The Indian Clerk (6 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
S
ATURDAY EVENING, he goes to the weekly meeting of the Apostles, which is held on this occasion at King's, in the rooms of
Jack Sheppard, classicist. He goes mostly out of boredom, because he is impatient to receive Ramanujan's reply, and hopes
that the meeting will distract him from trying to guess at its content. In his coat pocket he carries the first page of Ramanujan's
original letter, as, when he took the tripos, he carried the first volume of Jordan's
Cours
d'analyse.
It is his habit to arrive exactly twenty minutes late to the meetings, thereby avoiding both the awkwardness of being the
first to arrive and the ostentation of being the last. Fifteen or so men between the ages of nineteen and fifty stand gathered
on Sheppard's Oriental carpet, trying to look as if they're smart enough to deserve to belong to such an elite society. Although
some are active undergraduate members, most are angels. (The Society's stock is rather low at the moment.) But what angels!
Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, G. E. Moore: himself excepted, Hardy thinks, these are the men who will determine England's
future. And why should he be excepted? Because he is merely a mathematician. Russell has political aspirations, Keynes wants
to rebuild the British economy from the ground up, Moore has published
Principia Ethica,
a work that many of the younger Apostles regard as a kind of Bible. Hardy's ambition, on the other hand, is merely to prove
or disprove a hypothesis that perhaps a hundred people in the world even understand. It's a distinction in which he takes
some pride.
He counts the other angels in the room. Jack McTaggart is here, pressed up against the wall, as always, like a fly. So is
suave little Eddie Marsh, who, in addition to serving as Winston Churchill's private secretary, has recently established a
reputation as a connoisseur of poetry. Indeed, he has just published an anthology entitled
Georgian
Poetry,
to which one of the major contributors is Rupert Brooke (no. 247), whom everyone thinks very handsome and whom, at the moment,
Marsh is chatting up. Of the more significant angels, only Moore and Strachey are missing, and Strachey, Sheppard tells Hardy,
is due any minute on the train from London. For this is no ordinary meeting. Tonight two new Apostles are to be born into
the society. One of the "twins," Francis Kennard Bliss, has good looks and a talent for playing the clarinet to recommend
him. The other, Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a new arrival from Austria via Manchester, where he went to learn to fly an aeroplane.
Russell says he's a metaphysical genius.
To distract and amuse himself, Hardy plays a game. He pretends that he has not, in fact, come alone to the meeting, but that
he has brought along a friend. No matter that such a thing would never be done, or that the "friend," though he answers to
the name Ramanujan, bears an uncanny physical likeness to Chatterjee, the cricketer: so far as the game goes, the young man
standing next to him is the author of the letter in his pocket, fresh off the boat from India and eager to learn Cambridge
ways. He wears flannel trousers that ripple when he walks, like water touched by a breeze. A shadow of beard darkens his already
dark cheeks. Yes, Hardy has studied Chatterjee with care.
He takes his friend on a tour of the rooms. Until recently, they belonged to O. B., who kept them filled with visiting royals,
Louis XIV furniture,
Voi che sapete,
and handsome representatives of the Royal Naval Service. But then O. B., much to his dismay, was forced into superannuation
and Italian retirement, and Sheppard took the rooms over. His sordid motley of domestic possessions looks forlorn and miserly
in a space so accustomed to grandiose gestures. A portrait of his mother, stout and contemptuous, gazes across the Hamlet
chair at a pianola that doesn't work. On the wall are some photographs of Greek statues, all of them nude, several missing
limbs, none, Hardy notes, missing the dainty penis-and-balls set that the Greeks considered so elegant, especially when compared
to those huger, crasser appendages that figured so prominently in O. B.'s badinage, and continue to figure prominently in
Keynes's. And what does his friend from India think of Keynes? At the moment, the rising star of British economics is lecturing
a rapt audience of undergraduates on the comparative size of "cock-stands" in Brazil and Bavaria. Wittgenstein is standing
alone in a corner, staring at one of the photographs. Russell is directing at Sheppard a foul-odored expatiation on the liar's
paradox from which poor Sheppard has intermittently to turn away, if only to catch his breath.
"Imagine a barber who each day shaves every man in his town who doesn't shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?"
"I should think so."
"All right, then the barber's one of the men who doesn't shave himself."
