The Indian Clerk Read Online Free PDF Page B

said to Hardy, "What's he supposed to do with it, stir
     his tea?"
    "Who?" Hardy asked.
    "The wooden spoon."
    Hardy did not want to talk about the wooden spoon. Already he despised the tripos, the preparations for which he considered
     an undue burden, pulling him away from those matters to which he would have preferred to devote his energy, such as the prime
     numbers. For him, the tripos was an exercise in archaism. When taking it, you had not just to employ Newton's out-of-date
     vocabulary, but to recite the lemmas of his Principia Mathematica just upon being given their numbers, as if they were psalms. Because few dons lectured on this mathematics, a cottage industry
     of private tripos coaches had sprung up, their fees proportionate to the number of senior wranglers they "produced." These
     coaches were in many ways more famous than their counterparts, the dons. Webb was the most famous of all, and it was to Webb
     that Hardy was sent.
    These are not days that he remembers with any fondness. Three times a week, during the term and also during the long vacation,
     at precisely 8:15 in the morning, he would be sat down with five other young men in a room that was damp in summer and freezing
     in winter. The room was in Webb's house, and Webb spent the entirety of every day in it, hour after hour, coaching successive
     groups of six until dusk fell, while Mrs. Webb, dour and silent, hovered in the kitchen, filling and refilling the tea urn.
     The routine never varied. Half the meeting was devoted to rote memorization, the other half to practice against the clock.
     Hardy thought it a colossal waste of time, yet what made his suffering all the worse was the conviction that he was alone
     in experiencing it. Ambition seemed to have blinded the other men to the folly of what they were doing. He didn't know then
     that in Germany the professors made a game of mocking the questions on the exam: "On an elastic bridge stands an elephant
     of negligible mass; on his trunk sits a mosquito of mass m. Calculate the vibrations of the bridge when the elephant moves the mosquito by roaring his trunk." Yet this was exactly the
     sort of question in which the tripos specialized, and for the sake of which generations of Cambridge men had given up the
     chance to have a real education, just at the moment when their minds were ripest for discovery.
    Later, he tried to explain all this to O. B. Through the Apostles they had become, in a peculiar way, friends. Although O.
     B. never made his famously salacious jokes to Hardy, or tried to touch him, he did have a habit of dropping by Hardy's rooms
     unexpectedly in the afternoons. Often he would speak of Oscar Wilde, who had been his friend and whom he greatly admired.
     "Just before he died I saw him in Paris," O. B. said. "I was driving in a cab and passed him before I realized who he was.
     But he recognized me. Oh, the pain in his eyes . . ."
    At this stage in his life, Hardy knew little of Wilde beyond what rumors had managed to slip through the fortifications that
     his Winchester masters had erected to protect their charges from news of the trials. Now he asked O. B. to tell him the whole
     story, and O. B. obliged: the glory days, Bosie's perfidy, the notorious testimony of the hotel maids . . . Even today, only
     a few years after Wilde's death, the scandal was still fresh enough that one dared not risk being seen carrying a copy of
     one of his books. Still, O. B. loaned Hardy The Decay of Lying. When Hardy touched the covers, heat seemed to rise off them, as off an iron. He devoured the book, and afterward copied out,
     in his elegant hand, a passage that had made a particularly strong impression on him:
    Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.
     It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of
     its time, it is usually in