Father Jacobus: “You are great scholars and aesthetes, you Castalians. You measure the weight of the vowels in an old poem and relate the resulting formula to that of a planet’s orbit. That is delightful, but it is a game. And indeed your supreme mystery and symbol, the Glass Bead Game, is also a game. I grant that you try to exalt this pretty game into something akin to a sacrament, or at least to a device for edification. But sacraments do not spring from such endeavors. The game remains a game.”
Joseph: “You mean, reverend Father, that we lack the foundation of theology?”
Father Jacobus: “Come now, of theology we will not speak. You are much too far from that. You could at least do with a few simpler foundations, with a science of man, for example, a real doctrine and real knowledge about the human race. You do not know man, do not understand him in his bestiality and as the image of God. All you know is the Castalian, a special product, a caste, a rare experiment in breeding.”
For Knecht, of course, it was an extraordinary piece of good fortune that these hours of instruction and discourse provided him with the widest field and the most favorable opportunities to carry out his assignment of gaining Father Jacobus’s approval of Castalia and convincing him of the value of an alliance. The situation in fact was so favorable to his purposes that he soon began to feel twinges of conscience. He came to think it shameful and unworthy when they sat together, or strolled back and forth in the cloisters, that the reverend man should be so trustfully sacrificing his time, when he was all the while the object of secret political designs. Knecht could not have accepted this situation in silence for long, and he was already considering just how to make his disclosure when, to his surprise, the old man anticipated him.
“My dear friend,” he said to him with seeming off-handedness one day, “we have really found our way to a most pleasant and, I would hope, also a fruitful kind of exchange. The two activities that have been my favorites throughout my life, learning and teaching, have fused into a fine new combination during our joint working sessions, and for me that has come at just the right time, for I am beginning to age and cannot imagine any better cure and refreshment than our lessons. As far as I am concerned, therefore, I am the one who gains from our exchange. On the other hand, I am not so sure, my friend, that you and particularly those whose envoy you are and whom you serve will have profited from the business as much as they may hope. I should like to avert any future disappointment and would be sorry to have any unclear relationship arise between us. Therefore permit an old hand a question. I have of course had occasion to think about the reason for your sojourn in our little abbey, pleasant as it is for me. Until recently, that is up to the time of your vacation, it seemed to me that the purpose of your presence among us was not completely clear even to yourself. Was my observation correct?”
“It was.”
“Good. Since your return from that vacation, this has changed. You are no longer puzzling or anxious about the reason for your presence here. You know why you are here. Am I right? — Good, then I have not guessed wrong. Presumably I am also not guessing wrong in my notion of the reason. You have a diplomatic assignment, and it concerns neither our monastery nor our Abbot, but me. As you see, not very much is left of your secret. To clarify the situation completely, I shall take the final step and ask you to inform me fully about the rest of it. What is your assignment?”
Knecht had sprung to his feet and stood facing Fattier Jacobus, surprised, embarrassed, feeling something close to dismay. “You are right,” he cried, “but at the same time that you relieve me of a burden, you also shame me by speaking first. I have long been considering how I could manage to give our relationship the clarity you have established so rapidly. The one saving thing is that my request for instruction and our agreement fell in the period before my vacation. Otherwise it truly would have seemed as if the whole thing had been diplomacy on my part, and our studies merely a pretext.”
The old man spoke with friendly reassurance: “I merely wanted to help both of us move forward a step. There is no need for you to aver the purity of your motives. If I have anticipated you and helped speed the coming of something that also seems desirable to you, all is well.”
