Demian

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 of
the 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 of
the 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
boardinghouse. 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 a
bear 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 it
seems to me that in weather like this a man does the right thing when he looks for a quiet place where he can
drink a good glass of wine or something. Will you join me? I happen to be all by myself at the moment. Or
would you rather not? I don't want to be the one who leads you astray, mon vieux, that is, in case you happen
to be the kind that 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. The world glowed in new colors, thoughts gushed out of a hundred
audacious springs. The fire of enthusiasm flared up within me. We discussed our teachers and fellow students
and it seemed to me that we understood each other perfectly. We talked about the Greeks and the pagans in
general and Beck very much wanted me to confess to having slept with girls. This was out of my league. I
hadn't experienced anything, certainly nothing worth telling. And what I had felt, what I had constructed in
imagination, ached within me but had not been loosened or made communicable by the wine. Beck knew
much more about girls, so I listened to his exploits without being able to say a word. I heard incredible things. Things I had never thought possible became everyday reality, seemed normal. Alfons Beck, who was eighteen,
seemed to be able to draw on a vast body of experience. For instance, he had learned that it was a funny thing
about girls, they just wanted to flirt, which was all very well, but not the real thing. For the real thing one
could hope for greater success with women. Women were much more reasonable. Mrs. Jaggelt, for example,
who owned the stationery store, well, with her one could talk business, and all the things that had happened
behind her counter wouldn't fit into a book. I sat there enchanted and also dumbfounded. Certainly, I could
never have loved Mrs. Jaggelt --yet the news was incredible. There seemed to be hidden sources of pleasure, at
least for the older boys, of which I had not even dreamed. Something about it didn't sound right, and it tasted
less appealing and more ordinary than love, I felt, was supposed to taste--but at least: this was reality, this was
life and adventure, and next to me sat someone who had experienced it, to whom it seemed normal. Once it
had reached this height, our conversation began to taper off. I was no longer the damned clever little bastard;
I'd shrunk to a mere boy listening to a man. Yet all the same--compared with what my life had been for
months--this was delicious, this was paradise. Besides, it was, as I began to realize only gradually, very much
prohibited--from our presence in the bar to the subject of our talk. At least for me it smacked of rebellion. I
can remember that night with remarkable clarity. We started on our way home through the damp, past gas
lamps dimly lighting the late night: for the first time in my life I was drunk. It was not pleasant. In fact it was
most painful, yet it had something, a thrill, a sweetness of rebellious orgy, that was life and spirit. Beck did a
good job taking charge of me, even though he cursed me bitterly as a "bloody beginner, " and half led, half
carried me home. There he succeeded in smuggling me through an open window in the hallway. The sober
reality to which I awoke after a brief deathlike sleep coincided with a painful and senseless depression. I sat up
in bed, still wearing my shirt. The rest of my clothes, strewn about on the floor, reeked of tobacco and vomit.
Between fits of headache, nausea, and a raging thirst an image came to mind which I had not viewed for a long
time: I visualized my parents' house, my home, my father and mother, my sisters, the garden. I could see the
familiar bedroom, the school, the market place, could see Demian and the Confirmation classes--everything
was wonderful, godly pure, and everything, all of this--as I realized now--had still been mine yesterday, a few
hours ago, had waited for me; yet now, at this very hour, everything looked ravaged and damned, was mine no
longer, rejected me, regarded me with disgust. Everything dear and intimate, everything my parents had given
me as far back as the distant gardens of my childhood, every kiss from my mother, every Christmas, each
devout, light-filled Sunday morning at home, each and every flower in the garden--everything had been laid
waste, everything had been trampled onby me! If the arm of the law had reached out for me now, had bound
and gagged me and led me to the gallows as the scum of the earth and a desecrator of the temple, I would not
have objected, would have gladly gone, would have considered it just and fair. So that's what I looked like
inside! I who was going about contemptuous of the world! I who was proud in spirit and shared Demian's
thoughts! That's what I looked like, a piece of excrement, a filthy swine, drunk and filthy, loathsome and
callow, a vile beast brought low by hideous appetites. That's what I looked like, I, who came out of such pure
gardens where everything was cleanliness, radiance, and tenderness, I, who had loved the music of Bach and
beautiful poetry. With nausea and outrage I could still hear my life, drunk and unruly, sputtering out of me in
idiotic laughter, in jerks and fits. There I was. In spite of everything, I almost reveled in my agonies. I had
been blind and insensible and my heart had been silent for so long, had cowered impoverished in a corner, that
even this self-accusation, this dread, all these horrible feelings were welcome. At least it was feeling of some
kind, at least there were some flames, the heart at least flickered. Confusedly I felt something like liberation
amid my misery. Meanwhile, viewed from the outside, I was going rapidly downhill. My first drunken frenzy
was soon followed by others. There was much going to bars and carousing in our school. I was one of the
youngest to take part, yet soon enough I was not merely a fledgling whom one grudgingly took along, I had
become the ringleader and star, a notorious and daring bar crawler. Once again I belonged entirely to the
world of darkness and to the devil, and in this world I had the reputation of being one hell of a fellow.