"Fine."
"But you just said he did shave himself."
"I did?"
"Yes. I said the barber shaved every man who didn't shave himself.
If he does shave himself, then he doesn't shave himself."
"All right, then he doesn't shave himself."
"But you just said he did!"
"Hardy, come save me," Sheppard says. "Russell is tying me to a spit and is about to roast me."
"Ah, Hardy," Russell says. "Yesterday Littlewood was telling me about your Indian, and I must say, it sounds quite exciting.
On the brink of proving Riemann! Tell me, when will you be bringing him over?"
Hardy is rather taken aback to learn that Littlewood has been talking Ramanujan up. "I'm not sure we will," he says.
"Oh yes, I've heard about the fellow," Sheppard says. "Living in a mud hut and scribbling equations on the walls with a stick,
isn't that right?"
"Not exactly."
"But Hardy, couldn't this be someone's idea of a joke? Mightn't your Indian be, I don't know, some bored Cambridge man trapped
in an observatory in the wilds of Tamil Nadu, trying to while away the hours by having you on?"
"If so, the man's a genius," Hardy says.
"Or you're a fool," Russell says.
"Isn't there a point, though, where it comes to the same thing?
Because if you're clever enough to construct something this brilliant as a joke . . . well, you've defeated your own intention,
haven't you? You've proven yourself a genius in spite of yourself."
Sheppard laughs—a wheezy, girlish laugh. "A puzzle worthy of Bertie!" he says. "And speaking of puzzles, Wittgenstein ought
to be a client of your maddening barber, Bertie. Look at the cuts on his chin."
They look. There are indeed cuts; fairly pronounced ones. "Excuse me, will you?" Russell says, then walks over to join his
protege, with whom he confers in a quiet voice.
"Thick as thieves," Sheppard says, leaning in closer to Hardy.
"So it seems."
"You know, of course, that Bertie fought against his election."
"Wittgenstein's? But I thought Bertie was his champion."
"He is. He says he's worried that Wittgenstein's so brilliant he'll find us all puerile and shallow, and resign as soon as
he's elected. Of course we assumed the truth was that Bertie wanted him all to himself, but now I'm beginning to think he
might be right. Look how he's staring at us!" He mimics a stage shudder. "As if we're a bunch of silly dilletantes. And who's
to say we're not, what with our Keynes carrying on about Bulgarian cocks and what have you? Did you hear that, by the way?
I'm sure
he
did."
"From what I've been told, there's no reason that talk of cock-stands would offend him."
"Oh, but he's very sensitive on such matters. For instance, he absolutely loathes Count Bekassy."
"Who's Count Bekassy?"
"Count Ferenc Istvan Denes Gyula Bekassy. Hungarian. Born last year. You should come to more meetings, Hardy."
"Which one?"
Sheppard points to a tall youth with dark eyes, a thin mustache, heavy Tartar lips that lend to his expression a quality at
once doubting and lewd. At present he is talking to Bliss, the clarinetist. He has one hand on Bliss's shoulder, and with
the other is stroking his hair.
"Most of us find him charming," Sheppard says. "Even Rupert Brooke finds him charming, which is generous, as rumor has it
he's after Brooke's girlfriend. As well as Bliss."
"Evidence to back that up. Still, it doesn't explain why Wittgenstein loathes him."
"Perhaps it's some old Austro-Hungarian rivalry simmering to the surface. Or he's jealous. I've heard the Witter-Gitter man's
rather keen on Bliss himself."
G. E. Moore comes into the room. Arguably he is the most influential Apostle in the Society's history. Nonetheless he comes
through the door shyly. He is fat, with a frank, friendly, childlike face. With gingerly self-effacement, he inserts himself
between Wittgenstein and Russell. He speaks, and as he does, he looks at Hardy and nods.
Although he's a few years younger than Hardy, Sheppard's hair is turning white. He has a cherubic, doughy face, a weakness
for gambling, and the sort of instinct for the classics that finds a truer expression in theatrical productions than in scholarship.
