"It's a free college, George. Say what you want." Now he pouted in earnest, and flushed red as his fresher pimples. "I'm right used to getting knocked, imagewise, by Sally Ann and everybody else." His manner suggested nevertheless that he was curious to hear what I had to say, even eager, though apprehensive.
"Tell me one thing honestly," I said; "you did used to service O.B.G.'s daughter, didn't you?"
He snorted. "Which ain't to say, mind you! Durn uppity woman! Said she'd tell Sally Ann if not!"
"Tell her what?"
"That I'd been in the woods with her." He squinted his eye at me. "Which ain't to say!"
"But you did service her, didn't you? And put her in kid?"
"That don't matter!" He thumped the handlegrip with his fist. "It's the principle of the thing. Could just as well been one of them redskins."
"The ones you let service her, so they wouldn't scalp you?"
He jerked his head. "I soon learnt them a lesson: Only good red's a dead red! Who d'you suppose opened up the New Tammany Forest Preserve?"
"And drove out the redskins…"
"Yeah!"
"And cut down the trees, and ruined the rivers…"
"Say what you want! Say what you want!" I did just that, all the way to Great Mall, but in a cordialer tone. First I laid his hostility by assuring him that unlike his wife and some other of his critics I did not regard him as a hopeless flunker, but rather admired what evidence I'd seen of his magnanimity, industriousness, efficiency, and ingenuity.
"Good old New Tammany know-how," he declared; and as I had expected, once sincerely praised he began to condemn himself: he had done wrong by O.B.G. and O.B.G.'s daughter, especially in terms gone by, and had yet to make right amends; he had laid waste the wilderness, exploited his mill-hands, sneered at book-learned folk and art-majors, been rude to exchange-students, played hooky from school, bribed traffic-policemen and legislators, serviced his private secretary (who however was as flunkèd a durn tease in the first place as O.B.G.'s daughter), subscribed to lewd magazines in plain wrappers, made a fortune in the Second Campus Riot, and cheated on his income tax; and though he'd made efforts lately to redeem in some measure this poor past, he had replaced old failings with new: he manufactured packages intended to disguise and mislead as well as to contain, and plastics designed to break upon the expiration of their guarantee; he spent too much time watching Telerama, for the low quality of which his own Department of Promotional Research was largely responsible; and it was he (that is to say, his staff) who had invented the premium-stamps with which rival departments now lured students into their curricula. But of all the failings for which he had to answer — and he dared say there was no article in the Junior Enochist Pledge that he had left unbroken — he counted none so vile as the desecration of his marriage-vows in the hot-chocolate arms of O.B.G.'s daughter. As well spit on the NTC pennant, become a Founderless Student-Unionist, or be disrespectful of your passèd mother like that immigrant Dean Taliped in the play, as defile purity with impurity! Which, however, wasn't to say.
"That's the only thing keeps Miss Anastasia and me apart, marriage-wise," he concluded.
I was astonished. "You mean she's said she'd let you service her if it weren't for deceiving your wife? Or what?"
"I beg you mind what you say!" he said angrily. What he meant, I discovered, had nothing to do with his wife at all (whose existence, like Stoker's, he seemed unable to keep in mind when his beloved's name was mentioned): he simply felt so unworthy of Anastasia's pristine favors, sullied as his conscience was, that he could not bring himself to speak to her, much less make the proposal he yearned to make.
I bleated with mirth. "Oh, for Founder's sake!"
"Laugh if you want, doggone it," he said. "When a man's sunk down to the likes of O.B.G.'s daughter, it plain unstarches him for good girls like Chickie Ann and Miss Anastasia."
I assumed his tongue had slipped; it turned out, however, that he'd used one of his pet-names for Mrs. Greene. Unlikelihood! But that memory from buckwheat-days made me dizzy. Sorely I was tempted to inquire about Mrs. Greene's tastes in verse; judging from Greene's view of certain people whom I knew also, and my recollection of his tale at the Pedal Inn, I began to wonder whether Miss Sally Ann was quite as guiltless as her husband made her out. But I had no clear evidence, and it seemed more tactful in any case to bring him indirectly to that consideration. Where to begin!
"Do you think Max is innocent or guilty?" I asked him.
He considered for a moment — not at all disturbed by the change of subject — and then replied: "You got to have faith."
"How about Maurice Stoker? Do you believe he's as flunkèd as people say?"
"Well," he said judiciously, "you know how folks are, supposing-the-worst-instead-of-the-bestwise. Me, I never met a man I didn't like."
We were drawing near Tower Hall, where I meant to have at my first task.
" 'Which ain't to say,' " I mocked.
"How's that? Which ain't to say what?"
I took his sleeve then, smiling for all my exasperation (we had parked in a lot beside the great hall), and begged him to hear me out for a quarter-hour without interrupting, as a Grand-Tutor-to-be with no motive but his welfare and eventual true Candidacy.
He blinked and bobbed. "Say what you want. I can tell by looking you're no slicker."
Without mitigation or abridgement then I reviewed for him what I knew of Anastasia, her husband, and others of our mutual acquaintance, both first-hand and by hearsay. I told him of the wondrous spankings, the boys in Uncle Ira's house, the rape in George's Gorge, and the Memorial Service. I repeated Stoker's avowed suspicion, which I myself could not entirely discredit, that Anastasia like Max had a talent for being victimized, possibly even throve on it; and further recounted what I'd witnessed and heard of Stoker's own diversions and abominations: his malice towards all, his delight in subverting every order and indulging every flunkèd impulse of the student mind. I described Dr. Sear's amusements and Dr. Eierkopf's, what I had seen in the buckwheat-meadow and done with dear departed G. Herrold; how I had bit Anastasia in the sidecar and watched her tickee the false Grand Tutor. Next I enlarged upon the divers failings of New Tammany College, past and present, as revealed to me by Max and partially confirmed by my own reading and observation: its oppression of Frumentians, its lawless Informationalism, its staggering wastefulness, its pillage of natural resource and despoil of natural beauty, its hostility to learning and refinement, its apotheosis of the lowest percentile, its vulgarity, inflated self-esteem, self-righteousness, self-deception, sentimentality, hypocrisy, artificiality, simple-mindedness, naïve optimism, concupiscence, avarice, self-contradiction, ignorance, and general fatuity…
"Which ain't to say!" Greene could not help crying out; but his face had passed from crimson to white.
"Which isn't to say other colleges don't have their failings," I agreed. "Or that NTC doesn't have its passèd aspects too." What mattered, I declared, was that one not confuse the passèd with the flunkèd, or see no failure where failure was. All very well to Certify someone's Candidacy on the ground of Innocence, a no doubt passèd opposite to Culpability; I too might make such a Certification; but not unless the innocence were truly innocent, purified as well of ignorance as of guilt. "If I were your advisor, Mr. Greene — "
"Pete," he said dejectedly.
"My advice would be to get a pair of high-resolution glasses like the ones Dr. Eierkopf gave me, to help you see the difference between things. And Dr. Sear's mirror, to take a closer look at yourself in."