Masters of Atlantis Read online

  Mr. Jimmerson quickly became adjusted to the comforts of Temple life. The Council had been wise to insist on his living here. He particularly liked the Red Room, with its big fireplace, the bookshelves that rose to the ceiling, the wine-colored carpet and the wall coverings of wine-colored silk. Here he settled in. In the Red Room a man could study and think. Here he could get down to business on his new book, The Jimmerson Spiral.

  Fanny liked the oversize bathtubs and the canopied beds and the rose bower and the splashing fountain. She had a number of servants at her disposal, these including a cook, a gardener, two maids and a butler-chauffeur named Maceo, a quiet Negro man who had the additional duty of sweeping out the Inner Hall of the Black Throne, into which neither Fanny nor the maids, as females, were allowed to penetrate.

  Mr. Jimmerson’s office was fully staffed too, and overseen by one Huggins, whose title was editorial advisor. Huggins was a journalist, an irritable, alcoholic bird of passage who brought certain professional skills to bear on the production of Gnomon printed matter. Austin Popper was the mail boy. That was the job description but he was not really very boyish at the age of nineteen—or maybe it was twenty-four, or even thirty. Even at that time Popper was coy about his age, and his origins, and no one could pin him down on these things.

  Popper was quick in every sense of the word. His physical movements were quick and sure, and he could learn a new task in short order and execute it with confidence. He had a ready fund of information gleaned from newspapers and popular magazines. He kept his eyes open. He remembered names. His charm was effective on both men and women, and even the misanthropic Huggins became fond of him. Maps and Epps thought him just a shade ambitious but they too found his company pleasant, against their will.

  When Huggins was drunk, Popper covered for him, and when Huggins had editorial disputes with the Master, or printing disputes with the Letts, it was young Popper who stepped in to smooth the ruffled feathers and suggest a sensible accommodation. Huggins soon found himself working for Popper, and still they remained friends.

  But Huggins was bound to be left behind anyway since he refused to become a Gnomon. Out of a natural perversity and a newspaperman’s terror of being duped, he refused to join anything, and so remained a P.S., or Perfect Stranger, while Popper answered the summons with alacrity and went on to become a power in the great brotherhood. Soon he was writing speeches for the Master and helping him with his books. He talked and wrote with facility, seldom at a loss for a word, or an opinion. He was never Master of Gnomons, nor even a member of the Council of Three, but the common perception that he directed the organization was not far off the mark.

  What Popper did was transform the Gnomon Society. Having gained the confidence of the Master, he was able to persuade him that they must broaden their appeal. The way to do this was to relax the standards. The Codex Pappus, for instance, was much too difficult for most beginners and should be revised. There was too much memory work for the ordinary man; the staggering volume of this stuff must be reduced. Only in this way could the Society expect to grow and become a force in the world.

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “And how would you go about all this, Austin?”

  Popper was turning through the pages of the Codex. “The first thing we must do, sir, is get rid of some of these triangles.”

  “You would do away with the symbolic forms?”

  “Oh no, not all of them. I would keep the Cone of Fate. Under no circumstances would I tamper with the Jimmerson Spiral.”

  “But you think there are too many triangles? The simplest of polygons?”

  “Far too many, sir, for the people I have in mind. Do you remember in school how hard it was to get anyone to join the Geometry Club?”

  “I don’t believe we had a Geometry Club in our school.”

  “Neither did we but you see what I mean.”

  “The ordinary man, you say. Why should we concern ourselves with ordinary men? Pletho tells us that most of them are pigs or children.”

  “Some of them are pigs, certainly, but I need not remind you, sir, that it is our ancient business to transmute base matter into noble matter.”

  “The great work.”

  “As you say. All I want to do, sir, is prepare a simplified version of the Codex for use at a new and elementary level of our craft. Then, step by step, we can lead these men on to the Codex Pappus itself and pure Gnomonism.”