As an undergraduate, he was brought to Hardy's rooms for tea once, part of the complex procedure through which the Society
replenishes its stock. Sheppard's hair, in those days, was still blond. He had no idea that he was an embryo. None of them
did. The assessment and the courting had to take place without the embryo ever realizing that he was being assessed or courted,
his "father" given the difficult task of ushering his charge through a series of interviews that the charge was never to recognize
as such. If the embryo failed to pass muster, he would be an "abortion," and—in theory, at least—never learn that he had been
in the running. If, on the other hand, he did pass muster, then his discovery of the Society's existence—again, at least in
theory—would be simultaneous with his invitation to join.
Now Sheppard sits on a small, spindly, upholstered chair—no, Hardy thinks, he
doesn't
sit. He roosts. There is something distinctly henlike about Sheppard. These days he is the fulcrum on which the Society's
doings turn, not because he brandishes, as Moore does, vast intellectual influence—intellectually he contributes nothing—but
because he can be counted on to order the whales, and arrange the tea cart, and, most importantly, to look after the Ark,
which is really just a cedarwood trunk presented years before to the Society by O. B., and now filled to the brim with the
papers that the members have given over the course of countless Saturday nights, going back to the early days when Tennyson
(no. 70) and his fellows debated such topics as "Have Shelley's Poems an Immoral Tendency?" (Tennyson, the record shows, voted
no.) Part of the initiation for any new Apostle is being given the chance to rifle through the papers in the Ark; to peruse
"Is Self-Abuse Bad as an End?" (Moore), and "Should a Picture be Intelligible?" (Roger Fry, no. 214), and "Does Absence Make
the Heart Grow Fonder?" (Strachey). And, of course, McTaggart's "Violets or Orange-Blossom?"
Sheppard is talking to Moore now. Over his head, Moore looks at Hardy, and Sheppard takes out his watch. "Oh dear, oh dear,"
he says—and all at once Hardy realizes who it is that he reminds him of: it's the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland.
The white head, the twitching nose . . . "Oh, where is Strachey?" he says, gazing at the watch. "He's late, he's late! I'm
afraid we'll have to start without him."
By now the room has grown crowded. Hardy counts nine angels and six active brethren. Abandoning cock-stands for the time being,
Keynes joins Sheppard and Moore by the Ark, where the three of them lay out the hearthrug, which is in fact an old piece of
kilim. The men go quiet, and Hardy takes a seat on Sheppard's rather uncomfortable velvet sofa. He wants his charge to have
a good view of the reading of the curse.
The curse is an old Apostolic tradition. Decades before an Apostle named Henry John Roby (no. 134) declared one Saturday evening
that he was sorry but he was just too busy to go on attending the weekly meetings. His flouting of the rules, not to mention
his supercilious tone, outraged the brethren, who banished him from the Society, and declared that forever after his name
would be spelled with lowercase letters.
Now the curse is issued as a warning at every birth. Usually the father does the issuing, but since this is a twin birth,
the duty has been handed over to Keynes. While the other Apostles watch in ruminative silence, Keynes stands before the embryos,
Wittgenstein a head taller than the broad-shouldered, pink-cheeked Bliss. "May you know that the vow you are about to take
is sacred," he warns. "Never shall you reveal to any outsider the existence of the Society, for should you do so, your soul
shall writhe forever in torment."
This aspect of the curse has always puzzled Hardy. What has secrecy to do with Roby (or roby)?
He
didn't reveal the Society's existence to anyone. Instead he committed a different sin: that of failing to treat the Society
with the deference it felt was its due. In subsequent years more Apostles than Hardy can name have broken their vow of secrecy,
writing about the Society in memoirs and letters and speaking of it at luncheon parties. None, however, has committed the
apparently more grievous offense of pooh-poohing his membership. Until now.
As Keynes reads the curse, the twins listen in silence, Wittgenstein without expression, Bliss with a look of solemnity behind
which Hardy can detect a suppressed impulse to laugh. Then Keynes backs away and the brethren, bursting into applause, stand
to give the new members (nos. 252 and 253) their official welcome.
It is in many ways a beautiful moment, and, as with most beautiful moments, it is interrupted by a knock on the door. Sheppard
answers, and Strachey comes bounding in, accompanied by Harry Norton (no. 246). "There's your mathematician," Sheppard says
to Hardy, which is what he always says to Hardy when Norton enters a room. Generally speaking, the Society spurns scientists,
unless, as Sheppard once put it, the scientist in question is "a very nice scientist."