Giles Goat Boy (38 page)

Following a brief confusion (our commands were not clearly worked out yet, and he was still thinking in stickly terms) he put me on him lightly as a hat, I pointed ahead, and we went off, first down to the road and then, as I hoped, towards New Tammany—in any case, away from the Powerhouse. It was an asphalt pavement in good repair, yet apparently little used—I’d heard no vehicles upon it since waking—and I chose to go in plain sight rather than stalk through the woods, reasoning that if Stoker or others were bent on obstructing me they’d find me anyhow, if not hereabouts then at Main Gate, and in the meantime I could cover more ground and perhaps locate Max. Not impossibly, too, I was aware that to be “captured” by Stoker (for whatever reason) could mean seeing Anastasia once again, and her good escutcheon—but I have little patience with this sort of analysis. She was most certainly on my mind, with sundry other matters, as we went along; the road was straight, the scenery unvarying, the sun high and warm on my face: everything conduced to reverie. It was not my habit to think in a directed manner, but rather to brood upon what images came to mind as it were unbid: not to manipulate and question them, but to attend like an interested spectator their links and twinings, stuntful as the folk upon my stick. Max and G. Herrold, Anastasia and Stoker, Dr. and Mrs. Sear, Sakhyan in his yellow robe and Madge with her mustard buttocks—they came and went and came again, myself among them, rehearsing deeds and speeches from the script of memory or improvising new. And in lieu of reasoned conclusions, net feelings were what I came to. I had, ever since waking and despite my hangover, felt unaccountably cleansed, emptied: now as I watched myself watch me drinking the black liquor with Stoker, biting Anastasia’s belly and servicing her upon G. Herrold’s public bier, I noted with interest that while I was perplexed, I was penitent no longer: my humility was nothing humiliation, but more nearly awe before the special nature of my freedom, not appreciated thitherto. Truly it seemed to me (though I could no more word it then than Croaker could discourse upon low-relief woodcarving) that a deed became Grand-Tutorial from its having been done by the Grand Tutor and in no other way; at the same time, that the Grand Tutor defines Himself ineluctably and exclusively in the Grand-Tutoriality of His deeds. There was no cause, I strongly felt, to
worry
about myself: if I was indeed Grand Tutor then I would choose infallibly the Grand-Tutorial thing—how could I do otherwise?—whose Grand-Tutoriality could yet be said to derive from my recognition. If I was not, then no choice of actions
could make me so, because in my un-Grand-Tutoriality I would make the wrong choices. The statement is paradoxical; the feeling was not. Max believed that a Grand Tutor was a man who
acted
thus-and-so, who did the Grand-Tutorial work: Enos Enoch, Max argued, said
Love thy classmate as thyself
because to love one’s classmate as oneself was a Right Answer; He’d had no option, except to be or not to be a Grand Tutor; had He commanded us otherwise, He’d not have been one. I on the contrary had sometimes held that to love one’s classmate as oneself was Correct only because Enos Enoch so commanded; that to hate oneself and one’s classmate would be just as Correct instead had He commanded
that;
in short that His choice was free because His nature wasn’t, He being in any case a Grand Tutor. But now I felt that we both had been in error: Max himself might love his classmate and the rest, and teach others to—might even sacrifice himself in the name of studentdom as Enos Enoch did—and yet by no means be a Grand Tutor in his own right, but only an imitation Enos Enoch. On the other hand Enos could not have gone about saying just
anything
, or nothing, and still have been Enos Enoch. In truth the doer did not define the deed nor did the deed the doer; their relation (in the case at least of Grand Tutors and Grand-Tutoring) was first of all that of artists, say, to their art, and to speak of freedom or its opposite in such a relation was not quite meaningful. Without Grand Tutors there’d be no Answers, no Commencement, any more than there’d be great poems without great poets: to ask whether Maro, say, could have
not
-written the
Epic of Anchisides
is to ask whether he was free to be not-Maro—a futile question. There remained this difference: a great poem might be anonymous, the manner of its making and the character of its maker not even known except as implied in the piece itself. What Enos Enoch said and and did, on the other hand—or Maios the Lykeionian, or the original Sakhyan—was if anything less important than the way of His doing it: Grand Tutoring was inseparable from the Grand Tutor, of Whose personality it was the expression; it could never be anonymous, and thus must be always more or less lost by the Tutees, as Enos Enoch was lost in Enochism. Yet the analogy held, after all: a man who transcribed a copy of the
Anchisides
or imitated it was not Maro, any more than the Graduate was the Grand Tutor. And as the poet might transcend the conventions of his art and with his talent make beautiful what in lesser hands would be ugly, so the Grand Tutor in His passèdness stood beyond ordinary Truth and Falsehood. Maios drank the night long and let young men fall in love with Him; Sakhyan in His youth had a herd of mistresses, and in His Tutorship never lent a helping hand to anyone (any more than His descendant—I
was stirred to recall—had tried to rescue G. Herrold); Enos Enoch Himself had once railed against the Founder, lost His temper on several occasions, and contradicted not only the teachings of the Old Syllabus but even His own
obiter dicta—
and had passed both Carpo the Fool and Gaffer McKeon the Perfect Cheat.

