Free Klingsor's Last Summer by Hermann Hesse Page A

and trustfulness. This small, amiable, hospitable landscape with its serenely cheerful people was something you could love. And something to love—what a salvation!
    With a passionate determination to forget and to lose himself, the sufferer in flight from lurking anxieties immersed himself in this foreign world. He walked out into the open country, country of attractive, industriously tended farmlands. Neither the peasants nor their lands reminded him of the farms of his own country, but rather of Homer and the Romans; there was something age-old, cultivated and yet primitive, about this landscape. It had an innocence and a maturity lacking in the north. The small chapels and shrines, brightly painted and gently crumbling, most often adorned with bouquets of wildflowers brought by children, stood everywhere along the roads in honor of saints. They seemed to him to have the same meaning and to derive from the same spirit as the many small sanctuaries of the ancients which honored a divinity in every grove, spring, and mountain. There was a serene piety about them that smelled of bread and wine and health.
    He turned back to the town, walked under echoing arcades, tired himself out on rough cobblestone pavements, peered curiously into open stores and workshops, bought Italian newspapers without reading them, and finally, thoroughly tired, found himself in a splendid lakeside park. Tourists were strolling about or sitting on benches reading, and tremendous old trees hung like dark vaults above blackish-green water, as if infatuated with their reflections. A host of improbable plants, smoke tree and snakewood, cork oaks and other rarities, dotted the lawns, their shapes rakish or anxious or sorrowful. There were flowers everywhere. And on the distant shore across the lake glimmered, white and pink, lovely villages and country houses.
    He was sitting hunched on a bench, almost on the point of nodding off, when a firm, elastic footstep startled him into wakefulness. A woman, a girl, passed by him. She was wearing russet-colored laced boots and a short skirt above flimsy net stockings. She walked vigorously, with a firm rhythm, erect and provocative. Proudly fashionable, she had a cool face with crimsoned lips and wore her golden hair piled high. For just a second in passing her glance fell upon him with that self-assured, appraising look of doormen and hotel bellboys. Indifferently, she walked on.
    Certainly, Klein thought, she is right; I am not a person to be noticed. A girl like that doesn’t look twice at my sort. Nevertheless, the brevity and coolness of her glance secretly pained him. He felt deprecated and despised by someone who saw only the surface, and from the depths of his past he summoned up weapons to arm himself against her. Already he had forgotten that her fine, lively shoes, her firm elastic gait, her taut leg in the thin silk stocking had for a moment fascinated him and given him pleasure. The rustling of her dress was extinguished, and the faint fragrance of her hair and skin. Cast away and crushed underfoot was the lovely breath of sex and the possibility of love that had come from her and just grazed him. Instead many memories rose up. How often he had seen such creatures, such young, self-assured, and provocative females, whether sluts or vain society women; how often their shameless provocation had irritated him, their self-assurance annoyed him, their cool, bold display of themselves repelled him. How often, on outings and in city restaurants, he had sincerely shared his wife’s outrage at such unwomanly and hetaera-like creatures.
    Crossly, he stretched out his legs. The woman had spoiled his good humor. He felt irritable and at a disadvantage. He knew that if this yellow-haired creature passed by once more and scrutinized him again, he would flush and decide that his clothes, his hat, his shoes, his face, his hair and beard were inadequate and inferior. The devil take her. That yellow hair