The Masters of Atlantis Read online

  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?

  Fanny said she was sorry, that she had not meant to goad him. She just thought he might be interes
ted in Sydney’s work. After all, they were, were they not, brothers in this secret order? Lamar said she was absolutely right. He asked her to forgive him for raising his voice. It would not happen again. He was, of course, pleased to hear that Sydney was doing well and she was right to remind him of his duty.

  Once again he set about in earnest to find recruits, to the neglect of his clothing sales. He told his buyers that he had something in his sample case more beautiful than painted silk neckties and more lasting than Harris tweed, and the best part was that this thing would cost them nothing more than a little hard study at night.

  Bates too pitched in anew. Through a friend at the big Chicago marketing firm of Targeted Sales, Inc., he got his hands on a mailing list titled “Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana,” which, by no means exhaustive, contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers, who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men. Lamar was a little surprised to find his own name on the list. It was given as “Mr. Jimmerson.” His gossiping neighbors in Skokie, it seemed, had put him down for an odd bird. They had observed him going into his garage late at night in a pointed cap and had speculated that he was building a small flying machine behind those locked doors, or pottering around with a toy railroad or a giant ball of twine.

  He and Bates wrote letters to the seven hundred cranks, with questionnaires enclosed that had been run off at the Latvian printshop. They waited. They sorted out the replies. Those men who seemed to have the stuff of Gnomons in them got second questionnaires, and such of these as came back went through a further winnowing. The process culminated with Bates or Lamar appearing on the doorsteps of the worthy few, Codex Pappus in hand.

  “Good morning,” Lamar would say to the householder at the door. “I am—Mr. Jimmerson.”

  It was during this period that Lamar, still a young man, became known to all and sundry, young and old alike, as “Mr. Jimmerson.” He and Bates, with Gnomon gravity, had always addressed one another as “Mr. Bates” and “Mr. Jimmerson,” and this form now took hold in the wider world. Fanny continued to call him “Lamar,” as did Sydney Hen, and much later, Morehead Moaler, but few others took that liberty, not even Austin Popper.

  Mr. Bates and Mr. Jimmerson worked long hours for the Society and even bagged a member now and then. When they were fired from their sales jobs they hardly noticed, and they used their final commission checks to pay for a new line of printed study materials. The loss of the little brick house through foreclosure was more troubling. Mr. Jimmerson could see that Fanny was upset and he promised to make it up to her one day. Good soldier that she was, she made no fuss. They packed their goods and left Skokie, and when they were gone, the neighbors, peering from behind curtains, spilled out of their houses and went for the garage at a trot to see what they could see, with any luck a small airship.

  The Jimmersons moved into a rented room in Gary, where Fanny prepared budget meals on an electric hot plate. It was a cheerless winter. Mr. Bates often shared their dinner of baked beans and white bread spread with white oleomargarine. Neither of the two Gnomons paid much heed to the Pythagorean stricture against eating beans and the flesh of animals, although they did feel guilt in the act until Austin Popper came along and explained that this rule was never laid down by Pythagoras, but was rather an interpolation by some medieval busybody, and that in fact there was nothing Pythagoras liked better than a pot of Great Northern beans simmered with a bit of ham hock.

  The new members of the order, to be sure, paid certain fees, and the Society’s bank balance at this time stood at around $2,000, but Mr. Jimmerson was careful to keep that money separated from his personal funds, lest there be any breath of scandal. Fanny thought he should pay himself a small salary as Master of all the Gnomons in America, or at least take some expense money. Sydney didn’t stint himself at his London Temple. He even had a full staff of servants. Mr. Jimmerson said that Sir Sydney could do as he pleased, but as far as he, Lamar Jimmerson, was concerned, the great work was not for sale. She must understand that his position was a fiduciary one, one of trust.

  Fanny saw there was nothing for it but for her to take a job. She found work as a nurse’s aide at Hope Hospital, in the physical therapy ward, where she soon became a great favorite with patients and staff alike. After completing a brief refresher course she took the state examination and received her license as registered nurse, along with a supervisory position in the therapy ward that paid $150 a month.

  Mr. Jimmerson knew nothing of this. He had noticed that they were eating better, pork chops and such, and living better. They seemed to be living in a different place, in a clean new apartment just down the street from Hope Hospital, but he was so preoccupied that he had not bothered to inquire into these new domestic arrangements. Fanny was reluctant to tell him about the job. With all his quirky principles he was sure to have objections to working wives. He would put his foot down. As it turned out, he didn’t mind at all, and as he became swamped with paperwork he even encouraged her to take courses in accounting and hectograph operation, and lend him a hand. She did so, and, with an hour snatched here and there from her busy day, she also prepared the typescripts of his first three books, 101 Gnomon Facts, Why I Am a Gnomon and Tracking the Telluric Currents. These works, written for the general public, contained no secret matter, nor were they indexed or annotated.

