by John Barth
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 g
ain 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.
“One of your friends had an accident,” Max observed.
Indeed, the sidecar was partly crushed, the windscreen broken, and the front tire burst, as if the vehicle had plunged into the ditch with some force. I suggested that the driver, nowhere in sight, must have been the sharp-faced officer sent to find Max, but then observed that the original position of the motorcycle in the ditch, as well as its tire-marks on the shoulder of the road, indicated that it had been traveling towards the Powerhouse at the time of the accident.
“So,” Max said without interest. “There’s lots of roads, and Stoker’s got more bullies than one.”
“What happened to the driver, do you think?”
Max shrugged. As he was so plainly indifferent, I ordered Croaker to wait while I searched and called through the underbrush on both sides of the road, in case someone lay injured. There was no reply.
“He must have gone for help,” I decided. “Or someone came after him already.”
Max turned his head contemptuously and would not even look at the damaged machine, which I however examined curiously.
“How far is it to Great Mall, Max?”
“Farther than yesterday,” he said dryly. Among the other misfortunes of encountering Stoker, it seemed, was that previously we’d been moving west, from the College Farms towards Great Mall, but the route from the Gorge to the Powerhouse had fetched us many kilometers to the north, out of our way.
I decided then to attempt to use the motorcycle: if it proved possible to manage it, at a low speed, Croaker could either sit in the sidecar or trot alongside, with Max on his shoulders, and we might reach Great Mall before dark; otherwise we’d spend another night in the open or have to beg lodging. So at least I imagined, ignorant as I was of the campus and of such matters as the medium of exchange and Max’s wherewithal; I assumed that, once officially matriculated, one was housed and fed at the College’s expense—but I knew nothing of these matters, and Max, who ordinarily might have advised me, was grown so morose I had difficulty getting out of him that he knew nothing of motorcycle-operation himself or the legal aspects of borrowing the vehicle. This I could scarcely credit; privately I was becoming persuaded that besides his distress over G. Herrold and his objection to Stoker, what was really upsetting him was my independence of his authority, and Anastasia’s declaration that he was her natural father—which for all I knew might be true despite his denying it. In any case he was too lost in his broodings to care much what I did, and so I set about examining the machine’s controls and recalling what I could of Stoker’s operation of them.
After some experiment I managed, partly by accident, to get the ignition on, the throttle half-opened, the carburetor choked, and the clutch disengaged all at the same time, and was rewarded by a sputter from the engine when I kicked the starter. Presently I contrived a sustained idle, having by chance let off the choke, and was able to sit on the trembling three-wheeler and vary the engine speed most satisfyingly—without however moving from the spot. Next came a series of jerks and stalls as I fiddled with the shift-lever and learned its association with the clutch-pedal; finally, by a happy combination of chance and deduction, I released my grip on the hand-brake, shifted out of neutral into low gear (not suspecting there were other ratios still), and throttled the engine sufficiently in time to keep from stalling. The jerk nearly took me off the seat; luckily my hand slipped from the throttle before I could reduce speed and stop again out of terror; but I hung on and even mustered presence enough of mind to steer away from the ditch, onto the pavement. To negotiate a straight course was more difficult than I’d imagined, owing (as I was to learn presently) to the flat front tire and the pull of the sidecar, which had been wrenched out of line by the crash. But I was exhilarated—two monsters brought to heel in as many days!—and hobbled along delightedly in low gear, with the engine roaring. Croaker skipped alongside, grinning and grunting, and bid fair to bounce my advisor from his shoulders; he seemed as pleased as I by my achievement, and I perfected his bliss by giving him my stick to chew, since Max showed no interest in using it to direct him. We did after all move a little faster in this clumsy wise than we had before, though perhaps not enough to redeem the time lost in my self-instruction. Happily there was no traffic to deal with. More happily yet, as it turned out, we came in a quarter-hour to a crossroads, where a young man with orange hair and a satchel was.
He wore a trim gray woolen suit and a cap of raccoon-fur and did push-ups in the road; his flowered necktie, loose at the throat, folded itself upon the asphalt when he sank and unfolded when he rose. Mid-dip he paused at the sound of us, face gleaming like his hair, then stood and waved his cap as we approached. An uncommonly tall chap: his trouser-cuffs hung shy of his great yellow shoes, his sleeves of his great red hands. Now we were nearer I saw he meant us to stop, and wondered whether, despite the freckled cheer of his countenance, he mightn’t be some sort of threat. It seemed odd, too, that he showed no alarm at sight of Croaker, whom however he regarded with a look of merry amazement. There was no time for Max to advise me, even had he wished to; in any case I’d have had trouble hearing him over the engine. It was a choice between stopping, running the man down, and turning to right or left: I chose to stop. Indeed, the choice was made for me by my ignorance and indecision: I braked without either declutching or closing the throttle, and the motor stalled.
“Mercy sakes a’mighty Pete!” The fellow drew out his exclamation in an accent not unlike G. Herrold’s, scratching his head the while. His grin quite laid my apprehension, as did the good-natured wonder in his eyes—in his eye, rather, for though the pair were of an equal blue and glint, it was only the right that moved from me to the flat-tired cycle to Max and Croaker, while the left (if anything more wide than its companion) stared always straight ahead.
