Naturally, the question of his successor was hotly discussed, and nowhere so intensely as among the elite of the Glass Bead Game players. After the departure of the Shadow, whose overthrow these players had sought and achieved, the functions of the Magister’s office were temporarily distributed by vote of the elite itself among three temporary deputies — only the internal functions in the Vicus Lusorum, of course, not the official work in the Board of Educators. In keeping with tradition, the Board would not permit the Magistracy to remain vacant more than three weeks. In cases in which a dying or departing Magister left a clear, uncontested successor, the office was in fact filled immediately, after only a single plenary session of the Board. This time the process would probably take rather longer.
During the period of mourning, Joseph Knecht occasionally talked with his friend about the festival game and its singularly troubled course.
“This deputy, Bertram,” Knecht said, “not only played his part tolerably well right up to the end — that is, tried to fill the role of a real Magister — but in my opinion did far more than that. He sacrificed himself to this
Tegularius shook his head. “We did understand it,” he said, “and have accepted it. You were fortunate in being able to participate in the Game as a guest; as such you probably did not follow the course of events so very closely. No, Joseph, we will not have any opportunity to act on whatever feelings for Bertram we may have. He knows that his sacrifice was necessary and will not attempt to undo it.”
Only now did Knecht fully understand him. He fell into a troubled silence. Now he realized that he had not experienced these festival days as a real Waldzeller and a comrade of the others, but in truth much more like a guest; and only now did he grasp the nature of Bertram’s sacrifice. Hitherto Bertram had seemed to him an ambitious man who had been undone by a task beyond his powers and who henceforth must renounce further ambitious goals and try to forget that he had once been a Master’s Shadow and the leader of an annual Game. Only now, hearing his friend’s last words, had he understood — with shock — that Bertram had been fully condemned by his judges and would not return. They had allowed him to conduct the festival Game to its conclusion, and had co-operated just enough so that it would go off without a public scandal; but they had done so only to spare Waldzell, not Bertram.
The fact was that the position of Shadow demanded more than the Magister’s full confidence — Bertram had not lacked that. It depended to an equal degree on the confidence of the elite, and the unfortunate man had been unable to retain it. If he blundered, the hierarchy did not stand behind him to protect him, as it did behind his Master and model. And without the backing of such authority, he was at the mercy of his former comrades, the tutors. If they did not respect him, they became his judges. If they were unyielding, the Shadow was finished. Sure enough, Bertram did not return from his outing in the mountains, and after a while the story went round that he had fallen to his death from a cliff. The matter was discussed no further.
