Free The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

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 to 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