The Indian Clerk (27 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
Finally the storm let up. The exhausted sister was now able to remove her galoshes and retire for a cup of tea. Thayer stretched;
his eyes fluttered. At that moment I would have done anything to protect him. I would have stayed, holding up the umbrella,
all night. But I feared that my prolonged presence might be thought unseemly, either by the sister or by Thayer himself. So
I picked up the umbrella and said, "Well, I'd best be going." And much to my surprise, he asked me if I would return again
tomorrow. And if I might, before I left, wet the cloth, one more time, and lay it on his brow.
I said that of course I would—both wet the cloth and come back tomorrow. And I did come back. Every day for two weeks I came
back. We talked and talked. He asked me to tell him what kind of mathematics I did, and I tried to explain Riemann to him,
and, much to my amazement, he grasped the essentials. Or we talked cricket. (He shared my admiration for Shrimp Levison-Gower.)
Or he told me about his mother and his sisters, and his friend Dick Tarlow, to whom one of his sisters had been engaged, and
how, at Wipers, Dick Tarlow had been blown to bits, and how much he missed him, and how much his sister missed him.
Thayer did not, in the end, lose his leg. Instead I arrived, one afternoon, at the hospital, bearing a gift for him—the first
gift I had dared bring, a copy of Wells's
The Time Machine
—only to be told by the sister that he had been discharged that very afternoon, and sent to his people in Birmingham, for
a few weeks' rest before going back to the front. A month or so later he sent me one of those horrible form letters that the
government issued to the soldiers in those days, with the line checked off that read "I am being sent down to the base. Letters
follow at first opportunity." Only his signature at the bottom—J. R. Thayer—indicated any connection between the form and
the lad who had filled it out.
That winter was famously cold—so cold that I could not bear to visit the hospital anymore, for fear of witnessing too much
suffering and feeling hopeless at my own inability to ease it. This included my own suffering. Thayer, at least, I had helped
make comfortable, though I never touched any part of him besides his forehead, on which I laid, once an hour or so, that warm,
wet cloth. It was for his sake, those days, that I prayed for rain. Every morning I would rise and beg God to bring rain.
Sometimes He would oblige, which annoyed me. I worried that He was onto the game. Most days, though, the clouds never broke,
and once or twice the sun even shone through the vast space where the south wall of the ward should have been, raising the
spirits of the soldiers and giving some cause to smile. On such days I was grateful for the umbrella, which I was able to
rest, closed, against the wall next to Thayer's bed. Closed, it had brought luck. Open—who knows what it had brought?
I must confess that I fear myself, now, ever finding out.
I
N MARCH 1915, Russell sends him a note saying that he has invited D. H. Lawrence to visit Trinity. Would Hardy join them,
after dinner, for sherry in Russell's rooms?
Most of the officers have left by now, so he goes that evening to Hall. A man he supposes to be Lawrence sits across from
Russell and next to Moore. Hardy is too far down the high table to overhear their conversation. Still, he can tell it's strained.
There are long silences, during which the eupeptic Moore eats with relish, while Lawrence merely stares at his plate, a morose
expression on his oblong face. Although Hardy hasn't read any of his books, he's heard much about the writer: about his childhood
in a coal-mining town near Nottingham, and the years he spent as an elementary schoolteacher, and his recent marriage to a
zaftig
German divorcee, the daughter of a Baron, six years his senior. And what must he make of these Trinity men, sawing at their
meat while Byron and Newton and Thackeray look on? Do they seem ridiculous in their gowns? Is he overawed? Is he repulsed?
As requested, Hardy arrives at Russell's rooms around nine. A few others are there: Milne—former editor of the
Granta,
now at
Punch
—as well as Winstanley, who makes it his business to know more about the history of Trinity than anyone else, and is currently
pontificating to Lawrence about the building of the Wren Library in 1695. Moore is there too, and Sheppard (without Madam
Cecil, thank goodness), waiting his turn to address the author.
