For the first and only time his expression turned sorrowful. "He's no longer with us. He has… gone away for a while."
Dreamily I said, "But he'll come back, of course."
He looked at me. "Of course."
"One day — when we need him again." How I should have liked to sleep.
His smile returned, albeit melancholily. "We need him now. Things are worse than they ever were in his day. But he's — on a sort of sabbatical leave, you might say. It's up to us to carry on."
He pressed upon me then his story, which I heard in my torpor and made this sense of only on later recollection: His father was or had been some sort of professor extraordinarius (of what subject I never learned) whose reputation rested on his success in preparing students to pass their final examinations. His pedagogical method had been unorthodox, and so like many radicals he had worked against vehement opposition, even actual persecutions: I gathered his tenure was revoked and he was dismissed from his position on a charge of moral turpitude while still in his early thirties — though it was not clear to me whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he'd left the campus for a short time, returned clandestinely (don't ask me why) to confer with his protégés, and then disappeared for good. The tale was like so many others one has heard, I could almost have predicted certain features — such as that these same protégés had subsequently dedicated their lives to spreading their Mentor's word and institutionalizing his method as they understood it; that they too were roughly used as they transferred from college to college, but won proselytes by their zeal wherever they went. Neither was it surprising to learn that this Professor Giles, this "Grand Tutor" as his son called him, never committed his wisdom to the press: what academic department has not its Grand Old Man who packs the lecture-halls term after term but never publishes a word in his field? In fact, the one unusual particular of the whole story as I heard it this first time was the not-very-creditable one that the man had got a child, by a lady married to someone else; otherwise it was the standard painful history of reformers and innovators.
The problem for my visitor, then — the fruit of this illicit planting — was the common one faced by second-generation followers of any pioneer: to formulate the Master's teaching into some readily disseminable canon, a standard and authority for the fast-swelling ranks of its adherents. By the time Stoker Giles had reached young manhood his father's original pupils were already divided into factions; the son's first thought had been to compile as a source-book their reminiscences of the great man's life and tenure, but so many discrepancies, even contradictions, were made manifest in the collation, he abandoned that project. In its early stages, however, he had gone so far as to read the several texts into an automatic computer, as our fashionable classicists are fond of doing nowadays, to speed the work of comparing them — and here, gentle editors and publishers, your credulity like mine must flex its muscles for a considerable stretch.
This remarkable computer, I was told (a gadget called WESCAC), not only pointed out in accordance with its program the hopeless disagreement of the texts; on its own hook, or by some prior instruction, it volunteered further that there was in its Storage "considerable original matter" read in fragmentarily by George Giles himself in the years of his flourishing: taped lecture-notes, recorded conferences with protégés, and the like. Moreover, the machine declared itself able and ready (with the aid of "analogue facilities" and a sophistication dismaying at least to a poor humanist like myself) to assemble, collate, and edit this material, interpolate all verifiable data from other sources such as the memoirs then in hand, recompose the whole into a coherent narrative from the Grand Tutor's point of view, and "read it out" in an elegant form on its automatic printers! The son, as disinclined to writing as the father but apparently commanding some authority in his college, agreed, and in the face of opposition from certain "Gilesians" as well as "anti-Gilesians," the computer made good its promise. After several false starts and program adjustments it produced a first-person chronicle of the life and teachings of the Grand Tutor, a text so faithful to the best evidence and polished in its execution that young Stoker needed only to "change a date or a place-name here and there," as he vowed, to call it finished.
The great test came, he told me, when he took the manuscript to one Peter Greene, an early student of Giles's, now past sixty and the strongest critic of the "WESCAC Project." A famous teacher in his own right by then, Greene met the youngster with a scowl and only after much persuasion agreed to listen to a dozen pages. Refusing even to sit, he paced the floor of his office with every prejudice in his expression (so Stoker declared) as the reading began. At the end of page one he stood still; halfway through the second he was weeping; by the third he was on his knees at the young man's feet, begging his pardon and declaring it was "the GILES's very voice" that sounded off the pages!
Thus was born The Revised New Syllabus, which like its narrator and its evangels was destined for arduous vicissitudes. Those Gilesians whose teaching it contradicted — some of them chairmen of their own departments by that time — charged that the work was spurious, concocted either by WESCAC or by the upstart Stoker Giles, perhaps both, if not by the "Dean o' Flunks" himself.* The most antipathetic went so far as to deny that my visitor was actually the Grand Tutor's son, calling him an opportunist and antigiles who made the best of an accidental resemblance; while the non-Gilesians, "naturally," maintained as they had from the first that the man called George was never "the true GILES" at all but a dangerous impostor, and that the R.N.S., "authentic" or not, was anti-intellectual, immoral, subversive, and altogether unfit for undergraduate reading-lists.
* Quem vide infra.
My visitor sighed as he concluded this account, and toyed glumly with the shaft of his stick; then with a shrug his animation returned. "But it all worked to our advantage, you understand — all that censorship and prohibition, and beating us up and throwing us in jail. Even the imitations and pirated versions that everybody ran into print with helped us out — you must have wished for that sort of ruckus over your own books! We put up with it, just as Dad used to, and the New Curriculum gets established sooner or later despite all. Because you see, classmate, the one thing we have on our side is the only thing that matters in the long run: we're right. The others are wrong." His face was joyous. "It may take a hundred semesters, but we know the New Curriculum will win. The non-majors will flunk; the impostors and false tutors will be exposed. It's just a matter of time until that book on your desk there will be in every briefcase on every campus in the University. It must be so: there isn't any other hope for studentdom."
He consulted his walking-stick watch again and abruptly rose to leave. It occurred to me that I had lost track of the clock-chimes from Main Tower.
"I can't stay longer; I've got other colleges to visit — even other universities." He winked at me. "There are other universities, you know."
"Look here, now — " I shook my head vigorously to throw off my drowsiness and indicated the box of typescript. "What am I supposed to do with this? I don't have time — "
"Indeed you don't!" He laughed — and what a stance he struck with his mad cane! "It's late, late, late, that's certain! On the other hand, you have all the time there is, exactly." He poked at the manuscript with his stick. "Forget about yourself if you like. Just send this on to your publishers without reading it; they'll be grateful enough, and so will your students. Or throw it out, if you don't care what happens to them on the Finals. I have other copies for other campuses; this one is your affair entirely…"