The Book And The Brotherhood

`Rather young to retire, aren't you? Were you at the top?'

`No.’

`Why retire then? You've got the worst of both worlds. Power, isn't that what it was all about? What you wanted was power, wasn't it?'

`Not just power. I like arranging things.'

`Arranging things! You should have arranged your mind, stayed here and done some real thinking.'

This was an old traditional liturgy. Levquist, who scarcely believed that very 'clever people could exercise their minds anywhere else, had wanted Gerard to stay on at Oxford, get into All Souls, become an academic. Gerard had been determined to get away. The political idealism which largely prompted his flight soon lost its simplicity and much of its force; and a humbler perhaps more rational desire to serve society by arranging it a little better, had led him later into the Civil Service. Gerard was, as he was intended to be, hurt by Lequist’s familiar jibe. Sometimes he did wish that he had stayed on, tracing the Platonic streams down the centuries, liccorning a genuinely learned man, a justified ascetic, a scholar. He said mildly, 'I hope to do some thinking now.'

' It's too late. How's your father?'

Levquist always asked after Gerard's father whom he had not metsince Gerard was a student, but whom he remembered with some sort of, not fully intelligible to Gerard, respect and approval. Gerard’s father, a solicitor, had been, for instance,entirely unable upon the first occasion of their meeting, which Gerard recalled with a shudder, to converse

with Levquist about Roman law. Yet this, by contrast, ordinary ignorant man, patently unafraid of his son's formidable teacher, had, perhaps just by this simple directness, made himself memorable. Gerard in fact respected and approved of his father, saw the simplicity and truthfulness of his nature, but was used to finding these qualities invisible to others. His father was not brilliant or erudite or witty or particularly successful, he could seem mediocre and boring, yet Levquist, who despised mediocrity and ruthlessly refused to allow himself to be bored, had at once met Gerard's father upon the ground of the latter’s best qualities. Or perhaps he was just startled to meet some 'ordinary person' who was not, in his presence, a little awed.

`He's very ill,' said Gerard in answer to Levquist's question, `he's -' He suddenly found himself unable to bring out the next word.

`Is he dying?' said Levquist.

`Yes.'

`I'm sorry. Well, it is for all of us a short walk. But one's father – yes -' Levquist's father and his sister had died in a German concentration camp. He looked away for a moment, smoothing over the close-cropped silvery fur which covered the dome of his head.

Gerard, to change the subject, said, 'I hear Jenkin came to see you earlier.'

Levquist chuckled. 'Yes, I saw young Riderhood. He was quite stumped by that piece of Thucydides. A pity -'

`He hasn't got anywhere?'

`A pity he's let his Greek slip so. He knows several modern languages. As for 'getting anywhere', ridiculous phrase, he's teaching, isn't he? Riderhood doesn't need to get anywhere, he walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you -'

`Whereas I -?'

`You were always dissolving yourself into righteous discontent, thrilled in your bowels by the idea of' some high thing elsewhere. So it has gone on. You see yourself as a lonely climber, of course higher up than the other ones, you think you might leap out of yourself onto the summit, yet you know you can not, and being pleased with yourself both ways you go nowhere. This 'thinking' that you are going to do, what will it be? Writing your memoirs?'

`No. I thought I might write something about philosophy.'

`Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! They fancy their substanceless thought can lead to deep conclusions! Are you so unambitious?' This was an old conflict too. Levquist, teacher of the great classical languages, resented the continual disappearance of his best pupils into the hands of the philosophers.

`It's quite difficult,' said Gerard patiently, 'to write even a short piece of philosophy. And at least it has proved to be rather influential empty thinking! Anyway I shall read -'

`Play around with great books, pull them down to your level and make simplified versions cifyour own?'

`Possibly,' said Gerard, unprovoked. Levquist, used to roughing up his best pupils, always had to get rid of a certain amount of spleen upon them when they reappeared, as if this was necessary before he could speak gently to them, as perhaps he really wished to do, for there was usually some kind thing which he wanted to say and held in reserve.

`Well, well. Now read me something in Greek, that sort of reading you were always good at.'

`What shall I read, sir?'

`Anything you like. Not Sophocles. Perhaps Homer.'

Gerard got up and went to the shelves, knowing where to look, and as he touched the books he felt some fierce and agonising sense of the past. It's gone, he thought, the past, it ^is irrevocable and beyond mending and far away, and yet it is here, blowing at one like a wind, I can feel it, I can smell it, and it's so sad, so purely sad. Through the window open on the pa rk came the distant sound of music, which he had not been aware of since he entered the room, and the wet dark odour of the meadows and the river.

Sitting again at the desk Gerard read aloud from the Iliad, about how the divine horses of Achilles wept when they heard of the death of Patroclus, bowed their heads while hot tears poured from their eyes onto the ground, as they wept with hinging fir their charioteer, and their long beautiful manes were darkened with mud, and as they mourned Zeus looked down on them and pitied them, and spoke thus in his heart. Unhappy beasts, why did I give you, ageless and deathless as you are, as a gift to Lord Peleus, a mortal? Was it so that you too should grieve among unhappy men? Indeed there is nothing that breathes and crawls upon the earth more miserable than man.

As Levquist reached across and took the book from him and they avoided each other's eyes, Gerard was, in the swift zigzag of his thought, thinking of how Achilles, mad with grief, had killed the captive Trojan boys like frightened fawns beside the funeral pyre of his friend, then how Telemachus had hanged the handmaids who had slept with the suitors who were even now dead at the hands of his father, and how, hanging in a row-upon a line, they jumped about in their death agony. Then he thought of how Patroclus had always been kind to the captive women. Then he thought again about the horses shedding burning tears and drooping their beautiful manes in the mud of' the battlefield. All those thoughts occurred in a second, perhaps two seconds. Then he thought of Sinclair Curtland.

Levquist said, for his mind by some other secret thought-way had also reached Sinclair, 'Is the Honourable Rose here?'

`Yes, she came with me.'

`I thought I saw her when I was coming over. How she still resembles that boy.'

`Yes.'

Levquist, who had an amazing memory, reaching back very many years over the generations of his pupils, said, 'I'm glad you've kept your little group together, these friendships formed when you are young men are very precious, you and Riderhood and Topglass and Cambus and Field and – Well, Topglass and Cambus got married, didn't they -' Levquist did not approve of marriage. 'And poor Field is some sort of monk. Friendship, friendship, that's what they don't understand these days, they just don't understand it any more. As for this place – you know we have women now?'

`Yes! But you don't have to teach them!'

`No, I thank God. But it spoils the scene – I cannot tell you how much it mars it all.'

`I can imagine,' said Gerard. He would have felt the same.

`No, the young men don't make friends now. They are superficial. They hunt the girls to take them to bed. In the night when they should be talking and arguing with their friends they are in the bed with the girls. It is – shocking.'