What impresses Hardy most about Lawrence is his gauntness. Gauntness like that you have to work at. With his big head and
hunched shoulders, he might be an underfed gargoyle. His hair is thick and brown, and looks as if it has been cut the old-fashioned
way, by placing a bowl over the head, which is strangely shaped, thick and protuberant at the brow, then tapering into a chin
the sharpness of which his beard, cut to a point, only accentuates. He doesn't speak much. He seems to be listening very intently—at
the moment to Russell, who has just received, by post, an article that Edmund Gosse wrote for the
Edinburgh Review
at the beginning of the war. "Listen to this," Russell says. " 'War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign
disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of
the intellect.' " He throws the review down. "Have any of you ever actually seen a bottle of Condy's Fluid? I had to ask my
bedmaker. She showed me one. Purplish stuff. She says she uses it to 'get out the odors.' And this from a man who hasn't left
London in ten years! What does he know? What do any of us know?"
"War is not fine," Lawrence says. "This abstract hate of a fairy-tale German ogre—there are finer things to live and die for."
Then he is quiet again. Does the mention of the ogre owe to the influence of the German wife? From what Hardy has heard, she
left her first husband, also an Englishman, to marry Lawrence.
"Gosse is a shit," says Russell. "And Eddie Marsh—even worse. Selling this bill of goods just so he can dress up and go with
Churchill to parties. These men are insects, obscene, venturing out from their crevices into the darkness, crawling over corpses,
polluting them with their slime."
"Oh, come now, Bertie," Milne says. "Surely they're not
that
bad."
"They are that bad."
"Well, haven't we got into a gloom!" Sheppard says. "And when the whole purpose of this evening is to welcome Mr. Lawrence
to Cambridge." With that, he strides up to Lawrence and starts talking to him about his books. And really, he is a marvel,
with his gift for shepherding
(Sheppard shepherds)
a conversation along. Whether he's actually read the books is immaterial: what matters is that he gives the impression, brilliantly,
of having read them. And clearly he's read
something,
for now he starts quoting to Lawrence from Lawrence's own work.
"Sons and Lovers,
of course, is a masterpiece," he says, "though personally I shall always feel a special fondness for
The White
Peacock.
And that early chapter, 'A Poem of Friendship,' the two boys frolicking in the water and drying each other off afterwards!"
He clears his throat. " 'He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me
briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and
to get a better grip of me, he put his arms round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked
bodies one against the other was superb.'" Sheppard breathes deeply. "What language! You see, I've memorized it."
Silence greets this unexpected declamation. Lawrence says, "Thank you," then turns away.
Now Russell introduces him to Hardy, whose hand Lawrence grips warmly, fervently, for too long. Perhaps he simply finds it
a relief to have been saved from Sheppard's insinuating little performance. Much more pleasant, no doubt, to listen as Hardy,
at Russell's request, rambles on about the Riemann hypothesis. Indeed, even after Russell's gone off to chat with Winstanley,
Lawrence sticks close to him; leans into him; clings to him almost as a life raft. And how ironic
that
is, considering Hardy's own—how to put it?—predilections. Yet he takes a certain pride in the misreading; if Lawrence takes
him to be normal, if he does not ally him with Sheppard, so much the better.
And meanwhile, in the background, Sheppard doesn't stop declaiming. It's the oddest thing. He has no audience. He knows Lawrence
is valiantly not listening. And still he declaims, with an almost vicious irony: " It satisfied in some measure the vague,
indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him.'"
"There must be a revolution of the state," Lawrence says to Hardy. "Everything must be nationalized—all industries, all the
means of communication. And of course the land. In one fell blow. Then a man shall have his wages whether he's sick or well
or old. If anything prevents his working, he shall have his wages all the same. He shouldn't live in fear of the wolf."
Sheppard: " 'When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our
love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.'"
Lawrence: "And every woman shall have her wage, too, until she dies, whether she works or not, so long as she works while
she's fit to."
Sheppard: " 'The cool, moist fragrance of the morning, the intentional stillness of everything, of the tall bluish trees,
of the wet, frank flowers'—Isn't that marvelous? 'Wet, frank flowers'—'of the trustful moths folded and unfolded in the fallen
swaths, was a perfect medium of sympathy.'"
Lawrence: "But for now we live trapped within a shell. And the shell is a prison to life. If we don't break the shell, our
lives turn in upon themselves. But if we can smash the shell, then anything is possible. Then and only then we shall begin
living. We can examine marriage and love and all. But until then we are fast within the hard, unliving, impervious shell."
Hardy, in imitation of Ramanujan, waggles his head. Lawrence frowns. "You must have patience with me. I know sometimes my
language isn't clear."