  Popper spoke of thousands of new members and at last the Master came around. He took the proposal to the Council of Three, or T.W.K.—Those Who Know. Mr. Bates liked the idea. Mapes and Epps conceded that it might have some merit—but was Austin Popper the right person to direct such a program? He was willful, erratic. He was vain in his personal apperance. He was sometimes facetious in a most unbecoming way. In his writing he had a vulgar inclination to make everything clear. He had not yet learned to appreciate the beauties of allusion and Gnomonic obfuscation—that fog was there for a purpose. He couldn’t see that to grasp a delicate thing outright was often to crush it.

  But in the end, under pressure from the Master, they gave way and Popper was authorized to proceed. An abridged Codex was prepared, and a new teaching syllabus. A new probationary degree called “Neophyte” was created.

  Popper went on the road with his mission, due east, to Toledo and Cleveland, where he placed small, mystifying notices in the newspapers, and then met in hotel rooms with those men of Ohio who responded. It was a period of trial and error. There was no shortage of idle men on Lake Erie but the wisdom of Atlantis, clarified though it now was, still did not hold their attention. Popper had to grope about for ideas they could hearken to. Little by little he worked things out. Most of the triangles and a good many of the oracular ambiguities had already been pruned from the Codex, and Popper went further yet. The Cone of Fate was not exactly abandoned but he no longer talked about it except in response to direct inquiry. The Gnomonic content of his lectures diminished daily as the Popper content swelled. Soon he had a coherent system, one with wide appeal, and he had to book ever larger rooms and halls to accommodate the growing number of men who came to hear his words of hope.

  For this was what he gave them. Through Gnomonic thought and practices they could become happy, and very likely rich, and not later but sooner. They could learn how to harness secret powers, tap hidden reserves, plug in to the Telluric Currents. It was all true enough. Popper plugged them in to something of an electrical nature and he bucked them up with the example of his own dynamic personality and they went away thinking better of themselves.

  The Gnomon wave was cresting, and it was at this high point that Morehead Moaler of Brownsville, Texas, became a Gnomon, perhaps the most steadfast of them all. But little notice was taken of him at the time, or of his remote Texas Pillar, what with all the national excitement. There were articles in the press about “the mysterious Mr. Jimmerson” who remained concealed in his “Egyptian Temple” in Burnette, Indiana, while his spokesman, Austin Popper, went about teaching “a lost Egyptian science.” Look, the magazine, published an account of a Popper rally in Philadelphia, with a striking photograph of a roomful of solemn men standing with their hands clasped atop their heads. Popper appeared on a network radio show in Chicago, a breakfast show, and was received with whistles and sustained applause from the friendly oldsters in the audience. He marched around the breakfast table with them, and one jolly old man, whose name he failed to catch in the hubbub, presented him with a talking blue jay. He caught the bird’s name, Squanto, but just missed catching the name of the old gentleman, whose smiling red face he was to see often in his dreams, the face saying its name, but just out of earshot, never with quite enough force.

  Mr. Jimmerson, at the urging of the Council, called Popper in off the road and said, “This has gone too far, Austin. I want you to stop playing the fool. I want you to show some dignity. They tell me you have a Victrola now and a talking bird.”

  Popper was contrite. He promised to conduct himself
with restraint in the future. Then he went back on the road and resumed his old ways. He led his followers in cheers and he played bouncy tunes on a windup phonograph, marking the beat with wildly swooping arms. He engaged in comic dialogues with Squanto. He continued to court the press and he even had his picture taken with politicians. These were two of the Four P’s that all Gnomons were under orders to shun, the other two being the Pope and the police. He continued to weaken the membership requirements until admittance to the order became almost effortless. The two nights of initiation were reduced to a token twenty minutes, with no insistence on figs, and the Pledge was no longer eight densely printed pages of Hermetical mystery lore and bloody vows of faith to the Ten Pillars of Atlantis—all to be recited without stumbling once—but rather one short paragraph that was little more than a bland affirmation of humility before the unseen powers of the universe.

  Still, there was something to be said for Popper. He did bring in thousands of new members, a few of whom turned out to be good Gnomons, and all of whom paid monthly dues and bought books and study materials from the Gnomon Press.

