The Masters of Atlantis (2 page)

The sunny days passed, and the warm nights, and Lamar ran out of money. No word came from Robert or Pletho. Time to take stock. He was a Gnomon Initiate with a hidden Master, a book he couldn't read, some thirty-odd stitches in his lips and no robe. He did have his Poma. But when to wear it? He looked about town for work. Sydney said he might be in a position to make a personal loan against the
Codex Pappus
. Lamar said it would hardly be fitting to mortgage the Codex.

The only job he could find was one cleaning boots and emptying chamber pots at the Gregale. There was no pay but he did get his meals and the use of a cot in the basement. The Gregale guests, mostly English poets and Greek honeymooners, were poor tippers. Now and then a poet would fling him a threepenny bit. The Greeks, when they left anything at all, left tiny brass coins in their broad shoes that could not be exchanged. But these Greeks—brides, grooms, chubby merchants—were quite generous in another way. They translated the
Codex Pappus
for Lamar, a page or two at a time. He allowed no single Greek to see much more of the book than that, being fearful lest the entire text be exposed to a Perfect Stranger.

The pages of handwritten English accumulated. At length the work was finished. Lamar bound the leaves together with a shoelace and began his study. He sat on the cot at night, wearing his Poma, and labored over the hard passages, reading a sentence over and over again in an effort to wrest some meaning from it, as he brushed away on the high-top yellow boots of the poets. In later years, in his introductory remarks to Gnomon aspirants, he was fond of saying, “Euclid told the first Ptolemy that there was no royal road to geometry, and I must tell you now, gentlemen, that the road to Gnomonism is plenty tough too.”

He committed the entire work to memory, all eightyeight pages of Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles and extended alchemical metaphors. He knew every cone and every triangle by heart, just as he knew the 13 Hermetical Precepts, and how to recognize the Three Secret Teachers, Nandor, Principato and the Lame One, should they make one of their rare appearances before him in disguise. Soon he began to wonder if he might not be an Adept. He became sure of it one afternoon when he overheard a remark in the street—”Don't worry about Rosenberg.” That is, he did not become sure of it at that moment, but only a little later, as the words continued to ring in his head and swell in volume. This, surely, was what he was waiting for. The sense of the message was obscure but there could be no doubt that the signal was genuine. This was Pletho's oblique way of communication.

As an Adept he now felt free to put the whole business before Sydney, with a view to bringing him into the brotherhood. Sydney had come to doubt the existence of the book from Atlantis and he could no longer receive Lamar, a boot-black, socially at Villa Hen, but the two young men still managed to see one another on occasion, behind the giant ferns at the Botanical Gardens or at one of the low waterfront cafés. So it was, at a sidewalk table of the Café Gregale, that Lamar told Sydney the full story of Robert, the
Codex
, Hermes, the Poma, the translation, the voice in the street.

Sydney heard him out, his skepticism giving way to excitement. He looked through the two booklets, one Greek, one English. He read Greek, though with difficulty, forming each word slowly with his mouth and on the bilabials blowing little transparent bubbles that quivered and popped. Then he turned in impatience to the English version and read hungrily. “This is marvelous stuff!” he said, in a fairly loud voice. “I can't make head or tail of it!” He had to speak up over the shouting and scuffling that was taking place in the street. It was some political disturbance that did not concern them. Sydney wanted to take the books home and study them at leisure, but Lamar said he could not, at this time, let them out of his hands. Trying to soften the refusal, he pointed out that the
Codex
was largely incomprehensible without the keys that Robert had revealed to him. These keys were never to be written. They could only be spoken, from one Gnomon to another.

Sydney became agitated and demanded to be given the keys and taken into the Society at once. Then he sighed and asked Lamar's pardon. He took Lamar's hand between his two hands and begged that allowance be made for his short termper. He had been a very naughty boy. The only thing now was for Lamar to move into Villa Hen, where he could live in that comfort and peace so necessary to the scholar, and give instructions in this great work in the proper way.

Lamar accepted the invitation and the next day he carried his bag up the hill to the villa. Fanny Hen, the crippled girl, was not around. He asked about her and Sydney said he had moved her into a boardinghouse down the way so that Lamar might have her room. But Lamar would not hear of this and the girl was soon restored to her room. Lamar slept in the library.

