The Glass Bead Game (35 page)

Knecht studied the young man, convinced that he was one of the old Master's protégés. Cautiously, he queried: “How long do you linger in our Archives,
studiose?”

“Until I see that you are setting out for Monteport, reverend sir,” was the reply.

Knecht considered a moment. “Very well,” he said. “And why have you not repeated the exact wording of the ex-Master's message, as you should have done?”

Petrus unflinchingly met Knecht's eyes, and answered slowly, still circumspectly choosing his words, as if he were speaking a foreign language. “There is no message, reverend sir,” he said, “and there is no exact wording. You know my reverend Master and know that he has always been an extraordinarily modest man. In Monteport it is said that in his youth, while he was still a tutor but already recognized by the entire elite as predestined to be the Music Master, they nicknamed him ‘the great would-be-small.' Well, this modesty, and his piety no less, his helpfulness, thoughtfulness, and tolerance have actually increased ever since he grew old, and more so since he resigned his office. Undoubtedly you know that better than I. This modesty of his would forbid him to do anything like asking your Reverence for a visit, no matter how much he desired it. That is why,
Domine,
I have not been honored with any such message and nevertheless have acted as if I received one. If that was a mistake, you are free to regard the nonexistent message as actually nonexistent.”

Knecht smiled faintly. “And what about your work in the Game Archives, my good fellow? Was that mere pretext?”

“Oh no. I have to obtain the ciphers for a number of clefs, so that I would in any case have had to cast myself upon your hospitality in the near future. But I thought it advisable to speed this little journey somewhat.”

“Very good,” the Magister said, nodding, his expression once again grave. “Is it permissible to ask into the reason for this haste?”

The young man closed his eyes for a moment. His forehead was deeply furrowed, as though the question pained him. Then he looked once more into the Magister's face with his searching, youthfully incisive gaze.

“The question cannot be answered unless you would be so good as to frame it more precisely.”

“Very well then,” Knecht said. “Is the former Master's health bad? Does it give reason for anxiety?”

Although the Magister had spoken with the greatest calm, the student perceived his affectionate concern for the old man. For the first time since the beginning of their conversation a gleam of good will appeared in his rather fierce eyes, and as he at last prepared to state candidly the real object of his visit, his voice sounded a trace friendlier and less distant.

“Reverend Magister,” he said, “rest assured that my honored Master's condition is by no means bad. He has always enjoyed excellent health and does so still, although his advanced age has naturally greatly weakened him. It is not that his appearance has so much changed or that his strength had suddenly begun to diminish rapidly. He takes little walks, plays a little music every day, and until recently even continued to give two pupils organ lessons, beginners moreover, for he has always preferred to be surrounded by the youngest pupils. But the fact that he dismissed these pupils a few weeks ago is a symptom that caught my attention all the same, and since then I have watched the venerable Master rather more closely, and drawn my conclusions about him. That is the reason I have come. If anything justifies my conclusions, and my taking such a step, it is the fact that I myself was formerly one of the former Music Master's pupils, more or less one of his favorites, if I may say so; moreover, for the past year I have served him as a kind of secretary and companion, the present Music Master having named me to look after him. It was a very welcome assignment; there is no one in the world for whom I feel such veneration and attachment as I do for my old teacher and patron. It was he who opened up the mystery of music for me, and made me capable of serving it; and everything I may have acquired since in the way of ideas, respect for the Order, maturity, and inner concord has all come from him and is his doing. This past year I have been living at his side, and although I am occupied with a few studies and courses of my own, I am always at his disposal, his companion at table and on walks, making music with him, and sleeping in an adjoining room. Being so close to him all the time, I have been able to keep close watch over the stages of—I suppose I must say, of his aging, his physical aging. A few of my associates comment pityingly or scornfully now and then about its being a peculiar assignment that so young a person as myself should be the servant and companion of a very old man. But they do not know, and aside from myself I suspect no one really knows, what kind of aging the Master is privileged to undergo. They do not see him gradually growing weaker and frailer in the body, taking less and less nourishment, returning from his short walks more fatigued every time, without ever being really sick, and at the same time becoming, in the tranquility of age, more and more spiritual, devout, dignified, and simple in heart. If my office of secretary and attendant has any difficulties at all, they arise solely from the fact that his Reverence does not want to be waited on and tended at all. He still wants only to give and never to take.”