Nonetheless, I felt wretched. I lived in an orgy of self-destruction and, while my friends regarded me as a
leader and as a damned sharp and funny fellow, deep down inside me my soul grieved. I can still remember
tears springing to my eyes when I saw children playing in the street on Sunday morning as I emerged from a
bar, children with freshly combed hair and dressed in their Sunday best. Those friends who sat with me in the
lowest dives among beer puddles and dirty tables I amused with remarks of unprecedented cynicism, often
even shocked them; yet in my inmost heart I was in awe of everything I belittled and lay weeping before my
soul, my past, my mother, before God. There was good reason why I never became one with my companions, why I felt alone among them and was therefore able to suffer so much. I was a barroom hero and cynic to
satisfy the taste of the most brutal. I displayed wit and courage in my ideas and remarks about teachers,
school, parents, and church. I could also bear to hear the filthiest stories and even ventured an occasional one
myself, but I never accompanied my friends when they visited women. I was alone and was filled with intense
longing for love, a hopeless longing, while, to judge by my talk, I should have been a hard-boiled sensualist.
No one was more easily hurt, no one more bashful than I. And when I happened to see the young
well-brought-up girls of the town walking in front of me, pretty and clean, innocent and graceful, they seemed
like wonderful pure dreams, a thousand times too good for me. For a time I could not even bring myself to
enter Mrs. Jaggelt's stationery store because I blushed looking at her remembering what Alfons Beck had told
me. The more I realized that I was to remain perpetually lonely and different within my new group of friends
the less I was able to break away. I really don't know any longer whether boozing and swaggering actually
ever gave me any pleasure. Moreover, I never became so used to drinking that I did not always feel
embarrassing after-effects. It was all as if I were somehow under a compulsion to do these things. I simply did
what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long,
was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love
surging up in me. What I missed above all else was a friend. There were two or three fellow students whom I
could have cared for, but they were in good standing and my vices had long been an open secret. They avoided
me. I was regarded by and large as a hopeless rebel whose ground was slipping from under his feet. The
teachers were well-informed about me, I had been severely punished several times, my final expulsion seemed
merely a matter of time. I realized myself that I had become a poor student, but I wriggled strenuously through
one exam after the other, always feeling that it couldn't go on like this much longer. There are numerous ways
in which God can make us lonely and lead us back to ourselves. This was the way He dealt with me at that
time. It was like a bad dream. I can see myself: crawling along in my odious and unclean way, across filth and
slime, across broken beer glasses and through cynically wasted nights, a spellbound dreamer, restless and
racked. There are dreams in which on your way to the princess you become stuck in quagmires, in back alleys
full of foul odors and refuse. That was how it was with me. In this unpleasant fashion I was condemned to
become lonely, and I raised between myself and my childhood a locked gateway to Eden with its pitilessly
resplendent host of guardians. It was a beginning, an awakening of nostalgia for my former self. Yet I had not
become so callous as not to be startled into twinges of fear when my father, alarmed by my tutor's letters,
appeared for the first time in St. ------and confronted me unexpectedly. Later on that winter, when he came a
second time, nothing could move me any more, I let him scold and entreat me, let him remind me of my
mother. Finally toward the end of the meeting he became quite angry and said if I didn't change he would have
me expelled from the school in disgrace and placed in a reformatory. Well, let him! When he went away that
time I felt sorry for him; he had accomplished nothing, he had not found a way to me--and at moments I felt
that it served him right. I could not have cared less what became of me. In my odd and unattractive fashion,
going to bars and bragging was my way of quarreling with the world--this was my way of protesting. I was
ruining myself in the process but at times I understood the situation as follows: if the world had no use for
people like me, if it did not have a better place and higher tasks for them, well, in that case, people like me
would go to pot, and the loss would be the world's. Christmas vacation was a joyless affair that year. My
mother was deeply startled when she saw me. I had shot up even more and my lean face looked gray and
wasted, with slack features and inflamed eyes. The first touch of a mustache and the eyeglasses I had just
begun wearing made me look odder still. My sisters shied away and giggled. Everything was most unedifying.
