Giles Goat Boy (88 page)

Though I approved neither the narrow alma-matriotism of that sentiment nor the general notion that the weal of studentdom was politically contingent, I could not but be moved, in those circumstances, by the fitness of their appeal, directed as it seemed not to their college but to me:

Reginald Hector’s several offices—as Commencement Director, Executive Secretary of the Philophilosophical Fund, and Board Chairman of his brother’s reference-book cartel—were housed, along with his living-quarters, in a smaller version of Lucius Rexford’s Light House, just across Great Mall. As it had originally served the latter’s purpose, it was now appropriately called the Old Chancellor’s Mansion. Inappropriately, however, its white-brick façade and gracious windows were lit more brightly than those of its larger counterpart: either the Power-Plant trouble was localized, or Lucky Rexford had altered his ways indeed! The respect still felt by New Tammanians for their old professor-general was evidenced by the fact that whereas half a hundred guards had not kept them out of Tower Hall, the sight of one—a white-helmeted and -gloved ROTCMP—was enough to halt my bearers a respectful way from the porch. The fellow was armed, of course; yet surely it was not his rifle (held anyhow at Parade Rest) that stayed them, but their esteem for the man whose door he ceremonially protected. Much impressed at this contradiction of Max’s contempt, and Dr. Sear’s, for the former Chancellor, I asked to be set down, declared again into a row of microphones that important announcements would soon be forthcoming, perhaps from Reginald Hector as well as myself, and insisted that no one accompany me into the building. As I strode porchwards (gimplessly as possible) campus patrolmen assembled to contain the crowd—which I was gratified to see make no effort to push
past them. A number of photographers and journalism-majors were rude enough to press after me up the walk, and though I respected their professional persistence, I was pleased when the military doorman, having inspected my ID-card and saluted me, obliged them to remain without.

“The P.-G.’s in the P.P.F.O., sir,” he informed me; and so satisfying was his brisk courtesy I thanked him and stepped inside before considering what his message signified. Happily, another like him, only female, came forward from a desk in the reception-hall as I entered, and inquired politely whether it was the P.-G. I sought; if so, she was sure he would interrupt his P.P.F.-work for another audience with the Grand Tutor—especially in view of the shocking news, which she daresaid had brought me to the P.P.F.O. I understood then the several initials and, reminded of the general crisis by a dimming of the lights, bid her not fear the alarming reports from Founder’s Hill and the Light House, since all radical progress entailed some temporary disorder.

“Oh no, sir,” she said—a pert thing she, in her olive skirt and blouse and her dark-rimmed spectacles—“I meant what that Ira Hector’s gone and done.” She’d led me down a short hall to a glass-paned double door labeled P
HILOPHILOSOPHICAL
F
UND
: E
XECUTIVE
S
ECRETARY
. “None of my business, I’m sure,” she declared, opening the door with a fetching thrust of her hip, “but I still think Ira Hector’s a nasty old man and the P.-G’s a sweetie. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

Curious as I was to know what news she alluded to, I was more so at the sight, in the P.P.F. Office, of what appeared to be the same shaggy band of indigent scholars I’d rescued Ira Hector from in the morning. Beggars now as then, and no less disdainful, they seemed however to be meeting with more success. The man they importuned, pressing round the desktop where he sat, I gathered was Reginald Hector, my maternal grandfather and would-be assassin. A strong-jawed, hairless man in conservative worsted, he dispensed largesse with an even hand and a steady smile. Though his perch was informal, his back was as straight as the guard’s outside; his eyes, blue, seemed now to twinkle, now to glint like mica; at each beneficence he said, “Take
this!
” or, “
There
, by golly!” in a tone of level satisfaction, as if delivering a counter-thrust. To one man he gave a check, to another a set of drafting-instruments boxed in blue velvet, to another a reference-book bound in half-morocco, to another three tins of corned beef; his own fountain-pen he took from his inside pocket and bestowed upon a long-haired woolly girl, who kissed his hand; his pocket-watch and chain, his desk-barometer and appointment-calendar, even his striped cravat and cufflinks went the same charitable way.
And though two aides behind him replaced these items, including the personal ones, from a stock in cartons at their side, I was pleased by the spectacle of such philanthropy, stirred by the contrast between the brothers Hector, and not a little incensed at the students’ want of gratitude; even the hand-kisser I suspected of a smirk, which happily her hair hid from her benefactor.