Fanny had made no very distinct impression on him before, apart from her kindness and her game leg. Now he began to notice other things about her. She was small and dark like her brother, but there the resemblance ended. Where Sydney was moody Fanny was sprightly, and where Fanny was open Sydney was sly. She had been an army nurse and her right knee was stiff from shrapnel wounds received in the final Flanders offensive of September 1918. She wore billowy shirts with striped neckties.

Sydney was an apt pupil, much quicker than himself, Lamar had to admit. He cut short his work at the Botanical Gardens and came home early each evening, flinging his black cape carelessly from his shoulders and quickly slipping into his red silk dressing gown, eager for another long session with Lamar in the locked library. He smoked black Turkish cigarettes and sipped Madeira. From time to time he rubbed his hands together. When he had grasped a Gnomonic point he would say, “Quite!” or “Quite so!” or “Just so!” or “Even so!” and urge Lamar to get on with it. The progress slowed somewhat when they came to the symbolic figures. Sydney found himself in a tangle with these cones and triangles. He often confused one with another and got the words slightly wrong.

During the day Lamar enjoyed the company of Fanny Hen. They discussed their war experiences. He expressed regret that he was not free to tell her, a woman, about Gnomonism, except in very general terms, but there it was, he was under certain vows. She said she understood and that, after all, women had their little secrets too. He told her about Gary, Indiana, carefully pointing out that his people had nothing to do with the steel mills. She talked about girlhood escapades at The Grange, Little-Fen-on-Sea, which was her home. They sat at the piano and sang “Beautiful Dreamer.” They went to the harbor and watched the boats and ate Italian sausages. She made light of her “silly knee” and apologized for being such a slow walker. Slow or fast, he said, he counted it a privilege to be at her side and would consider it a great honor if she would take his arm.

In little more than a month of intense study Sydney became an Initiate in the Gnomon Society. Within another month he was an Adept, and then, as a peer of Lamar's, he began to speak out on things. He suggested how the course of study might be organized along more efficient lines. The ritual of investiture could be improved too. A processional was needed, a long solemn one, and more figs and more candles, and some smoldering aromatic gums. Lamar agreed that such touches were appealing. The innovations seemed harmless enough and might even be useful, but how could two Adepts presume to do such things without direct authorization from Pletho Pappus or some other Master?

Then Sydney Hen uttered the thought that had been troubling Lamar for some weeks. It was a wild thought that he had often suppressed. “Can't you see it, man? You're already a Master! We're both Masters! You still don't see it? Robert was Pletho himself! Your Poma is the Cone of Fate! You and I are beginning the New Cycle of Gnomonism!”

So saying, Hen produced a Poma of his own, one he had had run up in red kid, and then like Napoleon crowned himself with it.

Thus boldly expressed and exposed to the blazing light of day, the thing could be seen clearly, and Lamar knew in his heart that it was true. He was Master of Gnomons and had been Master of Gnomons for perhaps as long as six weeks. He had not, however, suspected for one moment that Sydney might be a Master too, and this news took his breath away. What was more, Sydney said he believed himself to be a “Hierophant of Atlantis.” Lamar was puzzled by the claim, there being no such title or degree in Gnomonism, to the best of his knowledge.

Over the next few days Sydney outlined an Alexandrian scheme whereby he and Lamar would take Gnomonism to the world. He, Sydney, would be responsible for Europe and Asia, and Lamar would establish the ancient order in the Americas, in accordance with Pletho-Robert's plan. There was no time to lose. He all but pushed Lamar out of the house, saying he was terribly sorry but an unsecured personal loan was out of the question. He must make his way back home as best he could.

Lamar, as a veteran in distress, was able to get a hardship loan from the American consul, upon surrender of his passport, just enough to pay steerage fare to New York in the sweltering hold of a Portuguese steamer. Fanny kissed him goodbye at the dock and so the rough accommodations bothered him hardly at all.

LAMAR WAS hardly noticed as he passed through New York with his
Codex
and continued on his journey home by rail. In Gary he picked up his old job as clerk in his uncle's dry goods store. He took his meals and his baths at the YMCA down the street, and slept in the back of the store. Here, in the shadowy storage room, with the drop light and the cardboard boxes, he established Pillar No. 1 of the Gnomon Society, North America.