Disagreeable and bitter was the talk I had with my father in his study, disagreeable exchanging greetings with
a handful of relatives, and particularly unpleasant was Christmas Eve itself. Ever since I had been a little child
this had been the great day in our house. The evening was a festivity of love and gratitude, when the bond
between child and parents was renewed. This time everything was merely oppressive and embarrassing. As
usual my father read aloud the passage about the shepherds in the fields "watching their flocks, " as usual my
sisters stood radiantly before a table decked with gifts, but father's voice sounded disgruntled, his face looked
old and strained, and mother was sad. Everything seemed out of place: the presents and Christmas greetings,
Gospel reading and the lit-up tree. The gingerbread smelled sweet; it exuded a host of memories which were
even sweeter. The fragrance of the Christmas tree told of a world that no longer existed. I longed for evening
and for the holidays to be over. It went on like this the entire winter. Only a short while back I had been given
a stern warning by the teachers' council and been threatened with expulsion. It couldn't go on much longer. Well, I didn't care. I held a very special grudge against Max Demian, whom I hadn't seen again even once. I
had written him twice during my first months in St. ------but had received no reply; so I had not called on him
during the holidays. In the same park in which I had met Alfons Beck in the fall, a girl came to my attention
in early spring as the thorn hedges began to bud. I had taken a walk by myself, my head filled with vile
thoughts and worries--for my health had deteriorated--and to make matters worse I was perpetually in
financial difficulties, owed friends considerable sums and had thus continually to invent expenditures so as to
receive money from home. In a number of stores I had allowed bills to mount for cigars and similar things.
Not that this worried me much. If my existence was about to come to a sudden end anyway--if I drowned
myself or was sent to the reformatory--a few small extras didn't make much difference. Yet I was forced to
live face to face with these unpleasant details: they made me wretched. On that spring day in the park I saw a
young woman who attracted me. She was tall and slender, elegantly dressed, and had an intelligent and boyish
face. I liked her at once. She was my type and began to fill my imagination. She probably was not much older
than I but seemed far more mature, well-defined, a full-grown woman, but with a touch of exuberance and
boyishness in her face, and this was what I liked above all. I had never managed to approach a girl with whom
I had fallen in love, nor did I manage in this case. But the impression she made on me was deeper than any
previous one had been and the infatuation had a profound influence on my life. Suddenly a new image had
risen up before me, a lofty and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as fervent within me as
the craving to worship and admire. I gave her the name Beatrice, for, even though I had not read Dante, I knew
about Beatrice from an English painting of which I owned a reproduction. It showed a young pre-Raphaelite
woman, long-limbed and slender, with long head and etherealized hands and features. My beautiful young
woman did not quite resemble her, even though she, too, revealed that slender and boyish figure which I
loved, and something of the ethereal, soulful quality of her face. Although I never addressed a single word to
Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She raised her image before me, she gave me
access to a holy shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple. From one day to the next I stayed
clear of all bars and nocturnal exploits. I could be alone with myself again and enjoyed reading and going for
long walks. My sudden conversion drew a good deal of mockery in its wake. But now I had something I
loved and venerated, I had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery and a feeling of dawn that
made me immune to all taunts. I had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and servant of a
cherished image. I find it difficult to think back to that time without a certain fondness. Once more I was
trying most strenuously to construct an intimate "world of light" for myself out of the shambles of a period of
devastation; once more I sacrificed everything within me to the aim of banishing darkness and evil from
myself. And, furthermore, this present "world of light" was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer
an escape, no crawling back to mother and the safety of irresponsibility; it was a new duty, one I had invented
and desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control. My sexuality, a torment from which I was in
constant flight, was to be transfigured into spirituality and devotion by this holy fire. Everything dark and
hateful was to be banished, there were to be no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious pictures,
no eavesdropping at forbidden doors, no lust. In place of all this I raised my altar to the image of Beatrice, and
by consecrating myself to her I consecrated myself to the spirit and to the gods, sacrificing that part of life
