The Book and the Brotherhood Read Online Free PDF

young people, and a few embracing couples standing alone kissing. There would be more of these as the night wore on. Gerard set his foot on the familiar stairway and experienced the familiar shock of emotion. He knocked upon the dimly lighted door and heard the harsh sound, scarcely verbal, with which Levquist invited entry. He entered.
    The long room, barred with jutting bookshelves, was dark except for a lamp at the far end upon Levquist’s huge desk where the old man sat with hunched shoulders, his head turned toward the door. Beside the desk the big window facing onto the deer park was wide open. Gerard advanced along the dark well-worn carpet and said, ‘Hello, it’s me.’ With deliberate restraint, he did not now lard all his speeches with the word ‘sir’, nor could he bring himself, though well aware that he could not be by any means Levquist’s only ‘old pupil’ visitor that evening, to utter his own name.
    ‘Hernshaw,’ said Levquist, lowering his cropped grey head and taking off his glasses.
    Gerard sat down in the seat opposite to him and stretched out his long legs cautiously under the desk. His heart beat violently. He was still afraid of Levquist.
    Levquist did not smile, neither did Gerard. Levquist fiddled with his nearest books and with an open notebook in which he had been writing. He frowned. He left Gerard to open the conversation. Gerard stared at the large beautiful grotesque Jewish head of the great scholar. ‘How’s the book getting on, sir?’ This was just a standard opening move.
    This book was Levquist’s interminable book on Sophocles. Levquist did not regard this as a genuine question. He replied, ‘Slowly.’ Then said, ‘Are you still in that office?’
    ‘No, I’ve retired.’
    ‘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 Levquist’s familiar jibe. Sometimes he did wish that he had stayed on, tracing the Platonic streams down the centuries, becoming 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 met since 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