The Glass Bead Game (42 page)

“Well, then, I had rotten luck. The animating spark was missing from our haphazard group; there was no impetus, not even a little warmth. The whole thing remained a feeble extension course for grown-up schoolboys. The days passed, and my disappointment increased with each passing day. Still, besides the Glass Bead Game there was Waldzell, a place of sacred and cherished memories for me. If the Game course were a failure, I still ought to be able to celebrate a homecoming, to chat with former schoolmates, perhaps have a reunion with the friend who more than anyone else represented to me our Castalia—you, Joseph. If I saw a few of the companions of my schooldays again, if on my walks through this beautiful, beloved region I met again the lares and penates of my youth, and if good fortune would have it that we might come close to each other again and a dialogue should spring up between us as in the old days, less between you and me than between my problem with Castalia and myself—then this vacation would not be wasted; then it would not so much matter about the course and all the rest.

“The first two old schoolfellows who crossed my path were innocuous enough. They were glad to see me, patted me on the back and asked childish question about my legendary life out in the world. But the next few were not so innocuous; they were members of the Players' Village and the younger elite and did not ask naive questions. On the contrary, when we ran into one another in one of the rooms of your sanctuaries and they could not very well avoid me, they greeted me with a pointed and rather tense politeness, or rather a condescending geniality. They made it clear that they were busy with important matters quite closed to me, that they had no time, no curiosity, no sympathy, no desire to renew old acquaintance. Well, I did not force myself on them; I let them alone in their Olympian, sardonic, Castalian tranquility. I looked across at them and their busy, self-satisfied doings like a prisoner watching through bars, or the way the poor, hungry, and oppressed eye the wealthy and aristocratic, the handsome, cultivated, untroubled, well-bred, well-rested members of an upper class with their clean faces and manicured hands.

“And then you turned up, Joseph, and when I saw you I felt rejoicing and new hope. You were crossing the yard; I recognized you from behind by your walk and at once called you by name. At last a human soul, I thought; at last a friend, or perhaps an opponent, but someone I can talk to, a Castalian to the bone, certainly, but someone in whom the Castalian spirit has not frozen into a mask and a suit of armor. A man, someone who understands. You must have noticed how glad I was and how much I expected from you, and in fact you met me halfway with the greatest courtesy. You still recognized me, I meant something to you, it gave you pleasure to see my face again. And so we did not leave it at that brief warm greeting in the yard; you invited me and devoted, or rather sacrificed, an evening to me. But what an evening that was! The two of us tormented ourselves trying to seem jocose, civil, and comradely toward each other, and how hard it was for us to drag that lame conversation from one subject to another. Where the others had been indifferent to me, with you it was worse—this strained and profitless effort to revive a lost friendship was much more painful. That evening finally put an end to my illusions. It made me realize with unsparing clarity that I was not one of your comrades, not seeking the same goals, not a Castalian, not a person of importance, but a nuisance, a fool trying to ingratiate himself, an uncultivated foreigner. And the fact that all this was conveyed to me with such politeness and good manners, that the disappointment and impatience were so impeccably masked, actually seemed to me the worst of it. If you had upbraided me: ‘What has become of you, my friend, how could you let yourself degenerate this way?' the ice would have been broken and I would have been happy. But nothing of the sort. I saw that my notion of belonging to Castalia had come to nothing, that my love for all of you and my studying the Glass Bead Game and our comradeship were all nothing. Elite Tutor Knecht had taken note of my unfortunate visit to Waldzell; for my sake he had put himself through a whole evening of boredom, and shown me the door with undeviating courtesy.”

Designori, struggling with his agitation, broke off and with a tormented expression looked across at the Magister. Knecht sat there, all attention, absorbedly listening, but not in the least upset; he sat looking at his old friend with a smile that was full of friendly sympathy. Since Designori did not continue, Knecht rested his eyes on him, with a look of good will and satisfaction, in fact with a touch of amusement. For a minute or longer Plinio bleakly met that gaze. Then he cried out forcefully, although not angrily: “You're laughing! Laughing? You think it was all fine?”