which I withdrew from the forces of darkness to those of light. My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness
but beauty, and spirituality. This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life. Yesterday a precocious cynic,
today I was an acolyte whose aim was to become a saint. I not only avoided the bad life to which I had
become accustomed, I sought to transform myself by introducing purity and nobility into every aspect of my
life. In this connection I thought of my eating and drinking habits, my language and dress. I began my
mornings with cold baths which cost me a great effort at first. My behavior became serious and dignified; I
carried myself stiffly and assumed a slow and dignified gait. It may have looked comic to outsiders but to me
it was a genuine act of worship. Of all the new practices in which I sought to express my new conviction, one
became truly important to me. I began to paint. The starting point for this was that the reproduction of the
English picture I owned did not resemble my Beatrice closely enough. I wanted to try to paint her portrait for
myself. With new joy and hopefulness I bought beautiful paper, paints, and brushes and carried them to my
room--I had just been given one of my own--and prepared my palette, glass, porcelain dishes and pencils. The
delicate tempera colors in the little tubes I had bought delighted me. Among them was a fiery chrome green
that, I think, I can still see today as it flashed up for the first time in the small white dish. I began with great
care. Painting the likeness of a face was difficult. I wanted to try myself out first on something else. I painted ornaments, flowers, small imagined landscapes: a tree by a chapel, a Roman bridge with cypress trees.
Sometimes I became so completely immersed in this game that I was as happy as a little child with his
paintbox. Finally I set out on my portrait of Beatrice. A few attempts failed completely and I discarded them.
The more I sought to imagine the face of the girl I had encountered here and there on the street the less
successful I was. Finally I gave up the attempt and contented myself with giving in to my imagination and
intuition that arose spontaneously from the first strokes, as though out of the paint and brush themselves. It
was a dream face that emerged and I was not dissatisfied with it. Yet I persisted and every new sketch was
more distinct, approximated more nearly the type I desired, even if it in no way reproduced reality. I grew
more and more accustomed to idly drawing lines with a dreaming paintbrush and to coloring areas for which I
had no model in mind, that were the result of playful fumblings of my subconscious. Finally, one day I
produced, almost without knowing it, a face to which I responded more strongly than I had to any of the
others. It was not the face of that girl--it wasn't supposed to be that any longer. It was something else,
something unreal, yet it was no less valuable to me. It looked more like a boy's face than a girl's, the hair was
not flaxen like that of my pretty girl, but dark brown with a reddish hue. The chin was strong and determined,
the mouth like a red flower. As a whole it was somewhat stiff and masklike but it was impressive and full of a
secret life of its own. As I sat down in front of the completed painting, it had an odd effect on me. It
resembled a kind of image of God or a holy mask, half male, half female, ageless, as purposeful as it was
dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive. This face seemed to have a message for me, it belonged to me, it was
asking something of me. It bore a resemblance to someone, yet I did not know whom. For a time this portrait
haunted my thoughts and shared my life. I kept it locked in a drawer so that no one would take it and taunt me
with it. But as soon as I was alone in my small room I took it out and communed with it. In the evening I
pinned it on the wall facing my bed and gazed on it until I fell asleep and in the morning it was the first thing
my eyes opened on. It was precisely at this time that I again began having many dreams, as I had always had
as a child. It felt as though I had not dreamed for years. Now the dreams returned with entirely new images,
and time after time the portrait appeared among them, alive and eloquent, friendly or hostile to me, sometimes
distorted into a grimace, sometimes infinitely beautiful, harmonious, and noble. Then one morning, as I
awoke from one of these dreams, I suddenly recognized it. It looked at me as though it were fabulously
familiar and seemed to call out my name. It seemed to know who I was, like a mother, as if its eyes had been
fixed on me since the beginning of time. With a quivering heart I stared at the sheet, the close brown hair, the
half-feminine mouth, the pronounced forehead with the strange brightness (it had dried this way of its own
accord) and I felt myself coming nearer and nearer to the recognition, the rediscovery, the knowledge. I leapt
out of bed, stepped up to the face, and from inches away looked into its wide-open, greenish, rigid eyes, the
right one slightly higher than the left. All at once the right eye twitched, ever so faintly and delicately but
unmistakably, and I was able to recognize the picture... Why had it taken me so long? It was Demian's face.
