"Tomorrow the Revised New Syllabus," I said to My Ladyship. "Today the stick."
The other white helmet now escorted to me Hedwig Sear — at her request, it turned out, who had observed from the viewing-stand my entry. She was gowned in black, her face veiled; Anastasia hurried to her, and they wept together as Three-T grazed. The shock of Croaker's assault, it seemed, had cleared Hedwig's mind; she spoke lucidly and quietly, impeded only by her grief at the critical condition of her husband. Dr. Sear lay in the Infirmary, she told me, at the point of death. Her one wish was to join him, but she'd come to Founder's Hill at his request in order to honor Max and give me a message. The circumstances of her attack she recounted with extraordinary calm — despite the fact that Croaker, with Dr. Eierkopf aboard, was present in the visitors' stand. She could even smile, mournfully enough, at the irony of her rape: that when she'd tried to provoke him to it once before, in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, he had rejected her in favor of an automatic soft-drink dispenser. There had followed her return to childishness, of which I'd heard, and when Croaker's path and hers had crossed again, following their separate releases in yesterday's amnesty, she had fled him with the fright of a five-year-old girl.
"Which is just what turned him on," she said ruefully. "He couldn't help it; he was just being Croaker. But poor Kennard — " She chuckled and wept. "In the old days he'd have taken pictures, and I'd have been showing Croaker naughty tricks. But Kennard's changed, too, since last spring — the different things you've told him, and his cancer and all…" She blew her nose. Perhaps it was no more than a metastasis of the cancer to his brain, she said; in any case, he'd been escorting her from the Asylum to Great Mall (so he told her afterwards) to get a taxi to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, not this time to mount her in Position One as the consummate perversion, but to come to her in simple love, in hope (her voice grew awed even now at the notion; she doubted I would believe her) that he could leave a child behind him upon his death! The rest I had witnessed from my noose: how, seeing her attacked, Dr. Sear had leaped — spontaneously, instantly, one could only say heroically — to her defense, and been felled by Croaker with a backhand smite. The blow had struck his bandaged tumor; though entirely blind now and basically, mercifully unconscious, he still had moments of lucidity, during which, in the night just past, she'd told him of her own astonishing recovery, begged his forgiveness for her part in their sorry past, professed her devotion to him, and announced her intention to undergo surgical curettage, against the unlikely chance that Croaker had accomplished what her husband had aspired to.
"But Kennard said I mustn't," she declared. "He says we have to be grateful to Croaker for bringing us together after all these years, and that we ought to hope I'm pregnant! No matter what the baby looks like, he says, it's our child — Kennard's and mine — because of what Kennard did without stopping to think."
"Oh, Heddy!" Anastasia wept with delight and embraced her again, clearly as convinced of the fact and nature of Mrs. Sear's pregnancy as of her own — though neither was two dozen hours past! Time was getting on; I asked Mrs. Sear directly whether her husband was pleased to be dying.
She shook her head at once. "That's what I'm supposed to tell you, George. He says he doesn't regret for a minute doing what he did. He says that what he'd never seen till Croaker hit him, even though he thought he'd seen everything, was that a certain kind of spiritedness was absolutely good, no matter what a person's other Answers are. It doesn't have anything to do with education, he said to tell you, and it's the most valuable thing in the University. Something about Dean Taliped's energy, even at the end… He wants to know whether he's right."
"Oh, George!" Anastasia cried. "Pass him now, so Heddy can tell him!"
Stoker huffed. "He's out of his head."
I smiled at tearful Hedwig. "Please tell Dr. Sear that in my opinion his attitude is certainly sentimental, and that his cancer may very well have damaged his mind as well as his eyesight. But tell him also that he's a Candidate for Graduation, and congratulate him for me on being a father."
"Only a Candidate?" Stoker jeered.
I nodded. "Like yourself."
This retort so infuriated Stoker that Anastasia, still holding Triple-T, was obliged to step between us and command him to behave himself. Taking Mrs. Sear's arm I slipped away to the viewing stand, and added en route: "Of course, some Candidates are much closer to Commencement than others. Give your husband my love, Mrs. Sear."
"Goat-Boy!" It was Dr. Eierkopf calling, from the dignitaries' bleachers. There also I saw Chancellor and Mrs. Rexford, holding hands; the brothers Hector, amply coated; and Leonid Alexandrov, fidgeting as usual and looking restlessly to westward (though he could not see), where the sun fast sank upon the distant reaches of East Campus. Peter Greene was on the right, similarly bandaged, and flanked, to my surprise, by Stoker's secretary Georgina and a pretty young white girl whom I concluded must be Greene's daughter. But she was the very image of Chickie, that co-ed girl I'd watched disporting years ago with the Beist-in-the-buckwheat! The same uncombed locks; the taunty eyes! And if anything younger, though I her witness had aged seven years in body, thrice that in spirit, since the night I'd heard her beg to Be. She could not be the original Chickie, then; wry speculations came to mind once again about Miss Sally Ann — but I put them aside as immaterial to Greene's Candidacy and Assignment; also to attend Dr. Eierkopf, who, despite the bandage around his forehead and his general want of robustness, was fairly bouncing on Croaker's shoulders. Round about them, come to retrieve their errant colleague, sat the delegation of visiting scholars from Frumentius, in the colorful garb of their alma maters. Outfitted with cameras and clipboards, they appeared to be making a careful record of the proceedings.
"I'm Übertrittig, Goat-Boy!" he cried. "My eyes have been opened!" While Croaker croaked croaks of greeting and the Frumentian scholars sniffed my air, felt of my fleece, and made pictogrammatic notes, he reported shrilly that he was a skeptic no more in the matter of Grand-Tutoriality. For he had seen with his own two eyes (abetted, to be sure, by corrective lenses) wonders unexplainable by natural law and student reason: Harold Bray, not two hours past, had appeared on the Hill as it seemed from nowhere; he had changed color and physiognomy before their eyes, leaped over the reflecting pool — a distance of some dozen meters — in a single bound, walked up the vertical face of the Founder's Shaft as if it were a sidewalk, to rig ropes and pulleys for the main event, and then vanished, declaring from nowhere over the loudspeakers that he'd reappear at sunset.
"Wunderbar, Goat-Boy!" he exclaimed. "No tricks! No mirrors! Excuse you: that Bray, He's a real Grand Tutor!"
I smiled. "You believe you've seen a miracle, Dr. Eierkopf?"
"Ja wohl, boy! I believe because I saw one! Five-and-twenty, yet!"
From behind me, where I'd not observed his approach, Stoker scoffed. "You haven't seen anything, Doc. If it's miracles you want, George here can do better." He clapped my shoulder in feigned affection.
"Dean o' Flunks!" cried Eierkopf. "Heraus!"
"He's going to rescue Spielman off the tip of the Shaft at the crucial moment," Stoker announced to the stand at large, pointing at me with his index finger. "That'll prove he's the real Grand Tutor! He might even save the whole University in one whiz-bang, and Pass us all! Why not?"