drew him into an empty room, closed the door behind him, and burst out: “Joseph, Joseph! My God, I should have guessed it, I ought to have known, it was likely enough… Oh, I’m altogether beside myself and truly don’t know whether I ought to be glad.” And he, who was privy to all the sources of information in the Game village, babbled on: it was more than probable, already virtually certain, that Joseph Knecht would be elected Master of the Glass Bead Game. The director of the Archives, whom many had regarded as Master Thomas’s predestined successor, had obviously been eliminated from the sifted group of prospects the day before yesterday. Of the three candidates from the elite whose names had hitherto headed the lists during the inquiries, none, apparently, enjoyed the special favor and recommendation of a Magister or of the directors of the Order. On the other hand, two directors of the Order as well as Monsieur Dubois were supporting Knecht. In addition to that, there was the weighty vote of the former Music Master, who to the certain knowledge of several persons had been consulted by several Masters.
“Joseph, they’re going to make you Magister!” Fritz exclaimed once more. Whereupon his friend placed his hand over his mouth. For a moment Joseph had been no less surprised and stirred by the possibility than Fritz, and it had seemed to him altogether impossible. But even while Tegularius was reporting the various opinions circulating in the Game village about the status and course of the “conclave,” Knecht began to realize that his friend’s guess was not likely to be wrong. Rather, in his heart he felt something akin to assent, a sense that he had known and expected this all along, that it was right and natural. And so he placed his hand on his excited friend’s mouth, gave him an aloof, reproving look, as if he had suddenly been removed to a great distance, and said: “Don’t talk so much,
Tegularius, though he had meant to say a great deal more, fell silent at once. He turned pale under the gaze of this utter stranger, and went out. Later he remarked that at first he had felt Knecht’s remarkable calm and iciness at this moment as if it were a blow and an insult, a slap in the face and a betrayal of their old friendship and intimacy, an almost incomprehensible overstressing and anticipation of his impending position as supreme head of the Glass Bead Game. Only as he was leaving — and he actually went out like a man who had been slapped — did the meaning of that unforgettable look dawn on him, that remote, royal, but likewise suffering look, and he realized that his friend was not proud of what had fallen to his lot, but that he was accepting it in humility. He had been reminded, he said, of Joseph Knecht’s thoughtful expression and the note of deep compassion in his voice when, recently, he had inquired about Bertram and his sacrifice. It was as if he himself were now on the point of sacrificing and extinguishing himself like the Shadow. His expression had been at once proud and humble, exalted and submissive, lonely and resigned; it was as if Joseph Knecht’s face had become an effigy of all the Masters of Castalia who had ever been. “Go to your comrades,” he had said. Thus, in the very second he first heard of his new dignity, this incomprehensible man had fitted himself into it and saw the world from a new center, was no longer a comrade, would never be one again.
Knecht might easily have guessed that this last and highest of his calls, the appointment as Magister Ludi, was coming, or at least he might have seen it as possible, or even probable. But this time, too, his promotion startled him. He might have guessed it, he afterward told himself, and he smiled at his zealous friend Tegularius, who to be sure had not expected the appointment from the start, but all the same had calculated and predicted it several days before the decision and announcement. There were in fact no objections to Joseph’s election to the highest Board except perhaps his youth; most of his predecessors had entered on their high office at the age of forty-five to fifty, whereas Joseph was still barely forty. But there was no law against any such early appointment
Now, when Fritz surprised his friend with the results of his surmises and observations, the observations of an experienced elite player who knew down to its smallest detail the complex apparatus of the small Waldzell community, Knecht had immediately realized that Fritz was right; he had instantly grasped the fact of his election and accepted his fate. But his first reaction to the news had been that rejection of his friend, the refusal to “hear this gossip.” As soon as Fritz had left, stunned and very nearly insulted, Joseph went to a meditation room to order his thoughts. His meditation started from a memory that had assailed him with unusual force. In his vision he saw a bare room and a piano. Through the room fell the cool, blithe light of forenoon, and at the door of the room appeared a handsome, friendly man, an elderly man with graying hair and a lucid face full of kindness and dignity. Joseph himself was a small Latin school pupil who had waited in the room for the Music Master, partly frightened, partly overjoyed, and who now saw the venerated figure for the first time, the Master from the legendary Province of elite schools, and the Magister who had come to show him what music was, who then led him step by step into his Province, his realm, into the elite and the Order, and whose colleague and brother he had now become, while the old man had laid aside his magic wand, or his scepter, and had been transformed into an amiably taciturn, still kindly, still revered, but still mysterious elder whose look and example hovered over Joseph’s life and who would always be a generation and several stages of life ahead of him, as well as immeasurably greater in dignity and also modesty, in mastership and in mystery, but would always remain his patron and model, gently compelling him to walk in his steps, as a rising and setting planet draws its brothers after it.
As long as Knecht permitted the flow of inner images to come without direction, as they do, like dreams, in the initial stage of relaxation, there were two principal scenes which emerged from the stream and lingered, two pictures or symbols, two parables. In the first Knecht, as a boy, followed the Master along a variety of ways. The Music Master strode before him as his guide, and each time he turned around and showed his face he looked older, more tranquil and venerable, visibly approaching an ideal of timeless wisdom and dignity, while he, Joseph Knecht, devotedly and obediently walked along after his exemplar, but all the time remaining the selfsame boy, at which he alternately felt at one moment shame, at another a certain rejoicing, if not something close to defiant satisfaction. And the second picture was this: the scene in the piano room, the old man’s entering where the boy waited, was repeated again and again, an infinite number of times; the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honor and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth. With shifting sensations he alternately slowed the pace and speeded it to a frantic rush. Out of this process there evolved a new conception, more akin to a symbol than a dream, more insight than image: the conception or rather the insight that this meaningful and meaningless cycle of master and pupil, this courtship of wisdom by youth, of youth by wisdom, this endless, oscillating game was the symbol of Castalia. In fact it was the game of life in general, divided into old and young, day and night, yang and yin, and pouring on without end. Having arrived at this in his meditation, Joseph Knecht found his way from a world of images to tranquility, and after long absorption returned strengthened and serenely cheerful.
When a few days later the directors of the Order summoned him, he went confidently. He received the fraternal greeting of the superiors, a brief clasping of hands and suggestion of an embrace, with composure and grave serenity. He was informed of his appointment as Magister Ludi, and commanded to appear at the festival hall on the day after the morrow for the investiture and swearing-in. This was the same hall in which, so short a while ago, the deceased Master’s deputy had completed the dismal ceremonies as if he were a sacrificial beast decked out with gold. The day before the investiture was to be devoted to a careful study, accompanied by ritual meditations, of the formula of the oath and the “breviary for the Magister” under the guidance and supervision of two superiors. This time they were the Chancellor of the Order and the Magister Mathematicae, and during the noon rest of this very strenuous day Joseph vividly recalled his admission to the Order and how the Music Master had talked with him beforehand. This time, to be sure, the rite of admission did not lead him, as it yearly did hundreds of others, through a wide gate into a large community. Rather, he was passing through the eye of the needle into the highest and narrowest circle, that of the Masters. Later he confessed to the former Music Master that on that day of intensive self-examination one thought had given him trouble, one altogether ridiculous notion. He had, he said, feared the moment in which one of the Masters would point out to him how unusually young he was to be receiving the highest dignity. He had seriously had to fight this fear, this childishly vain thought, and to fight as well the impulse to answer, if there should be some allusion to his age: “Why not then wait until I am older? I have never aspired to this elevation, you know.” But further self-examination showed him that unconsciously the thought of his appointment, and the desire for it, could not after all have been so far from his
