The Masters of Atlantis Read Online Free PDF Page B

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