The Glass Bead Game (57 page)

“What about?” Designori asked with curiosity.

“Oh, anything, the subject would not matter. It would only be a pretext for me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of leisure. The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the solemn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have learned. I don't suppose the way this poet Friedrich Rückert mixes instruction and thinking, information and casual talk, would be my way, and yet something about it appeals strongly to me; it is personal and yet not arbitrary, playful and yet submits to strict rules of form. I like that. Well, for the present I shall not enter upon the joys and problems of writing little books; I have to keep my mind on other tasks. But some time later, I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in mind.”

Next morning Knecht set out for Belpunt. Designori had wanted to accompany him, but Knecht had firmly vetoed the idea, and when the father attempted to press it, had almost snapped at him. “The boy will have enough to do coming to terms with this nuisance of a new teacher,” he said curtly. “To foist his father on him at the same time would scarcely help things.”

As he rode through the brisk September morning in the car Plinio had hired for him, his good humor of yesterday returned. He chatted frequently with the chauffeur, asking him to stop or drive slowly every so often when the landscape looked particularly attractive, and several times he played his little flute. It was a beautiful and exciting ride from the lowlands in which the capital lay toward the foothills and on into the high mountains. The journey also led from fading summer deeper into autumn. About noon the last great climb began, over sweeping serpentines, through thinning evergreen forest, past foaming mountain streams roaring between cliffs, over bridges and by solitary, massive walled farmhouses with tiny windows, into a stony, ever rougher and more austere world of mountains, amid whose bleakness and sobriety the flowering meadows bloomed like tiny paradises with doubled loveliness.

The small cottage they reached at last was tucked away near a mountain lake, among gray cliffs with which it scarcely contrasted. The traveler was at once aware of the austerity, even the gloom, of this kind of building, which so accorded with the ruggedness of the mountains. But then a cheerful smile lighted his face, for in the open door of the house he saw a figure standing, a young man in a colorful jacket and shorts. It could only be his pupil Tito, and although he had not really been seriously concerned about the fugitive, he nevertheless breathed a grateful sigh of relief. If Tito were here and welcoming his teacher on the threshold, all was well; that disposed of a good many possible complications he had been considering during the ride.

The boy came forward to meet him, smiling, friendly, and a little embarrassed. While helping Knecht out of the car, he said: “I didn't mean to be horrid, letting you travel alone.” And before Knecht had a chance to reply, he added trustfully: “I think you understood my feeling. Otherwise you would have brought my father with you. I've already let him know that I arrived safely.”

Laughing, Knecht shook hands with the boy. He was guided into the house, where the servant welcomed him and promised that supper would soon be ready. Yielding to an unwonted need, he lay down for a little while before the meal, and only then realized that he was curiously tired, in fact exhausted, from the lovely automobile trip. During the evening, moreover, as he chatted with his pupil and looked at Tito's collections of mountain flowers and butterflies, his fatigue increased. He even felt something akin to giddiness, a kind of emptiness in the head that he had never experienced before, and an annoying weakness and irregularity of his heartbeat. But he continued to sit with Tito until their agreed bedtime, and took pains not to show any sign that he was not feeling well. Tito was somewhat surprised that the Magister said not a word about the beginning of school, schedules, report cards, and similar matters. In fact, when he ventured to capitalize on this good mood and proposed a long walk for the morning, to acquaint his teacher with his new surroundings, the proposal was readily accepted.

“I am looking forward to the walk,” Knecht added, “and want to ask you a favor right now. While looking at your plant collection I could see that you know far more about mountain plants than I do. One of the purposes of our being together is, among other things, that we exchange knowledge and reach a balance with each other. Let us begin by your checking over my meager understanding of botany and helping me go further in this field.”