To be sure, there were questions for which I could not yet feel clear answers. Could Enos have murdered as well as railed? Could Sakhyan have taken a mistress during His Tutorship as well as before? Could Maios have practiced outright pederasty? And Carpo: was he an ordinary fool whose passage was meant as an illustration, or did he have some special passèd quality not recognized by his classmates? Or was his passage so purely gratuitous that even to interpret it as an illustration of Grand-Tutorial gratuitousness was to give it false significance? I began to suspect that such questions were invalid, but before the suspicion had time to clarify itself my attention was caught by the sight of a figure squatting in the weeds some hundred meters up the roadside. Croaker spied him too, and muttered. Then all my new composure was put to rout—by joy, uneasy conscience, and concern—for I saw that it was Max.

I shouted to him and urged Croaker on. We had passed no inns—indeed, no buildings of any sort. Had Max spent the night outside, or had he been lodged by Stoker’s aide and set out in the morning to find me? I scolded myself afresh for having abandoned him; my alarm grew when I saw that he was not at stool there among the dock, as I’d supposed, but merely hunkered and hugging himself, as against the cold, and resting his forehead upon his knees. Even the approach of Croaker, whose new manageability he had no way of knowing, seemed not to impress him: he raised to me a blank, distracted face.

“We have a new helper,” I said, and smiling, clambered down. Croaker took the stick from my hand as I dismounted, and squatted peacefully with it in the weeds like a dog with a bone. I touched his shoulder lightly for support, a bit put out that Max ignored my mastery and smart handling of what after all had been a menace to the student body. In my own mind it augured well for the graver encounters ahead. “I have him under control now. We’ve been looking all over for you. Are you all right?”

“All right?” His voice was feeble. He got stiffly up.

I took his arm, not certain of my ground. “I’m glad to see you, Max.” It was on my tongue to apologize for deserting him, for carousing in the Power Plant, and the rest. But I remembered that in a sense it was he who had abandoned
me
, and that anyhow I wasn’t sure it was necessary to regret my behavior in itself. Apart from those earlier considerations—the
qualitative tautology, so to speak, of act and agent in the case of Grand Tutorship—it seemed not so terrible even to regard my night as simple dereliction. Anchisides, to mention only one example, had dallied with his mistress for an entire winter, whereas I, if guilty at all, was so of but a single Memorial Service. “Sorry if you had to spend the night outdoors.”

Max shook his head. “A little sore in the joints is all.” His tone was as guarded as mine; he too, then, it gave me some comfort to imagine, had had second thoughts about leaving me. I decided not to reproach him, nor on the other hand to recount my night’s activity.

“Well. Do you feel strong enough to go on?”

He widened his eyes, like one just waking. “I guess.”

“Stoker
sent
a man after you,” I said defensively. “He was supposed to make sure you had a place to sleep.”

