John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"But it doesn't matter!" Anastasia said. "I forgive you anyway. There's no need to keep saying you're not my father."

"By me there's need! I wish I was your poppa, such a girl! But I'm not, I swear it!"

"Then I believe you," the girl said firmly. "Don't go on like that, now." As if he were the child and she the parent, she gathered Max's old head to her breast, which lacking the hard-cupped harness I had noted on Chickie-in-the-buckwheat's, yielded softly to his cheek — and I wished I had something to be forgiven for. The effect was admirable: Max soon recomposed himself and set to praising her virtues to me (who needed no persuasion) in a more controlled if no less enthusiastic spirit. He now believed her utterly, he said, and would add to the proofs of my untutored wisdom, and his own too-human fallibility, that I had been drawn strongly to her from the first, and had affirmed her goodness in the face of his skepticism.

"That was sweet of him," she said, and smiled me such a warm smile of gratitude, I wished I truly had never doubted her, and been impelled from the first by the sight of her spiritual merits alone. "He tried his best to hold Croaker back, too, but it wasn't any use."

"An atrocity!" Max cried. "The brute ought to be caged up."

But Anastasia protested once again that after all men were what they were, Founder pass them, and animals were what they were; Croaker couldn't help himself any more than her husband could, who often did things to her and to others that were misinterpreted as proceeding from a flunkèd nature simply because the deeds themselves were flunkèd. Besides, it pained her to see anything caged, no matter how wild or dangerous — an animal, a criminal, anything… Often in the past, she confessed, she had pitied "poor Croaker" for not having a mate equal to his passions — though to be sure she pitied even more their unequal victims: the co-eds, the policeman, the poodle, and the cute little monkeys whose expressions had looked so like wise old men's. But only look at Croaker now, she bade us, how docile and content he was, like a great spoiled child that's had his lollipop at last. How could she, she asked us almost light-heartedly, be aggrieved at her own mistreatment — which albeit hurtsome had not been fatal, after all — when in addition to sparing others the same or worse, it had so plainly done its doer a campus of good?

I was purely touched, and asked her how it came that so gentle a lady girl had wed Maurice Stoker, whom despite her excusing him I took to be a flunkèder brute than Croaker, because more conscious of his ways?

"That's well asked, Georgie," Max approved. "That's asked like a Grand Tutor." And to Anastasia, before she could reply, he professed frankly his belief that I might be no person else than a true Grand Tutor to the Western Campus, destined to rescue studentdom from the tyranny of its own invention. "Don't mock," he cautioned her; "myself I'm a skeptic; I wouldn't say such a thing in a hundred years without plenty good reasons."

But Anastasia was far from mocking; she looked up at me in wonder as Max spoke. "So that's it!"

I assumed she meant that she understood now certain earlier remarks and attitudes of mine which must have struck her as mysterious at the time (such as my alarm at her mention that Chancellor Rexford was expecting a Grand Tutor's arrival at any moment). But she drew from the pocket of her shift a small glass phial, which she said had been given her by one of The Living Sakhyan's company as they left the beach, just a short time previously.

"It was the strangest thing," she said to Max — as if scarcely presuming to address me directly. "Here I didn't even think they could talk our language, and I swear they hadn't said a word to one another the whole time they were sitting here; but suddenly The Living Sakhyan smiled at me and raised His hand — it was like He'd just come out of his trance — and it made me feel peculiar all over! Then one of His men led me up to the fire — this was while George had come back to get you. And I felt so funny, because I didn't know whether they were going to thank me for fixing their fire, or — or do something to me, or what. And it didn't seem to matter, if you know what I mean, Him being such a great man and all; you can almost feel how wise and Commencèd He is, and whatever He wanted to do, I have this feeling it was all right, and I'd be flunkèd not to let Him do it…" She turned to me, her eyes full of reverence. "But then His helper took out this little bottle and gave it to me, and said it was for you from The Living Sakhyan. 'From ours to yours,' is what he said — and he didn't even speak with an accent! I was so surprised I stood there like a dunce, and didn't think to ask what it was until they'd picked up The Living Sakhyan and were almost gone. Then the man who gave it to me sort of frowned and closed his eyes, as if I was so stupid he couldn't stand to look at me, and he said, 'It's the Disappearing Ink.' I swear that's what he said!"

She held the phial out to me, rather diffidently. "He must have just said that to let me know it was none of my business. There doesn't seem to be anything in it at all, that I can see…"

I held it up to the firelight, shook it at my ear. It did in fact appear to be empty.

"Do you think — " She touched her fingers to her cheek and smiled uncertainly at Max. "What I mean, could it have disappeared already?"

Max examined gravely the empty phial and returned it to me. East-Campus Graduates, he pointed out, famously spoke in riddles, and it was by no means unthinkable that The Living Sakhyan, or His disciple, had been making some obscure joke with Anastasia; but whatever the true nature and significance of the gift, he took its presentation as no joke at all, but one more proof of my authenticity.

I myself was not impressed. "Disappearing ink!" I flung the phial down, angered afresh at the revelation that the men in yellow had after all been aware of everything that had happened in the gorge: had understood G. Herrold's plight and Anastasia's, but had suffered the one to drown and the other to be raped without lifting a finger in either's behalf. "Dunce take it!"

"Oh, don't!" Anastasia snatched it up at once from the sand. "Really — excuse me, George, I'm sure you're a thousand times brighter than I am, but I really don't think…" She blushed, "Would it be all right if I kept it for you? In case you change your mind?"

"That might be smart, Georgie," Max agreed. "These things mean more than they seem to, sometimes. I'd like to have time to think it over before you throw it away."

I shrugged. "You're the advisor." Anastasia gratefully returned the phial to her pocket, as if it were a precious gem, and I pressed her again to account for her marriage to the notorious Stoker, which it seemed to me she had been pleased to digress from explaining. My tone was even a bit peremptory, for I was on the one hand impressed by her clearly self-sacrificial behavior with Croaker, her husband, Max, The Living Sakhyan, and myself, and on the other hand vaguely uneasy about it: it disturbed me to see her equally submissive to everyone, the flunkèd as well as the not. Yet sincere as this concern of mine was (which it made me feel quite Grand-Tutorish to express), in the main I was simply flattered by the novelty of being stood in awe of, especially by that lovely creature — so ready to obey, one could not resist commanding her! Out of all these feelings I demanded to know whether she had wed of her free will or been abducted like the captive brides of old, in which latter case I intended by some means to slay her captor and set her at liberty.

"Oh, you couldn't do that !" she said — amused, alarmed, and pleased at once, as it seemed to me. "I mean, I guess you could, if you're a Grand Tutor, but — "