A Table of Green Fields, Guy Davenport [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

He was paid handsomely, but what worried him was that the papers he had been writing were harder and harder to finish. He was famous for averaging a mathematical paper a month. He knew that he had the reputation among his peers of having the most fertile genius of his generation. He was a Mozart of mathematics. He was finding it embarrassing to keep up his correspondence with the few men in Germany, France, and England who understood his work. These barbarian louts with their slaves and dueling pistols were making him sterile, and that tore at his soul more than their childish disrespect and leaden ignorance.

Why were they here, at a university, at least a university in name and intent? The French professor was slowly losing his mind, as none of his students had learned two words together of French. They gambled all night, knifed each other at dawn, drank until they puked.

And on this March afternoon Professor Sylvester found himself approaching the brothers Weeks, Bill and Al, or Mr. William and Mr. Alfred Weeks, gentlemen, as he must address them in class. They wore yellow and green frock coats, with flowery weskits. They were smoking long black cigars, and carried their top hats in their hands.

—You ain't a-going to speak to us, Jewboy?

Thus William, the elder of the brothers.

—Sir! said Sylvester.

—Yes, Fesser Jew Cockney, said Alfred. If you're going to teach rithmatic and that damn calc'lus shit to gentlemen, you ought to take off your hat to them when you meet us on the lawn, oughtn't he, Bill?

—Sir! said Sylvester.

—May be, said William Weeks, that if we pulled the fesser's Jew hat down over his Jew chin, he'd remember next time to speak to gentlemen.

Sylvester drew his sword from his cane with one graceful movement, and with another drove it into Alfred Weeks's chest.

Alfred screamed.

William ran.

Alfred fell backward, groaning:

—O Jesus! I have met my fatal doom!

Professor Sylvester coolly sheathed his sword, tapped it on the brick walk to assure that it was firmly fitted in his cane, turned on his heel, and walked away. He went to his rooms, packed a single suitcase, and walked to the posthouse to wait for a stage to Washington. This he boarded, when it came.

Alfred Weeks writhed on the brick walk, crying like a baby, calling for instant revenge. William came back with a doctor, who was mystified.

—Have you been bit by a m'skeeter, son? They ain't no wound. There's a little tear in your weskit, as I can see, and a kind of scratch here on your chest, like a pinprick.

—You mean I ain't killed dead?

Sylvester retrenched in New York City, where he practiced law. The mathematical papers began to be written again. He was called to the Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the first school of mathematics in the United States, where he arranged for the first woman to enter an American graduate school, where he argued with Charles Sanders Peirce, and where he introduced the Hebrew letters shin and teth into mathematical annotation.

Years later, the great Georg Cantor, remembering Sylvester, introduced the letter alef as a symbol of the transfinite.

3

 

As we descended westward, we saw the fen country on our right, almost all covered with water like a sea, the Michaelmas rains having been very great that year, they had sent down great floods of water from the upland countries, and those fens being, as may be very properly said, the sink of no less than thirteen counties; that is to say, that all the water, or most part of the water of thirteen counties falls into them.

The people of that place, which if they be born there they call the Breedlings, sometimes row from one spot to another, and sometimes wade.

In these fens are abundance of those admirable pieces of art called duckoys; that is to say, places so adapted for the harbor and shelter of wild fowl, and then furnished with decoy ducks, who are taught to allure and entice their kind to the places they belong to. It is incredible what quantities of wild fowl of all sorts they take in these duckoys every week during the season, duck, mallard, teal, and widgeon.

As these fens are covered with water, so I observed too that they generally at this latter part of the year appear also covered with fogs, so that when the downs and higher grounds of the adjacent country were gilded by the beams of the sun, the Isle of Ely looked as if wrapped up in blankets, and nothing to be seen, but now and then, the lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster.

 

4

Now the bike that was idling down the sheepwalk to the cove as sweet as the hum of a bee was a Brough, we saw, Willy and I. The rider of it lifted his goggles, which had stenciled a mask of clean flesh on the dust and ruddle of his face. A long face with shy blue eyes it was, and his light hair was blown back. He wore a Royal Air Force uniform and was, like we judged, a private.

Willy asked if he was lost or had come on purpose, after naming the bike a Brough and the uniform RAF, showing that he knew both by sight.

—Right and right, the motorcyclist said.

He spoke Oxford.

—I'm here on purpose if I've found Tuke the painter's, though I shan't disturb him if he's busy. I wrote him last week.

—Aye, the penny postal, I remembered. He was interested in it. —Name's Ross, the cyclist said.

—Sainsbury here, Willy said. My mate's Georgie Fouracre.

We all nodded, fashionable-like.

—Mr. Tuke, I said, is down yonder, in the cove, with Leo Marshall, painting of him in and out of a dory. If your postal named today, he'll be expecting you. We get the odd visitor from London, time to time, and some from up north and the continent.

So we rolled the motorbike down to Mr. Tuke and Leo. The canvas was on the easel, the dory on the strand, and Leo was drawing off worsted stockings, brown as a nut all over.

For all of his having the lines of a Dane, this airman Ross was uncommonly short. The crinkle of Mr. Tuke's eyes showed how pleased he was. His blue beret and moustache, his French blouse and sailor's breeks made