  Mr. Jimmerson was of two minds. He wavered. One day he was resolved that Austin must go and the next day he would defend him in a heated session of the Council. More than once he had to raise his little bronze rod, the Rod of Correction, to calm tempers. Mapes and Epps demanded that Popper be silenced. If not, they warned, he would soon be their Master. Already he had changed the Society into an ungainly beast that Pletho Pappus would hardly recognize, to say nothing of Pythagoras and Hermes Triplex, and if they, the Master and Council, stood by and allowed this headstrong young man to further corrupt the brotherhood, then the judgement of history would indeed be hard on them, and rightly so.

  The argument was telling and in his heart Mr. Jimmerson knew that something would have to be done. In February 1940 the painful decision was made. Austin Popper was to be formally “humbled,” and assigned to a menial administrative job in the Temple. The axe was poised, and then, just before it fell, something happened that changed the picture.

  A few months before, in September 1939, with the outbreak of war in Europe, Sir Sydney Hen had fled England with his robes billowing behind him and come to Toronto, Canada. Mr. Jimmerson invited him to make his home in the Temple in Burnette. Hen declined with thanks. Every courtesy was extended to him by the Canadian Gnomons, who found him a suite of rooms in a lakefront residential hotel that was filled with chattering widows.

  Fanny Jimmerson went to Toronto for a Christmas reunion with her brother and she was very much upset at what she found. He was bent and had lost his teeth. His neck was prematurely wattled. The elf locks were gone and indeed all his hair except for a semicircular fringe in back that hung straight down, dead and gray like Spanish moss. The poisoning report, the henbane story, which Fanny had dismissed as one of Sydney’s hysterical flights, turned out to have been all too true, though the French Rosicrucians had been unjustly blamed. The poisoner was a young man named Evans who had been lightly dusting Sir Sydney’s muffins with arsenic on and off over the years. Hen described him as a “paid companion.” The boy’s motive was not clear, with the police suggesting that Welsh peevishness was somehow behind it all, and in any case there was not enough evidence to prosecute. “All I could do was pull his ears and sack him,” said Hen.

  Fanny extended her visit so as to nurse Sydney and prepare restorative meals for him. She brightened up the place with bits of song and decorative touches and small pots of vegetation, including some of Sydney’s favorite ferns and spiky desert succulents. His appetite gradually returned. She bundled him up and took him for walks along the lake. The icy winds made his cheeks glow. His eyes cleared. She bought him a puppy and Hen taught the little dog to shake hands and how to untie simple knots that had been loosely tied in one of his older sashes.

  Some of the ladies in the hotel approached Fanny to ask if it was true that her brother was a baronet. Physical wreck that he was, Sir Sydney still had a certain air, and the ladies were curious about him, this titled mystery figure on the sixth floor. Fanny responded in a friendly way and the ladies proposed a tea party, with Sir Sydney as guest of honor. He agreed to attend, to allow the ladies to honor him and look him over for a half hour or so, if certain conditions were observed. There must be no receiving line, no cameras and, above all, no handshaking. He would not stand or even sit. Arrangements must be made for him to recline. The conditions were met. Hen wore a white cassock and gold chain and embroidered slippers. He thoroughly enjoyed the affair. The cakes were good and the ladies hovered about his recumbent form and listened attentively to his far-ranging opinions.

  Toward the end of January, Fanny left him in fairly good health and in the hands of a rich widow named Babette. A few weeks later, in February, a Toronto newspaper published a long letter from Hen that rocked the Gnomon Society.

  He began his remarks with an attack on Popper, calling him “Austin Rotter” and “a low American farceur” and “a confidence trickster of the very lowest type,” and went on to bring a full and stinging indictment against American Gnomonism. No doubt, he said, the leadership in Indiana, U.S.A., meant well, but it was very weak. Substantial changes could be expected now that he, Hen, was on the scene. As Grand Prior of World Gnomonry he was seriously considering revocation of the charter of the American Temple in Burnette, and would certainly do so if that Temple did not act soon to purge itself of Popper and Popperism.

