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