  Things began to pick up toward the end of the decade, and then in 1929, with the economic collapse of the nation, the Gnomon Society fairly flourished. Traders and lawyers and bricklayers and salesmen and farmers now had time on their hands. They had time to listen and some were so desperate as to seek answers in books. By the summer of 1931 there were more than forty Pillars in six states, and in January of the next year Mr. Jimmerson went to his Latvian printers and placed an order for 5,000 copies of the Codex Pappus.

  The Letts were in serious financial trouble. Their newspaper had already gone under and the printshop was just barely afloat. But Mr. Jimmerson was not one to forget his friends. True, they had garbled important passages in his books and left pages uncut and bound entire chapters upside down, but they had also extended credit to him in those dark days when it could not have been justified in a business way. He was now in a position to return the favor. The firm was to be reorganized as the Gnomon Press. No one would be fired. The production of Gnomon tracts and books would have priority but the shop would be free to take in outside jobs as well. When this announcement was made, and translated, amid heavy Baltic gloom in the back shop, the printers at first were stunned, and then they cheered Mr. Jimmerson and threw their paper hats in the air.

  With success came the inevitable attacks. There was the usual sour grapes disparagement and mockery of outsiders looking in. Pagan nonsense, said the bishops. At best a false science, said the academic rationalists. An ornate casket with no pearl inside, said the Masonic chiefs. A foolish distraction from the real business of life, said the political engineers. A nest of cuckoos who like to dress up and give themselves titles, said the newspaper writers.

  None of these gentlemen could say just what Gnomonism was—the Archbishop of Chicago had it confused with Gnosticism—but they all agreed it was something to stay clear of. Why the secrecy? Who are these people? Whatever it is they are concealing must be evil. What are their long-range plans? Do they claim magical powers? What are they up to with all their triangles?

  Lies were spread about the Gnomons. They were said to carouse in their meeting halls, which had painted windows like mortuaries, dancing the night away with much chanting and tambourine shaking, following their ritual meal of bulls’ blood, lentils and smoked cat meat. There was at least one physical attack. A young man from Northwestern University tracked Mr. Jimmerson down and demanded a refund of the dollar he had paid for a copy of Why I Am a
Gnomon and an apology for foisting it off on the public. He said the book was “not any good at all” and “just awful stuff,” and when Mr. Jimmerson hesitated in his reply the young man ripped the little book into two pieces and flung them away and then punched the Master in the face. Fanny did not know about the fracas until the next morning, when she noticed that her husband’s lips and nose were stuck fast to his pillow with dried blood. He told her it was nothing, that he believed the young bruiser had assaulted him as a writer rather than as a Gnomon, and that in any case all this abuse was contemptible, not to say futile. Their enemies were much too late. The Gnomon Society had taken root in the New World and was here to stay.

  This became clear for all to see on April 10, 1936, when the Gnomon Temple was dedicated in Burnette, Indiana, the most fashionable suburb of Gary. It was a mansion of Bedford limestone, which, with grounds and outbuildings, occupied a good part of the 1400 block of Bulmer Avenue, the most fashionable street of Burnette. An iron-and-steel tycoon, lately deceased, had built it, with little regard for expense, and his widow, eager to be off to Palm Beach, sold it to the Gnomon Society for $180,000. Mr. Jimmerson was uneasy over the prospect of moving into so grand a house and he had to be persuaded by the Council of Three, Bates, Mapes and Epps, that it was necessary for the Master to live in the Temple, at the center of the web, just as it was necessary for the Temple to be monumental, have great mass, be gray and oppressive to every eye that gazed upon it.

  SIR SYDNEY HEN cabled fraternal congratulations from London. It was another wonderful day for the Society, he said. He regretted that he could not attend the dedication but his health was such that he was no longer able to travel. He was suffering greatly from fevers, fluxes and the dry gripes and could hardly get away from the bathroom for an hour at a time. He suspected that he was being given a debilitating poison by Rosicrucian agents from France. The cable was dated “Anno, XVII, New Gnomon Cycle,” and was signed “Hen, Theos Soter, Master and Hierophant, C.H., F.S.A.,” with the letters standing for “Companion of Hermes” and “Far-Seeing Arbiter.” Thus had the advanced degrees of Gnomonry begun to proliferate.