“Thank you,” Knecht said. “I am happy to know that his Reverence has so devoted and grateful a pupil at his side. And now, since you are not speaking on his orders, tell me plainly why you feel that I should visit Monteport.”

“You asked with concern about the reverend former Music Master's health,” the young man answered, “evidently because my request suggested to you that he might be ill and it could be high time to pay him one last visit. To be frank, I do think it is high time. He certainly does not seem to me to be close to his end, but his way of taking leave of the world is quite unique. For the past several months, for example, he has almost entirely lost the habit of speaking; and although he always preferred brevity to loquacity, he has now reached a degree of brevity and silence that frightens me somewhat. At first, when he did not answer a remark or question of mine, I thought that his hearing was beginning to weaken. But he hears almost as well as ever; I have made many tests of that. I therefore had to assume that he was distracted and could no longer focus his attention. But this, too, is not an adequate explanation. Rather, it is as if he has been on his way elsewhere for some time, and no longer lives entirely among us, but more and more in his own world. He rarely visits anyone or sends for anyone; aside from me he no longer sees another person for days. Ever since this started, this absentness, this detachment, I have tried to urge the few friends whom I know he loved most to see him. If you were to visit him,
Domine,
you would make your old friend happy, I am sure of that, and you would still find relatively the same man whom you have revered and loved. In a few months, perhaps only in a few weeks, his pleasure in seeing you and his interest in you will probably be much less; it is even possible that he would no longer recognize you, or at any rate pay attention to you.”

Knecht stood up, went to the window, and stood there for a while looking out and breathing deeply. When he turned back to Petrus he saw that the student was also standing, as though he thought the audience over. The Magister extended his hand.

“I thank you once more, Petrus,” he said. “As you surely know, a Magister has all sorts of duties. I cannot put on my hat and leave at once; schedules have to be rearranged. I hope that I shall be able to leave by day after tomorrow. Would that be time enough, and would you be able to finish your work in the Archives by then? Yes? Then I shall send for you when I am ready.”

A few days later Knecht left for Monteport, accompanied by Petrus. When they reached the pavilion in the gardens where the former Music Master now lived—it was a lovely and beautifully tranquil monastic cell—they heard music from the back room, delicate, thin, but rhythmically firm and deliciously serene music. There the old man sat playing a two-part melody with two fingers—Knecht guessed at once that it must be from one of the many books of duets written at the end of the sixteenth century. They remained outside until the music ended; then Petrus called out to his master that he was back and had brought a visitor. The old man appeared in the doorway and gave them a welcoming look. The Music Master's welcoming smile, which everyone loved, had always had an open, childlike cordiality, a radiant friendliness; Joseph Knecht had seen it for the first time nearly thirty years before, and his heart had opened and surrendered to this friendly man during that tense but blissful morning hour in the music room. Since then he had seen this smile often, each time with deep rejoicing and a strange stirring of his heart; and while the Master's gray-shot hair had gradually turned completely gray and then white, while his voice had grown softer, his handshake fainter, his movements less supple, the smile had lost none of its brightness and grace, its purity and depth. And this time Joseph, the old man's friend and former pupil, saw the change beyond a doubt. The radiant, welcoming message of that smiling old man's face, whose blue eyes and delicately flushed cheeks had grown paler with the passing years, was both the same and not the same. It had grown deeper, more mysterious, and intense. Only now, as he was exchanging greetings, did Knecht really begin to understand what the student Petrus had been concerned about, and how greatly he himself, while thinking he was making a sacrifice for the sake of this concern, was in fact receiving a benefaction.