  All this, out of the blue. It was quite a spirited blast from such a frail figure. Mr. Jimmerson’s reply was strong stuff too. He gave an interview to a Chicago newspaper, saying it was shameful that a Master, albeit a junior one, of the Gnomon Society, a secret brotherhood based on principles of Hermetical and Pythagorean harmony, had seen fit not only to make such false and scandalous charges, but to make them publicly. As for any “charter,” there was none to be revoked, just as there was no such title in Gnomonry as “Grand Prior,” but if there was ever any revoking to be done, then he, Lamar Jimmerson, First Master of the New Cycle, successor to Pletho Pappus and tutor to Sydney Hen, would do it.

  Hen came back with another letter to the editor, a short one this time, to the Chicago newspaper. He wrote:Please be advised that the Gnomon Society can no longer recognize degrees awarded by the gang of Indiana ruffians led by the impostor Lamar Jimmerson, who styles himself First Master of the New Cycle. Lamar Jimmerson is Master of Nothing. He is a grey nullity whose teaching is worthless and whose conversation is tiresome beyond belief and whose book, The Jimmerson Spiral, purporting to contain some later writings of Pletho Pappus, is the most brazen forgery since the Donation of Constantine.

  Trailing after Hen’s signature there were many titles and capital letters.

  So it was that the break came and the Society divided into the Jimmerson school and the Hen school, and thus did Popper escape the axe. To discipline him now, the Council saw, would give the appearance of acknowledging Hen’s authority and yielding to it.

  The bitter exchanges went on and on. Hen’s favorite weapon was the letter of ridicule. Mr. Jimmerson fought back with a barrage of pamphlets that kept the Latvian printers hopping. Then Hen stepped up the campaign, initiating the battle of the books, by having his people remove Mr. Jimmerson’s books from libraries and bookstores and destroy them. Popper countered with a program of defacement, ordering the Jimmerson men to fill in all the closed loops of letters in Hen’s books with green ink, to underline passages at random in that same green ink and to scrawl such comments in the margins as “Huh??!!” and “Is this guy serious?” and “I don’t get it!” in red ink, the aim being to break the reader’s concentration and so subvert the message. He also commissioned a drawing of a pop-eyed, moronic human face, that of a collegiate-looking fellow with spiky hair and big bow tie, and had rubber stamps made of it. The face had a strange power to annoy, even to sicken the spirit—one had to turn away from it—and Popper directed that it be stamped on every page of Hen’s books, in a di
fferent place on each page so that the reader could not prepare himself.

  THE PRESS grew tired of Gnomons and moved on to other things. The public likewise lost interest, almost overnight. War was coming, the country was preparing for a mighty crusade and the Popper rallies suddenly had a shabby, dated air of selfishness about them. The crowds dwindled away to nothing. Popper had run out his string, or so it appeared.

  He went back to the Temple to think. Once the life of the luncheon table, he now took a sandwich outside to the fountain and ate alone, or rather with Squanto, the two of them resting on the rim of the circular stone basin. There were goldfish in the pool, and at the center of it, atop a cone of granite, there was fixed the gnomon, or upright part of a sundial, a flat bronze object resembling a carpenter’s square. From a window in the Red Room, Mr. Jimmerson could look out on the scene, at the sparkling plumes of water, at the little shifting rainbows, at the simple bronze of his order, at a chastened Austin Popper. He found it pleasing. This was the proper state of things at the Temple, the right pitch, this drowsy afternoon air of not much going on, a state very close to that of sleep.

  But with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Popper was off and running again. Here was an opportunity. Once more he was alive with ideas. First came the Gnomon blood drive, with the brothers laid out in rows, rubber tubes coming out of their left arms and their right arms raised in military salutes for the news photographers. Then on to the army. The Society’s first duty in this crisis, Popper said, was to set an example, and how better to do it than for the entire male staff of the Temple—excluding the Master, who, in a manner of speaking, had already borne arms for his country—to enlist in the army as a body. It was their duty and it was just the kind of thing to catch the eye of President Roosevelt and the national press.