“Then you have taken the substance of the reply to heart, esteemed Master?”
“Taken note of it, and I should say that at bottom I have also understood it and approved it. I suppose the reply could not have been anything but a rejection of my petition, together with a gentle reprimand. My circular letter was something untoward, and altogether inconvenient to the Board — I never for a moment doubted that. Moreover, insofar as it contained a personal petition, it probably was not couched in a suitable way. I could scarcely expect anything but a negative reply.”
“We are pleased,” the President of the Order said with a hint of acerbity, “that you regard it in this light and that our letter therefore could not have surprised you in any painful way. We are very pleased by that. But I still do not understand. If in writing your letter you already — I do understand you aright, don’t I? — did not believe in its success, did not expect an affirmative answer, and in fact were convinced in advance that it would fail, why did you persist with it and go to the farther trouble — the whole thing must have involved considerable effort — of making a clean copy and sending it out?”
Knecht gave him an amiable look as he replied: “Your Excellency, my letter had two purposes, and I do not think that both were entirely fruitless. It contained a personal request that I be relieved of my post and employed at some other place. I could regard this personal request as relatively subsidiary, for every Magister ought to regard his personal affairs as secondary, insofar as that is possible. The petition was rejected; I had to make the best of that. But my circular letter also contained something quite different from that request, namely a considerable number of facts and ideas which I thought it my duty to call to the attention of the Board and to ask you all to weigh carefully. All the Masters, or at any rate the majority of them, have read my exposition — let us not say my warnings — and although most of them were loath to ingest them and reacted with a good deal of annoyance, they have at any rate read and registered what I believed it essential to say. The fact that they did not applaud the letter is, to my mind, no failure. I was not seeking applause and assent; I intended rather to stir uneasiness, to shake them up. I would greatly regret if I had desisted from sending my letter on the grounds you mention. Whether it has had much or little effect, it was at least a cry of alarm, a summons.”
“Certainly,” the President said hesitantly. “But that explanation does not solve the riddle for me. If you wished your admonitions, warnings, cries of alarm to reach the Board, why did you weaken or at least diminish the effectiveness of your golden words by linking them with a private request, moreover a request which you yourself did not seriously believe would be or could be granted? For the present I don’t understand that. But I suppose the matter will be clarified if we talk it over. In any case, there is the weak point in your circular letter: your connecting the cry of alarm with the petition. I should think that you surely had no need to use the petition as a vehicle for your sermon. You could easily have reached your colleagues orally or in writing if you thought they had to be alerted to certain dangers. And then the petition would have proceeded along its own way through official channels.”
Knecht continued to look at him with the utmost friendliness. “Yes,” he said lightly, “it may be that you are right. Still — consider the complications of the matter once more. Neither the admonition nor the sermon was anything commonplace, ordinary, or normal. Rather, both belonged together in being unusual and in having arisen out of necessity and a break with convention. It is not usual and normal for anyone, without some urgent provocation from outside, to suddenly implore his colleagues to remember their mortality and the dubiousness of their entire lives. Nor is it usual and commonplace for a Castalian Magister to apply for a post as schoolteacher outside the Province. To that extent the two separate messages of my letter do belong together quite well. As I see it, a reader who had really taken the entire letter seriously would have had to conclude that this was no matter of an eccentric’s announcing his premonitions and trying to preach to his colleagues, but rather that this man was in deadly earnest about his ideas and his distress, that he was ready to throw up his office, his dignity, his past, and begin from the beginning in the most modest of places; that he was weary of dignity, peace, honor, and authority and desired to be rid of them, to throw them away. From this conclusion — I am still trying to put myself into the mind of the readers of my letter — two corollaries would have been possible, so it seems to me: the writer of this sermon is unfortunately slightly cracked; or else the writer of this troublesome sermon is obviously not cracked, but normal and sane, which means there must be more than whim and eccentricity behind his pessimistic preachments. And that ‘more’ must then be a reality, a truth. I had imagined some such process in the minds of my readers, and I must admit that I miscalculated. My petition and my admonition did not support and reinforce each other. Instead, they were both not taken seriously and were laid aside. I am neither greatly saddened nor really surprised by this rejection, for at bottom, I must repeat, I did expect it to turn out that way. And I must also admit that I desired it so. For my petition, which I assumed would fail, was a kind of feint, a gesture, a formula.”
Master Alexander’s expression had become even graver and overcast with gloom. But he did not interrupt the Magister.
“The case was not,” Knecht continued, “that in dispatching my petition I seriously hoped for a favorable reply and looked forward joyfully to receiving it; but it is also not the case that I was prepared to accept obediently a negative answer as an unalterable decision from above.”
"… not prepared to accept obediently a negative answer as an unalterable decision from above — have I heard you aright, Magister?” the President broke in, emphasizing every word. Evidently he had only at this point realized the full gravity of the situation.
Knecht bowed slightly. “Certainly you have heard aright. The fact was that I could scarcely believe my petition had much prospect of success, but I thought I had to make it to satisfy the requirements of decorum. By doing so I was, so to speak, providing the esteemed Board with an opportunity to settle the matter in a relatively harmless way. But if it eschewed such a solution, I was in any case resolved neither to be put off nor soothed, but to act.”
“And to act how?” Alexander asked in a low voice.
“As my heart and my reason command. I was determined to resign my office and take on work outside Castalia even without an assignment or leave from the Board.”
The Head of the Order closed his eyes and seemed to be no longer listening. Knecht saw that he was performing that emergency exercise used by members of the Order in moments of sudden danger to regain self-control and inner calm; it consisted in twice emptying the lungs and holding the breath for long moments. As Knecht watched, Alexander’s face paled slightly, then regained color as he inhaled slowly, beginning with the muscles of the stomach. Knecht was sorry to be inflicting psychic distress on a man whom he so highly esteemed, indeed loved. He saw Alexander’s eyes open with a staring, abstracted look, then focus and grow keener. With a faint sense of alarm he saw those clear, controlled, disciplined eyes, the eyes of a man equally great in obeying and commanding, fixed upon him now, regarding him with cool composure, probing him, judging him. He withstood that gaze in silence for what seemed long minutes.