The Glass Bead Game (46 page)

During his first frank conversation with Plinio, he had for the first time expressed the thing in words. Perhaps he had done so only in order to win over his friend and persuade him to open his heart; but perhaps also he had intended, by this initial act of communication, to turn this new awakening of his, this new attitude toward life, in an outward direction. That is, by letting someone into his secret he was taking a first step toward making it a reality. In his further conversations with Designori, Knecht's desire to shed his present mode of life sooner or later, to undertake the leap into a new life, assumed the status of a decision. Meanwhile, he carefully built on his friendship with Plinio, who by now was bound to him not only by his former admiration, but also by the gratitude of a cured patient. In that friendship Knecht now possessed a bridge to the outside world and to its life so laden with enigmas.

It need not surprise us that the Magister waited so long before allowing his friend Tegularius a glimpse of his secret and of his plan for breaking away. Although he had shaped each of his friendships with kindness and with regard for the good of the other, he had always managed to keep a clear, independent view of these relationships, and to direct their course. Now, with the re-entry of Plinio into his life, a rival to Fritz had appeared, a new-old friend with claims upon Knecht's interest and emotions. Knecht could scarcely have been surprised that Tegularius reacted with signs of violent jealousy. For a while, until he had completely won over Designori, the Magister may well have found Fritz's sulky withdrawal a welcome relief. But in the long run another consideration took a larger place in his thoughts. How could he reconcile a person like Tegularius to his desire to slip away from Waldzell and out of his magistracy? Once Knecht left Waldzell, he would be lost to this friend forever. To take Fritz along on the narrow and perilous path that lay before him was unthinkable, even if Fritz should unexpectedly manifest the desire and the courage for the enterprise.

Knecht waited, considered, and hesitated for a very long time before initiating Fritz into his plans. But he finally did so, after his decision to leave had long been settled. It would have been totally unlike him to keep his friend in the dark, and more or less behind his back prepare steps whose consequences would deeply affect him as well. If possible Knecht wanted to make him, like Plinio, not only an initiate, but also a real or imaginary aide, since activity makes every situation more bearable.

Knecht had, of course, long ago made his friend privy to his ideas about the doom threatening the Castalian organization, as far as he cared to communicate these ideas and Tegularius to receive them. After he resolved to tell Fritz of his intentions, the Magister used these ideas as his link. Contrary to his expectations, and to his great relief, Fritz did not take a tragic view of the plan. Rather, the notion that a Magister might fling his post back at the Board, shake the dust of Castalia from his feet, and seek out a life that suited his tastes, seemed to please Fritz. The idea actually amused him. Individualist and enemy of all standardization that he was, Tegularius invariably sided with the individual against authority. If there were prospect of fighting, taunting, outwitting the powers of officialdom, he was always for it.

His reaction gave Knecht a valuable clue as to how to go on. With an easier conscience, and laughing inwardly, the Magister promptly entered into his friend's attitude. He did not disabuse Fritz of his notion that the whole thing was a kind of
coup de main
against bureaucracy, and assigned him the part of an accomplice, collaborator, and conspirator. It would be necessary to work out a petition from the Magister to the Board, he said—an exposition of all the reasons that prompted him to resign his office. The preparation of this petition was to be chiefly Tegularius's task. Above all he must assimilate Knecht's historical view of the origins, development, and present state of Castalia, then gather historical materials with which Knecht's desires and proposals could be documented. That this would lead him into a field he had hitherto rejected and scorned, the field of history, seemed not to disturb Tegularius at all, and Knecht quickly taught him the necessary procedures. Soon Tegularius had immersed himself in his new assignment with the eagerness and tenacity he always had for odd and solitary enterprises. This obstinate individualist took a fierce delight in these studies which would place him in a position to challenge the bigwigs and the hierarchy in general, and show them their shortcomings.

