The Masters of Atlantis (7 page)

“Isn't he something?” said Popper, pointing with a toothpick. “Look at that, sir,
leaves
. He had
leaves
in his pocket. I wonder what kind of leaves they are. In what way are they special, do you think? Well, you can just bet there's a story behind them, and a good one too. What in the world will this fellow come up with next?”

Mr. Jimmerson didn't care to guess. He was ready for bed.

Popper said, “Wait. I think I've got it. I do believe Cezar is going to brew us a pot of tea. Yes, some sort of Romanian health beverage or Rosicrucian Pluto Water.”

“Not tea, no,” said Golescu. He had cleared a space on the table, pushing back the crockery and napkins and bones and rinds and crusts and other rejected edges of things, and placed there a candle stub and two glass vials of chemicals and a little hand-cranked grinder, with which he began to macerate the leaves. “A demitasse, eh, ha ha, such a funny joke. Perhaps you like this cyanide in your tea. What, you take one gram or two? For me, no, thank you very much. Ha ha. Tea.”

Mr. Jimmerson retired. He slept through the crushed leaves experiment, waking now and then to note with irritation that the lights were still on and that Austin and the professor were still talking. On his next trip, and God grant it would not be soon, he must remember to bring along his plywood board for a bed stiffener. And tomorrow he must not forget to pick up a box of dark chocolates for Fanny. A mingling of darkness and light. He would have used that, Pletho's favorite phrase for the world, to good effect in his radio speech. He had never had much confidence in the victory plan, or even fully understood all its many points, but why had the radio address been canceled? Politics? He had never thought much of Roosevelt anyway, or of his party. Rum, Romanism and Rebellion wasn't the half of it these days.

HE WENT back to Indiana and took little further interest in the war. He slept through much of it. Let someone else deal with the Central Powers this time. And the Japs. According to the newspapers, the little monkeys couldn't see very well. They were clever, and quick on their feet too, remarkable jumpers, but their jiujitsu would prove useless against the rapid and sustained fire of our Lewis guns.

Still, as with many others, Mr. Jimmerson was to suffer loss and misfortune. Even the birth of his son turned out to be a mixed blessing. Coming to motherhood so late, Fanny was much taken with the child, and she lavished all her attention on this tardy arrival, baby Jerome, to the neglect of her husband. “Look, Lamar!” she said. “What a little pig he is for his milk!” Sometimes Mr. Jimmerson held Jerome on his knee and patted his back and said jip jip jip in his face in the way he had seen others do, but he really didn't know what to make of the drooling little fellow and his curling pink feet, almost prehensile. And he was at a loss to understand the change that had come over his wife. People seemed to be pulling away from him, receding.

He passed more and more of his time alone, in his wingback chair before the fireplace in the Red Room, a copy of the
Codex Pappus
in his lap. At the age of forty-six he had become chair-bound. Pharris White's remarks had set him wondering if there weren't perhaps some higher secrets he had missed, something implicit, some deeply hidden pattern in the fine tapestry of Pletho's thought that had escaped him, and so he read and pondered and drifted in and out of sleep while the baby crawled about on the Temple carpets and great armies clashed around the world. At the age of forty-six Mr. Jimmerson was already looking forward to his senescence.

Meanwhile, Sir Sydney Hen, Bart., had become mobile. Now radiant with health and joined in a kind of marriage to the rich widow Babette, he began to stir. His new book,
Approach to Knowing
, had just been published, and it was his claim that he had written the entire work, excepting only bits of connective matter, while in a threeday Gnomonic trance, this being an exalted state of consciousness not to be confused with an ordinary hypnotic stupor or any sort of Eastern rapture. It was revealed to him in the trance that he had “completed the triangle” and “scaled the cone” and been granted “the gift of ecstatic utterance,” all of which meant that he had gone beyond Mastery and was no longer bound by law or custom.

Deep waters, as Hen himself admitted. There was more. Other men—other Gnomons, that is—could aspire to this singular state, and might even achieve it by undergoing a rigorous program of instruction in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Babette owned a house in Cuernavaca, a sprawling, enclosed place with swimming pool and blazing gardens, and it was here that Hen established his New Croton Institute for Advanced Gnomonic Study.

