Giles Goat Boy (67 page)

“Look what’s coming,” said one of their number.

They were too many; as I passed The Living Sakhyan’s elm I rapped His shoulder, less than reverently it may be, and bade Him help me help. T. L. Sakhyan’s palms were pressed together under His breast, fingers upward, and His eyes gently shut; yet I knew Him to be awake by that tranquil smile He’d borne across the torrent at our last encounter, and with which He’d favored Anastasia’s ravishment. It put me in a sweat of ire.

“At least call a patrolman!” I shouted in His ear, then dashed the more rashly, for my exasperation, to aid the old man, whose two chief
botherers now turned to me. The others had only stood by—shaggy lads mostly, out at elbows—and seemed inclined to withdraw when I challenged. I heard one say, “It’s that goat-boy,” in a tone that, oddly, did not mock. Others grinned; a few looked sheepish, and I took heart.

“Shoo!” I commanded, wishing that their old victim would fly to safety while he might. But he held his ground; worse, he called them scamps and beggars deserving of the horsewhip, a judgment he might have rendered at a better hour.

“Shameless!” one of them cried, more outraged than wrathful. Indeed, when the old man charged them further to go steal a watch if they wanted the time, as they’d not get free from him what others paid for, even the more aggressive pair seemed disarmed by the force of their own indignation, and called on the Founder to witness to what flunkèd depths of meanness the student mind could sink. I too was startled out of countenance.

“You only wanted the time of day?”

That, it developed, was their sole craving. Indigent scholarship-students all, they had not a watch among them, yet needed to measure the exact duration of the current eclipse in connection with some astronomy assignment. Understanding Tower Clock to be out of order, they had approached the “Old Man of the Mall,” who I now learned was a kind of institution in New Tammany College, famous for his store of information and his ability to tell the time of day, to the second, by the length of people’s shadows on the path.

“Not for free, though,” the old man said. “I don’t sit here for my health.” Now I could see it, his face was horny-beaked and sere-eyed like a turtle’s, and his neck as corded, loose in the carapace of his collar. I was amazed. A tattered, glaring chap turned to me.

“He’s the stingiest man on campus! Let’s shake it out of him!”

And indeed they might have laid hands on him, but I was inspired to point out that until after the eclipse there would be no clear shadows for the Old Man of the Mall to reckon from.

“I wouldn’t’ve told ’em anyhow,” he said.

“You
are
stingy!” I scolded him. The young men granted my point, but were incensed enough by the fellow’s meanness—as almost was I—to offer him a roughing in any case. I forestalled it by giving them the reading of my own timepiece, the best I could manage, for which they thanked me and withdrew, not without grumbled threats to return with the sun.

“Don’t come empty-handed,” the old man called after them. “I’m not Reg Hector.”

“You’re mad!” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell them yourself you didn’t know the right time?”

He rubbed his thumb against the tips of two fingers. “What’s it worth to you to find that out?”

I wished him loudly to the Dean o’ Flunks and promised next time to look on smiling, like The Living Sakhyan, while he got what his miserliness deserved; then I declared that it was to check my own watch I’d approached him, and that, he being in my debt already, I meant to have the time of day from him as soon as the eclipse ended (it was passing already) or call back the shabby young men to finish what I’d interrupted.

“I owe you nothing,” he said. “Did I hire you to help me?” However, he added, since I’d given him something he hadn’t asked for, he’d repay me with something I didn’t need: a blank ID-card and enough indelible ink to sign it with my name. Forged cards, he pointed out, were much in demand among undergraduates too young to purchase liquor legally; in fact, it was not for interfering in his private affairs that he was rewarding me with so salable a piece of goods, but for teaching him a new way to drive off the beggar-students who forever importuned him. Thitherto he’d been obliged to give the more threatening ones what they wanted, in order to insure his own safety, and he had been thoughtless enough to give them correct information. But thanks to my example (now there was sun enough to cast shadows, he could tell by the length of mine that my watch was slow) thenceforth he would buy his safety with false coin, seeing to it that any answers extorted from him were not quite accurate. He could hardly contain his satisfaction at learning this business-trick, the more pleasing to him since he had it from me
gratis
; nor much better could I at being rewarded, unbeknownst to him, with something I very much needed after all. If I was able to take the ID-card and ink with a show of indifference, it was only because my delight was pinched by bad conscience at having in a manner sharped him—and, himlike, savoring the cheat.

“You don’t get the whole bottle,” he grumbled. “Just enough to sign your name.”

I had no pen, but struck a bargain for the loan of his in return for what ink I saved him by having one name instead of three. Then, as I wrote
George
on the proper line, I saw that the card was after all
not a new one; nor was the ink, it seemed, absolutely indelible: dimly could be made out there, after mine, the previous owner’s name:
Ira Hector
. “You stole this card!”

He closed his eyes, thrust out his underlip, shook his head.

“Look here: it says
Ira Hector!
It’s a used card!”

“You don’t want it, give it back. But no refunds.”

I saw his eye glint so at that prospect that shrewdly I promised to have him taken up for theft if he didn’t give me at once the accurate time of day, which I needed to proceed with my Assignment.

“Call a cop,” he dared me. “He’ll arrest you as an accessory. In fact, I’ll say
you
stole it: your name’s on it! And I’ll charge you with extortion besides.”

Improvising swiftly and in anger, I declared myself willing to match a prospective Grand Tutor’s word against a nameless vagrant’s, or used-card dealer’s, especially since Mr. Ira Hector, when I should return his card to him, would doubtless apply his famous wealth and influence in my just behalf.

“Don’t count on it,” the old man chuckled. “I’m Ira Hector.”

I denied it.

“Of course I am, you great ninny. Everybody knows the Old Man of the Mall.”

Alas, he did quite fit the impression of her uncle I’d got from Anastasia’s narrative, and I was the more appalled at such petty avarice in the wealthiest man on campus. But I challenged him to prove his identity without a card.

He blinked like an old testudinate Peter Greene. “You should be a business major, Goat-Boy!” However, it was his notoriety in the College, he told me, that rendered his ID-card superfluous and induced him to sell it.
Everybody
recognized him, he was sorry to say, and pestered him for handouts which they no more deserved than did those young beggars the free tuition provided them by Chancellor Rexford’s new grant-in-aid program. Creeping Student-Unionism was what it was, to Mr. Hector’s mind: the tyranny of the have-nots, of the ignorant over the schooled. The only thing to be said for the Administration’s reckless giveaways was that, the untutored being always (and justly) more numerous than the learned, Rexford was buying political power with other people’s wealth. But it was bad business in the long term, Ira Hector was sure, and must lead the College’s economy to bankruptcy.

“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 in 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.”