The Masters of Atlantis (3 page)

Fanny said she was sorry, that she had not meant to goad him. She just thought he might be interested in Sydney's work. After all, they were, were they not, brothers in this secret order? Lamar said she was absolutely right. He asked her to forgive him for raising his voice. It would not happen again. He was, of course, pleased to hear that Sydney was doing well and she was right to remind him of his duty.

Once again he set about in earnest to find recruits, to the neglect of his clothing sales. He told his buyers that he had something in his sample case more beautiful than painted silk neckties and more lasting than Harris tweed, and the best part was that this thing would cost them nothing more than a little hard study at night.

Bates too pitched in anew. Through a friend at the big Chicago marketing firm of Targeted Sales, Inc., he got his hands on a mailing list titled “Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana,” which, by no means exhaustive, contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers, who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men. Lamar was a little surprised to find his own name on the list. It was given as “Mr. Jimmerson.” His gossiping neighbors in Skokie, it seemed, had put him down for an odd bird. They had observed him going into his garage late at night in a pointed cap and had speculated that he was building a small flying machine behind those locked doors, or pottering around with a toy railroad or a giant ball of twine.

He and Bates wrote letters to the seven hundred cranks, with questionnaires enclosed that had been run off at the Latvian printshop. They waited. They sorted out the replies. Those men who seemed to have the stuff of Gnomons in them got second questionnaires, and such of these as came back went through a further winnowing. The process culminated with Bates or Lamar appearing on the doorsteps of the worthy few,
Codex Pappus
in hand.

“Good morning,” Lamar would say to the householder at the door. “I am—
Mr. Jimmerson
.”

It was during this period that Lamar, still a young man, became known to all and sundry, young and old alike, as “Mr. Jimmerson.” He and Bates, with Gnomon gravity, had always addressed one another as “Mr. Bates” and “Mr. Jimmerson,” and this form now took hold in the wider world. Fanny continued to call him “Lamar,” as did Sydney Hen, and much later, Morehead Moaler, but few others took that liberty, not even Austin Popper.

Mr. Bates and Mr. Jimmerson worked long hours for the Society and even bagged a member now and then. When they were fired from their sales jobs they hardly noticed, and they used their final commission checks to pay for a new line of printed study materials. The loss of the little brick house through foreclosure was more troubling. Mr. Jimmerson could see that Fanny was upset and he promised to make it up to her one day. Good soldier that she was, she made no fuss. They packed their goods and left Skokie, and when they were gone, the neighbors, peering from behind curtains, spilled out of their houses and went for the garage at a trot to see what they could see, with any luck a small airship.

The Jimmersons moved into a rented room in Gary, where Fanny prepared budget meals on an electric hot plate. It was a cheerless winter. Mr. Bates often shared their dinner of baked beans and white bread spread with white oleomargarine. Neither of the two Gnomons paid much heed to the Pythagorean stricture against eating beans and the flesh of animals, although they did feel guilt in the act until Austin Popper came along and explained that this rule was never laid down by Pythagoras, but was rather an interpolation by some medieval busybody, and that in fact there was nothing Pythagoras liked better than a pot of Great Northern beans simmered with a bit of ham hock.

The new members of the order, to be sure, paid certain fees, and the Society's bank balance at this time stood at around $2,000, but Mr. Jimmerson was careful to keep that money separated from his personal funds, lest there be any breath of scandal. Fanny thought he should pay himself a small salary as Master of all the Gnomons in America, or at least take some expense money. Sydney didn't stint himself at his London Temple. He even had a full staff of servants. Mr. Jimmerson said that Sir Sydney could do as he pleased, but as far as he, Lamar Jimmerson, was concerned, the great work was not for sale. She must understand that his position was a fiduciary one, one of trust.

Fanny saw there was nothing for it but for her to take a job. She found work as a nurse's aide at Hope Hospital, in the physical therapy ward, where she soon became a great favorite with patients and staff alike. After completing a brief refresher course she took the state examination and received her license as registered nurse, along with a supervisory position in the therapy ward that paid $150 a month.

