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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, hadkilled 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 thoughtway 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.’
    Gerard too conjured up the dreadful scene, the degeneration, the collapse of the old values. He wanted to smile at Levquist’s indignation, yet he also shared it.
    ‘What do you make of it all, Hernshaw, our poor planet?Will it survive? I doubt it. What have you become, are you a stoic after all?
Nil admirari
, yes?’
    ‘No,’ said Gerard, ‘I’m not a stoic. You accused me of being unambitious. I’m too ambitious to be merely stoical.’
    ‘You mean morally ambitious?’
    ‘Well – yes.’
    ‘You are rotted by Christianity,’ said Levquist. ‘What you take for Platonism is the old soft masochistic Christian illusion. Your Plato has been defiled by Saint Augustine. You have no hard core. Riderhood whom you despise –’
    ‘I don’t,’ said Gerard.
    ‘Riderhood is tougher than you, he’s harder. Your “moral ambition” or whatever you call your selfish optimism, is just the old lie of Christian salvation, that you can shed your old self and become good simply by thinking about it – and as you sit and dream this dream you feel that you are changed already and have no more work to do – and so you are happy in your lie.’
    Gerard, who had heard this sort of tirade before, thought, how exact he is, how acute, he knows I have thought all those things too. He answered flippantly, ‘Well, at least I am happy, isn’t that a good thing?’
    Levquist stared at him, pouting his thick lips and drawing down the corners, his face become a sneering mask.
    Gerard said, ‘All right.’
    Levquist went on, ‘I am close to death. That is no scandal, old age is a well-known phenomenon. But now the difference is that everyone is close to death.’
    Gerard said, ‘Yes.’ He thought, it consoles him to think so.
    ‘All thought which is not pessimistic is now false.’
    ‘But you would say it has always been?’
    ‘Yes. Only now it is forced upon all thinking people, it is