I smiled at this analogy, ironically more telling than he knew, but declined to argue the point or disabuse him of his esteem for the former chancellor. It was between him and Greene that the argument raged, as it had since their first encounter at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party; only now, thanks to Greene's disillusionment, it was flunkèd versus passèd promiscuity rather than the latter versus passèd maidenhood. Otherwise they were the cordialest companions — except when Greene's bitter hallucinations and Leonid's epileptoid fits made one or the other unapproachable.
"No durn good," was Greene's new refrain, whether he was speaking of Anastasia, "Miss Sally Ann," New Tammany College, or himself. "No gosh durn good! What I mean, Truth-Beauty-and-Goodnesswise, y'know?" Though convinced that Anastasia had got what she deserved from him ("Flunking hussy, leading me on she hadn't never been touched, and all the time selling it faster'n O.B.G.'s daughter!"), he did not excuse himself of the felony. He was flunked, he saw plainly now; had always been flunked, in every wise. He had despoiled the forests and destroyed their aboriginal inhabitants, vaunted his uncouthness, ridden roughshod with his vulgar wealth; he had been no husband to his wife (who however he was sure now had betrayed him many times over), no father to his children (wastrels and delinquents though they were). Let them Shaft him; he deserved no less a penalty, even from a college he saw now to be corrupt from Belfry to Basement. Or, if the whore he'd alleyed and her pimp the false Grand Tutor chose to hush the thing up, let them acquit him: once free he'd divorce his wife, resign from his enterprises, quit the Junior Enochist League and all it stood for, perhaps even defect to the East Campus — or blow his brains out, he was not sure which. In earnest of these resolves he had already abandoned razor and soap: his chin bushed orange; his scent approached the late Redfearn's Tom's.
It turned out that he was neither convicted nor acquitted. In the morning of the day at hand — the first of Max's trial — the case against him was dismissed, and he left Main Detention.
"She wouldn't testify!" Stoker exclaimed to me, referring to his wife. I was only slightly less baffled than he. My Ladyship had decided to press no charges — so the prosecuting barrister had announced, plainly chagrined — because "mature reflection" had led her to believe that she'd doubtless invited and provoked Mr. Greene's assault, and doubtless been gratified by it in some flunkèd wise. As her statement was read, Anastasia regarded me coolly across the court-room, where I sat with other prospective witnesses in the Spielman case.
"Generostness!" Leonid wept later, when he heard the news. "GILES-hoodhood!"
At the counsel-table Greene muttered: "I knew she weren't no better'n she should be, drive-a-man-to-drinkwise. They're all of a feather."
But Stoker, like myself, could accept neither of these interpretations.
"It's what you've said about her all along," I reminded him; and he agreed, but pointed out with a troubled sigh the same irony that puzzled me: her admission was — perhaps for the first time! — not true at all.
"Flunk if I know what's come over everybody," Stoker said. "Maybe you are the Grand Tutor." I observed him narrowly: there was in his tone and expression no trace of his usual tease — nor did he lately, as of old, prompt one's least-passèd aspects to the fore. For example, his remark did not tickle my vanity or ambition, as formerly it would have, but rather shamed me, and I answered calmly: "I don't know any more whether Bray's the Grand Tutor or not; there's something extraordinary about him. But I know I'm not. I'm a total failure."
My warden smiled. "Maybe Failure is Passage."
The cell that Peter Greene had vacated I found occupied now by Croaker, fetched there from the Infirmary while I'd been in court.
"He's diplomatically immune," Stoker said. "We're just boarding him till they fetch him back home."
My black friend did not look well. Max and Leonid held his head as best they could while he vomited through the bars. He too was charged with rape, Stoker explained to us, and though he could not be prosecuted he had been declared non gratis in New Tammany College and was being held against his recall at the request of his Frumentian alma mater. Following my advice, it seemed, he had mutinied against Dr. Eierkopf: eaten every egg in the Tower Hall Belfry, fresh and otherwise, then jammed home the Infinite Divisor into the escapement of the clockworks and abandoned his master between Tick and Tock. Putting by all restraint, he had deflowered two co-eds, one male freshman, a trustee's maiden aunt, a blue-ribbon gilt, and a cast-bronze allegorical statue in heroic scale of Truth Unveiled. In addition he had consumed indiscriminately raw chipmunks, aspen catkins, toadstools, dog-stools, and the looseleaf lecture-notes of his third victim, an economics major. The campus patrol had overtaken him at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel; yet they doubted they'd ever have subdued him, unless fatally, had not a remarkable occurrence quite nonplussed him.
"A certain married couple known to us both," Stoker said, still with no sarcasm at all, "were spending the weekend at that motel, it seems, on the advice of the Grand Tutor. What happened between them isn't very clear — Kennard's in the Infirmary now, and Hedwig's in the Asylum — "
I groaned.
"— but whatever it was, it must've unhinged poor Heddy entirely. Ever heard of a woman attacking a man?" Mrs. Sear, it appeared, had accosted Croaker in the motel lobby (whose occupants had fled when he strode naked through the glass door and commenced to make love to a soft-drink dispenser), removed her clothing, and leaped upon him, shouting lewd encouragements. Alas, what the vending-machine had mustered, she dismayed; so addled and unmanned him (of course, his stomach was troubling him by this time too) that he stood like ravished Truth while patrolmen shackled and sedated him. Mrs. Sear, altogether distraught, skipped circles about the lobby, chanting He was my bashful, barefoot beau in uncertain contralto, until the white ambulance-cycle arrived. It had been summoned in fact for Dr. Sear, who during the furor in the lobby was found by a chambermaid to be unconscious and discolored in his room, overdosed with sleeping-capsules. Thus husband and wife had left the motel together, neither aware of the fact. Mrs. Sear was committed and had subsequently regressed to the behavior of a five-year-old girl, according to Stoker; Dr. Sear had his stomach pumped in the out-patient wing of the Infirmary and so was spared for the Cancer Ward, where he presently languished in preparation for palliative surgery. Croaker himself, once subdued, became ill, incontinent, and helpless: went on all fours, forgot how to feed himself, and finally huddled day and night in one corner like a distempered beast. When presently the fever had passed and his appetites began to re-waken, he'd been transferred to Main Detention rather than to the NTC Asylum because of a dispute among the psychiatric faculty as to whether insanity was possible in sub-rational animals. The alternative proposed by the negative faction, composed largely of South New Tammanians — that he be exhibited in the Zoologipal Gardens — was rejected by the Office of Intercollegiate Relations lest it give offense to the emerging colleges of Frumentius, whose political support the Office was courting. Of Dr. Eierkopf's fate there was no word.