned forth from myself, and demanding a certain responsibility and self-discipline. The sexuality I suffered from and was constantly fleeing could now be transformed into spirit and reverence in this holy fire. I was free of everything dark and ugly—no more nighttime groans, no more looking at obscene pictures with my heart pounding, no more listening in at forbidden doors, nothing dirty at all. Instead I built myself an altar, to the image of Beatrice, and by dedicating myself to her I was consecrating myself to the spirit and the gods. I took back a portion of life from the dark powers and offered it up to the powers of light. My goal was not pleasure but purity; not happiness but beauty and spirit.
This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life. From one day to the next, the premature cynic had become an acolyte with only one goal: to become a saint. I not only threw off the wicked life I had grown accustomed to, I tried to change everything—I wanted to bring purity, nobility, and dignity into everything I did, whether eating or drinking, my words or my clothes. I started every morning with cold ablutions; at first I had to force myself, but then they came naturally. I behaved seriously and with dignity, stood up straight, walked slower and with more dignity. It may have looked from the outside like ridiculous affectation, but to me it felt like nothing less than the service of God.
Of all the practices I embarked on to express my new way of thinking, one became especially important for me. I started to paint. At first, it was because the English picture of Beatrice I had did not resemble my Beatrice closely enough—I wanted to try to paint her for myself. With an entirely new feeling of joy and hope, I brought beautiful paper, paints, and brushes into my room (I had a room of my own by that point) and prepared a palette, a glass, porcelain bowls, and pencils. The fine tempera paints in little tubes that I had bought delighted me. They included a fiery chromium oxide green, and I can still see it lighting up my little white bowl for the first time.
I was cautious at first. It is hard to paint a face, and I wanted to start by trying other things. I painted ornaments, flowers, and little imaginary landscapes—a tree by a church, a Roman bridge with cypresses. Sometimes I lost myself entirely in this playful activity, as happy as a child with his paint box. Finally, though, I started to paint Beatrice.
Several efforts were total failures and I threw them away. The more I tried to capture the face of the girl I still saw on the street every now and then, the worse it went. Finally I gave up and started to simply paint a face from my imagination, following wherever the paint and brush led me. What emerged was a dream-face, and I was not unsatisfied with it. But I immediately tried again, and each new picture spoke to me more clearly and came closer to the type, if in no way closer to reality.
I got more and more comfortable drawing lines and filling surfaces with a dreaming brush, playfully feeling my way forward, the pictures not following any model but arising from the unconscious. At last, one day, almost without any conscious effort, I finished a face that spoke to me more powerfully than any of the others had. It was not the face of the girl from the park—but I had long since stopped trying to make it be. It was something else, something unreal but no less valuable for that. It looked more like a boy’s face than a girl’s; the hair was not light blond, like my pretty girl’s, but reddish brown, and the chin was firm and strong, though the mouth glowed a vivid red; the whole face was somewhat stiff and mask-like, but impressive and full of inner life.
As I sat before the finished picture, it made a strange impression on me. It struck me as a kind of idol or icon or sacred mask—half masculine, half feminine; ageless; strong-willed and dreamy at once; rigid and at the same time secretly vital and alive. This face had something to tell me—it belonged to me—it demanded something of me. And it bore a certain similarity to someone, though I didn’t know who.
This portrait accompanied all my thoughts for some time; it shared my life. I kept it hidden away in a drawer so that no one would find it and make fun of me, but as soon as I was alone in my room I took it out so it could keep me company. At night I pinned it up to the wallpaper across from me, over my bed, so that I would see it as I fell asleep and first thing when I woke up the next morning too.
It was just then that I started to dream a lot again, the way I always had as a child. I felt like I hadn’t had any dreams for years. Now they were back, with dream-images of an entirely new kind, and the portrait I had painted showed up in these dreams over and over again: living and talking, my friend or my enemy, sometimes grimacing grotesquely and sometimes infinitely noble, harmonious, and beautiful.
One morning when I woke up from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized the face. It looked at me with such marvelous familiarity and intimacy, as though it were calling my name. It seemed to know me like a mother, seemed to have been turned toward my face since the dawn of time. I stared at the sheet with my heart pounding—at the thick brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong and oddly bright brow (it had dried like that on its own)—and I felt recognition, rediscovery, and knowledge coming closer and closer to me.
I leaped out of bed, stood before the face, and looked at it up close—stared right into the wide-open, greenish, fixed eyes, the right one slightly higher than the left. And suddenly that right eye twitched, lightly and delicately but clear as day, and with that flutter I recognized the image. . . .
How could it have taken me so long! It was Demian’s face.
