The Indian Clerk (7 page)

"The reading of the curse," Sheppard says. "We couldn't wait."

"Oh, what a pity. But not the paper, I hope."

"No."

"Good. Who's on the hearthrug tonight?"

"It was supposed to be Taylor but he couldn't get his written."

"Thank heavens for that," Norton murmurs. The decision as to who should read is made by drawing lots; whenever an Apostle
arrives at a meeting without his paper (something very much frowned upon), an angel is asked to read in his stead one of his
old papers, ferreted out of the Ark. More often than not McTaggart reads "Violets or Orange-Blossom?" and tonight he looks
as if he would be glad to do so again. Keynes and Moore, however, appear to have other ideas, for they are even now digging
through the Ark-ive.

Norton says, "They're probably trying to figure out how to take advantage of Madam Cecil's withdrawal to make a better impression
on Wittgenstein. You know they're all terrified of him."

"Are they?"

As for Taylor (no. 249), he is, as the brethren put it, Sheppard's "special friend": a blandly handsome, ill-tempered, rather
dim young man whose only claim to distinction, so far as Hardy can tell, is that he is the grandson of the great logician
George Boole. At the moment he looks distinctly put out, as if his failure to come through with the promised paper is the
Society's fault and not his own. No one understands Sheppard's passion for him. Indeed, so far as Hardy can discern, the only
reason he was elected to the Society in the first place was that Sheppard made it painfully clear that he would suffer acutely—perhaps
at Taylor's hands—if the election failed to go through. Now Taylor, a cross expression on his face, watches as Moore at last
retrieves the paper he was looking for from the Ark, thumbs through the pages, then stands himself on the hearthrug. McTaggart
turns away. "So it's to be the man himself," Norton says to Hardy.

"Well, if anyone's got a shot at impressing the Witter-Gitter man, I suppose it's him."

They sit down, once again, on the sofa. Norton sits to Hardy's right, Taylor to his left, though in his imagination Taylor
evaporates, replaced by the Indian friend in the flannel trousers. Through the flimsy casing Hardy imagines that he can feel
the heat of a hard leg.

Moore clears his throat and reads the paper's title: "Is conversion possible?"

"Oh, that old thing," Hardy says under his breath, for he remembers the paper from when Moore first read it, back before the
turn of the century.

Actually, it's not an uninteresting paper—that is, if you have the patience to untangle Moore's convoluted syntax, which Wittgenstein
may not. By conversion, Moore means not religious conversion but an experience akin to the Tolstoyan concept of new birth:
a mystic transformation of the spirit that we experience regularly in childhood and then, as we grow older, less and less
often, until we arrive at middle age, after which we never experience it again. The question Moore poses is whether we can
will ourselves to undergo this kind of "conversion" even in adulthood. He himself believed, when he first read the paper,
that he had managed to do so once, perhaps twice, which surprised Hardy: did Moore really consider it such a feat? As a mathematician,
Hardy "converted" every day. Every day he trafficked in numbers that could not exist, and gazed upon dimensions that could
not be envisioned, and enumerated infinities that could not be counted. Yet Moore was too much a rationalist simply to accept
his own mysticism. Indeed, Hardy's private belief was that, through his relentless interrogation of his capacity to "convert,"
he had managed merely to shut it down.

"Finally I have only this to ask the Society," Moore reads, "whether it is not possible that any one of us might discover,
tonight or at any moment, this true philosopher's stone, the true Wisdom of the Stoics, a discovery which might permanently
remove for him who made it, and perhaps for others, by far the most obstructive part of the difficulties and evils with which
we have to contend."

He puts the paper down. Everyone applauds except for Wittgenstein, who stares stonily at the Ark. Moore steps off the hearthrug
and sits on one of Sheppard's rickety chairs. Keynes asks if anyone wishes to respond.

Hardy feels the creaking of shot springs. Taylor gets up and approaches the hearthrug. Strachey covers his eyes.

Much to Hardy's astonishment, Wittgenstein stands. Strachey removes his hand from his eyes. Wittgenstein does not walk to
the hearthrug. Instead he stays where he is and says, in his light Viennese accent, "Very interesting, but as far as I can
see, conversion consists merely in getting rid of worry. Of having the courage not to care what happens."

Then he sits down again. Norton nudges Hardy in the side.

"Thank you, Brother Wittgenstein," Keynes says. "Well, then, if that's all, why don't we bring the matter to a vote? The question
is: can we turn Monday mornings into Saturday nights? All in favor, say yea."

Various hands shoot up, including Taylor's, Bekassy's, and, to Hardy's surprise, Strachey's. The "nays" include Wittgenstein,
Russell, Moore, and Hardy himself.

The formal part of the meeting is now over. With a clattering like the inauguration of dinner in Hall, the brethren move toward
the tea cart that Sheppard's gyp, who has become accustomed to the Society's strange ways, has wheeled in unobtrusively during
the reading of the curse. Marsh eyes Brooke, Bekassy fondles Bliss, Wittgenstein scowls, Sheppard tries to push a whale on
to Taylor, who refuses it. "Ah, the drama of it all," Norton says. "Though if I'm to be honest, I must say that I wouldn't
have minded the train being kept another hour. Even nursing Strachey through the vapors would have been preferable to hearing
Moore read that old paper for the umpteenth time. And then the squitter-squatter . . . squitter-squattering so. Don't you
despise it?"

"Taylor does go on a bit."

"You do know what it is that keeps Sheppard so fascinated, don't you? He has three balls."

"Who?"

Hardy is unequal to the three balls. "Really," he says.

