My dear Gerard,
You will have seen Levquist's obituary in the Times. Whoever wrote it didn't praise him enough. That kind of greatness is not the fashion these days I dare say! I feel extraordinarily sad and felt I must write to you. I know you saw him at that terrible dance last summer, and maybe you have seen him since. He was a kind of saint ofscholarship, a special kind of example. Perhaps his life ending made me wonder what Pvr made of mine. What a mess it's all been, and how short the business is really, a topic I've heardyou mention. I conclude that what really matters is friendship, not that overrated love business, but one's closefriends, the really close people who are one's comforters and one's judges. You have always been both to me. May I express the hope that, in all the recent shambles, we haven't lost each other. It seems, here, infinitely far from London. We have bought a house, but address at present is this hotel.
Hope you are writing something. I've given up thought.
Yours
Duncan
Gerard had not seen the Times obituary. So Levquist was gone. He recalled the long room, the big desk covered with books, the window open to the summer night, Levquist's great grotesque beautiful head, Levquist saying 'Come again, come and see the old man.' He had not been again. He had never kissed Levquist's hands and said he loved him. Levquist saying, 'I saw young Riderhood. He was quite stumped by that piece of Thucydides!' 'Oh God, oh God,' said Gerard aloud, and sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the fire and hid his face in his hands. A cloud, a presence, of dark unhappiness was suddenly beside him. That was the night when his father died. Levquist, who had also been his father, was dead too. And, Jenkin was dead; and the presence in the room was that of Jenkin, Jenkin sad, Jenkin as sadness, Jenkin as incurable torturing grief. Why did you have to die, when I loved you so? Gerard said to Jenkin. And it was terrible, terrible to him, as if the shade of Jenkin were weeping and holding out its strengthless hands. It wasn't my fault, said Gerard to the shade, forgive me, forgive me, I am bereaved, I am punished, I am poisoned. Why are you weeping these awful tears? Is it because you were murdered and I have befriended your murderer? Oh Jenkin, how can we have so lost cacti other, how can we be so changed, you an accuser and I paralysed by a poisonous drug!
Gerard stood up and actually looked around the room, searching for something, some little thing, for that was what the awful accusing shade had now become, something like a little box or a black mechanical toy. There was nothing but the room itself, awkward and graceless and accidental and empty. With a sudden gesture Gerard hit the pile of neatly stacked proofs knocking them onto the floor. As they fell they took one of the Staffordshire dogs with them. The dog was broken. Gerard picked up the pieces and put them on the sideboard.
He thought, I'm poisoned all right, I'm haunted, I'm cursed, I'm mad. The destruction of the dog had brought tears to his eyes at last. How can I write this book, he thought, when I can't help thinking that Jenkin was murdered? What do Crimond's thoughts matter? Why did I talk to Rose about a house or being together? Let her go to Yorkshire. I'm under a curse, I'm condemned to a haunted solitude. Crimond's book made me feel I had some thoughts, but it was an illusion. Levquist said I had no hard core, Crimond said anything I wrote would be beautified and untrue, Rose said it was vanity. I haven't got the energy to write a long book. I see now it's not important. I'll get out of'here though. I don't want company any more, whether it's humans or ghosts. Oh God, I'm getting old I've never felt this before. I'm old.
He picked up the plate and the mug from the tiles beside the fire and took them back to the kitchen. He put on the kettle for his hot water bottle. He had forgotten to switch on the electric fire in the bedroom and the room was icy. He switched it on and pulled the curtains. The wind, now filled with rain, was lashing at the window panes which were rattling and admitting cold streams of air which were agitating the curtains. He said to himself, of course I'm drunk, but that's how it is. The curse I'm under is the one we're all under. The Oxford colleges and Big Ben can't buy us off now. The time when we could talk on this planet of controlling our destinies is finished for good – the short short time. Rose is right, it's no use trying to think any more. The party's over. Apris nous le diluge.
The kettle boiled and he filled the bottle and put it in the bed which seemed to be inhabited by some cold damp fungus. He took his pyjamas and went back to the sitting room to undress before the fire. Crimond's galley proofs were all over the floor and he thrust them into a heap with his foot. He took off his tic which he had put on hours ago to go to the Fairfaxes' party, where fie knew he would see Rose, and where he had arrived late because he had been unable to tear himself away from that damnable book.
As he unbuttoned his shirt he saw Duncan's letter open upon the chair. He would reply of course, but he felt no urgent desire to see Duncan. Later perhaps. I feel discredited, he thought, these deaths have knocked the stuffing out of me. I'd be ashamed before Duncan. It's all right for him to have a woman and a house. Duncan could manage his life, even his bad luck, he was never 'high-minded', like Jenkin, like Gerard, like Crimond. Gerard remembered that he had used that term to Rose to describe Crimond's book. But Jenkin's high-mindedness was not like Gerard's or like Crimond's. Gerard recalled how Levquist had snubbed him when he had suggested that Jenkin hadn't 'got anywhere'. 'Riderhood doesn't need to get anywhere. He walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you -' Yes, thought Gerard, Jenkin always walked the path, with others, wholly engaged in wherever he happened to be, fully existing, fully real at every point, looking about him with friendly curiosity. Whereas I have always felt reality was elsewhere, exalted and indifferent and alone, upon some misty mountain peak which I, among the very few, could actually see, though of course never reach, and whose magnetism thrilled in my bowels (that was Levquist's phrase) while I enjoyed my superior vision, my consciousness of height and distance, the gulf below, the height above, and a sense of pleasurable unworthiness shared only by the elect – self-satisfied Platonism, Augustinian masochism, Levquist called it. Why didn't I go back and see him and talk about all that, I could have gone any time. Now I feel, I feel at last alone – and the mountain and the mountain peak, that hanging on, that looking up, was it all an illusion? Can I live without thinking of myself, and of it, in just that way? Perhaps it was the loss of it which I felt just now when I realised how poisoned I am by that murderous doubt, when I thought it's too high, it's too far. Just when I meet with the insuperable difficulty which I've so much desired I find I have no strength left. I shall shrink and shrink and creep into a crevice. What I thought was the top of the mountain was a false summit after all – the summit is far higher up and hidden in cloud and as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist, my endurance is at an end.