The name put a temporary end to Max’s strange reserve. “That Dean o’ Flunks!” he cried, waving two fists above his head. “Stoker and Eierkopf—two Bonifacists!
Bragging
what they did to the Moishians!
Ach
, I hate them!” He went on in this vein, not always coherently: Eblis Eierkopf he cursed for a flunkèd soulless monster who had betrayed studentdom in general and Virginia R. Hector in particular in the name of some Siegfriedish perversion of science; Stoker he reviled afresh as the very principle of antiFounderism, who had not even Eierkopf’s twisted rationale for his iniquities, but relished them openly for their flunkèdness; whose one delight and motive, like that of the legendary Dean o’ Flunks, was to tempt out everyone’s grievousest failings, to show cankers in the hearts of roses, make the worse appear the better reason, and laugh at the debauchment of the purest, most generous minds, like Anastasia’s. Tears stood in his eyes; his voice turned shriller. All very well to love one’s enemy, as Enos Enoch enjoined, so long as the enemy was a human student with the mortal proneness of us all to unthinking cruelty and the like; but the Bonifacists and their ilk had removed themselves from human studentdom. To call them
beasts
was to insult the nobility and lack of malice in even the fiercest wild animal: embodiments of flunkage was what they were, and he Max had been wrong not to hate them before, not to wish them dead and work for their extermination with all the energy they’d devoted to his, and to his classmates’. Vain to object, as he had used to, that violence in the name of
any
principle was flunking: when the principle was anti-violence and the victim the violent principle; when it was a case of either destroying the violent few or delivering the innocent many into their hands, the matter was ethically
sui generis
, and otherwise valid rules did not apply,
etc., etc
.

I was impressed not only by the violence of his speech itself, so foreign to his usual temper, but also by my inability to quite agree, though I was much stirred. Nor was it that like the Max of old I did not assent to violence on any grounds: on the contrary, what I felt, dimly but positively, was that in a way beyond my describing there was something
right
in Stoker’s attitude; that Dean-o’-Flunkèdness, so to speak, was not so simply to be understood and come to terms with, at least not by a Grand Tutor. I could by no means have argued the point, and therefore said nothing, but vividly before my mind’s eye was the uproar of the Furnace Room, ever on the verge of explosion; the glimpse of that natural inferno in the bowels of Founder’s Hill; the wonder of flinging back my head in Stoker’s fashion and roaring like a madman at the top of my lungs … To this, to my intoxication (which I could not even recognize yet by name), to all I’d seen and been and done subcampusly, as it were, there was a certain all-rightness which I sensed as clearly as I sensed that Max would never understand it. I myself was far from understanding it, if for no other reason than that in the harmony of my feelings it nowise discorded with Max’s compassionate indignation; but I felt it had nothing to do with rationalizing on the one hand or Grand-Tutorial apriority on the other. I set the matter aside, with my earlier speculations, against the improvement of my experience, and asked Max if he’d had anything to eat.

He shook his head. “I got no appetite.” He gave me a sharp look and combed at his beard with his fingers. “Two things, George. Whatever else I did wrong in my life, I never touched Virginia Hector, so I can’t be that poor girl’s father. It’s got to be Eblis Eierkopf. And if Maurice Stoker sent anybody after me, it wasn’t to find me a hotel. But this is the second thing: I waited right here by the road all night, and I
never saw a soul
.”

This established, he lapsed into the heavy spirits in which I’d found him, and made no move either to go or to stay. I blushed at the reproach in his last remark, and we stood about awkwardly for a moment. Then, in view of his age and uncertain condition, I suggested he ride pick-a-back on Croaker, whom I did not yet quite trust unmounted, while I went beside on foot. I was prepared to counter any misgivings with praise of Croaker’s reliability and resourcefulness—indeed, I had no idea how we’d manage for food and fire without him, unless Great Mall proved but a short way ahead, and though I supposed I’d have to return him to Dr. Eierkopf upon reaching New Tammany proper, in the meanwhile I reckoned him a potent companion, whom I’d give up regretfully, and I hoped that once Max was himself again we could learn to deal yet more effectively with the huge creature. But my advisor showed neither fear nor
interest: he shrugged and permitted himself to be set aloft when I’d got the message through to Croaker. I retrieved my stick, on which now an intaglio spiral of grape-leaves and tendrils filigreed the limbs of the lowest figures and promised to bear clusters upon the next. Another time I’d have invited Max to admire the carving with me, but as he seemed so spiritless I merely pointed down the road with the stick, and we trudged away.

With his light burden and stronger legs Croaker’s pace was better than mine. Every hundred meters or so he’d gain a dozen and wait with a grin for me to catch up. We went in this manner for about a kilometer, and then at one of his pauses I saw him turn abruptly off the pavement toward a ditch that ran beside us. I called and hurried after, afraid he was bolting; Max held tightly to keep from falling but seemed otherwise indifferent, and made no effort to stop him. However, it was something in the ditch had caught his eye. He sprang down in, grunting like a boar, and as I overtook him fetched his prize up onto the roadside: a black motorcycle, which he hauled out lightly as a toy. It was the kind used by Stoker’s men, and perhaps for this reason Croaker hammered at it earnestly with his fists until I bade him stop.