Later I compared the page many times with Demian’s actual features as I remembered them. They were not the same, although they were similar. But still, it was Demian.
One time, on an early summer evening, the red sunlight was slanting through my west-facing window. A dim twilight entered the room. I had the idea of pinning the portrait of Beatrice, or Demian, to the wooden cross between the panes of the window and seeing how it looked with the evening sun shining through it. The face became blurred, losing all its outlines, but the red around the eyes, the bright forehead, and the intensely red mouth glowed deep and savage from the paper’s surface. I sat across from it for a long time, even after the light was gone. The feeling gradually came over me that this was not Beatrice, and not Demian, but rather—myself. The picture didn’t look like me—and it wasn’t supposed to, I felt—but it was my life, it was my soul, my destiny, my daemon. That was how my friend would look, if I ever found another friend; that was how my lover would look, if I ever found her. That was how my life would be, and my death—it was the sound and the rhythm of my destiny.
I had recently started reading a book that made a deeper impression on me than anything I had ever read. I would rarely encounter another book in that way ever again, either, maybe none but Nietzsche’s. It was a book by Novalis, with letters and aphorisms, many of which I did not understand, but they all attracted me and drew me in anyway. One of the maxims came back to my mind, and I wrote it under the portrait with a quill: “Fate and character are different names for the same idea.” Now I understood what it meant.
I saw the girl I called Beatrice many more times. I no longer felt nervous excitement when this happened, only a gentle harmony, a presentiment rich in emotion: you are joined to me, but not you, only your image; you are a part of my destiny.
• • •
I started to feel a great longing for Max Demian again. I had not heard anything about him for years and had seen him only once on my vacations. Thinking back, I see I have omitted this short meeting in my account here, out of what I now see was shame and vanity. I have to make up for that omission.
So, on one vacation from school during my bar-hopping phase, when I was wandering around my hometown with the same blasé and half-asleep face I always had then, swinging my walking stick and seeing philistines in all the old unchanged faces of the fellow townspeople I despised, my former friend came up to me. I flinched almost as soon as I saw him. Lightning-fast, the memory of Franz Kromer came to me. How I hoped that Demian had forgotten that whole story! It was so unpleasant to have this debt to him—really it was just stupid childhood nonsense, but still, it was something I owed him. . . .
He seemed to wait and see if I wanted to say hello to him, and when I did, as casually as I could, he held out his hand to me. There it was again, his handshake! So firm, so warm and yet cool, and so manly!
He peered into my face and said, “You’ve grown up, Sinclair.” He himself seemed completely unchanged to me: still as old, still as young, as ever.
He joined me, and we walked together talking about nothing but trivial matters—nothing about the past. I remembered I had written to him several times without receiving an answer. Oh, let him have forgotten that too, those stupid, idiotic letters! He said nothing about them.
There was no Beatrice yet, and no portrait; I was still in the midst of my dissolute time. Before we got back to the city, I invited him to a pub. He agreed. Showing off, I ordered a bottle of wine, poured him a glass, toasted with him, and showed him how well acquainted I was with student drinking customs. I emptied the first glass in a single gulp.
“You go to bars a lot?” he asked me.
“Oh, yes,” I said lazily. “What else is there? In the end it’s still the most fun thing to do.”
“You think so? It may be. Some parts of it are great—the euphoria, the Bacchanalian side. But it seems to me that most people who spend a lot of time in bars have lost all that. Running round to bars all the time is what’s truly philistine. Now staying up all night once, with torches lit, in real drunkenness and frenzy, that’s one thing. But again and again, one glass after another, that’s not the real thing, is it? Can you imagine Faust as a regular in some bar night after night?”
I drank my wine and gave him a hostile look.
“Yes, well, we can’t all be Faust,” I said curtly.
He looked at me a little suspiciously.
Then he laughed his old cool and superior laugh.
“Let’s not fight about it! In any case, a drunkard’s or sensualist’s life is presumably more lively than a blameless middle-class life at least. Also—I read somewhere—the life of a sensualist is one of the best preparations there is for mystics. It’s always people like St. Augustine who turn into visionaries. He was a rake and a sensualist beforehand too.”
I was suspicious, and wanted at all costs to avoid bowing down to him and his lessons. So I said, in a blasé voice, “Yes, well, to each his own. To tell you the truth, I have no interest in becoming a visionary or whatever.”
Demian looked knowingly at me from his slightly narrowed eyes.
“My dear Sinclair,” he said slowly, “I wasn’t trying to say anything disagreeable. And anyway—neither of us really knows the real reason why you’re drinking. Whatever it is inside you shaping your life knows already. It’s so good to know that there’s something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do! — But forgive me, I have to go home now.”
