Murphy (10 page)

Murphy’s front did not bear out the promise of his rear, but the Duck had gone too far to draw back.

‘Nelly is in heat,’ she said, without the least trace of affectation, in a voice both proud and sad, and paused for Murphy to congratulate or condole, according to his lights. When he did neither she simply laid down her hand.

‘The oui-ja board is how I live, I come all the way from Paddington to feed the poor dear sheep and now I dare not let her off, here is my card, Rosie Dew, single woman, by appointment to Lord Gall of Wormwood, perhaps you know him, a charming man, he sends me objects, he is in a painful position, spado of long standing in tail male special he seeks testamentary pentimenti from the
au-delà
, how she strains to be off and away, the protector is a man of iron and will not bar, plunge the fever of her blood in the Serpentine or the Long Water for that matter, like Shelley’s first wife you know, her name was Harriet was it not, not Nelly, Shelley, Nelly, oh Nelly how I
ADORE
you.’

Shortening her hold on the lead she whipped up Nelly with great dexterity into the wilds of her bosom and covered her snout with all the kisses that Nelly had taught her in the long evenings. She then handed the trembling animal to Murphy, took two heads of lettuce out of the bag and began sidling up to the sheep.

The sheep were a miserable-looking lot, dingy, close-cropped, undersized and misshapen. They were not cropping, they were not ruminating, they did not even seem to be taking their ease. They simply stood, in an attitude of profound dejection, their 
heads bowed, swaying slightly as though dazed. Murphy had never seen stranger sheep, they seemed one and all on the point of collapse. They made the exposition of Wordsworth’s lovely ‘fields of sleep’ as a compositor’s error for ‘fields of sheep’ seem no longer a jibe at that most excellent man. They had not the strength to back away from Miss Dew approaching with the lettuce.

She moved freely among them, tendering the lettuce to one after another, pressing it up into their sunk snouts with the gesture of one feeding sugar to a horse. They turned their broody heads aside from the emetic, bringing them back into alignment as soon as it passed from them. Miss Dew strayed further and further afield in her quest for a sheep to eat her lettuce.

Murphy had been too absorbed in this touching little
argonautic
, and above all in the ecstatic demeanour of the sheep, to pay any attention to Nelly. He now discovered that she had eaten all the biscuits with the exception of the Ginger, which cannot have remained in her mouth for more than a couple of seconds. She was seated after her meal, to judge by the infinitesimal angle that her back was now making with the horizon. There is this to be said for Dachshunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie. If Parmigianino had gone in for painting dogs, he would have painted them like Nelly.

Miss Dew was now experimenting with quite a new
technique
. This consisted in placing her offering on the ground and withdrawing to a discreet remove, so that the sheep might separate in their minds, if that was what they wanted, the ideas of the giver and the gift. Miss Dew was not Love, that she could feel one with what she gave, and perhaps there was some dark ovine awareness of this, that Miss Dew was not lettuce, holding up the entire works. But a sheep’s psychology is far less simple than Miss Dew had any idea, and the lettuce masquerading as a natural product of the park met with no more success than when presented frankly as an exotic variety. 

Miss Dew at last was obliged to admit defeat, a bitter pill to have to swallow before a perfect stranger. She picked up the two heads of lettuce and came trundling back on her powerful little legs to where Murphy was sitting on his heels, bemoaning his loss. She stood beside him too abashed to speak, whereas he was too aggrieved not to.

‘The sheep,’ he said, ‘may not fancy your cabbage—’

‘Lettuce!’ cried Miss Dew. ‘Lovely fresh clean white crisp sparkling delicious lettuce!’

‘But your hot dog has eaten my lunch,’ said Murphy, ‘or as much of it as she could stomach.’

Miss Dew went down on her knees just like any ordinary person and took Nelly’s head in her hands. Mistress and bitch exchanged a long look of intelligence.

‘The depravity of her appetite,’ said Murphy, ‘you may be glad to hear, does not extend to ginger, nor the extremity of mine to a rutting cur’s rejectamenta.’

Miss Dew kneeling looked more than ever like a duck, or a stunted penguin. Her bosom rose and fell, her colour came and went, in consequence of Murphy’s reference to Nelly, who with Lord Gall was almost all she had in this dreary
en-deçà
, as a rutting cur. Her pet had certainly placed her in a very false position.

Wylie in Murphy’s place might have consoled himself with the thought that the Park was a closed system in which there could be no loss of appetite; Neary with the unction of an
Ipse dixit
; Ticklepenny with reprisal. But Murphy was inconsolable, the snuff of the dip stinking that the biscuits had lit in his mind, for Nelly to extinguish.

‘Oh, my America,’ he cried, ‘my Newfoundland, no sooner sighted than Atlantis.’

Miss Dew pictured her patron in her place.

‘How much are you out?’ she said.

These words were incomprehensible to Murphy, and remained so until he saw a purse in her hand.

‘Twopence,’ he replied, ‘and a critique of pure love.’ 

‘Here is threepence,’ said Miss Dew.

This brought Murphy’s filth up to fivepence.