“I must admit,” Knecht said smilingly, “that you have described that episode remarkably well, splendidly. That is exactly how it was, and perhaps the lingering sense of insult and accusation in your voice was needed for you to bring it out as effectively as you did and to recall the scene to my mind with such perfect vividness. Also, although I'm afraid you still see the whole affair in somewhat the same light as you did then, and have not fully come to terms with it, you told your story with objective correctness—the story of two young men in a rather embarrassing situation in which both had to dissemble, and one of whom—that is, you—made the mistake of concealing the painfulness of the whole matter behind a gay exterior, instead of dropping the masquerade. It seems as if you were to this day blaming me more than yourself for the fruitlessness of that encounter, although it was absolutely up to you to have set its terms. Have you really failed to see that? But still you have described it very well, I must say. You've called back the whole sense of oppression and embarrassment over that weird evening. For a while I've felt as if I had to fight for composure again, and I've been ashamed for the two of us. No, your story is exactly right. It's a pleasure to hear a story so well told.”

“Well now,” Plinio began, rather astonished, and with an offended and mistrustful note lingering in his voice, “it's good that my story has amused at least one of us. If you want to know, it didn't amuse me.”

“But you do see,” Knecht said, “how merrily we can now regard this story, which isn't exactly to the credit of either of us? We can laugh at it.”

“Laugh? Why should we?”

“Because this story about the ex-Castalian Plinio who struggled to master the Glass Bead Game and worked so hard for his former friend's appreciation is now past and over with for good, exactly like the story of the tutor Knecht who in spite of all his training in Castalian manners was a total duffer when it came to dealing with this Plinio who suddenly blew in on him, so that today after so many years that clumsy behavior can be held up to him as in a mirror. Once again, Plinio, you have an excellent memory and you've told the story well—I couldn't have done it justice. It's fortunate that the tale is over and done with and we can laugh at it.”

Designori was perplexed. He could not help feeling the warmth and pleasantness of the Magister's good humor. It was obviously far removed from mockery. And he felt also that an intense seriousness lay behind this gaiety. But in telling his story he had too painfully relived the bitterness of that episode, and his narrative had been so much in the nature of a confession that he could not change key so readily.

“Perhaps you forget,” he said hesitantly, already half persuaded, “that what I related was not the same for me as it was for you. For you it was at most chagrin; for me it was defeat and collapse, and incidentally also the beginning of important changes in my life. When I left Waldzell that time, just as soon as the course ended, I resolved never to return here, and I was close to hating Castalia and all of you. I had lost my illusions and had realized that I would never again belong among you, perhaps had never belonged as much as I had imagined. It would not have taken much more to make me into a renegade and an outright enemy of everything Castalian.”

Knecht fixed him with a look at once cheerful and penetrating.

“Certainly,” he said, “and of course you're going to tell me all about that soon, I very much hope. But for the present I see our relationship as this: In our early youth we were friends, were parted and took very different paths. Then we met again—this at the time of your unlucky holiday course. You'd become half or entirely a person of the world; I was a rather conceited Waldzeller, much preoccupied with Castalian forms; and today we have recalled this disappointing and shaming reunion. We have seen ourselves and our awkwardness at that time and we have been able to laugh at it, because today everything is completely different. I freely admit that the impression you made on me at that time did in fact embarrass me greatly; it was an altogether unpleasant, negative impression. I could make nothing of you; to me you unexpectedly, disturbingly, and annoyingly seemed unfinished, coarse, worldly. I was a young Castalian who knew nothing of the world and actually wanted to know nothing of it. And you, well, you were a young foreigner whose reason for visiting us I could not rightly understand. I had no idea why you were taking a Game course, for you seemed to have almost nothing of the elite pupil left in you. You grated on my nerves as I did on yours. Of course I could not help striking you as an arrogant Waldzeller without any basis for his arrogance who was bent on keeping his distance from a non-Castalian and amateur at the Game. And to me you were a kind of barbarian, semicultured, who seemed to be making bothersome and groundless claims upon my interest and my friendship. We fended each other off; we came close to hating each other. There was nothing we could do but part, because neither of us had anything to give the other and neither of us could be fair to the other.

“But today, Plinio, we have been able to revive that shamefully buried memory and we may laugh at that scene and at the pair of us, because today we have come together as different men and with quite different intentions and potentialities—without sentimentality, without repressed feelings of jealousy and hatred, without conceit. Both of us grew up long ago; both of us are men now.”

Designori smiled with relief. But still he asked: “Are we so sure of that? After all, we had good will enough even then.”