Out of his notice, I observed that the supply of goods in the cartons ran out as the receptionist approached. Ex-Chancellor Hector frowned, shrugged, smiled, cleared his throat, and deftly rolled himself a cigarette.

“That’s the end, boys,” he said briskly. “No more to hand out.”

There was a chorus of complaints, but the aides sharply marshaled the supplicants past me into the hall, reminding them to call a final Thank-you-sir as they left. Few did, except mockingly. Me they regarded with expressions of suspicion, contempt, or hostility—a reassuring surprise, considering my mask. One called me a charlatan, another a “square,” another a “company man”; they were, it was clear, disaffiliated from the mainstream of New Tammany sentiment, and my heart warmed to them. Indeed, I privately resolved to seek them out, once I’d proclaimed myself, and enlist them among my first Tutees, as they were beyond doubt the goatliest of undergraduates. Mightily tempted to reveal myself, I urged them to wait with their classmates outside, as I had good tidings concerning their friend the Goat-Boy. Naturally they sniffed at this news; the aides rallied them along then, despite their threats to “go limp” if anyone laid a hand on them.

“Flunking ingrates,” one aide muttered to me. “We’ll see how they holler with no more handouts from the P.-G.”

I began to declare to him that their number included, in my opinion, the very salt of the campus, but by this time the receptionist had informed “the P.-G.” of my presence, and he came over to me shaking his head.

“Good to see you, G.T.!” he said warmly. His handshake was strong, his tone friendly, but his smile grave. “Everything’s going to the Dunce, eh?”

The receptionist excused herself, but Reginald Hector asked her to look in once more on “Miss Virginia in the next room” instead of returning to the entrance-hall, as he feared his daughter was still half-hysterical.

“The things she’s been saying …” He scratched his pate ruefully. “And there’s always a flunking reporter around, you know.” He cast a brief sharp eye at me, wondering no doubt how aware I might be of his daughter’s new distress, and how much of her raving was true.

“Naturally Miss Hector’s upset,” I said. “Most unfortunate business back there in the Library.”

“Unfortunate! I’d like to get my hands on that freak of a Goat-Boy!” He seemed unsure of his ground—as I could well imagine he might be, whomever his daughter was presently claiming to be the GILES. Gruffly he thanked me—that is, Bray—for having Certified him earlier in the day: the quotation on his diploma—
No class shall pass—
he deemed so apt a summary of his philosophy that he meant to propose it as a motto for his favorite club, the Brotherhood of Independent Men. Rather, he hoped to do so if he had the wherewithal to maintain his own membership in that society, now that his brother had “pulled the rug from under the P.P.F.,” and the Executive Secretary’s salary with it.

“More of that flunking Goat-Boy’s meddling, so I hear,” he said crossly. “Not that I think half those rascals deserve a hand-out anyhow! But better dole it out privately than turn New Tammany into a welfare-college, the way Rexford’s been doing.”

“Your brother’s changed his mind about philanthropy?” I asked.

“Changed his mind! He’s lost it!” It had always been his own policy, he declared, to be beholden to no man; to look out for himself in order to be able to look out for others. In this he differed from his brother Ira, who gave alms in self-defense, as it were, or to further his own interests. They shared the opinion that the ignorant mass of studentdom by and large deserved its wretched lot; their own example proved that ambition and character could overcome any handicap; but there was no reason, Reginald felt, not to pity one’s inferiors. He thought it important that the College administration keep out of the charity-business, lest the worthless masses—already too dependent and lazy—come to think of free board and tuition as their due; and nothing would militate more favorably for Lucius Rexford’s sweeping grant-in-aid bill than the curtailment of the Philophilosophical Fund.

I could not help smiling. “Maybe the Goat-Boy will get to Chancellor Rexford, too,” I suggested. Reginald Hector declared with a sniff that he’d heard disturbing rumors to just that effect, adding that back in the days of C.R. II such a dangerous subversive would have been shot, at least under
his
command. Nowadays it was coddle, coddle—and look at the crime-rate, and the drop-out rate, and the illegitimate birthrate, and the varsity situation!