His friend Carlo Ferromonte was the first person to whom he spoke about this. Ferromonte was at this time librarian at the famous Monteport music library, and Knecht called on him a few hours later. Their conversation has been preserved in a letter of Ferromonte's.

“Our former Music Master was your teacher, of course,” Knecht said, “and you were very fond of him. Do you see him often nowadays?”

“No,” Carlo replied. “That is, I see him fairly often, of course, when he is taking his walk, say, and I happen to be coming out of the library. But I haven't talked with him for months. He is more and more withdrawing and no longer seems able to bear sociability. In the past he used to set aside an evening for people like me, those among his former subordinates who are officials in Monteport now; but that stopped about a year ago. It amazed us all that he went to Waldzell for your investiture.”

“Ah yes,” Knecht said. “But when you do see him occasionally, haven't you been struck by any change in him?”

“Oh yes. You mean his fine appearance, his cheerfulness, his curious radiance? Of course we have noticed that. While his strength is diminishing, that serene cheerfulness is constantly increasing. We have grown accustomed to it. But I suppose it would strike you.”

“His secretary Petrus sees far more of him than you do,” Knecht exclaimed, “but he hasn't grown accustomed to it, as you say. He came specially to Waldzell, on a plausible excuse, of course, to urge me to make this visit. What do you think of him?”

“Of Petrus? He has a first-rate knowledge of music, though he's more on the pedantic than the brilliant side—a rather slow-moving if not slow-witted person. He's totally devoted to the former Music Master and would give his life for him. I imagine his serving the master he idolizes is the whole content of his life; he's obsessed by him. Didn't you have that impression too?”

“Obsessed? Yes, but I don't think this young man is obsessed simply by a fondness and passion; he's not just infatuated with his old teacher and making an idol out of him, but obsessed and enchanted by an actual and genuine phenomenon which he sees better, or has better understood emotionally, than the rest of you. I want to tell you how it struck me. When I went to the former Master today, after not having seen him for six months, I expected little or nothing from this visit, after the hints his secretary had dropped. I had simply been alarmed to think that the revered old man might suddenly depart from us in the near future, and had hastened here in order to see him at least once more. When he recognized and greeted me, his face glowed, but he said no more than my name and shook hands with me. That gesture, too, and his hand, seemed to me also to glow; the whole man, or at least his eyes, his white hair, and his rosy skin, seemed to emit a cool, gentle radiance. I sat down with him. He sent the student away, just with a look, and there began the oddest conversation I have ever had. At the beginning, I admit, it was very disturbing and depressing for me, and shaming also, for I kept addressing the old man, or asking questions, and his only answer to anything was a look. I could not make out whether my questions and the things I told him were anything but an annoying noise to him. He confused, disappointed, and tired me; I felt altogether superfluous and importunate. Whatever I said to the Master, the only response was a smile and a brief glance. If those glances had not been so full of good will and cordiality, I would have been forced to think that he was frankly making fun of me, of my stories and questions, of the whole useless trouble I had taken to come and visit him. As a matter of fact, his silence and his smile did indeed contain something of the sort. They were actually a form of fending me off and reproving me, except that they were so in a different way, on a different plane of meaning from, say, mocking words. I had first to wear myself out and suffer total shipwreck with what had seemed to me my patient efforts to start a conversation, before I began to realize that the old man could easily have manifested a patience, persistence, and politeness a hundred times greater than mine. Perhaps the episode lasted only fifteen minutes or half an hour; it seemed to me like half a day. I began to feel sad, tired, and angry, and to repent my journey. My mouth felt dry. There sat the man I revered, my patron, my friend, whom I had loved and trusted ever since I could think, who had always responded to whatever I might say—there he sat and listened to me talk, or perhaps did not listen to me, and had barricaded himself completely behind his radiance and smile, behind his golden mask, unreachable, belonging to a different world with different laws; and everything I tried to bring by speech from our world to his ran off him like rain from a stone. At last—I had already given up hope—he broke through the magic wall; at last he helped me; at last he said a few words. Those were the only words I heard him speak today.