By the time they bade each other good night, Tito was in excellent spirits and had made some good resolutions. Once again he had found this Magister Knecht very much to his liking. Without using fancy language and going on about scholarship, virtue, the aristocracy of intellect, and so on, as his schoolteachers were prone to do, this serene, friendly man had something in his manner and his speech that imposed an obligation and brought out your good, chivalric, higher aspirations and forces. It could be fun, and sometimes you felt it as a badge of honor, to deceive and outwit the ordinary schoolmaster, but in the presence of this man such notions never even occurred to you. He was—why, what exactly was he like? Tito reflected on this, trying to determine what it was about this stranger that was so likeable and at the same time so impressive. He decided that it was the man's nobility, his innate aristocratic quality. This was what drew him to Knecht, this above all. He was a nobleman, although no one knew his family and his father might have been a shoemaker. He was nobler and more aristocratic than most of the people Tito knew, more aristocratic than Tito's own father. The boy, who highly prized the patrician instincts and traditions of his house and could not forgive his father for having broken with them, was for the first time encountering intellectual aristocracy, cultivated nobility. Knecht was an example of that power which under favorable conditions can sometimes work miracles, overleaping a long succession of ancestors and within a single human life transforming a plebeian child into a member of the highest nobility. In the proud and fiery boy's heart there stirred an inkling that to belong to this kind of nobility, and to serve it, might be a duty and honor for him; that here perhaps, embodied in this teacher who for all his gentleness and friendliness was a nobleman through and through, the meaning of his own life was drawing near to him, that his own goals were being set.

Knecht, after being shown to his room, did not lie down at once, although he craved rest. The evening had cost him a great effort. He had found it difficult to comport himself so that nothing in his expression, posture, or voice would reveal his peculiar fatigue or depression or illness to the young man, who was undoubtedly observing him closely. Still, he seemed to have succeeded. But now he had to meet and master this vacuity, this nausea, this alarming giddiness, this deathly tiredness which was at the same time restiveness. He could master it only if he recognized its cause. This was not hard to find, although it took him some time. The reason for his indisposition, he decided, was simply the journey which had taken him in so short a time from the lowlands to an altitude of close to seven thousand feet. Except for a few outings in his early youth, he was unaccustomed to such heights and had not reacted well to the rapid ascent. Probably this disability would last another day or two. If it did not disappear by then, he would have to return home with Tito and the housekeeper, in which case Plinio's plan for a stay in lovely Belpunt would come to nothing. That would be a pity, but no great misfortune.

After these reflections, he went to bed, and since sleep refused to come, spent the night partly in reviewing his travels since his departure from Waldzell, partly trying to quiet his heartbeat and his exacerbated nerves. He also thought a good deal about his pupil, with pleasure, but without making any plans. It seemed to him wiser to tame this noble but refractory colt by kindness and slow domestication; nothing must be hasty or forced in this case. He thought that he would gradually bring the boy to an awareness of his gifts and powers, and at the same time nourish in him that noble curiosity, that aristocratic dissatisfaction from which springs love for the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. The task was a rewarding one, and his pupil was not just any talented young man whom he had to awaken and train. As the only son of a wealthy and influential patrician he was also a future leader, one of the social and political shapers of the country and the nation, destined to command and to be imitated. Castalia had failed the Designori family; it had not educated Tito's father thoroughly enough, had not made him strong enough for his difficult position poised between the world and culture. As a result, gifted and charming young Plinio had become an unhappy man with a life out of balance and ill managed. As a further result, his only son was endangered in his turn and had been drawn into his father's difficulties. Here was something to heal and make good; here was a debt to be paid. It seemed meaningful, and gladdened him, that this task should fall to him of all persons, to him the disobedient and seemingly apostate Castalian.

In the morning, when he sensed the house awakening, he rose. Finding a dressing gown laid ready beside his bed, he put it on, and stepped out through the rear door that Tito had shown him the night before into the arcade that connected the house with the bath hut by the lake.

Before him the little lake lay motionless, gray-green. Further off was a steep cliff, its sharp, jagged crest still in shadow, rearing sheer and cold into the thin, greenish, cool morning sky. But he could sense that the sun had already risen behind this crest; tiny splinters of its light glittered here and there on corners of rock. In a few minutes the sun would appear over the crenellations of the mountain and flood lake and valley below with light. In a mood of earnest attentiveness, Knecht studied the scene, whose stillness, gravity, and beauty he felt as unfamiliar and nevertheless of deep concern and instructiveness to him. Now, even more strongly than during yesterday's ride, he felt the ponderousness, the coolness and dignified strangeness of this mountain world, which does not meet men halfway, does not invite them, scarcely tolerates them. And it seemed to him strange and significant that his first step into the freedom of life in the world should have led him to this very place, to this silent and cold grandeur.