“The Goat-Boy won’t meddle any more,” one of the aides said from the hallway, and reported what he’d just heard from the crowd outside: that I had left the impostor EATen in WESCAC’s Belly.

“No!” Reginald Hector exclaimed happily, and slapped me on the back. “Why didn’t You say so, doggone You!” I confirmed that the false Grand Tutor was no longer a menace to studentdom, and explained the object of my visit: a final official endorsement of my Passage and Grand-Tutorship now that the pretender had been put down.

“Gladly, gladly! Give Your card here, sir; I’ll be glad to okay it!” He fished for a pen, found he’d given his away, and borrowed one from an aide. “I knew he was a phony—GILES indeed! As if there ever was such a thing!”

I smiled and handed him my Assignment-sheet. Within the circle of its motto, I observed, Bray had written
Passage is Failure—
alluding, I supposed, to those Certifications of his which I’d shown to be false. The presumption annoyed me until I remembered his dubious claim to accessoryhood back in the Belly, which I’d not had time to consider and evaluate.

“Mm-hm,” the ex-Chancellor said, holding it at various distances from his eyes. Perhaps he couldn’t make it out at all; in any case he only glanced at it hastily, nodding all the while. “Oh, yes, this is quite in order. Hum! I can sign it anywhere, I suppose?”

Calling his attention to the seventh and final task, I observed that no signatures on the Assignment-list itself seemed called for, only on the matriculation- (i.e., ID-) card—which too there was apparently no need for him to sign, only to inspect.

“Sure, sure,” he agreed at once, as if he’d known that fact as well as his own name, but had forgot it for half a second. “Unless You want me to initial it just for form’s sake …”

Inspecting the card myself as he talked, I saw that Bray had printed WESCAC in the “Father” blank and signed his own name as “Examiner.” I borrowed Reginald Hector’s borrowed pen, scratched through the name
George
I’d signed earlier, and after it, on the same line, printed GILES.

“Keep it, keep it,” he said of the pen, and took the card. Instantly he reddened. “What’s this?”

I offered the pen to its first owner, who, however, stepped back with a little embarrassed sign.

“Something wrong?” I asked the ex-Chancellor. “Here—initial it after my title, if you like.”

“
I
see,” he said, drawing the words out as if he’d caught on to a tease. “You examined Yourself! Why not? And You’re going to call Yourself the GILES because You
are
the Grand Tutor.” He scribbled
RH
at the
end of the line. “Don’t blame You a bit! Darned clever idea, in fact—help put an end to that Goat-Boy nonsense. There You are, sir!”

Retrieving the two documents I said, “I
am
the GILES, Mr. Hector.”

“Of course You are!” he cried indignantly. “You’ve got every right to be! I was trying to tell that daughter of mine just a while ago, when Stacey brought her in all upset: she’s got to get that nonsense out of her head—”

“That she’s my mother?” I interrupted. “She is, Mr. Hector. I’m the
real
GILES, that you put in the tapelift twenty-one years ago.”

“Ridiculous.” He had been looking a rattled and somewhat fatuous old man; now his jaw set, and his eyes flashed in a way that must once have intimidated ranks of junior officers. In fact, the two aides withdrew at once. He was a military-scientist, he told me then curtly, not a fancy-talk politician or a philosopher with thick eyeglasses, and there were plenty of things over his head, he did not doubt: but be flunked if he didn’t know a racket when he smelled one, and in
his
nose, so to speak, this Grand-Tutor business stank from Belly to Belfry. What was my angle? he wanted to know. He’d gone along with Rexford and the others in recognizing my Grand-Tutorhood (which was to say, Bray’s) for the same reason he’d joined the Enochist Fraternity during his campaign for the Chancellorship; because he knew it was as important for “the common herd” to believe in Commencement as it was for riot-troopers to believe in their alma mater, true or false—a consolation for and justification of their inferior rank. And he’d hoped I was merely a clever opportunist; in fact he’d rather admired my “get up and git,” as he put it, and assumed I’d got what I was after: fame, influence, campus-wide respect, and a lucrative berth in the Rexford administration. But apparently I was after bigger, more dangerous game; had gone digging into great men’s pasts in search of paydirt, as it were, and turning up that libelous old gossip about his daughter and the GILES, had thought to extort something from him with it …