Joseph Knecht took no such pleasure in these endeavors, nor had he any faith in their outcome. He was determined to free himself from the fetters of his present situation, leaving himself unencumbered for tasks which he felt were awaiting him. But he fully realized that he could not overpower the Board by rational arguments, nor delegate Tegularius any part of the real work that had to be done. Nevertheless, he was very glad to know that Fritz was occupied and diverted for the short while that they would still be living in proximity to each other. The next time he saw Plinio Designori he was able to report: “Friend Tegularius is now busy, and compensated for what he thinks he has lost because of your reappearance on the scene. His jealousy is almost cured, and working on something for me and against my colleagues is doing him good. He is almost happy. But don't imagine, Plinio, that I count on anything concrete coming out of this project, aside from the benefit to himself. It is most unlikely that our highest authority will grant this petition of mine. In fact, it's out of the question. At best they will reply with a mild reprimand. What dooms my request is the nature of our hierarchy itself. A Board that would release its Magister Ludi in response to a petition, no matter how persuasively argued, and would assign him to work outside Castalia, wouldn't be to my liking at all. Besides, there is the character of our present Master of the Order. Master Alexander is a man whom nothing can bend. No, I shall have to fight this battle out alone. But let us allow Tegularius to exercise his mind for the present. All we lose by that is a little time, which I need in any case so as to leave everything here so well arranged that my departure will cause no harm to Waldzell. But meanwhile you must find me some place to live on the outside, and some employment, no matter how modest; if necessary I shall be content with a position as a music teacher, say. It need only be a beginning, a springboard.”

Designori said he thought something could be found, and when the time came his house was at his friend's disposal for as long as he liked. But Knecht would not accept that.

“No,” he said, “I wouldn't do as a guest; I must have some work. Besides, my staying more than a few days in your house, lovely as it is, would only add to the tensions and troubles there. I have great confidence in you, and your wife, too, nowadays treats me in a friendly way, but all this would look entirely different as soon as I ceased to be a visitor and Magister Ludi, and became a refugee and permanent guest.”

“Surely you're being a little too literal-minded about it,” Plinio said. “Once you've made your break and are living in the capital, you'll soon be offered a suitable post, at least a professorship at the university—you can count on that as a certainty. But such things take time, as you know, and of course I can only begin working in your behalf after you have won your freedom.”

“Of course,” the Master said. “Until then my decision must remain secret. I cannot offer myself to your authorities before my own authority here has been informed and has made its decision; that goes without saying. But for the present, you know, I am not at all seeking a public appointment. My wants are few, probably fewer than you can imagine. I need a little room and my daily bread, but above all work to do, some task as a teacher; I need one or a few pupils to whom I can be near and whom I can influence. A university post is the last thing on my mind. I would be just as glad—no, I would by far prefer—to work with a boy as a private tutor, or something of the sort. What I am seeking and what I need is a simple, natural task, a person who needs me. Appointment at a university would from the start mean my fitting into a traditional, sanctified, and mechanized bureaucracy, and what I crave is just the opposite of that.”

Hesitantly, Designori brought up the project that had been on his mind for some time.

“I do have something to propose,” he said, “and hope you will at least think it over. If you can possibly accept it, you would be doing me a service too. Since that first day I visited you here you have given me a great deal of help. You've also come to know my household and know how things stand there. My situation isn't good, but it is better than it has been for years. The thorniest problem is the relationship between me and my son. He is spoiled and impudent; he's made himself a privileged position in our house—as you know, this was virtually pressed on him while he was still a child and courted by both his mother and myself. Since then he's decidedly gone over to his mother's side, and gradually whatever authority I might have had over him has been adroitly taken out of my hands. I had resigned myself to that, as I have to so much else in my botched life. But now that I have recovered somewhat, thanks to you, I've regained hope. You can see what I am driving at. I would think it a piece of great good fortune if Tito, who is having difficulties in school anyhow, were to have a tutor who would take him in hand. It's a selfish request, I know, and I have no idea whether the task appeals to you at all. But you've encouraged me to make the suggestion, at least.”

Knecht smiled and extended his hand.