Later I often compared the portrait with Demian's true features as I remembered them. They were by no
means the same even though there was a resemblance. Nonetheless, it was Demian. Once the early-summer
sun slanted oblique and red into a window that faced westward. Dusk was growing in my room. It occurred to
me to pin the portrait of Beatrice, or Demian, at the window crossbar and to observe the evening sun shine
through it. The outlines of the face became blurred but the red-rimmed eyes, the brightness on the forehead,
and the bright red mouth glowed deep and wild from the surface. I sat facing it for a long time, even after the
sun had faded, and gradually I began to sense that this was neither Beatrice nor Demian but myself. Not that
the picture resembled me--I did not feel that it should--but it was what determined my life, it was my inner
self, my fate or my daemon. That's what my friend would look like if I were to find one ever again. That's
what the woman I would love would look like if ever I were to love one. That's what my life and death would
be like, this was the tone and rhythm of my fate. During those weeks I had begun to read a book that made a
more lasting impression on me than anything I had read before. Even later in life I have rarely experienced a
book more intensely, except perhaps Nietzsche. It was a volume of Novalis, containing letters and aphorisms
of which I understood only a few but which nevertheless held an inexpressible attraction for me. One of the
aphorisms occurred to me now and I wrote it under the picture: "Fate and temperament are two words for one
and the same concept. " That was clear to me now. I often caught sight of the girl I called Beatrice but I felt
no emotion during these encounters, only a gentle harmony, a presentiment: you and I are linked, but not you,
only your picture; you are a part of my fate. My longing for Max Demian overwhelmed me again. I had had
no news of him for years. Once I had met him during a vacation. I realized now that I suppressed this brief encounter in my notes and I realize that it was done out of vanity and shame. I have to make up for it. Thus,
during one of my holidays as I strolled through my home town, wearing the blasé, always slightly weary
expression of my bar-crawling days, peering into the same old, despised faces of the philistines, I saw my
former friend walking toward me. I had hardly seen him when I flinched. At the same moment I could not help
thinking of Franz Kromer. If only Demian had really forgotten that episode! It was so unpleasant to be
obligated to him. It was actually a silly children's story but an obligation nonetheless... He appeared to wait:
would I greet him? When I did so as casually as possible he stretched out his hand. Yes, that was his grip! As
firm, warm yet cool, and virile as ever! He scrutinized my face and said: "You've grown, Sinclair. " He
himself seemed quite the same, as old or as young as ever. He joined me and we took a walk, but talked of
only inconsequential matters. It occurred to me that I had written him several times without getting a reply. I
hoped that he'd forgotten that too, those stupid letters! He did not mention them. At that time I had not yet met
Beatrice and there was no portrait. I was still in the midst of my drunken period. At the outskirts of town I
asked him to join me for a glass of wine and he did so. At once I made a big show of ordering a whole bottle,
filled his glass, clinked mine with his, and displayed my great familiarity with student drinking customs by
downing the first glass in one swallow. "You spend a lot of time in bars, do you?" he asked. "Well, yes, " I
replied. "What else is there to do? In the end it's more fun than anything else. " "You think? Maybe so. One
part of it is of course very fine--the intoxication, the bacchanalian element. But I think most people that
frequent bars have lost that entirely. It seems to me that going to bars is something genuinely philistine. Yes,
for one night, with burning torches, a real wild drunk! But again and again, one little glass after the other, I
wonder whether that's the real thing or not? Can you see Faust sitting night after night stooped over the bar?"
I took a swallow and looked at him with hostility. "Well, not everybody's Faust, " I said curtly. He looked at
me somewhat taken aback. Then he laughed at me in his old lively and superior fashion. "Well, let's not fight
over it! In any case, the life of a drunk is presumably livelier than that of the ordinary well-behaved citizen.
And then--I read that once somewhere--the life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.
