Now and again Joseph Knecht had stood, a silent but attentive listener, on the edges of small groups of students whose center was Designori. Plinio usually did most of the talking. With curiosity, astonishment, and alarm Joseph had heard Plinio excoriating all authority, everything that was held sacred in Castalia. He heard everything questioned, everything he believed in exposed as dubious or ridiculous. Joseph soon noted that many in the audience did not take these speeches seriously; some, it was clear, listened only for the fun of it, as people listen to a barker at a fair. Frequently, too, he heard some of the boys answer Plinio’s charges sarcastically or seriously. Still there were always several schoolmates gathered around this boy Plinio; he was always the center of attention, and whether or not there happened to be an opponent in the group, he always exerted an attraction so strong that it was akin to seduction.
Joseph himself was as much stirred as those others who gathered around the lively orator and listened to his tirades with astonishment or laughter. In spite of the trepidation and even fear that he felt during such speeches, Joseph was aware of their sinister attraction for him. He was drawn to them not just because they were amusing. On the contrary, they seemed to concern him directly and seriously. Not that he would inwardly have agreed with the audacious orator, but there were doubts whose very existence or possibility you had only to know about and you instantly began to suffer them. At the beginning it was not any serious suffering; it was merely a matter of being slightly disturbed, uneasy — a feeling compounded of powerful urge and guilty conscience.
The time had to come, and it came, when Designori noticed that among his listeners was one to whom his words meant more than rousing entertainment and the fun of argument: a fair-haired boy who looked handsome and finely wrought, but rather shy, and who blushed and gave terse, embarrassed replies when Plinio said a friendly word to him. Evidently this boy had been trailing after him for some time, Plinio thought, and decided to reward him with a friendly gesture and win him over completely by inviting him to his room that afternoon. To Plinio’s surprise the boy held off, would not linger to talk with him, and declined the invitation. Provoked, the older boy began courting the reticent Joseph. Possibly he did so at first only out of vanity, but later he went about it in all seriousness, for he sensed an antagonist who would be perhaps a future friend, perhaps the opposite. Again and again he saw Joseph hanging around near him, and noted the intensity with which Joseph listened, but the shy boy would always retreat as soon as he tried to approach him.
There were reasons behind this conduct. Joseph had long since come to feel that this other boy would mean something important to him, perhaps something fine, an enlargement of his horizon, insight or illumination, perhaps also temptation and danger. Whatever it was, this was a test he had to pass. He had told his friend Ferromonte about the first stirrings of skepticism and restlessness that Plinio’s talks had aroused in him, but his friend had paid little attention; he dismissed Plinio as a conceited and self-important fellow not worth listening to, and promptly buried himself in his music again. Instinct warned Joseph that the headmaster was the proper authority to whom to bring his doubts and queries; but since that little clash he no longer had a cordial and candid relationship with Zbinden. He was afraid the headmaster might regard his coming to him with this question as a kind of talebearing.
In this dilemma, which grew increasingly painful because of Plinio’s efforts to strike up a friendship, he turned to his patron and guardian angel, the Music Master, and wrote him a very long letter which has been preserved. In part, it read:
“I am not yet certain whether Plinio hopes to win me over to his way of thinking, or whether he merely wants someone to discuss these matters with. I hope it is the latter, for to convert me to his views would mean leading me into disloyalty and destroying my life, which after all is rooted in Castalia. I have no parents and friends on the outside to whom I could return if I should ever really desire to. But even if Plinio’s sacrilegious speeches are not aimed at conversion and influencing, they leave me at a loss. For to be perfectly frank with you, dear Master, there is something in Plinio’s point of view that I cannot gainsay; he appeals to a voice within me which sometimes strongly seconds what he says. Presumably it is the voice of nature, and it runs utterly counter to my education and the outlook customary among us. When Plinio calls our teachers and Masters a priestly caste and us a pack of spoon-fed eunuchs, he is of course using coarse and exaggerated language, but there may well be some truth to what he says, for otherwise I would hardly be so upset by it. Plinio can say the most startling and discouraging things. For example, he contends that the Glass Bead Game is a retrogression to the Age of the Feuilleton, sheer irresponsible playing around with an alphabet into which we have broken down the languages of the different arts and sciences. It’s nothing but associations and toying with analogies, he says. Or again he declares that our resigned sterility proves the worthlessness of our whole culture and our intellectual attitudes. We analyze the laws and techniques of all the styles and periods of music, he points out, but produce no new music ourselves. We read and exposit Pindar or Goethe and are ashamed to create verse ourselves. Those are accusations I cannot laugh at. And they are not the worst; they are not the ones that wound me most. It is bad enough when he says, for example, that we Castalians lead the life of artifically reared songbirds, do not earn our bread ourselves, never face necessity and the struggle for existence, neither know or wish to know anything about that portion of humanity whose labor and poverty provide the base for our lives of luxury.”
The letter concluded: “Perhaps I have abused your friendliness and kindness, Reverendissime, and I am prepared to be reproved. Scold me, impose penances on me — I shall be grateful for them. But I am in dire need of advice. I can sustain the present situation for a little while longer. But I cannot shape it into any real and fruitful development, for I am too weak and inexperienced. Moreover, and perhaps this is the worst of all, I cannot confide in our headmaster unless you explicitly command me to do so. That is why I have troubled you with this affair, which is becoming a source of great distress to me.”
It would be of the greatest value to us if we also possessed the Master’s reply to this cry for help in black and white. But the reply was given orally. Shortly after Knecht wrote, the Magister Musicae himself arrived in Waldzell to direct an examination in music, and during the days he spent there he devoted considerable time to his young friend. We know of this from Knecht’s later recollections. The Music Master did not make things easy for him. He began by looking closely into Knecht’s grades and into the matter of his private studies as well. The latter, he decided, were much too one-sided; in this regard the headmaster had been right, and he insisted that Knecht admit as much to the headmaster. He gave precise directives for Knecht’s conduct toward Designori, and did not leave until this question, too, had been discussed with Headmaster Zbinden. The outcome was twofold: that remarkable joust between Designori and Knecht, which none who looked on would ever forget; and an entirely new relationship between Knecht and the headmaster. Not that this relationship ever partook of the affection and mystery that linked Knecht to the Music Master, but at least it was lucid and relaxed.