“Thank you, Plinio. No proposal could be more welcome to me. The only thing lacking is your wife's consent. Furthermore, the two of you must be prepared to leave your son entirely to me for the time being. If I am to do anything with him, the daily influence of his home must be excluded. You must talk to your wife and persuade her to accept this condition. Go at it cautiously; give yourselves time.”

“Do you really think you can do something with Tito?” Designori asked.

“Oh yes, why not? He has good blood and high endowments from both parents. What is missing is the harmony of these forces. My task will be to awaken in him the desire for this harmony, or rather to strengthen it and ultimately to make him conscious of it. I shall be happy to try.”

Thus Joseph Knecht had his two friends occupied with his affair, each in a different way. While Designori in the capital presented the new plan to his wife and tried to couch it in terms acceptable to her, Tegularius sat in a carrel in the library at Waldzell following up Knecht's leads and gathering material for the petition. The Magister had put out good bait in the reading matter he had prescribed. Fritz Tegularius, the fierce despiser of history, sank his teeth into the history of the warring epoch, and became thoroughly infatuated with it. With his enthusiasm for any pastime, he ferreted out more and more anecdotes from that epoch in the dark prehistory of the Order. Soon he had collected such copious notes that when he presented them to his friend, Knecht could use only a tenth of them.

During this period Knecht made several visits to the capital. Because a sound, integrated personality often finds easy access to troubled and difficult people, Designori's wife came to trust him more and more. Soon she consented to her husband's plan. Tito himself, on one of these visits, boldly informed the Magister that he no longer wished to be addressed with the familiar pronoun, as if he were a child, since everyone nowadays, including his teacher, used the polite pronoun to him. Knecht thanked him with perfect courtesy and apologized. In his Province, he explained, the teachers used the familiar form to all students, even those who were quite grown up. After dinner he invited the boy to go for a walk with him and show him something of the city.

In the course of the walk Tito guided him down a stately street in the old part of the city, where the centuries-old houses of wealthy patrician families stood in an almost unbroken row. Tito paused in front of one of these substantial, tall, and narrow buildings and pointed to a shield over the doorway. “Do you know what that is?” he asked. When Knecht said he did not, he explained: “Those are the Designori arms, and this is our old house. It belonged to the family for three hundred years. But we are living in our meaningless, commonplace house just because after grandfather's death my father took it into his head to sell this marvelous old mansion and build himself a fashionable place that by now isn't so modern any more. Can you understand anyone's acting like that?”

“Are you very sorry about the old house?” Knecht asked.

“Very sorry,” Tito said passionately, and repeated his question: “Can you understand anyone's acting like that?”

“Things become understandable if you look at them in the right light,” the Magister said. “An old house is a fine thing, and if the two had stood side by side and your father were choosing between them, he probably would have kept the old one. Certainly, old houses are beautiful and distinguished, especially so handsome a one as this. But it is also a beautiful thing to build one's own house, and when an ambitious young man has the choice of comfortably and submissively settling into a finished nest, or building an entirely new one, one can well see that he may decide to build. As I know your father—and I knew him when he was a spirited fellow just about as old as you are—the sale of the house probably hurt no one more than himself. He had had a painful conflict with his father and his family, and it seems his education in our Castalia was not altogether the right thing for him. At any rate it could not deter him from several impatient acts of passion. Probably the sale of the house was one of those acts. He meant it as a thrust at tradition, a declaration of war upon his family, his father, the whole of his past and his dependency. At least that is one way to see it. But man is a strange creature, and so another idea does not appear altogether improbable to me, the idea that by selling this old house your father wanted primarily to hurt himself rather than the family. To be sure, he was angry at the family; they had sent him to our elite schools, had given him our kind of education, only to confront him on his return with tasks, demands, and claims he could not handle. But I would rather go no further in psychological analysis. In any case the story of this sale shows how telling the conflict between fathers and sons can be—this hatred, this love turned to hate. In forceful and gifted personalities this conflict rarely fails to develop—world history is full of examples. Incidentally, I could very well imagine a later young Designori who would make it his mission in life to regain possession of the house for the family at all costs.”