The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  They look. There are indeed cuts; fairly pronounced ones. “Excuse me, will you?” Russell says, then walks over to join his protégé, 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 dilettantes. 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 be 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 Békàssy.”

  “Who's Count Békàssy?”

  “Count Ferenc Istvàn Dénes Gyula Békàssy. 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.”

  “My dears, we had an absolutely beastly journey,” Strachey says, shaking out his umbrella. “The train was stuck for hours near Bishops Stortford. A body on the track, they said. Can you think of anything more ghastly? If I hadn't had dear Norton to entertain me, I might have had a fit. Now tell me, what have we missed?”

  “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 t
o 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?”

  He nods. Like Sheppard, Norton makes it his business to stay in the know. As Sheppard likes to point out, Norton is a mathematician—or used to be, until mathematics drove him “to the point of nervous collapse,” after which he pretty much gave up his academic career and started spending most of his time in London, trying to ingratiate himself with the Bloomsbury set. Now he counts among his close friends not just Strachey but the Stephen sisters and that elusive object of desire, Duncan Grant. Yet for all his literary aspirations, Norton doesn't seem to do anything. This is what puzzles Hardy—how he can live within the radiance of artistic men and women without exhibiting any artistic impulses of his own. Today he remains what he's always been—short, monkeyish, rich from trade; a convenient source of cash when the Bloomsberries are hard up—and yet he's also less than he used to be, because he is no longer a man with a driving passion. Hardy likes him, even had an affair with him once—but that was long ago.

  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.

  Dear God, Hardy thinks, please let Taylor talk for a long time. I so want to hear what he has to say.

  This time the feint fails. Taylor talks. He talks and talks. Time is irrelevant. As with music, the effect of slowness remains independent of the actual number of minutes eaten up. And what does he say? Nothing. “Humanism … ethos … cri de coeur . . .” If he goes on much longer, Hardy thinks, I'm going to have a conversion here and now. But finally he sits down again. “Thank you, Brother Taylor,” Keynes says. “And now would anyone else like to speak?”

  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, Békássy'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, Békássy 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?”

  “Madam Taylor. It's true. At first I didn't believe it either, but then I checked a medical dictionary. Polyorchidism is the technical term. A rare but documented condition. Apparently Sheppard just can't keep his hands off him—them.”

  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 Békássy 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 Békássy. Don't you? Not that Békássy 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, Békássy 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 Békássy 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.