He was unable to recruit his uncle, who said he didn't have time to read a lot of stuff like that, much less memorize it. Nor did Lamar have any luck with his old school chums. His first success came with a traveling salesman named Bates, who set up Pillar No. 2 in Chicago. Bates was followed by Mapes, and Pillar No. 3, in Valparaiso, Indiana. Mapes was a football coach, ready to try anything. He hoped that Gnomonic thought might show him the way to put some life into his timorous and lethargic team. Mapes was followed by—nobody, for quite a long time. Three Pillars then, and three members, all told, and that was what Lamar had to show for almost two years of work.

By this time he had made a typewritten copy of the
Codex.
The string-bound manuscript version was getting dog-eared and did not make a good impression. The typewritten copy did not make a much better impression but it was easier to read. Lamar could see that many men did not accept this as a real book either, judging from their hard faces as they flipped through it, pausing over the triangles and recoiling, and then giving it back to him.

What was needed was a properly printed book. Bates told him about a Latvian newspaper in Chicago, where, in the back shop, English could be set in type and printed without anyone there understanding a word of it. Lamar went there and ordered fifty copies of the book and asked the Letts not to break the plates but to keep them readily available for reorders. The books had blue paper covers and were bound with staples.

Some years were to pass before the first printing was exhausted. The 1920s were later to be celebrated as a joyous decade but to Lamar it was a time of the grossest materialism and of hollow and nasty skepticism. No one had time to listen. Fanny Hen's letters kept him going. Her monthly letter, lightly scented, was the one bright spot in his gloomy round. She was now in London with Sydney, or Sir Sydney, he having become the fourth baronet on the death of his father, Sir Billy Hen, the sportsman. Sydney was disappointed in his patrimony, which amounted to little more than a pile of Sir Billy's gambling debts, but he had pushed on with that energy characteristic of the Hens to set up his Gnomon Temple on Vay Street, and, according to Fanny, was doing quite well with it. Lamar kept Fanny's current letter in his inside coat pocket, where he could get a whiff of it with a slight dip of his head, and where it was handy for rereading over his solitary meals. In his replies to her he always enclosed a money order for fifteen dollars and said he hoped she would use the small sum for some little personal luxury she might otherwise deny herself.

In the spring of 1925 Lamar went on the road as a salesman, working out of Chicago under Bates with a line of quality haberdashery. It was a good job and at first he did well with it, so well that he was able to make a down payment on a small house in Skokie and a transatlantic proposal of marriage. Fanny accepted, against the wishes of her mother, who was worried about Chicago gangsters, and of brother Sydney, who stood to lose an unsalaried secretary. She arrived at New York on the
Mauretania
. Lamar took her to Atlantic City, where they were married in a Methodist chapel. The honeymoon was delightful. From their hotel room high above the beach they could watch the battering waves. They took rides together on the Boardwalk in the ridiculous rolling chairs and had late suppers at Madame Yee's with tiny white cups of tea. It was the last carefree time the young Jimmersons were to know for several years.

Fanny Jimmerson was fond of her brick bungalow in Skokie, which she fancied to be in the exact center of the continent, and she might have kept it had she not unwittingly stirred up the embers of Gnomonism. Lamar no longer talked much about the Gnomon Society. Repeated failure to interest others in the secret order had worn him down. He no longer bothered his fellow drummers in hotel lobbies with confidential talk about the Cone of Fate. Now here was Fanny telling him of Sydney's great successes in London. He had brought hundreds of men into the brotherhood, including some very famous members of the Golden Order of the Hermetic Dawn and the Theosophical Society. His building fund for the Temple was already oversubscribed.

Lamar, stung, turned on her one night and spoke sharply. The two situations were hardly comparable, he said. Sydney was dealing with a class of men who had a sense of the past and a tradition of scholarship. How well, he asked, would Master Sydney fare with the 13 Precepts on a smoking car of the Illinois Central? How far would he get with his fine words on the streets of Cicero, above the din of careening beer trucks and blazing machine guns?