Hardy doesn't expect to see Lawrence again. The next afternoon, though, as he's crossing Great Court, he hears a voice calling
his name, and turns to see Lawrence running toward him, on storkish legs.
"What a boon," he says, taking Hardy's arm. "I've had a very terrible morning. Please, may I walk with you?"
"Of course."
"It was one of the crises of my life."
They head toward the river, Hardy feeling at once flattered and embarrassed by the rapacity with which Lawrence clutches him.
"I don't know whether Keynes is a friend of yours," he says. "And if he is your friend, and you come to loathe me, that is
regrettable, but I must speak or I shall die."
"What you say shall remain between the two of us. That goes without saying."
"Russell wanted me to meet him—Keynes," he says. "So this morning we went to his rooms, but he wasn't there. It was very sunny,
and Russell was writing him a note when Keynes came out of the bedroom, blinking from sleep. And he was in . . . his pyjamas.
And as he stood there some knowledge passed into me. I can't describe it. There was the most dreadful sense of repulsiveness.
Something like carrion. A vulture gives the same feeling."
"Oh my."
"And the pyjamas . . ." He shudders. "Striped. These horrible little frowsty people, men lovers of men, they give me a sense
of corruption, almost of putrescence. They make me dream of black beetles. Of a beetle that bites like a scorpion. In the
dream I kill it, a very large beetle, I scotch it and it runs off, but it comes again, and I must kill it again."
"How awful . . . and in striped pyjamas . . ."
"I have thought a lot about sodomy. Love is this: you go to a woman to know yourself, and knowing yourself, to explore the
unknown, which is the woman. You venture upon the coasts of the unknown, and open what you discover to all humanity. But what
nearly all English people do is, a man goes to a woman, he takes a woman, and he's merely repeating a known reaction, not
seeking a new reaction. And this is simply self-abuse. The ordinary Englishman of the educated classes goes to a woman to
masturbate himself. And sodomy is just a nearer form of masturbation, because there are two bodies instead of one, but still
it has the same object. A man of strong soul has too much honor for the other body, so he remains neutral. Celibate. Forster,
for instance."
They have circled back to Trinity. All this way they have encountered no one, but now two soldiers pass by, student soldiers,
in uniforms under their gowns. "How ugly they are," Lawrence says. "I think of that line from Dostoevsky: 'to insects—sensual
lust.' One insect mounting another—Oh God, the soldiers! So ugly. Like lice or bugs. Steer me clear of them!" Hardy steers
him to Nevile's Court, and he lets go, at last, of Hardy's arm. "I feel better," he says. "The bond of blood brotherhood is
a crucial one." Then he steps nearer. "Oh, how can you bear it here? I loathe Cambridge, its smell of rottenness, of marsh-stagnancy.
Come visit me and Frieda. We live in Greatham. In Sussex. The air is fresh, the food plain. Come and see us."
"I will," Hardy says, rubbing his arm, which has gone numb. And then Lawrence shakes his hand—his handshake is so weak, so
ineffectual, so moist, Hardy recoils—and walks through the door that leads to Russell's staircase.
Black beetles in striped pyjamas .
. .
A
GAIN, HE ENCOUNTERS Ramanujan with his Indian friends. This time they are sitting by the river. The shadows of an elm afford
him the chance to study them more carefully.
The stooped one with the turban is reading something aloud to the others. The youngest one—the one whose mortarboard blew
away—has intense, darting, faunlike eyes. When he notices Hardy, he turns away.
The next morning, Ramanujan says, "Ananda Rao is quite in awe of you."
"Why?"
"Because he is studying mathematics, and you are the great mathematician. The great Hardy. But he is shy to introduce himself."
"He need not be."
"I tell him that, but he won't listen. He is a youngster."
"Tell him he can come to see me anytime."
Hardy opens his notebook, indicating that the time has come to go to work. "Ananda Rao is preparing an essay for the Smith's
Prize," Ramanujan says.
"Oh, good for him."
"Might I submit an essay for the Smith's Prize?"
"But the Smith's Prize is for undergraduates. You're well beyond that."
"I do not have a B.A."
"Yes, the requirement was waived in your case."
"I should like to have a B.A."
"Well, I suspect we could arrange that."
"How?"
"You could do it 'by research,' as they say. Maybe your paper on highly composite numbers. You'll need to ask Barnes."