“I should think we had,” Knecht said, laughing. “And with all our good will we drove and strained ourselves until we couldn't bear it any longer. At that time we disliked each other instinctively. To each of us the other was unfamiliar, disturbing, alien, and repugnant, and only an imaginary sense of obligation, of belonging together, forced us to play out that tedious farce for a whole evening. I realized that soon after your visit. Neither of us had properly outgrown either our former friendship or our former opposition. Instead of letting that relationship die we thought we had to exhume it and somehow continue it. We felt indebted to it and had no idea how to pay the debt. Isn't that so?”

“I think,” Plinio said thoughtfully, “that even today you are still being somewhat overpolite. You say ‘we both,' but in fact it was not the two of us who were seeking and unable to find each other. The seeking, the love, was all on my side, and so the disappointment and suffering also. And now I ask you: What has changed in your life since that meeting? Nothing. In my case, on the other hand, it was a deep and painful dividing line, and I cannot accept your laughing way of dismissing it.”

“Forgive me,” Knecht amiably apologized. “I have probably rushed matters. But I hope that in time you too will be able to laugh at that incident. Of course you were wounded then, though not by me, as you thought and still seem to think. You were wounded by the gulf between yourself and Castalia, by the chasm between your world and mine which we seemed to have bridged in the course of our schoolboy friendship but which suddenly yawned before us so fearfully wide and deep. Insofar as you blame me personally, I beg you to state your accusation frankly.”

“Oh, it was never an accusation. But it was a plaint. You didn't hear it at the time, and it seems you don't want to hear it even now. At the time you answered it with a smile and a show of good manners, and you're doing the same thing again.”

Although he sensed the friendship and profound good will in the Magister's eyes, he was impelled to stress this point; it was necessary for this burden he had borne for so long to be at last thrown off.

Knecht's expression did not change. After a moment's reflection he said cautiously: “Only now am I beginning to understand you, friend. Perhaps you are right and we must discuss this too. Still, may I remind you that you could legitimately have expected me to enter into what you call your plaint only if you had really expressed it. But the fact was that during that evening's conversation in the guest house you expressed no plaints whatsoever. Instead you put as brisk and brave a face as possible on the whole thing, just as I did. Like me, you acted the fearless warrior who has no grievances. But secretly you expected, as you now tell me, for me to hear the hidden plaint somehow and to recognize your true face behind your mask. Well, I fancy I did notice something of the sort at the time, though far from everything. But how was I to suggest to you that I was worried about you, that I pitied you, without offending your pride? And what would have been the good of my extending my hand, since my hand was empty and I had nothing to give you, no advice, no comfort, no friendship, because our ways had parted so completely? As a matter of fact, at the time the hidden uneasiness and unhappiness that you concealed behind a brash manner annoyed me; to be frank, I found it repugnant. It contained a claim on my sympathy which was contradicted by your manner. I felt there was something importunate and childish about it, and it made my feelings chill toward you all the more. You were making claims on my comradeship. You wanted to be a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; and at the same time you seemed so uncontrolled, so odd, so lost in egotistic emotions. That was the tenor of my opinion at the time, for I could see clearly that virtually nothing was left of the Castalian spirit in you. You had apparently forgotten even the elementary rules. Very well, that wasn't my affair. But then why were you coming to Waldzell and wanting to hail us as your fellows? As I've said, I found that annoying and repugnant, and at the time you were absolutely right if you interpreted my assiduous politeness as rejection. I did instinctively reject you, and not because you were a worldly person, but because you were asserting a claim to be regarded as a Castalian. But when you recently reappeared after so many years, there was no longer any trace of that. You looked worldly and talked like a man from outside. I noticed the difference especially in the expression of sadness, grief or unhappiness on your face. But I liked everything about you, your bearing, your words, even your sadness. They were beautiful, suited you, worthy of you. None of that bothered me; I could accept you and affirm it all without the slightest inner resistance. This time no excessive politeness and good manners were necessary, and so I promptly met you as a friend and tried to show you my affection and concern. But this time the situation was reversed; this time it was I who tried to win you while you held back. My only encouragement was that I tacitly understood your appearance in our Province and your interest in our affairs as a sign of attachment and loyalty. So then, finally you responded to my wooing, and we have now come to the point of opening our hearts to each other and in this way, I hope, being able to renew our old friendship.