She held the phial out to me, rather diffidently. "He must have just said that to let me know it was none of my business. There doesn't seem to be anything in it at all, that I can see…"
I held it up to the firelight, shook it at my ear. It did in fact appear to be empty.
"Do you think — " She touched her fingers to her cheek and smiled uncertainly at Max. "What I mean, could it have disappeared already?"
Max examined gravely the empty phial and returned it to me. East-Campus Graduates, he pointed out, famously spoke in riddles, and it was by no means unthinkable that The Living Sakhyan, or His disciple, had been making some obscure joke with Anastasia; but whatever the true nature and significance of the gift, he took its presentation as no joke at all, but one more proof of my authenticity.
I myself was not impressed. "Disappearing ink!" I flung the phial down, angered afresh at the revelation that the men in yellow had after all been aware of everything that had happened in the gorge: had understood G. Herrold's plight and Anastasia's, but had suffered the one to drown and the other to be raped without lifting a finger in either's behalf. "Dunce take it!"
"Oh, don't!" Anastasia snatched it up at once from the sand. "Really — excuse me, George, I'm sure you're a thousand times brighter than I am, but I really don't think…" She blushed, "Would it be all right if I kept it for you? In case you change your mind?"
"That might be smart, Georgie," Max agreed. "These things mean more than they seem to, sometimes. I'd like to have time to think it over before you throw it away."
I shrugged. "You're the advisor." Anastasia gratefully returned the phial to her pocket, as if it were a precious gem, and I pressed her again to account for her marriage to the notorious Stoker, which it seemed to me she had been pleased to digress from explaining. My tone was even a bit peremptory, for I was on the one hand impressed by her clearly self-sacrificial behavior with Croaker, her husband, Max, The Living Sakhyan, and myself, and on the other hand vaguely uneasy about it: it disturbed me to see her equally submissive to everyone, the flunkèd as well as the not. Yet sincere as this concern of mine was (which it made me feel quite Grand-Tutorish to express), in the main I was simply flattered by the novelty of being stood in awe of, especially by that lovely creature — so ready to obey, one could not resist commanding her! Out of all these feelings I demanded to know whether she had wed of her free will or been abducted like the captive brides of old, in which latter case I intended by some means to slay her captor and set her at liberty.
"Oh, you couldn't do that!" she said — amused, alarmed, and pleased at once, as it seemed to me. "I mean, I guess you could, if you're a Grand Tutor, but — "
"It's not your business to start slaying people," Max told me; "what you want to do is keep them from slaying each other. Besides, you got no kind of weapons, thank the Founder, and Maurice Stoker's got his own private Riot Squad."
It occurred to me to point out to him that my stick had once been deadly tool enough, and to argue that it was not without good precedent I contemplated using it again: Enos Enoch Himself had flung the Business Administration concessionaires bodily from Founder's Hall, and had declared to His protégés that He came to them not with diplomas but with a birch-rod, armed Tutors always prevailing where unarmed ones failed. But Anastasia forestalled me by protesting that while she had not exactly volunteered to marry Stoker, she had willingly assented to the match at the time of its arrangement by her guardian, Ira Hector, and further that she would not dream of deserting one who needed her so absolutely as did her husband — however violently he himself denied that need.
"I knew it!" Max cried out. "A pact between the meanest mind on campus and the flunkèdest!" Ira Hector, he reminded me, was the wealthy and infamously selfish older brother of the former chancellor of NTC; from humble beginnings as a used-book peddler he had risen to his present position as head of a vast informational empire, controlling the manufacture and distribution of virtually every reference-volume published in the West-Campus colleges. Ready to line his pockets at anyone's expense, he was despised and catered to by liberals and conservatives alike (though always closer in spirit to the latter); while he preached the virtues of free research, what he practiced was the stifling of competition, the freedom of the clever to oppress the ignorant and stupid. Yet so enormous was his wealth and so ubiquitous his influence, every New Tammany chancellor had to come to terms with him; and Max himself, how vehemently soever he had used to rail in the Senate against Ira Hector's unprincipled monopolies and graft, was obliged to admit that they were perhaps the necessary evils of Bourgeois-Liberal Studentism, his own philosophy. As was the case with Maurice Stoker too, however, the fact that Ira Hector was indispensable made him in Max's view no less a wretch; as he put it (reversing a much-quoted remark of Ira Hector's own): one might have to lick his boots, but needn't praise the flavor.
"Now, you're too hard on Uncle Ira," Anastasia chided. "You must try to understand him."
Max sniffed, but it was remarkable how the girl calmed his indignation with a pat on the knee. "So he's got a heart of gold," he complained with a smile. "Like Dean Midas he has!"
"He's more generous than you think," Anastasia said. "But he's so afraid somebody will make fun of it, or take advantage of him, he wouldn't admit it for the campus."
"He don't have to," said Max. "He owns the campus already."
But she pointed out with spirit that her own rearing in the rich man's house was proof enough that his selfishness was not complete. "He didn't have to take me in. Grandpa Reg said Mother was so upset when I was born, she wasn't able to take care of me, and he sent me to the Lying-in Hospital for Unwed Co-eds — which by the way Uncle Ira built with his own money…"
Max asked indignantly why Chancellor Hector had not staffed his own house with nurses, which he could easily have afforded to do, and thus spared both Virginia Hector and Anastasia a disgraceful connection with the New Tammany Lying-in.
"He wanted to," she replied. "But Mother wasn't herself, you know… I guess I reminded her of so many unhappy things, she couldn't bear to have me in the house, and of course she knew they'd take care of me in the hospital. I don't hold it against her that she felt that way: it must have been a bad time for her, having been Miss University and all and then being jilted and left pregnant… Oh dear: I didn't mean it that way!"
Max closed his eyes, shook his head, and waved away her apology.
"Anyhow it was only for a few weeks," Anastasia went on. "Then Uncle Ira (actually he's Mother's uncle) had a nursery fixed up in his house, and that's where I was raised. It was a wonderful childhood, and I was terribly grateful to him when I was old enough to understand all he'd done for me. And Mother, you know, she wasn't always upset: lots of times she'd come to visit, or take me out somewhere. Even when she'd have her spells where she'd say I was no daughter of hers, we were still friends."