Meanwhile, day after day high officials and directors of the Order and of the Board of Educators appeared in the Game village. Members of the elite and of the civil service were summoned for questioning. Now and then some of the matters discussed leaked out, but only within the elite itself. Joseph Knecht, too, was summoned and queried, once by two directors of the Order, once by the philological Magister, then by Monsieur Dubois, and again by two Magisters. Tegularius, who was also called in for several such consultations, was pleasantly excited and joked about this conclave atmosphere, as he called it. Joseph had already noticed during the festival how little of his former intimacy with the elite had remained, and during the period of the conclave he was made more painfully aware of it. It was not only that he lived in the guest house like a visitor, and that the superiors seemed to deal with him as an equal. The members of the elite themselves, the tutors as a body, no longer received him in a comradely fashion. They displayed a mocking politeness toward him, or at best a temporizing coolness. They had already begun to drift away from him when he received his appointment to Mariafels, and that was only right and natural. Once a man had taken the step from freedom to service, from the life of student or tutor to member of the hierarchy, he was no longer a comrade, but on the way to becoming a superior or boss. He no longer belonged to the elite, and he had to realize that for the time being they would assume a critical attitude toward him. That happened to everyone in his position. The difference was that he felt the aloofness and coolness with particular intensity at this time, partly because the elite, orphaned as it now was and about to receive a new Magister, defensively closed its ranks; partly because it had just so harshly demonstrated its ruthlessness in the case of the Shadow, Bertram.
One evening Tegularius came running to the guest house in a state of extreme excitement. He found Joseph, 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,
