John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

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.