The next morning Ramanujan says, "I have asked Barnes, and he agrees. I can do the B.A. by research with the paper on highly
composite numbers."
"Fine."
"Then I can submit my research for the Smith's Prize?"
"But you're eons beyond the Smith's Prize! Why should you even bother with the Smith's Prize?"
"You won the Smith's Prize."
"Prizes are meaningless. Just things to gather dust on the mantel." Then he catches himself. For how can he convey the meaninglessness
of prizes to one who has suffered so from not having won enough?
"Hardy," Ramanujan says, "may I ask you a kindness?"
"What?"
"I wonder if you would allow me . . . if I did not come to see you for the next three days."
"Oh? And why's that?"
"Chatterjee has invited me to go to London with him."
"To London?"
"With him and Mahalanobis and Ananda Rao. He has found a boardinghouse with a very pleasant landlady who serves, he says,
excellent vegetarian food."
"And what will you do in London?"
"We will see
Charley's Aunt."
"Charley's Aunt!"
Hardy suppresses a laugh. "No, of course. I mean, yes. You should start getting to know more of England than the corridors
of Trinity."
"Thank you. I promise that I shall continue my work in London. I shall have the mornings free."
"There's no need for that. Take a break from work. It'll clear your head."
"No, I shall work every morning, from eight to noon."
Four days later he's back at Hardy's fireside.
"So how was London?"
"Very pleasant, thank you."
"And you enjoyed
Charley's Aunt?"
"I laughed very much."
"What else did you do?"
"I went to the zoo."
"The zoo in Regent's Park?"
"Yes. And I saw Mr. Littlewood and his friend. They took me to tea." He waggles his head. "She is very amiable, Mr. Littlewood's
friend."
"So I've heard."
"And then after tea they took me to see Winnie."
"Who is Winnie?"
"Winnie is a black bear cub from Canada. She was brought by a soldier. Her name is short for Winnipeg, not Winifred. But then
the soldier's brigade was sent to France, and now Winnie lives at the zoo."
"And what is Winnie like?"
"She is very tame. A gentleman from the zoo fed her. I stayed and watched her for an hour, with Mr. Littlewood and his friend."
"So you shall go to London again?"
"I think so, yes. The boardinghouse was very comfortable. It is in Maida Vale."
"Very convenient for the zoo."
"And the landlady—Mrs. Peterson—she has taught herself Indian cooking. She even made
sambar
one night. Well, a sort of
sambar."
"That would no doubt please your mother."
"She would be pleased. May I ask your guidance on a small matter?"
"Of course."
"On the train back, Mahalanobis showed us a problem from the
Strand
magazine. They are published every month—mathematical puzzles—and this one he could not solve."
"What was it?"
Ramanujan fishes a magazine cutting from his pocket and hands it to Hardy. "Puzzles at a Village Inn"; the setting, familiar
to Hardy, is the Red Lion Inn in the Village of Little Wurzelfold. Only now the men speak of the war.
"I was talking the other day," said William Rogers to the other villagers gathered round the inn fire, "to a gentleman about
that place called Louvain, what the Germans have burnt down. He said he knowed it well—used to visit a Belgian friend there.
He said the house of his friend was in a long street, numbered on his side one, two, three, and so on, and that all the numbers
on one side of him added up exactly the same as all the numbers on the other side of him. Funny thing that! He said he knew
there was more than fifty houses on that side of the street, but not so many as five hundred. I made mention of the matter
to our parson, and he took a pencil and worked out the number of the house where the Belgian lived. I don't know how he done
it."
"Well," Hardy says, "and what is the solution? It shouldn't be difficult—for you."
"The solution is that the house is number 204 out of 288. But that is not what is interesting."
"What is interesting?"
"It is a continued fraction. The first term is the solution to the problem as stated. But each successive term is the solution
for the same type of relation between two numbers as the number of houses increases toward infinity."
"Very good."
"I think I should like to publish a paper on continued fractions. Perhaps this continued fraction. You see, with my theorem
I could now solve the puzzle no matter how many houses there were. Even on an infinite street."
An infinite street, Hardy thinks, of Belgian houses. And Ramanujan pacing the rubble, holding his continued fraction before
him like a sextant. And all the houses burning.
"I suspect that it would make an excellent paper," he says.
"Might it be a paper," Ramanujan asks, "with which I could win the Smith's Prize?"