"Of course I have no idea if they're all fully functional, or even the same size, or what the effect is—you know, whereas
most of us have just the two, with a sort of, well, cleavage down the middle, like a piece of fruit, are his the same, only
divided in three—like a three-lobed peach, if you can imagine? Or do two of them share one of the compartments? Or is the
third vestigial, like a cyst? Have you ever met anyone with supernumerary nipples? I knew someone who had an extra set, below
the regular ones, only they didn't look like nipples, they were just these little red spots . . . Who's that Bekassy is pawing?"

Hardy's attention is not so elastic as Norton's. He's still taking in the balls.

"I believe that's the clarinetist. Bliss."

"Yes, I suspect it would be." Norton sighs. "Personally, I prefer him to Bekassy. Don't you? Not that Bekassy isn't good-looking,
but he hardly gets me going the way he does Keynes. The other day Strachey—James, not Lytton—told me that at the last meeting,
Bekassy got Keynes so worked up, he wanted to 'have him on the hearthrug.' Now don't you agree, our forebrethren would have
looked away in shame at that?"

"No doubt," says Hardy, who's trying to envisage—and determine his views on—Taylor's anatomical peculiarity. Given the chance,
he's perfectly willing to admit that he wouldn't mind seeing the malformed testes; indeed, he wonders that Taylor, given his
exhibitionistic streak, hasn't already put on a show of sorts, or made them the subject of a talk from the hearthrug. The
metaphorical implications! Does one ball hang lower than the other two, like the three golden balls outside a pawnbroker's
shop? Yes, perhaps this is the secret that explains Taylor, his glumness and his arrogance both. For, at some point in his
youth, a family doctor must have called attention to this oddity, made him aware for the first time that he was not like other
boys. Quite possibly his schoolmates were cruel. How long has he borne the burden of self-consciousness, the knowledge that
what repels some is as likely to attract others? And what does it say about Sheppard that he is attracted? At the moment they
are quarreling, which is not unusual. Sheppard tries to put his arm around Taylor's waist, and Taylor, in response, pushes
him away. "I am not precious, I am not a boy, and I am most certainly not yours!" he says, then retreats in high dudgeon to
the hearth.

Norton nudges Hardy. "Rubber squirrel," he says—an old codeword, referring to a joke Norton once told in which a Japanese
tries to say "lover's quarrel."

"So I see."

"And after all these years together. It's enough to make you lose your faith in marriage."

Apparently this scene—which Sheppard ornaments by saying, "Cecil, please don't make a scene"—is more than Wittgenstein can
stomach. He turns away in disgust, only to find himself faced with the equally lurid spectacle of Bekassy pushing Bliss, his
arms around his waist, his crotch against his behind, toward the window seat. This is apparently the last straw. Wittgenstein
smashes down his cup, puts on his coat, and walks out.

A silence falls. "Excuse me," Russell says a few seconds later, then gathers up his own coat and leaves, too.

"Well, I guess that squares it," Strachey says, striding up to join Hardy and Norton. "We've lost him."

"Do you really think so?"

"I fear so. Of course, given the chance, I'll do my best to talk him out of resigning. Yet how am I to persuade him that the
Society's serious and honorable with all the silly business we've had going on tonight? What a pity that Madam had to put
her oar in!"

"But Strachey," Norton says, "mustn't Herr Witter-Gitter realize that Cecil's not the Society any more than Hardy is, or I
am, or—well, any one person? If he can't see that, there's nothing to be done."

"Still, the current lot of undergraduates . . . they don't make what you'd call a lasting intellectual impression. That's
why we need Wittgenstein. To raise the bar. Do you know what he told Keynes? He said that watching Taylor and the others talk
philosophy was like watching young men at their toilets. Harmless but obscene."

"But if he resigns, won't he have to be cursed and roby-ized?"

Strachey appears to be correct. At the moment, the tri-testicular Taylor is fuming by the fire. Bekassy and Bliss are in the
window seat, petting each other's necks. Sheppard looks as if he's about to weep. Fortunately Brooke—who has an instinct for
such things—picks this instant to pass around the tobacco jar. Matches snap, pipes are lit. In the past, they all would have
stood about chatting and arguing until three in the morning. Tonight, though, no one seems to have the heart for it, and the
meeting breaks up just after twelve. McTaggart rides off on his tricycle, while Hardy makes his way back, alone, to Trinity.
It's still surprisingly warm out. Patting the letter in his pocket, he thinks of his own letter. Has it yet passed through
the Suez Canal? Is it on a ship crossing the ocean? Or has it already arrived at Madras, at the Port Trust Office, where the
real Ramanujan will retrieve it Monday morning?

And now, as if on cue, his mysterious friend joins him; walks with him, matching his stride step for step. If the real Ramanujan
really does come to Cambridge, might he be inducted into the Apostles, as the Society's first Indian member? Hardy would be
his father, of course. Only what would Ramanujan make of these clever men with their fey rituals and private language? It's
difficult for Hardy to reconcile the public image of men like Keynes and Moore with this boys' school atmosphere in which
they frisk each Saturday night, calling each other by pet names and eating nursery food and talking endlessly, endlessly,
about sex, and then about philosophy, and then sex again. Dirty jokes, boastful hints of carnal adventuring. Yet how many
of them have any real experience? Practically none, Hardy suspects. Keynes, yes. Hardy himself, though few of them would guess
it. Brooke—mostly with women. Also a sticking point. Hardy thinks of McTaggart, making his creaking, three-wheeled progress
back to the unfeminine, Apostolic Daisy. For this is the Society's great secret, and its lie. Most of these men will marry
in the end.