“No, but then I simply did what I wished, and sat next to you without hesitation. The boy with whom I changed places was simply surprised, and let me do it without further say. And the parson indeed noticed once that a change had taken place—in fact, whenever he looks at me something worries him secretly. That is to say, he knows my name is Demian, and that something must be wrong that I, whose initial is D, am sitting back there among the S’s! But that does not penetrate his consciousness because my will is against it, because I prevent him again and again from becoming conscious of it. He notices now and then that something is wrong. He looks at me and begins to study the question, the good fellow. But I have a simple means at my disposal. I look at him very, very fixedly in the eyes. Hardly anyone can bear that. They always get restive. If you want to get something out of a person, and you fix him unexpectedly with your eyes, and if he doesn’t get restive, then give it up! You won’t get anything out of him, ever! But that happens seldom. I know only one single person with whom this trick won’t help me.”
“Who is that?” I asked quickly.
He looked at me, with eyes somewhat closed; as his fashion was when he meditated. Then he looked away and gave no answer, and in spite of my lively curiosity I could not bring myself to repeat the question.
But I believe he was referring to his mother. He seemed to live on very intimate terms with her, but he never spoke about her, never invited me to his house. I scarcely knew what his mother looked like.
Several times I attempted to imitate his example by concentrating my will-power on something so firmly that I would have to attain it. I had desires which seemed to me sufficiently pressing. But nothing came of it. I could not bring myself to talk matters over with Demian. I should not have been able to make him understand what I wanted. He did not ask, either.
My faith in matters of religion had meanwhile suffered many a breach. Yet in my manner of thinking, which was entirely under the influence of Demian, I was to be distinguished from those of my schoolfellows who professed an entire disbelief. There were a few such who let occasional phrases be overheard, to the effect that it was laughable and unworthy of man’s dignity to believe in a God, and that stories such as those of the Trinity and the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary were simply a joke. It was disgraceful, they said, that such rubbish was peddled about to-day. This was by no means my way of thinking. Even where I had doubts, the whole experience of my childhood taught me to believe in the efficacy of a godly life such as that led by my parents, which I knew to be neither contemptible nor hypocritical. On the contrary, now as before, I had the greatest reverence for the spirit of religion. Only Demian had accustomed me to consider and explain the stories and articles of belief from a more liberal and more personal point of view, a point of view in which fantasy and imagination had their share. At least, I always took great pleasure and enjoyment in the interpretations he suggested to me. To be sure much seemed to me too crude; such as the affair of Cain. And once, during the preparation for confirmation, I was terrified by a conception, which, if that were possible, seemed to me even still more daring. The master had been speaking of Golgotha. The Biblical account of the Passion and Death of Christ had, from my earliest years, made a deep impression on me. As a little boy, on such days as Good Friday, after my Father had read out to us the story of the Passion, I had lived in imagination and with much emotion in Gethsemane and on Golgotha, in that world so poignantly beautiful, pale and ghostlike, and yet so terribly alive. And when I listened to the Passion according to St. Matthew by Bach, I felt the mystical thrills of this dark, powerful, mysterious world of passion and suffering. I find in this music, even to-day and in the “actus tragicus,” the essence of all poetry and of all artistic expression.
At the conclusion of the lesson Demian said to me contemplatively:
“There’s something in this, Sinclair, which I don’t like. Read through the story, consider it, there’s something there which sounds insipid. I mean this business of the two thieves. It’s sublime, the three crosses standing side by side on the hill! But what about this sentimental story of the honest thief, which reads more like a tract? First he was a criminal who had perpetrated crimes, and God knows what, and now he breaks out in tears and is consumed by feelings of contrition and repentance. I ask you what’s the sense of such a repentance two steps from the grave? It’s nothing but a real parson’s story, mawkish and mendacious, larded with emotion, and having a most edifying background. If to-day you had to choose one of the two thieves as your friend, or if you consider which of the two you would the sooner have trusted, it would most certainly not be this weeping convert. No, it’s the other, who’s a real fellow with plenty of character. He doesn’t care a straw about conversion, which in his case can mean simply nothing more than pretty speeches. He goes his way bravely to the end, without being such a coward as to renounce the devil in the last moment who up to that point has had to help him. He is a character, and in Biblical history people of character always come off second best. Perhaps he’s a descendant of Cain. Don’t you think so?”
I was dismayed. I had believed myself to be quite familiar with the story of the crucifixion, and now I saw for the first time what little personal judgment I had brought to bear on it, with what little force of imagination and of fantasy I had listened to it and read it. Demian’s new ideas, therefore, were quite annoying, threatening to overthrow conceptions, the stability of which I had believed it necessary to maintain. No, one could not deal with anything and everything like that, certainly not with the All Holiest.