Candidates for the school were carefully selected. They had to have clear eyes and all their limbs. There was a fee of $1,200, payable in advance, nonrefundable. There was one week of forgetting followed by three weeks of learning. There was a rule of silence. They slept on a cold tile floor and fed on alfalfa sprouts and morning glory seeds. Their reading was restricted to Hen's books. Hen stood behind a screen as he taught them, in the morning and again in the afternoon, to lute music, or rather to lute strumming. Noel Kinlow could not actually play the lute; he simply trailed his fingers across the strings from time to time, on a signal from Hen, to point up some significant recurring word or phrase. The candidates were bled weekly, by Kinlow, and not of the customary pint but of an imperial quart at each draining. On successful completion of the program, with thin new blood coursing through their emaciated bodies, they were at last permitted to look Hen in the face. He embraced them and presented them with signed copies of
Approach to Knowing
and with some black gloves of the kind worn by the Templar Masons, and sent them on their way, staggering across Babette's courtyard. Any lingering, as of graduation day fellowship, was discouraged. Kinlow herded them to the door, saw them clear of it and closed it sharply behind them.

This Noel Kinlow was Hen's current male companion, a young Englishman who had been an elevator boy at the apartment house in Toronto when Hen picked him up. Babette did not approve of the arrangement but was comfortably resigned to it. As a woman of the world she knew this was the price she must pay for being Lady Hen, consort to the Master of Gnomons (Amended Order), and she found the price acceptable.

They made a striking group. Hen, of course, was always distinctive in his black cape and red Poma. Babette, who was buxom to say the least of it, wore bright yellow caftans and other loose garments that trailed the floor, so that one could only guess at the contours of her body, though one could make a pretty good guess. She was also fond of pendulous ear ornaments. The reedy Kinlow, in contrast to Babette, liked tight clothes, the tighter the better, and he usually came forth in a pinch-waist lounge suit made of some mottled, speckled, yellowish-green material. It was a hue not met with in nature and not often seen outside the British Isles, where it has always been a great favorite with tailors. The little yapping terrier, when traveling, sported a starched white ruff.

All through the war years this colorful family—Sir Sydney, Lady Hen, the little dog and the light-stepping Kinlow—could be found bowling up and down the continent between Toronto and Cuernavaca, sometimes in a Pullman compartment and sometimes in a white Bentley sports saloon, chatting merrily, sipping Madeira and snacking on pâté and Stilton cheese, there being no rule of silence or forbidden food at Hen's antinomian level.

Mr. Jimmerson was saddened to see his old friend now so completely estranged and sinking ever deeper into the murk of self.

He said, “I don't understand what he means by going beyond Mastery. What's next, do you think, Austin?”

“It's hard to say with Hen, sir. Nothing would surprise me. Astral traveling. Tarot cards. At this moment he may be prancing through the woods playing a flute. The man's an enigma to me.”

They were sitting in the Red Room before a fire. Mr. Jimmerson was turning over the pages of Hen's latest book,
Approach to Growing
, a sequel to
Knowing
. Popper was reading an encyclopedia article about California. On the table between them, under the fruitcake and coffee cups, there was a mud-stained letter from Sergeant Mapes in Italy, which neither of them had gotten around to opening. Above the fire-place there was a color portrait of the Master in full regalia, and from the mantel there hung Jerome's Christmas stocking, lumpy with tangerines and Brazil nuts, though he had no teeth. Jerome was asleep. Fanny was out with church friends distributing Christmas baskets to the poor.

Popper fed a glazed cherry to Squanto. The jaybird was getting old. One wing drooped and he no longer talked much in an outright way. During the night he muttered. Mr. Jimmerson leaned forward and jostled the burning logs about.

“But why should Sydney be so bitter?” he said. “All these ugly personal remarks about you and me.”

“Ah now, that's something else. That's quickly explained. First there's his nasty disposition. Then there's his envy of your precedence in the Society. Then there's this. Hen is English. We, happily, are Americans. In the brief space of his lifetime he has seen his country eclipsed by ours as a great power. Hen very naturally resents it.”

