A MONTH AFTER his admission, Ramanujan is still in the nursing hostel on Thompson's Lane. Hardy goes to visit him as often as he can. He brings work with him when he goes: scribbling paper, pens, notes on what they've already done. Unfortunately Ramanujan is listless and contributes virtually nothing. No one seems to know exactly what is wrong with him, only that the pain in his stomach has persisted. He describes it now as a dull pain—and for Hardy, dull is exactly the right word for it, especially after so many weeks of listening to Dr. Wingate speculate as to its cause. Gastric ulcer was blamed only until "intermittent pyrexia" set in. "Pyrexia," Hardy soon learned, simply meant "fever." How unbearable doctors are, with their private language, their pomposity! Nonetheless, and much to his own annoyance, he soon finds himself employing the same language. When he arrives in the afternoons to visit, he asks the matron for a report on Ramanujan's pyrexia. "Down a point," she says. Or: "Up half a point at three o'clock." The fever, in other words, is capricious, coming and going at its whim, until in July—for reasons no one seems to be able to determine—it settles down into a routine. Now there is no pyrexia during the day. Instead, every night at ten, his temperature spikes. He shivers and sweats so much the sheets have to be changed, and while they are being changed, the matron tells Hardy, he mutters mysteriously, frightening the nurses. "He's probably just speaking Tamil," Hardy says. "His native language."
"It doesn't sound like any language to me," the matron says. "It sounds like the devil."
No wonder Ramanujan is tired during the day! The nights are an ordeal for him. Examining him one afternoon, Dr. Wingate says, "Tuberculosis seems likely." It sounds like a weather prediction.
"But doesn't tuberculosis affect the lungs?"
"Usually, yes."
"Has he had any lung trouble?"
"His lungs are clear—for now. Even so, Indians in England are always contracting tuberculosis. The change in diet," he adds, waving his fingers about. "Not to mention the cold weather. We need to watch him carefully. The other symptoms should start manifesting themselves soon."
After Dr. Wingate leaves, Hardy returns to Ramanujan's bedside. He hopes that he'll be able to read in his face how his friend has reacted to the news. Will he be relieved, at least, that a diagnosis seems to have been hit upon? At least tuberculosis can be treated, even, on occasion, cured. There are sanatoriums for that. And yet, whether Ramanujan is relieved, or terrified, or grievous, Hardy cannot guess, for his face remains impassive. Tuberculosis! In One Tuscan Summer (Hardy has now read it, furtively) another young genius, a pianist, contracts tuberculosis. Shreds of romance cling to the disease. Perhaps Ramanujan is reflecting on the utter idiocy of the doctor's backward reasoning: because many Indians get tuberculosis, it must be tuberculosis. The fact that he shows no symptoms of the illness does not matter. Now they must all just sit back and wait for the coughing and spitting to begin.
But here's the thing: they don't begin. The summer draws to a close, and Ramanujan's lungs remain clear. And this failure of his lungs to do what they're supposed to do appears to puzzle Dr. Wingate as much as it does Hardy. Whether it puzzles Ramanujan himself is uncertain. Most of the times Hardy visits, he lies feebly in his bed, gazing at the river. He continues to show scant interest in mathematics, and consequently work on the partitions and compositeness papers grinds to a halt. Even when Hardy tells him that he's read Raymond, and asks his views on the seance, he mumbles only the vaguest reply.
It reaches the point where Hardy wonders whether he should bother continuing to visit. "What good does it do?" he asks Mahalanobis, who looks at him with a pained expression.
"But Mr. Hardy," Mahalanobis says, "every day before you come, he asks if you are coming. He looks forward to your visits more than anything else."
Is this possible? It hardly seems likely. Still, Hardy takes Mahalanobis at his word, and keeps visiting. Sometimes, when he arrives, another patient is lying in the bed next to Ramanujan's, usually an old don with lung trouble or an undergraduate sent back from the front with an infection. Invariably these companions are gone within a matter of days. Ramanujan, from what he can tell, never exchanges so much as a word with any of them. Nor, apparently, do they introduce themselves to him. The situation puts Hardy in mind of a joke he once heard, about two Englishmen stranded on a desert island for thirty years. A ship finally rescues them, and the captain is amazed to learn that they have never spoken to each other. He asks why, and one of the men says, "We haven't been introduced."
