The Indian Clerk Read Online Free PDF

of the society to outsiders. Meetings took place every Saturday evening. As an active member—as one of
     the brethren—you were obliged to attend every meeting during term so long as you were in residence. Eventually, each member
     "took wings" and became an "angel," at which point he would attend only those meetings he chose to.
    Hardy was elected to the society in 1898. He was number 233. His sponsor, or "father," was the philosopher G. E. Moore (no.
     229). At this point the active members of the Society, in addition to Moore, were R. C. and G. M. Trevelyan (nos. 226 and
     230), Ralph Wedgwood (no. 227), Eddie Marsh (no. 228), Desmond McCarthy (no. 231), and Austin Smyth (no. 232). The angels
     most likely to be in attendance were O. B. (no. 142), Goldie Dickinson (no. 209), Jack McTaggart (no. 212), Alfred North Whitehead
     (no. 208), and Bertrand Russell (no. 224), who had taken wings only the year before. Nearly all were from King's or Trinity,
     and of them, only two—Whitehead and Russell—had taken the mathematical tripos.
    And what was the mathematical tripos? Reduced to its skeleton, it was the exam that all mathematics students at Cambridge
     were obliged to take, and had been obliged to take since the late eighteenth century. The word itself referred to the three-legged
     stool on which, in olden times, the contestants would sit as they and their examiners "wrangled" over points of logic. Now
     a century and a half had gone by, and still the tripos tested the applied mathematics that had been current in 1782. The highest
     scorers on the exam were still classed as "wranglers," then ranked by score, the very highest being deemed the "senior wrangler."
     After the wranglers came the "senior optimes" and the "junior optimes." Much ceremony attended the ritual reading of the names
     and scores, the honors list, which took place annually at the Senate House on the second Tuesday in June. To have any future
     in mathematics at Cambridge, you had to score among the top ten wranglers. To be named senior wrangler guaranteed you a fellowship
     or, if you chose not to pursue an academic career, a lucrative post in government or law. Whitehead in his year had been fourth
     wrangler, Russell seventh.
    The tripos had something of the quality of a sporting event. Wagers preceded it, revels followed it. The third week in June,
     no man in Cambridge was as famous as the senior wrangler, whose photograph street vendors and newsagents sold, and whom undergraduate
     aspirants and girls followed through the streets, asking for his autograph. Starting in the 1880s, women were allowed to take
     the examination, though their scores didn't count, and when, in 1890, a woman beat the senior wrangler, no less worthy an
     organ than the New York Times reported on her astonishing victory.
    Some, generally those who had no personal experience of it, thought the tripos rather fun. O. B., for instance. A historian
     by inclination and profession, he adored pomp of any kind, and therefore could not understand why Hardy should object so vociferously
     to what was for him just a nice bit of Cambridge pageantry. In particular—and this was typical of O. B.—he loved the wooden
     spoon. Each year on degree day, when the poor fellow who had got the lowest score of all—the last of the junior optimes—knelt
     before the vice-chancellor, his friends would lower down to him from the Senate House roof an immense spoon, five feet long,
     elaborately hued and emblazoned with the insignia of his college as well as bits of comic verse in Greek along the lines of:
    In Honours Mathematical
None in Glory this shall equal.
Senior Wrangler, shed a tear
That you this Spoon shall never bear!
    The fellow would then carry the spoon off with him into the distance with as much pathos and equanimity as he could muster.
     For the rest of his life, he would be known as that year's wooden spoon.
    Once, in the mingling hour that followed an Apostles meeting, O. B.