“I never thought of Sydney in that way, as a patriot.”

“Listen to this, sir. The motto of California is ‘Eureka!' Isn't that interesting?
Eureka. I have found it.
What is our motto here in Indiana? Do you happen to know?”

“Let's see. No. Our state bird—”

“Surely we have a motto.”

“Yes, but I can't remember what it is. I've been doing some thinking, Austin, and I have an idea that Sydney must be under the influence of some malignant magnetic force. This fat lady he has taken up with. I wonder if—”

“Look, sir, a picture of Mount Whitney. Isn't that a magnificent sight? It gladdens the heart.”

“Yes. The snow. On top.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe we have any eminence in Indiana much higher than a thousand feet.”

“Yes, I think you can say that nature presents a more formidable face in California. But you know, Austin, I sometimes think if I could just talk to Sydney man to man for a few—”

Popper took the book from Mr. Jimmerson's hands and flung it into the fire. “Excuse me, sir, that was very rude, I know, but I can't sit here and let you torment yourself with that poison.”

“You might at least have—”

“Listen to me, sir. Hen and his ravings and his Mexican concentration camp—this is just a piddling episode in the vast time scale of Gnomonism. The man's a mayfly, the fluttering creature of an hour. Why should we take any notice of him? He works in sun-dried bricks. We are building in marble with Pletho. Now I want you to put Hen out of your mind. Will you do that for me?”

They looked into the blaze and waited silently for the flash point. The book covers writhed and then burst into yellow flames. “There. A fitting end for trash.”

It was not Popper's way to interrupt the Master or snatch objects from his hand but on this night he was tense. He was leaving the Temple the next day, leaving Burnette, pulling stakes, in circumstances that did not allow him to say goodbye. Over the past few months he had conferred often with Golescu in Washington via telephone. Their plans had been carefully laid and on this very night the professor was approaching Chicago by rail. Popper was to join him the next morning at Union Station and from there they would travel west together.

The trip had been delayed over and over again because of Golescu's difficulty in settling on an auspicious date for leaving his job and making a journey and undertaking a new enterprise. Popper himself was not so particular as to the alignment of the planets. He had a problem with the U.S. Selective Service, and it was one of growing urgency. He had never registered for the draft and had been lying low, in the Temple, since the Washington trip. Then, an informer, one of Hen's men, turned his name in to the local draft board. A series of notices and summonses were sent to Popper, with little result, and his secretary, a dull girl, unwittingly aggravated the situation.

Popper had instructed her to answer all unknown correspondents with a Gnomon leaflet and a photograph of himself on which he had written: THANKS A MILLION, AUSTIN POPPER. This was faithfully done. The draft board, in response to its letters and telegrams, had received five or six of these autographed pictures before turning the matter over to the G-men.

But when these officers finally arrived at the Temple with a warrant, Popper had been gone for almost a week, leaving behind him an enormous telephone bill and a note to Mr. Jimmerson saying that Laura had taken a turn for the worse and that he was racing to her bedside in San Francisco.

Mr. Jimmerson was bewildered. He read the note several times and turned it over to look for help on the blank side. Who was Laura? He had never heard Austin speak of a sweetheart or sister or any other dear one of that name, sick or well.

He showed the note to one of the federal agents, a hefty young man who seemed familiar but whom he could not place. He did not recognize Pharris White, still neckless but trimmed down a bit and wearing a tan fedora. White was now in the FBI, which had become something of a haven for lawyers seeking to avoid military service. He shook the warrant in Mr. Jimmerson's face. “I mean to serve this personally,” he said. “If you're holding out on me, Jimmerson, I'll put you away in a cell with Popper. Nothing would please me more. This Master of Gnomons business doesn't cut any ice with me. Did you ever hear of misprision of a felony? Accessory after the fact? Here, I want to see that cap.” He examined the Poma with rough disdain and even placed it clownishly atop his own head. The agent in charge of the raid spoke sharply to him about these unprofessional antics and made him return it.