By and by the story went the rounds that the Magister on his sickbed had begged his deputy and two seniors of the elite to keep the peace and not endanger the festival. The next day it was asserted that he had dictated his will and had named the man he desired for his successor. Moreover, names were whispered. These and other rumors circulated along with news of the Magister’s steadily worsening condition, and from day to day spirits sagged in the festival hall as well as in the guest houses, although no one went so far as to abandon the festival and depart. Gloom hung over the entire performance all the while that it proceeded outwardly with formal propriety. Certainly there was little of that delight and uplift that everyone familiar with the annual festival expected; and when on the day before the end of the game Magister Thomas, the author of the festival Game, closed his eyes forever, not even the efforts of the authorities could prevent the news from spreading. Curiously, a good many participants felt relieved and liberated by this outcome. The Game students, and the elite in particular, were not permitted to don mourning before the end of the
Joseph Knecht had been kept in close contact with the elite by his friend Tegularius. As an old player, moreover, he was fully sensitive to all these currents and moods. But he did not allow them to affect him. From the fourth or fifth day on he actually forbade Fritz to bother him with news about the Magister’s illness. He felt, and quite well understood, the tragic cloud that hung over the festival; he thought of the Master with sorrow and deep concern, and of the Shadow Bertram — condemned as it were to sharing the Magister’s death — with growing disquiet and compassion. But he sternly resisted being influenced by any authentic or mythical account, practiced the strictest concentration, surrendered gladly to the exercises and the course of the beautifully structured game, and in spite of all the discords and dark clouds his experience of the festival was one of grave exaltation.
At the end of the festival Bertram was spared the additional burden of having to receive congratulants and the Board in his capacity of vice-Magister. The traditional celebration for students of the Glass Bead Game was also cancelled. Immediately after the final musical performance of the festival, the Board announced the Magister’s death, and the prescribed days of mourning began in the Vicus Lusorum. Joseph Knecht, still residing in the guest house, participated in the rites. The funeral of this fine man, whose memory is still held in high esteem, was celebrated with Castalia’s customary simplicity. His Shadow, Bertram, who had summoned up his last reserves of strength in order to play his part to the end during the festival, understood his situation. He asked for a leave and went on a walking trip in the mountains.
There was mourning throughout the Game village, and indeed everywhere in Waldzell. Possibly no one had enjoyed intimate, strikingly friendly relations with the deceased Magister; but the superiority and flawlessness of his aristocratic nature, together with his intelligence and his finely developed feeling for form, had made of him a regent and representative such as Castalia with its fundamentally democratic temper did not often produce. The Castalians had been proud of him. If he had seemed to hold himself aloof from the realms of passion, love, and friendship, that made him all the more the object for youth’s craving to venerate. This dignity and sovereign gracefulness — which incidentally had earned him the half-affectionate nickname “His Excellency” — had in the course of years, despite strong opposition, won him a special position in the Supreme Council of the Order and in the sessions and work of the Board of Educators.