Tito appeared, in bathing trunks. He shook hands with the Magister and pointing to the cliffs opposite said: “You've come at just the right moment; the sun will be rising in a minute. Oh, it's glorious up here.”

Knecht gave him a friendly nod. He had learned long ago that Tito was an early riser, a runner, wrestler, and hiker, if only from protest against his father's casual, unsoldierly, comfort-loving ways. For the same reason he refused to drink wine. These leanings occasionally led him into a pose of being an anti-intellectual child of nature—the Designoris seemed to have this bent for exaggeration. But Knecht welcomed it all, and was determined to share his interest in sports as a means for winning over and taming the temperamental young man. It would be only one means among several, and not at all the most important; music, for example, would lead them much further. Of course he had no thought of matching the young man in physical feats, let alone surpassing him. But harmless participation would suffice to show the boy that his tutor was neither a coward nor a mere bookworm.

Tito looked eagerly toward the dark crest of the mountain, behind which the sky pulsed in the morning light. Now a fragment of the rocky ridge flashed violently like a glowing metal beginning to melt. The crest blurred and seemed suddenly lower, as if it were melting down, and from the fiery gap the dazzling sun appeared. Simultaneously, the ground, the house, and their shore of the lake were illuminated, and the two, standing in the strong radiance, instantly felt the delightful warmth of this light. The boy, filled with the solemn beauty of the moment and the glorious sensation of his youth and strength, stretched his limbs with rhythmic arm movements, which his whole body soon took up, celebrating the break of day in an enthusiastic dance and expressing his deep oneness with the surging, radiant elements. His steps flew in joyous homage toward the victorious sun and reverently retreated from it; his outspread arms embraced mountain, lake, and sky; kneeling, he seemed to pay tribute to the earth mother, and extending his hands, to the waters of the lake; he offered himself, his youth, his freedom, his burning sense of his own life, like a festive sacrifice to the powers. The sunlight gleamed on his tanned shoulders; his eyes were half-closed to the dazzle; his young face stared masklike with an expression of inspired, almost fanatical gravity.

The Magister, too, was overpowered by the solemn spectacle of dawn breaking in this silent, rocky solitude. But he was even more fascinated by the human spectacle taking place before his eyes, this ceremonial dance performed by his pupil to welcome the morning and the sun. The dance elevated this moody, immature youth, conferring upon him a priestly solemnity, suddenly in a single moment irradiating and revealing to the onlooker his deepest and noblest tendencies, gifts, and destinies just as the appearance of the sun opened and illuminated this cold, gloomy mountain dale. In this moment the young man seemed to him stronger and more impressive than he had hitherto thought, but also harder, more inaccessible, more remote from culture, more pagan. This ceremonial and sacrificial dance under the sign of Pan meant more than young Plinio's speeches and versemaking ever had; it raised the boy several stages higher, but also made him seem more alien, more elusive, less obedient to any summons.

The boy himself was in the grip of his impulse, without knowing what was happening to him. He was not performing a dance he already knew, a dance he had practiced before. This was no familiar rite of celebrating sun and morning that he had long ago invented. Only later would he realize that his dance and his transported state in general were only partly caused by the mountain air, the sun, the dawn, his sense of freedom. They were also a response to the change awaiting him, the new chapter in his young life that had come in the friendly and awe-inspiring form of the Magister. In that morning hour many elements conspired in the soul of young Tito to shape his destiny and distinguish this hour above a thousand others as a high, a festive, a consecrated time. Without knowing what he was doing, asking no questions, he obeyed the command of this ecstatic moment, danced his worship, prayed to the sun, professed with devout movements and gestures his joy, his faith in life, his piety and reverence, both proudly and submissively offered up in the dance his devout soul as a sacrifice to the sun and the gods, and no less to the man he admired and feared, the sage and musician, the Master of the magic Game who had come to him from mysterious realms, his future teacher and friend.