John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Nobody paid my way!" he concluded with heat. "All I know today I learned the hard way, by myself. Coddle the crowd, they'll trample you down!" The proper use of charity on the administrative level, he asserted, corresponded to his personal practice: just enough sops and doles to prevent revolution. Beyond that, individual initiative like his own would serve those who had it; the rest deserved their lot, and it was the responsibility of Tower Hall and the Campus Patrol to see to it they got no more than their desert.

"Caveat emptor!" he snapped. "Laissez-faire! Sauve qui peut!"

"I beg your pardon?"

He offered to translate the mottoes for me at a cut rate, the three of them for the price of two. The sun had emerged now from eclipse; my sharp shadow made me impatient to get on with my Assignment and other concerns, and I begged him for Founder's sake to tell me the time and be done with it, if only repayment for hearing out his grasping diatribe. The insult had no visible effect.

"What's in it for me if I tell you?" he chuckled, squinting at my shadow. "It's later than you think."

Angrily I reminded him that I was no ignorant beggar, deserving or otherwise, but a registered bonafide Candidate for Graduation and a Grand Tutor in posse, who could certainly give him a much-needed Tutorial word or two if I so chose — the which by tradition and common fame were pearls of so great price that all the information in all the encyclopedias of the University was as nothing beside the least of them.

"No deal," Ira Hector replied. "I've been Certified already." From a worn leather snap-purse in his vest pocket he pinched out a much-folded parchment, of a kind familiar: under the usual certificatory formulations, Harold Bray's signature and a penned subscription: "Founder helps those who help themselves."

"I've helped myself to everything in reach!" he admitted gleefully, adding that while he personally regarded Graduation as the daydream of fools and bankrupts, worth nothing on the informational market, he'd offered to support Bray's Grand-Tutorship in Tower Hall in return for Certification, both because he frankly enjoyed possessing anything that other people craved, and because he wanted to assure himself that even a Grand Tutor has His price.

"That diploma's worthless," I told him. "Bray's no Grand Tutor."

"So it's worthless. Didn't cost me anything." Out of patience, I harangued him on the subjects both of his miserliness and of his contempt for Graduation, declaring that even if Bray were a genuine Grand Tutor and the ground of his Certification valid — neither of which was the case — he Ira Hector was flunked nonetheless. It might be argued, I admitted, that Commencement, always necessarily of the Self, was the highest form of self-preservation, and therefore of greater value to the selfish man than to the unselfish; likewise, that if the greed for Passage was a passèd greed, it passed by extension the greedy principle whereof it was the passèdest example, in the fashion of legal precedents or the single combats of ancient terms, on which the fate of whole quads hung. But endeavor as he doubtless had, Ira Hector had not achieved perfect selfishness, I maintained; had not looked out unremittingly for Number One; indeed he must answer for a quite uncommon generosity!

"Poppycock! Balderdash!"

How did he account then, I demanded, bending near his beak, for his adoption of Anastasia and the open-handedness, so to speak, with which he'd reared her? For his readiness to sacrifice a golden business-opportunity in order to spare her a fate worse than flunking? There was no getting around it: his claim to have spanked his ward for fun and Stokered her for profit — like his claim to have endowed the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital to gratify his lecherous curiosity and lower his taxes — had an inauthentic ring; whatever other motives were involved, such behavior had in it a streak of magnanimity, even of philanthropy!

"All lies!" Ira Hector cried. But I had quicked him. He demanded to know where I'd heard those slanders, yet rejected my offer to sell him that information in return for the correct time. Then, wonderfully agitated, he insisted that although he and his brother Reginald were the abandoned get of an unwed freshman girl and some drunken janitor, his establishment of the New Tammany Lying-in and any favors he'd done his brother were purely selfish. Granted he'd fed and clothed young Reginald, pulled strings to get him a cadetship in the NTCROTC, arranged his marriage to the woman whom Ira himself had been courting, financed his campaign for the chancellorship after C.R. II, and appointed him director of the Philophilosophical Fund: his end from the beginning had been simply to profit from his brother's offices and connections, and profit he had.

These disclosures were surprising news to me; even so I failed to see what gain there was in losing his fiancée, for example, or endowing the Philophilosophical Fund.

His smile was chelonian: "Why should I pay for the woman's keep, when I could get her for nothing anytime I wanted?" Referring to Reginald's wife, Anastasia's grandmother.

"Is that what you did?"

"It's what I would have done; but she died when Stacey's mother was born. There's always a few investments don't pay off." As for the P.P.F. and the lying-in hospital, they were manifold assets, he insisted, providing him with tax write-offs, opportunities for graft and patronage, and such entertainments as playing doctor with patient young ladies when the whim took him. He had, for example, assisted in the delivery-room when his niece, Virginia R. Hector, gave birth, and had quite enjoyed the show even though she'd brought forth neither monster nor GILES, as had been predicted in some quarters, but only Anastasia, a normal baby girl whom he then raised to serve his pleasures.

"But you did try to help Anastasia," I said, no longer certain however of my point. "She told me so."

Ira Hector winked and licked his lips. "I helped myself, like everybody else! Stoker says he gets a commission on her; I used to get her whole price!"

Repellent as I found this remark, and its maker, I was skeptical of its truth. For one thing, Anastasia had confessed worse things unabashedly in George's Gorge, but had made no mention of fees and commissions. For another, I observed that Ira Hector could not speak painlessly of her connection with Maurice Stoker: his neck-cords flexed at the man's name, and his voice shelled over.

"You pity her!" I accused him. "You pitied her mother, too, and your own brother when you were kids."

"Rot!"

"And all those unwed co-eds! I think you pity everybody, and you're ashamed to say so!"

Now his eyes gleamed. "I pity you, you nincompoop!"

"I bet you did business with Bray for the same reason Anastasia did," I said. "Out of charity! You taught her to be the way she is!"

"Charity be flunked!" Ira hollered. "Every man for himself!"

It occurred to me to argue, then, more out of spite than out of conviction, that even his vaunted miserliness might be passèd, and its opposite flunked. Enos Enoch, it was true, bade men give all their wealth of information to poor students and become as unlettered kindergarteners, if they would Pass; but it seemed to me that this was to pass at the expense of others, those to whom one's wealth was given, for nowhere did the Founder's Scroll say "Passèd are the wealthy." What nobler martyrdom, then, than to keep from men that which it would flunk them to possess, and hoarding it to oneself, flunk like a scapegoat in their stead?

"You're demented," Ira said. "You think I'm going to pay you for clap-trap like that?"

"I'm not Harold Bray," I replied. "I can't be bought." And seeing I would not get from him what I needed, I walked off.