We said brief goodbyes. I stayed at the bar in a bad mood, drank my whole bottle of wine, and then, when I got up to go, found out that Demian had already paid for it. That annoyed me even more.
I could not stop thinking back to this little incident. It was Demian to a T. And the words he had spoken in that bar on the edge of town came back to my mind, strangely fresh, as though he had just said them: “It’s so good to know that there’s something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do!”
How I longed to see Demian. I didn’t know anything about him and had no way to reach him. I knew only that he was probably at university somewhere, and that his mother had left our hometown after he’d graduated high school.
I tried to call up all my memories of Max Demian, even back to my history with Kromer. So many things he had said to me echoed in my ears then, all still meaningful, still current, still relevant to me! What he had said about the sensualist and the visionary at our last meeting, unsatisfactory as it had been, suddenly stood shining before my soul too. Wasn’t that exactly what had happened with me? Hadn’t I lived in drunkenness and filth until a new vital urge brought the exact opposite to life within me—a desire for purity, a longing for the sacred?
I continued to pursue my memories. Night had long since fallen, and it was raining outside. In my memories I heard the rain too—it was that time under the chestnut tree when he had first asked about Franz Kromer and guessed my first secrets. One scene after the other rose up in my mind: conversations on the way to school, confirmation classes. Last of all, my very first meeting with Max Demian came to mind. What had we talked about again? I couldn’t recapture it right away, but I plunged completely into the past and waited as long as it took, and then it came back to me—that too. We were standing in front of my house after he’d told me his ideas about Cain, and he was saying something about the old, faded coat of arms above our door, in the keystone that grew wider at the top than it was at the bottom. He said it interested him, and that you should pay attention to such things.
That night I dreamed about Demian and the coat of arms. It changed from one thing into another in a continual metamorphosis while Demian held it in his hands: now it was small and gray, now multicolored and tremendously large. He explained to me that it nevertheless remained always one and the same. Finally he made me eat it. When I swallowed it, I felt, with monstrous horror, that the bird on the coat of arms I had swallowed was still alive inside me—it filled me entirely and started to eat away at me from the inside. I was terrified I would die, and I started up in bed.
Soon I was fully awake. It was the middle of the night, and I could hear the rain coming into my room. I stood up to close the window and stepped on some pale thing on the floor. In the morning I realized it was my painting. It lay in a puddle on the floor and had gotten warped and bent. I smoothed it out and put it between sheets of blotting paper in a heavy, thick book. When I looked at it again the next day, it was dry. But it had changed. The red mouth was paler and thinner. Now it was exactly Demian’s mouth.
I decided to paint another picture, of the heraldic bird. I no longer knew exactly what it looked like, and I knew that some of its features could not be made out even if you stared right at it from up close, since the thing was old and had been painted over many times. The bird was standing or sitting on something, maybe a flower, or a basket or nest, or the crown of a tree. I didn’t worry about it and started with what I had a clear mental picture of. Some inchoate need compelled me to start with strong, bright colors—in my picture, the bird’s head was golden yellow. I worked on it as the mood took me, and finished it in a few days.
It had turned into a bird of prey, with the aquiline, pointed head of a sparrow hawk. Half of its body was stuck inside a dark globe that it was working its way out of, as though out of a giant egg. The more I looked at the picture, the more it seemed like the brightly colored coat of arms I had seen in my dream.
There was no way I would have been able to write a letter to Demian, even if I’d known where to send it. I decided, though, in the same dreamlike intuitive state with which I did everything at that time, to send him the picture of the sparrow hawk, whether or not it would ever reach him. I did not write anything on it, not even my name; I carefully trimmed the edges of the paper, bought a large envelope, and wrote my friend’s former address on it. Then I mailed it off.
An exam was approaching, and I had to work harder than usual at my schoolwork. The teachers had taken me back into their good graces, ever since I had changed my contemptible ways. Not that I was a good student even now, but neither I nor anyone else still thought about how close I had been to expulsion only six months before.
My father was writing to me again, the same way as before, without threats or recriminations. But I felt no urge to explain to him or anyone else how my transformation had taken place. It was purely by chance that the change coincided with the wishes of my parents and teachers. It did not bring me any closer to them, or to anyone—it only made me lonelier. It was aiming in another direction: at Demian, at a distant fate, I myself didn’t know yet, I was still in the middle of the transformation. It had started with Beatrice, but I had been living with my paintings and my thoughts of Demian for so long, in such an unreal world, that she too had vanished utterly from my eyes and my thoughts. There was no one I could say anything to about my hopes, my dreams, my inner transformation, even if I had wanted to.
And how could I have wanted to?