"Well, the Moishians anyhow," Max said, "they call their sons by the last man that died in the family, so his name don't die too." He said this lightly, but it turned our thoughts together to my dead friend, inasmuch as in goatdom we all had been brothers.
"You want to be a Tommy, boy?"
I shook my head: the burden were too painful — and besides, noble Tom had been after all… a goat. For similar cause I rejected Max III, after my keeper's father: however dignified, even dynastic, the air of such numerals in studentdom, to my mind they still suggested prize livestock.
George Herrold the booksweep here lost interest both in our discussion and in my swaying stance; he returned to his machine, humming some tune for his own entertainment. I followed him with my eyes. After a moment Max said from behind, "Ja, I raised you; but that George Herrold, what you might say, he brought you into this campus."
I turned to him with a smile. "George is a good name, isn't it?"
"A fine name," Max agreed. "There's been famous Georges." Presently he added, "His wife left him since he was EATen. I don't think he ever had any kids."
"If nobody minds," I said, "I want to be called George from now on."
Max nodded. "That's good as you could do."
I found myself then unspeakably fatigued, and proposed we go home. Standing was one thing, walking another; Max fetched George Herrold to help, but even with their joint support I got no farther than the drinking-fountain before I was exhausted. Still I refused to go on all fours.
"So let your namesake carry you," Max suggested. And when I was fetched up in the black man's arms he said, "Now wait: I do something important." He wet his fingers at the running fountain. "When the Enochists name a child," he said soberly, "they take it to a Founder's hall and spritz some special water on its head; and they say a thing like Dear Founder please drive out the old goat from this kid, and keep the Dean o' Flunks off him, and help him pass the Finals and sit with you and Enos Enoch on Founder's Hill for ever and ever. Well, so, this is just good drinking-water here, and instead of a Founder's hall we got a library. With a crazy Schwarzer for your Founder-father and a tired old Moishian for your chaplain. So this won't be a regular Enochizing; what you might say, I'm going to Maximize you."
So saying he declared to the empty stacks: "This kid he's not a goat any more, but a human student. Let suffering make him smart, that's all I care." His voice rose: "By all the Grand Tutors, true ones and fakes, that ever made students miserable; by everything that suffers — Moishians and Schwarzers and billygoats and the whole flunking student body — I dub you once George, you should Pass All Fail All."
The clock in far-off Tower Hall happening just at this point to strike the hour of one (but we were on Daylight Saving Time), he touched waterdrops to my brow. We three then stepped into shadowless midday, my namesake singing as he bore me:
" 'One more river' say the Founder-Man Boss:
'Y'all gone Graduate soon's y'all cross.' "
SECOND REEL
1
Seven years I spent a-prepping — where did they fly? It is an interval in my history far from clear. As those unlettered hordes of old swept down on the halls of Remus College and were civilized by what they sacked, so vandal youth must bring forever the temple of its heritage to rubble, and turning then the marble shatters in its hand, commence to wonder and grow wise, regret its ignorance, and call at last for mortarbox and trowel. Just such a reconstruction was that account of my earliest years, whose cracks and plaster-fills will not have escaped the critical; and such another must I render now of my education, like an archaeologist his lost seminaries of antiquity, from its intellectual residue. Certain events unquestionably took place at certain times: Mary V. Appenzeller, for instance, empty of udder and full of years, Commencèd to greener pastures not a month after Redfearn's Tommy — peace of mind be eternally hers, who gave me the only and lovingest mothering I knew. These are my benchmarks, the footers and standing columns of past time's ruin. The rest I reimagine from the shards of Max's teaching that remain to me — altered, I do not doubt, by passage of time, by imperfect excavation, and by my own notions of how things should have been. Even so are the sayings of Maios known to us only through the dialogues of his pupil Scapulas, and the deeds of Enos Enoch through the reminiscences (by no means indiscrepant) of his protégés. What I may want in fidelity of reproduction, let good faith and earnestness atone for, accepting too this special extenuation: that for reasons presently to be made manifest there is fitness, even significance, in the obscurity of this period and the consequent vagueness of my accounting.
Who buried Redfearn's Tommy, for example, I cannot say: I was bedded down at once on our return to the barn, more weakened than I knew, and thus spared further sight of my misdeed. Most likely it was George Herrold did the mournful work, for after my Maximizing in the branch library my keeper gave over to him entirely the management of the herd. G. Herrold's rapport with the goats (thus we called him, by his last name only, when I took his first) was instant and fine, he forsook his beloved sweeper for the shophar and went daily into the fields — splendid he looked, too, like some chancellor-chieftain out of dark Frumentius, with his white fleece cap and the horn on his good black arm. If the weather was fine we went with him; otherwise we closeted ourselves in the barn or the livestock-stacks, for Max's physical condition, at least, declined in these years from wiry good health towards thin senescence. In any case, we applied ourselves altogether to the work of my education.
"We got catching up to do," Max declared. "What we'll do, we'll study the University in general and you in particular; then when we find out what you want to do in the University we'll study that."
"I already know what I want to do," I said. "I want to be a great student and pass all my tests. And I want to make WESCAC tell me about my parents. And punish your enemies."
It was explained to me then that unlike the goats, whose one desire (if something unconscious may be called that) was to be supremely goatish, human beings did not aspire to be supremely human. Rather, they chose some single activity of life such as watching stars or making music and strove for excellence there exclusively, ignoring the rest. This notion of majors and vocations was not easy for me to understand: Brickett Ranunculus had been a stud — that is, a major as it were in the impregnation of nannies — but his excellence in this line was a feature of his goatly magnificence in general, just as Mary Appenzeller's record milk-yield was of hers; neither virture was a matter of election, and neither was developed at the expense of other merits. On the contrary. Why needed the case be different with humans, I wanted to know; was not an un-athletic scientist as inconceivable as a barren milch-goat?
Alas, you see, I was not always a ready and tractable student. My grand-Gruffian resolve I still officially subscribed to, but as much to spite Max as to do him honor, for he himself most gently pointed out, as did the passing years, its boyishness. WESCAC was no troll, I came to understand, unless metaphorically, and with figurative monsters one did not do literal battle — the only sort I had a taste for. It was as evident to me as to him that the real task before us was the unglamorous one of making up for the lost years of my kidship. In principle I was eager to learn all I could about the mysterious real University of human studentdom; but in fact, however genuine Curiosity, Pride balked at the knowledge that I could never truly "catch up" with my future classmates. I would not ever be like them; surely I would fail all my examinations and pass none. Mixed with my gratitude, therefore, for Max's devotion to my tutelage, was resentment that he'd not schooled me with my fellow humans from the first. Never mind that I owed him my life, if thanks to his way of preserving it I must work harder than the others to distinguish myself!