"That's nonsense," I said. "What you really hope is just the opposite. You hope your flunkèdness will pass you because it gives Anastasia a chance to be passèd. You call Chancellor Rexford your brother so that nobody'll believe he is."
"Right!" Stoker cried delightedly. "So Failure is Passage and Passage is Failure! Let's have a drink on it after we spy on Greene and Georgina."
I shifted my ground then (not quite certain whether the argument was still intelligible, and more in hopes of unsettling my adversary than of instructing either him or myself): refusing to peep through the keyhole of the outer-office door, whence issued muffled noises of pursuit, I declared that the first reality of life on campus must be the clear distinction between Passage and Failure, the former of which was always and only passèd, the latter flunked. "The truth about you is that you're not the Dean o' Flunks," I said. "You act like him because you have such a high opinion of Commencement that you're afraid you can't make the grade."
"Ha!"
But I believed I had touched him, as in the Assembly, and thanks to Max's tutelage in logical manipulation I was able to press home my purely improvised position. The real ground of Stoker's failure, I told him (he was squatting at the keyhole now, pretending not to hear me), was this equation of Passage and Failure; but even by his own paradoxical reasoning he was not "truly" flunked, and was therefore truly flunked. By this I meant that if he really believed that Rexford's calm reasonableness and Anastasia's submission to abuse were flunkèd — because of their passèdness or however — and also that he himself could in a manner pass from very flunkèdness, then he should pursue a policy just contrary to his present one: deny that Lucky Rexford was his brother, but emulate the ordered normalcy that he regarded as a perilous delusion; be a gentle loving husband to Anastasia, even a submissive one; give over his sprees and orgies, all his mad mischief — in short, turn his personality inside out, and flunk by his own transvaluated terms instead of by the usual ones. It was a challenge born of my distress and bad temper, and riddled with equivocations; yet giving it voice I felt once again some murky, valid point in Stoker's life, which I could not as yet assimilate: obscurely I suspected that however flunking were his treatment of Anastasia and his repudiation of every passèd thing, there was another side to them.
Georgina burst into the hall, nearly upsetting her new employer, and took indignant cover behind him. After her came Peter Greene, but stopped short and reddened at the sight of us.
"For pity's sake leave her alone," I said crossly — as if I were the forty-year-old and he the twenty-. And he responded appropriately:
"Shucks, I was only playing I'd paddle her if she didn't 'fess up who she is."
"I declare," Georgina said — not very upset. "Some people's children!"
I advised him testily to leave such games to Stoker — if Stoker still cared to play them — and drive me back to Great Mall, as I had work to do: in addition to my Assignment I meant to take up that very day, if possible, the Chancellor's invitation to discuss Max's case with him; and I had business with Anastasia also, if and when my third task took me to the Infirmary. The truth was (though I didn't care to discuss it further before Stoker), I felt an urgent need to show everyone whom Bray had Certified the invalidity of their Certification, lest like patients falsely prescribed for they turn their backs on honest medicine. And I meant to begin with Greene himself, whose case seemed grave enough. As if to illustrate my simile, while agreeing eagerly to chauffeur me anywhere if Anastasia was along the route, he popped a flaming pimple on his chin, and then complained that the salve Stoker had loaned him the night before had made his acne worse instead of better.
"Is that a fact?" Stoker said. "It does a fine job of scaling our boilers." I heard distraction in his gibe, and hoped that my sarcastic words to him, if they were striking some unsuspected target, had more point than I could find in them. He ushered Georgina back inside without wink or pinch, and though he answered with a fart my parting plea that Max be treated gently, I thought it significant that he made no promise to the contrary.
"I swear if that ain't O.B.G.'s daughter!" Greene marveled as we crossed the stone courtyard. "Couldn't be two such uppity ones in the entire cottonpicking College!" He prodded an elbow into my side. "Ain't she a hot one, though — what you might say teasewise?"
2
"Indeed she is not," I said. "Excuse me, but I wonder sometimes about the way you see things."
"You don't believe her, do you?" At my request he forwent the Cut-Out lever so that we could talk as we returned to Great Mall. I replied that the issue of whether or not Georgina was "O.B.G.'s daughter" seemed less to the point in my opinion than his appraisal of her, which struck me as altogether unwarranted.
"A durn floozy's what she is," he insisted. "Tease the bejeepers out of a feller."
"Not sweet and modest like your wife, I suppose."
"I should hope to kiss a pig!"
"And not pure, like Anastasia?"
Greene closed his eyes and bade me please not to speak in the same breath of darky harlots and passèd maiden girls. "Speaking of which," he added slyly, "don't forget what you promised me, Stacey's-motherwise; I'll see if I can fix up Dr. Spielman's prosecutor."
"For pity's sake!" I cried. "Look here, now — " He did, beaming and squinting, and very nearly steered us into a horse-chestnut tree. "No no! Look where you're going!" He returned his attention to the road in time to misread a sign directing us leftwards. He was sure it had pointed right, and turned that way; when I insisted it had pointed left, he reminded me that Stoker was a great hand at altering direction-signs, and that in any case the motorcycle's speed and power would compensate for misdirections. He opened the throttle to demonstrate his point, and cried, "Yippee!" as we swept through a busy intersection. I told him sharply to stop behaving like a kid.
"Dr. Bray says be like a kindergartener if you want to pass," he answered — pouting a little, but to my great relief halving our speed. I pointed out to him that Enos Enoch's advice had been to become as a kindergartener, not to remain one, and that Bray was anyhow wrong to Certify him on that ground.
"You're plain jealous," Greene teased.
"Never mind that," I said. "Whatever it is that's passèd about kindergarteners, it isn't their childishness. Or their ignorance."
Here he grew stubborn, if no less cheerfuclass="underline" "Say what you want how I'm just a simple-head country boy; there's a thing or two I know for sure. I'd rather be me than a educated slicker like Dr. Sear."
I agreed that Enos Enoch might have had in mind a certain kind of innocent simplicity such as Dr. Sear could not be said to share. "But you're not innocent or simple either, it seems to me. You just like to see yourself that way."
"I guess I'm okay," he grumbled. "What the heck anyhow."
"You might be," I declared, "if you'd open your eyes a little. Pardon me for criticizing you like this, but I hate to see everybody believing what Bray tells them."