And yet, if the man in the next bed knows Hardy, then he'll talk to him. Usually they talk about the war. By now, news has reached England of the explosions under the Messines Ridge. For more than a year British miners have been tunneling under the German lines, planting stacks of dynamite all of which were detonated at once, on the same day. The mines blew the top off the ridge. You could hear the explosion in Dublin. Lloyd George claimed he could hear it on Downing Street.
It is a turning point: Hardy is sure of that. At last, after months of leading its men to slaughter, England has done something intelligent. Plumer has taken the Germans by surprise; he has undermined, literally, their complacency, the trenches in which, if rumors are to be believed, their officers slept in comfortable beds, and ate their meat off china, and drank their schnapps from crystal glasses at tables laid with cloths, in bunkers illuminated by electric light. No more of that. A rude awakening: the phrase echoes in Hardy, because the battle of Messines has been an awakening for him, too. Suddenly it is clear to him how inured he has become to living in a state of chronic war. Out in the world, Russell is agitating; miners are tunneling; and in Cambridge, too, they are tunneling, with a mind toward exploding certain foundations, the ones on which the members of the Trinity council rest their large bottoms. Yet how modest is their ambition! It is merely to reinstate a philosopher who is decidedly ambivalent about being reinstated, and even then only once the war is over. But when will that be? And what is Hardy doing to bring the day about? Nothing.
One afternoon he goes to see Ramanujan and finds Henry Jackson lying in the second bed. He has not spoken to Jackson since the meeting in which Jackson said that he hoped the war would continue after his death. Now he lies in the bed next to Ramanujan's with his bandaged left foot outside the covers, the heavy wrinkled lids of his eyes lowered, and Hardy thinks: your wish will come true. Judging from the look of you, the war will outlast you.
Hoping not to wake Jackson, he sits, as is his habit, at Ramanujan's bedside. He asks Ramanujan how he is feeling, and his voice is enough to rouse the somnolent old man; the heavy lids flutter and open, revealing reddened slits of eyes. "Hardy," he says. "And what brings you here?"
"I am visiting Mr. Ramanujan," Hardy says.
"Ah, the Hindu calculator," Jackson says, as if Ramanujan isn't even there. Then he says, "I'm here for my gout. My gout is bad. I'm old, Hardy. Seventy-eight years old. I am nearly deaf, I suffer from rheumatism as well as gout. My life is nothing but pain." Without a hint of embarrassment, he passes wind. "And there is the war. There is always the war."
"I'm sorry you're not feeling well."
"What?" He cups a hand round his ear. "Well, it cheers me no end to see the troops drilling in Nevile's Court."
"You know my views on that, Jackson."
"What?"
"You know my position."
"So many have died. Friends, students. Hardly anyone left here in Cambridge. We are all just spinning in place."
Jackson is right. Stasis—unhappy stasis—is the condition of their lives. The explosions under the Messines Ridge shook things up for a time; but only for a time. "I fear you are right," Hardy says. But Jackson has fallen asleep.
After that the war resumes its halting, grinding immobility. Once again, the badly planned offensives fail, the names of the dead are published in newspapers, the shell-shocked are brought home stuttering, "treated," then sent back to the front. Intermittently there is talk of an armistice; hope shimmers in the distance, then recedes. Soon Hardy learns that he must greet any mention of an armistice with the same skepticism with which he and Gertrude greeted their mother's doctor's assurances that her death was imminent. Take nothing for granted. Assume the worst.
And Ramanujan? He lives in a stasis of his own, his condition neither worsening nor improving. Experts are called in. A host of doctors poke and palpate him. The dull pain, they note, is now constant. Eating and drinking make it neither better nor worse. Not typical of tuberculosis. So what is he suffering from? Some mysterious Oriental germ, one doctor suggests, but can go no further. Specialists visit Ramanujan, throw up their hands, and recommend other specialists, who in turn throw up their hands and recommend yet more specialists, until it is agreed that Ramanujan must go into London and see Batty Shaw. Yes, Batty Shaw is the man. A lung man. Batty Shaw will be sure to know what to do next.