Demian

happiness of my peaceful childhood. I did as everyone else. I led the double life of a child, who is yet a child no longer. My conscious self lived under the conditions sanctioned at home; it denied the existence of the new world whose dawn glimmered before me. But I lived as well in dreams, impelled by desires of a secret nature, upon which my conscious self anxiously attempted to build a new fabric, as the world of my childhood fell in ruins about me. Like almost all parents, my own did nothing to help the awakening life-instincts, about which not a syllable was uttered. They only aided, with untiring care, my hopeless attempts to deny the reality, and to continue my existence in a childlike world which was ever becoming more unreal and more mendacious. I do not know whether parents can do much in such a case, and I make mine no reproach. It was my own affair, to settle my difficulties and to find my way, and I carried through the business badly, like most of those who are well brought up.

Every man passes through this difficulty. For the average person, this is the point in his life where the demands of his own life come most in conflict with his surroundings, where the road forward has to be attained through the bitterest fighting. For many people this is the only time in their lives that they experience the sequence of death and rebirth that is our fate, when they become conscious of the slow process of the decay and breaking up of the world of their childhood, when everything beloved of us leaves us, and we suddenly feel the loneliness and deathly cold of the universe around us. And for very many this pitfall is fatal. They cling their whole life long painfully to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and most deadly of all dreams.

But to return to the story. The sensation and dream pictures in which the close of childhood presented itself to me are not important enough to be described. The important point was that I was once again conscious of the existence of the “dark” world, the “other” world. What Frank Kromer had once been to me, was now present within myself. And so, from the outside as well, the other world once more gained power over me.

Several years had passed since my affair with Kromer. That dramatic and guilty time of my life lay far behind me at that time and seemed to have passed like a quick nightmare into nothingness. Frank Kromer had long since disappeared from my life; I scarcely gave it a moment’s thought if I chanced to meet him. But the other important figure in my tragedy, Max Demian, never entirely disappeared from my life. However, for a long time he stood on the far horizon, visible, but not affecting me. Only by degrees he approached me again, and I came once more under the ray of his power and influence.

I will try to recollect what I know of Demian in that period. Perhaps for a year, or longer, I did not have a single conversation with him. I avoided him, and he in no wise forced himself on me. Once or twice, when we met, he nodded to me in friendly greeting. Then it seemed to me at times that there was a note of scorn or ironical reproach in his friendliness, but that might only have been imagination on my part. My relation with him, and the strange influence he had exercised over me, were as if forgotten, by him as well as by me.

I try to recall his face⁠—as I recollect him, I see that I was conscious of his existence after all, and took notice of him. I can see him going to school, alone or with some of the other big boys. I see him walking among them like a stranger, lonely and still like a celestial body, enveloped in a different atmosphere and subject to his own laws. No one liked him, he was intimate with no one, except his mother, and his relations with her did not seem like those of a child, but those of a grown-up person. The masters left him as much as possible in peace. He was a good pupil, but he did not go out of his way to please them. From time to time we heard, in gossip, of a word, a comment or a retort he had made to a master, and which left nothing to be desired in the way of blunt challenge or irony.

I call him to mind, as I close my eyes, and I see his picture emerge. Where was it? Ah, now I have it again. It was in the street, in front of our house. There one day I saw him standing, a note book in his hand. I saw that he was drawing. He was drawing the old crest with the bird over the door of our house. And I stood at a window, concealed behind a curtain, and gazed at him. I saw with astonishment his attentive, cool, bright features turned to the crest, the features of a man, of a research worker, or an artist, superior and full of willpower, oddly bright and cool, with knowing eyes.

And again I can see him. It was a little later, in the street; we had come out of school and were all standing round a horse that had fallen down. It lay, still harnessed to the shaft, in front of a peasant’s cart, and sniffed the air pitifully with open nostrils, while blood flowed from an invisible wound, so that the white dust in the street darkened as it became slowly saturated. As I, with a feeling of nausea, turned my gaze away, I saw Demian’s face. He had not pressed forward, he stood furthest back of all, rather elegant, quite at