"DEMIAN" by HERMANN HESSE

Chapter 4 BEATRICE

At the end of the holidays, and without having seen my friend again, I went to St. ------. My parents accompanied me and entrusted me to the care of a boy's boarding-house run by one of the teachers at the preparatory school. They would have been struck dumb with horror had they known into what world they were letting me wander.

The question remained: was I eventually to become a good son and useful citizen or did my nature point in an altogether different direction? My last attempt to achieve happiness in the shadow ofthe paternal home had lasted a long time, had on occasion almost succeeded, but had completely failed in the end. The peculiar emptiness and isolation that I came to feel for the first time after Confirmation (oh, how familiar it was to become afterwards, this desolate, thin air!) passed only very slowly.

My leave-taking from home was surprisingly easy, I was almost ashamed that I did not feel more nostalgic. My sisters wept for no reason; my eyes remained dry. I was astonished at myself. I had always been an emotional and essentially good child. Now I had completely changed. I behaved with utter indifference to the world outside and for days on end voices within preoccupied me, inner streams, the forbidden dark streams that roared below the surface. I had grown several inches in the last half year and I walked lanky and half-finished through the world. I had lost any charm I might ever have had and felt that no one could possibly love me the way I was. I certainly had no love for myself.

Often I felt a great longing for Max Demian, but no less often I hated him, accusing him of having caused the impoverishment of my life that held me in its sway like a foul disease. I was neither liked nor respected in my boys' boarding-house. I was teased to begin with, then avoided and looked upon as a sneak and an unwelcome oddity. I fell in with this role, even exaggerated it, and grumbled myself into a self-isolation that must have appeared to outsiders like permanent and masculine contempt of the world, whereas, in truth, I often secretly succumbed to consuming fits of melancholy and despair.

In school I managed to get by on the knowledge accumulated in my previous class--the present one lagged somewhat behind the one I had left--and I began to regard the students in my age group contemptuously as mere children. It went on like this for a year or more. The first few visits back home left me cold. I was glad when I could leave again. It was the beginning of November. I had become used to taking snort meditative walks during all kinds of weather, walks on which I often enjoyed a kind of rapture tinged with melancholy, scorn ofthe world and self-hatred.

Thus I roamed in the foggy dusk one evening through the town. The broad avenue of a public park stood deserted, beckoning me to enter; the path lay thickly carpeted with fallen leaves which I stirred angrily with my feet. There was a damp, bitter smell, and distant trees, shadowy as ghosts, loomed huge out of the mist. I stopped irresolute at the far end of the avenue: staring into the dark foliage I greedily breathed the humid fragrance of decay and dying to which something within me responded with greeting.

Someone stepped out of one of the side paths, his coat billowing as he walked--I was about to continue when a voice called out. "Hello, Sinclair. " He came up to me. It was Alfons Beck, the oldest boy in our boarding house. I was always glad to see him, had nothing against him except that he treated me, and all others who were younger, with an element of ironic and avuncular condescension. He was reputed to be strong as abear and to have the teacher in our house completely under his thumb.

He was the hero of many a student rumor. "Well, what are you doing here?" he called out affably in that tone the bigger boys affected when they occasionally condescended to talk to one of us. "I'll bet anything you're making a poem. "

"Wouldn't think of it, " I replied brusquely. He laughed out loud, walked beside me, and made small talk in a way I hadn't been used to for a long time. "You don't need to be afraid that I wouldn't understand, Sinclair. There's something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that, I know. About moribund nature, of course, and one's lost youth, which resembles it. Heinrich Heine, for example. "

"I'm not as sentimental as all that, " I defended myself. "All right, let's drop the subject. But itseems to me that in weather like this a man does the right thing when he looks for a quiet place where he candrink a good glass of wine or something. Will you join me? I happen to be all by myself at the moment. Orwould you rather not? I don't want to be the one who leads you astray, mon vieux, that is, in case you happento be the kind tqhat keeps to the straight and narrow. " Soon afterwards we were sitting in a small dive at the edge of town, drinking a wine of doubtful quality and clinking the thick glasses.

I didn't much like it to begin with, but at least it was something new. Soon, however, unused to the wine, I became very loquacious. It was as though an interior window had opened through which the world sparkled. For how long, for how terribly long hadn't I really talked to anyone? My imagination began to run away with me and eventually I even popped out with the story of Cain and Abel. Beck listened with evident pleasure--finally here was someone to whom I was able to give something! He patted me on the shoulder, called me one hell of a fellow, and my heart swelled ecstatically at this opportunity to luxuriate in the release of a long pent-up need for talk and communication, for acknowledgment from an older boy. When he called me a damned clever little bastard, the words ran like sweet wine into my soul.