People like St. Augustine are always the ones that become visionaries. He, too, was first a sensualist and man
of the world. " I distrusted him and didn't want him to gain the upper hand under any circumstance. So I said
superciliously: "Well, everybody to his own taste. As for me, I've no ambition to become a visionary or
anything of the sort. " Demian gave me a brief shrewd look out of half-closed eyes. "My dear Sinclair, " he
said slowly, "I didn't intend to tell you anything disagreeable. Besides --neither of us knows why you happen
to be drinking wine at this moment. That which is within you and directs your life knows already. It's good to
realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than
we ourselves. But excuse me, I must go home. " We exchanged brief good-bys. I stayed on moodily and
finished the bottle. When I wanted to leave I discovered that Demian had paid the bill--which put me in an
even worse humor. My thoughts returned to this small incident with Demian. I could not forget him. And the
words he said to me in that bar at the edge of town would come to mind, strangely fresh and intact: "It's good
to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything. " How I longed for Demian. I had no idea
where he was nor how I could reach him. All I knew was that he was presumably studying at some university
and that his mother had left town after he completed preparatory school. I tried to remember whatever I could
of Max Demian, reaching back as far as the Kromer episode. How much of what he had said to me over the
years returned to mind, was still meaningful today, was appropriate and concerned me! And what he had said
on our last and quite disagreeable meeting about a wasted life leading to sainthood suddenly also stood clearly
before me. Wasn't that exactly what had happened to me? Hadn't I lived in drunkenness and squalor, dazed
and lost, until just the opposite had come alive in me with a new zest for life, the longing for purity, the
yearning for the sacred? So I continued to pursue these memories. Night had long since come and now rain
was falling. In my memories, too, I heard the rain: it was the hour under the chestnut trees when he had probed
me about Franz Kromer and guessed my first secrets. One incident after another came back to me,
conversations on the way to school, the Confirmation classes, and last of all my first meeting with him. What
had we talked about? I couldn't find it at once, but I gave myself time, concentrating intensely. And now even
that returned. We had stood before my parents' house after he had told me his version of the story of Cain.
Then he had mentioned the old, half-hidden coat of arms situated in the keystone above our entrance. He had
said that such things interested him and that one ought to attend to them. That night I dreamed of Demian and
the coat of arms. It kept changing continuously. Demian held it in his hand, often it was diminutive and gray,
often powerful and varicolored, but he explained to me that it was always one and the same thing. In the end he obliged me to eat the coat of arms! When I had swallowed it, I felt to my horror that the heraldic bird was
coming to life inside me, had begun to swell up and devour me from within. Deathly afraid I started up in bed,
awoke. I was wide awake; it was the middle of the night and I could hear rain pouring into the room. As I got
up to close the window I stepped on something that shone bright on the floor. In the morning I discovered that
it had been my painting. It lay in a puddle and the paper had warped. I placed it between two sheets of blotting
paper inside a heavy book. When I looked at it again the next day it wasdry, but had changed. The red mouth
had faded and con-tracted a little. It now looked exactly like Demian's mouth. I set about painting a fresh
picture of the heraldic bird. I could not remember distinctly what it looked like and certain details, as I knew,
could not be made out even from close up, because the thing was old and had often been painted over. The
bird stood or perched on something, perhaps on a flower or on a basket or a nest, or on a treetop. I couldn't
trouble myself over this detail and began with what I could visualize clearly. Out of an indistinct need I at
once began to employ loud colors, painting the bird's head a golden yellow. Whenever the mood took me, I
worked on the picture, bringing it to completion in several days. Now it represented a bird of prey with a
proud aquiline sparrow hawk's head, half its body stuck in some dark globe out of which it was struggling to
free itself as though from a giant egg--all of this against a sky-blue background. As I continued to scrutinize
the sheet it looked to me more and more like the many-colored coat of arms that had occurred to me in my
dream. I could not have written Demian even if I had known his address. I decided, however--in the same
state of dreamlike presentiment in which I did everything--to send him the painting of the sparrow hawk, even
if it would never reach him. I added no message, not even my name, carefully trimmed the edges and wrote
my friend's former address on it. Then I mailed it. I had an exam coming up and had to do more work than
usual. The teachers had reinstated me in their favor since I had abruptly changed my previously despicable
mode of life. Not that I had become an outstanding student, but now neither I nor anyone else gave it any
further thought that half a year earlier my expulsion had seemed almost certain. My father's letters regained
some of their old tone, with-out reproaches or threats. Yet I felt no inclination to explain to him or anyone else
how the change within me had come about. It was an accident that this transformation coincided with my
parents' and teachers' wishes. This change did not bring me into the community of the others, did not make me
closer to anyone, but actually made me even lonelier. My reformation seemed to point in the direction of
Demian, but even this was a distant fate. I did not know myself, for I was too deeply involved. It had begun
with Beatrice, but for some time I had been living in such an unreal world with my paintings and my thoughts
of Demian that I'd forgotten all about her, too. I could not have uttered a single word about my dreams and
expectations, my inner change, to anyone, not even if I had wanted to. But how could I have wanted to?