My school career was over. My father had arranged that during the holidays I was to travel and then I was to go to the University. In which faculty, I knew not. I was to be allowed to take philosophy for one semester. I should have been equally content with anything else.
VII
Mother Eve
In the holidays I went once to the house in which, years before, Max Demian and his mother had lived. An old lady was walking in the garden. I entered into conversation and learned that the house belonged to her. I enquired after the Demians. She remembered them very well. But she did not know where they were living at that moment. As she felt my interest, she took me into the house, searched through a leather album and showed me a photograph of Demian’s mother. I scarcely had any recollections of what she was like. But when I saw the little picture my heart stood still. It was my dream picture! There it was, the tall, almost masculine woman’s figure, resembling her son, with traits of motherliness, traits which denoted severity, and deep passion, beautiful and alluring, beautiful and unapproachable, demon and mother, destiny and mistress. That was she!
I was filled with a wild wonder, when I learned that my dream picture lived on earth! There was a woman, then, who looked like that, who bore my fate in her features! Where was she? Where? And she was Demian’s mother!
I started on my travels soon after. A strange journey! I went restlessly from place to place as impulse directed, always in search of this woman. There were days when I met shapes which reminded me of her, and which resembled her. These shapes led me on through the streets of strange towns, into railway stations, into trains, as in a tangled dream. There were other days when I saw how useless my search was. Then I sat inactive, anywhere, in a park or the garden of a hotel, in a waiting room; I looked into myself and tried to make the picture live in me. But it was now shy and elusive. I could not sleep, I only nodded for a quarter of an hour or so on railway journeys through country unknown to me. Once in Zürich, a woman followed me, a pretty, rather forward woman. I scarcely noticed her and went on, as if she were air. I would rather have died at once, than have shown sympathy for another woman, even if only for an hour.
I felt that my destiny was leading me on. I felt that fulfillment was nigh. I was mad with impatience, to think that I could do nothing to help myself. Once at a station, I think it was at Innsbruck, I saw, at the window of a train which was just moving out, a form which reminded me of her, and I was miserable for days. And suddenly the form appeared again to me at night in a dream. I woke up with a feeling as of shame, realizing the fruitlessness and senselessness of my chase, and I went home by the most direct route.
A couple of weeks later I matriculated in the University of H⸺. Everything disappointed me. The course of lectures I followed, on the history of philosophy, was just as vain and mechanical as the common ground of student life. Everything was so much according to pattern, one person did as the other, and the boyish faces, although inflamed with a forced gaiety, looked so distressingly vacant. It was like the gloss of a ready-made article! But I was free, I had the whole day to myself, and lived quietly in a beautiful old building outside the town. I had a couple of volumes of Nietzsche on my table. I lived with him, feeling the loneliness of his soul, sensing his destiny, which impelled him onwards unceasingly. I suffered with him, and was happy that there had been one who had gone his way so inflexibly.
Late one evening I wandered through the town; an autumn wind was blowing and I heard the student societies singing in their taverns. Tobacco smoke rose in clouds through the open windows; songs were being roared out, loudly and tensely; but the noise did not soar up, it fell dully on the ear, and was lifelessly uniform.
I stood at a street corner and listened. From two cafés the flood of song rolled forth into the night. Everywhere community, everywhere this huddling together, everywhere this unloading of the burden of destiny, this flight into the warm proximity of the herd!
Two men passed me by slowly. I caught a phrase of their conversation.
“Isn’t it just like an assembly of youths in a nigger village?” said one. “They all do the same things. Even tattooing is in fashion. Look, that’s the young Europe.”
The voice rang suggestively in my ear. I followed behind the two in the dark street. One of them was a Japanese, small and elegant. I saw his yellow smiling face shine under the lamp.
The other spoke again.
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s any better with you in Japan. People who do not follow the herd are everywhere rare. There are a few here, too.”
Every word went through me. I felt pleasure and dread. I recognized the speaker. It was Demian.
In the windy night I followed him and the Japanese through the dark streets, listening to their conversation and enjoying the ring of Demian’s voice. It had the old tone, the old, beautiful sureness and tranquillity, and it had the same power over me. Now everything was right. I had found him.
At the end of a street in the suburbs the Japanese took leave and closed a house door behind him. Demian took the way back. I had remained standing, and awaited
