Now Plinio once more seemed a totally different person. Above all he seemed to have wholly laid aside or lost his youthful gaiety, his delight in communication, argument, talk, his active, winning, extroverted character. His diffidence on meeting his former friend, his slowness to greet Knecht, and his qualms at taking up the Magister’s request to address him with their oldtime intimacy, were signs of a change evident also in his bearing, his look, his manner of speech and movements. In place of his former boldness, frankness, and exuberance there was now constraint. He was subdued, reticent, withdrawn; perhaps it was stiffness, perhaps only fatigue. His youthful charm had been submerged and extinguished in it, but the traits of superficiality and blatant worldliness had also vanished. The whole man, but especially his face, seemed marked, partly ravaged, partly ennobled by the expression of suffering.
While the Glass Bead Game Master followed the proceedings, he dwelt with part of his mind on this change, wondering what kind of suffering had overwhelmed this lively, handsome, life-loving man, and set such a mark on him. It seemed to Knecht an alien suffering, of a kind he had never known, and the more he pondered and probed, the more he felt sympathetically drawn to this suffering man. Mingled with this sympathy and affection was a faint feeling as if he were somehow to blame for his friend’s sorrow, as if he must in some way make amends.
After considering and rejecting a variety of suppositions about Plinio’s sadness, it occurred to him that the suffering in the man’s face was most uncommon. It was, rather, a noble, perhaps a tragic suffering, and its mode of expression was also of a type unknown in Castalia. Knecht recalled having sometimes seen a similar expression on the faces of people who lived in the world, although he had never seen it in so pronounced and fascinating a form. He realized that he knew it also from portraits of men of the past, portraits of scholars or artists in which a touching, half morbid, half fated sorrow, solitariness, and helplessness could be read. To the Magister, with his artist’s fine sensitivity to the secrets of expressions and his educator’s perception of the various shades of character, there were certain physiognomic signs which he instinctively went by, without ever having reduced them to a system. So, for example, he could recognize a peculiarly Castalian and a peculiarly worldly way of laughing, smiling, showing merriment, and likewise a peculiarly worldly type of suffering or sadness. He now detected this worldly sadness in Designori’s face, expressed there with the greatest purity and intensity, as though this face were meant to be representative of many, to epitomize the secret sufferings and morbidity of a multitude.
He was disturbed and moved by this face. It seemed to him highly significant that the world should have sent his lost friend here, so that Plinio and Joseph might truly and validly represent respectively the world and the Order, just as they had once done in their schoolboy debates. But it struck him as even more important and symbolic that in this lonely countenance, overlaid by sorrow, the world had dispatched to Castalia not its laughter, its joy in living, its pleasure in power, its crudeness, but rather its distress, its suffering. That Designori seemed rather to avoid than to seek him, that he responded so slowly and with such resistance, gave Knecht much food for thought. It also pleased him, for he had no doubt that he would nonetheless be able to win Plinio over. To be sure, his former schoolmate, thanks to his education in Castalia, was not one of those unyielding, sulky, or downright hostile commission members, such as Knecht had dealt with more than once. On the contrary, he was an admirer of the Order and a patron of the Province, which was indebted to him for many a service in the past. He had, however, given up the Glass Bead Game many years before.
We are in no position to report in detail how the Magister gradually regained his friend’s trust. Those of us who are familiar with the Master’s serenity and affectionate courtesy may imagine the process in our own way. Knecht steadily continued to court Plinio, and who in the long run could have resisted the Magister when he was seriously concerned to win someone’s heart?
