The Book and the Brotherhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 provedto be rather influential empty thinking! Anyway I shall read–’
    ‘Play around with great books, pull them down to your level and make simplified versions of your 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 park 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 longing for 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