Mr. Jimmerson knew nothing of this. He had noticed that they were eating better, pork chops and such, and living better. They seemed to be living in a different place, in a clean new apartment just down the street from Hope Hospital, but he was so preoccupied that he had not bothered to inquire into these new domestic arrangements. Fanny was reluctant to tell him about the job. With all his quirky principles he was sure to have objections to working wives. He would put his foot down. As it turned out, he didn't mind at all, and as he became swamped with paperwork he even encouraged her to take courses in accounting and hectograph operation, and lend him a hand. She did so, and, with an hour snatched here and there from her busy day, she also prepared the typescripts of his first three books,
101 Gnomon Facts, Why I Am a Gnomon
and
Tracking the Telluric Currents.
These works, written for the general public, contained no secret matter, nor were they indexed or annotated.

Things began to pick up toward the end of the decade, and then in 1929, with the economic collapse of the nation, the Gnomon Society fairly flourished. Traders and lawyers and bricklayers and salesmen and farmers now had time on their hands. They had time to listen and some were so desperate as to seek answers in books. By the summer of 1931 there were more than forty Pillars in six states, and in January of the next year Mr. Jimmerson went to his Latvian printers and placed an order for 5,000 copies of the
Codex Pappus.

The Letts were in serious financial trouble. Their newspaper had already gone under and the printshop was just barely afloat. But Mr. Jimmerson was not one to forget his friends. True, they had garbled important passages in his books and left pages uncut and bound entire chapters upside down, but they had also extended credit to him in those dark days when it could not have been justified in a business way. He was now in a position to return the favor. The firm was to be reorganized as the Gnomon Press. No one would be fired. The production of Gnomon tracts and books would have priority but the shop would be free to take in outside jobs as well. When this announcement was made, and translated, amid heavy Baltic gloom in the back shop, the printers at first were stunned, and then they cheered Mr. Jimmerson and threw their paper hats in the air.

With success came the inevitable attacks. There was the usual sour grapes disparagement and mockery of outsiders looking in. Pagan nonsense, said the bishops. At best a false science, said the academic rationalists. An ornate casket with no pearl inside, said the Masonic chiefs. A foolish distraction from the real business of life, said the political engineers. A nest of cuckoos who like to dress up and give themselves titles, said the newspaper writers.

None of these gentlemen could say just what Gnomonism was—the Archbishop of Chicago had it confused with Gnosticism—but they all agreed it was something to stay clear of.
Why the secrecy? Who are these people? Whatever it is they are concealing must be evil. What are their long-range plans? Do they claim magical powers? What are they up to with all their triangles?

Lies were spread about the Gnomons. They were said to carouse in their meeting halls, which had painted windows like mortuaries, dancing the night away with much chanting and tambourine shaking, following their ritual meal of bulls' blood, lentils and smoked cat meat. There was at least one physical attack. A young man from Northwestern University tracked Mr. Jimmerson down and demanded a refund of the dollar he had paid for a copy of
Why I Am a Gnomon
and an apology for foisting it off on the public. He said the book was “not any good at all” and “just awful stuff,” and when Mr. Jimmerson hesitated in his reply the young man ripped the little book into two pieces and flung them away and then punched the Master in the face. Fanny did not know about the fracas until the next morning, when she noticed that her husband's lips and nose were stuck fast to his pillow with dried blood. He told her it was nothing, that he believed the young bruiser had assaulted him as a writer rather than as a Gnomon, and that in any case all this abuse was contemptible, not to say futile. Their enemies were much too late. The Gnomon Society had taken root in the New World and was here to stay.

This became clear for all to see on April 10, 1936, when the Gnomon Temple was dedicated in Burnette, Indiana, the most fashionable suburb of Gary. It was a mansion of Bedford limestone, which, with grounds and outbuildings, occupied a good part of the 1400 block of Bulmer Avenue, the most fashionable street of Burnette. An iron-and-steel tycoon, lately deceased, had built it, with little regard for expense, and his widow, eager to be off to Palm Beach, sold it to the Gnomon Society for $180,000. Mr. Jimmerson was uneasy over the prospect of moving into so grand a house and he had to be persuaded by the Council of Three, Bates, Mapes and Epps, that it was necessary for the Master to live in the Temple, at the center of the web, just as it was necessary for the Temple to be monumental, have great mass, be gray and oppressive to every eye that gazed upon it.

SIR SYDNEY HEN cabled fraternal congratulations from London. It was another wonderful day for the Society, he said. He regretted that he could not attend the dedication but his health was such that he was no longer able to travel. He was suffering greatly from fevers, fluxes and the dry gripes and could hardly get away from the bathroom for an hour at a time. He suspected that he was being given a debilitating poison by Rosicrucian agents from France. The cable was dated “Anno, XVII, New Gnomon Cycle,” and was signed “Hen, Theos Soter, Master and Hierophant, C.H., F.S.A.,” with the letters standing for “Companion of Hermes” and “Far-Seeing Arbiter.” Thus had the advanced degrees of Gnomonry begun to proliferate.

Mr. Jimmerson quickly became adjusted to the comforts of Temple life. The Council had been wise to insist on his living here. He particularly liked the Red Room, with its big fireplace, the bookshelves that rose to the ceiling, the wine-colored carpet and the wall coverings of wine-colored silk. Here he settled in. In the Red Room a man could study and think. Here he could get down to business on his new book,
The Jimmerson Spiral.

Fanny liked the oversize bathtubs and the canopied beds and the rose bower and the splashing fountain. She had a number of servants at her disposal, these including a cook, a gardener, two maids and a butler-chauffeur named Maceo, a quiet Negro man who had the additional duty of sweeping out the Inner Hall of the Black Throne, into which neither Fanny nor the maids, as females, were allowed to penetrate.

Mr. Jimmerson's office was fully staffed too, and overseen by one Huggins, whose title was editorial advisor. Huggins was a journalist, an irritable, alcoholic bird of passage who brought certain professional skills to bear on the production of Gnomon printed matter. Austin Popper was the mail boy. That was the job description but he was not really very boyish at the age of nineteen—or maybe it was twenty-four, or even thirty. Even at that time Popper was coy about his age, and his origins, and no one could pin him down on these things.

Popper was quick in every sense of the word. His physical movements were quick and sure, and he could learn a new task in short order and execute it with confidence. He had a ready fund of information gleaned from newspapers and popular magazines. He kept his eyes open. He remembered names. His charm was effective on both men and women, and even the misanthropic Huggins became fond of him. Maps and Epps thought him just a shade ambitious but they too found his company pleasant, against their will.

When Huggins was drunk, Popper covered for him, and when Huggins had editorial disputes with the Master, or printing disputes with the Letts, it was young Popper who stepped in to smooth the ruffled feathers and suggest a sensible accommodation. Huggins soon found himself working for Popper, and still they remained friends.

But Huggins was bound to be left behind anyway since he refused to become a Gnomon. Out of a natural perversity and a newspaperman's terror of being duped, he refused to join anything, and so remained a P.S., or Perfect Stranger, while Popper answered the summons with alacrity and went on to become a power in the great brotherhood. Soon he was writing speeches for the Master and helping him with his books. He talked and wrote with facility, seldom at a loss for a word, or an opinion. He was never Master of Gnomons, nor even a member of the Council of Three, but the common perception that he directed the organization was not far off the mark.

What Popper did was transform the Gnomon Society. Having gained the confidence of the Master, he was able to persuade him that they must broaden their appeal. The way to do this was to relax the standards. The
Codex Pappus
, for instance, was much too difficult for most beginners and should be revised. There was too much memory work for the ordinary man; the staggering volume of this stuff must be reduced. Only in this way could the Society expect to grow and become a force in the world.