Miss Dew went away without saying goodbye. She had not left home more gladly than she now returned sadly. It was often the way. She trundled along towards Victoria Gate, Nelly gliding before her, and felt the worse for her outing. Her lettuce turned down, her mortification, her pet and herself in her pet insulted, the threepence gone that she had earmarked for a glass of mild. She passed by the dahlias and the dogs’ cemetery, out into the sudden grey glare of Bayswater Road. She caught up Nelly in her arms and carried her a greater part of the way to Paddington than was necessary. A boot was waiting for her from Lord Gall, a boot formerly in the wardrobe of his father. She would sit down with Nelly in her lap, one hand on the boot, the other on the board, and wrest from the ether some good reason for the protector, who was also the reversioner unfortunately, to cut off the cruel entail.

Miss Dew’s control, a panpygoptotic Manichee of the fourth century, Lena by name, severe of deportment and pallid of feature, who had entertained Jerome on his way through Rome from Calchis to Bethlehem, had not, according to her own account, been raised so wholly a spiritual body as yet to sit down with much more comfort than she had in the natural. But she declared that every century brought a marked improvement and urged Miss Dew to be of good courage. In a thousand years she might look forward to having thighs like anyone else, and not merely thighs, but thighs celestial.

Miss Dew was no ordinary hack medium, her methods were original and eclectic. She might not be able to bring down
torrents
of ectoplasm or multiply anemones from her armpits, but left undisturbed with one hand on a disaffected boot, the other on the board, Nelly in her lap and Lena coming through, she could make the dead softsoap the quick in seven languages.

Murphy continued to sit on his heels for some little time, playing with the five pennies, speculating on Miss Dew, speculating on the sheep with whom he felt in close sympathy, 
deprecating this prejudice and that, arraigning his love of Celia. In vain. The freedom of indifference, the indifference of freedom, the will dust in the dust of its object, the act a handful of sand let fall – these were some of the shapes he had sighted, sunset landfall after many days. But now all was nebulous and dark, a murk of irritation from which no spark could be
excogitated
. He therefore went to the other extreme, disconnected his mind from the gross importunities of sensation and reflection and composed himself on the hollow of his back for the torpor he had been craving to enter for the past five hours. He had been unavoidably detained, by Ticklepenny, by Miss Dew, by his efforts to rekindle the light that Nelly had quenched. But now there seemed nothing to stop him. Nothing can stop me now, was his last thought before he lapsed into consciousness, and nothing will stop me. In effect, nothing did turn up to stop him and he slipped away, from the pensums and prizes, from Celia, chandlers, public highways, etc., from Celia, buses, public gardens, etc., to where there were no pensums and no prizes, but only Murphy himself, improved out of all knowledge.

When he came to, or rather from, how he had no idea, he found night fallen, a full moon risen and the sheep gathered round him, a drift of pale uneasy shapes, suggesting how he might have been roused. They seemed in rather better form, less Wordsworthy, resting, ruminating and even cropping. What they had rejected was therefore not Miss Dew, nor her cabbage, but simply the hour of day. He thought of the four caged owls in Battersea Park, whose joys and sorrows did not begin till dusk.

He bared his eyes to the moon, he forced back the lids with his fingers, the yellow oozed under them into his skull, a belch came wet and foul from the green old days—

He spat, rose and hastened back to Celia, with all the speed that fivepence could command. No doubt his news was good, according to her God, but it had been a trying day for Murphy 
in the body and he was more than usually impatient for the music to begin. It was long past his usual hour when he arrived, to find, not a meal spoiling as he had hoped and feared, but Celia spreadeagled on her face on the bed.

A shocking thing had happened.

I
T
is most unfortunate, but the point of this story has been reached where a justification of the expression ‘Murphy’s mind’ has to be attempted. Happily we need not concern ourselves with this apparatus as it really was – that would be an
extravagance
and an impertinence – but solely with what it felt and pictured itself to be. Murphy’s mind is after all the gravamen of these informations. A short section to itself at this stage will relieve us from the necessity of apologising for it further.

Murphy’s mind pictured itself as a large hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without. This was not an impoverishment, for it excluded nothing that it did not itself contain. Nothing ever had been, was or would be in the universe outside it but was already present as virtual, or actual, or virtual rising into actual, or actual falling into virtual, in the universe inside it.

This did not involve Murphy in the idealist tar. There was the mental fact and there was the physical fact, equally real if not equally pleasant.

He distinguished between the actual and the virtual of his mind, not as between form and the formless yearning for form, but as between that of which he had both mental and physical experience and that of which he had mental experience only. Thus the form of kick was actual, that of caress virtual.

The mind felt its actual part to be above and bright, its virtual beneath and fading into dark, without however connecting this with the ethical yoyo. The mental experience was cut off from the physical experience, its criteria were not those of the physical experience, the agreement of part of its content with physical fact 
did not confer worth on that part. It did not function and could not be disposed according to a principle of worth. It was made up of light fading into dark, of above and beneath, but not of good and bad. It contained forms with parallel in another mode and forms without, but not right forms and wrong forms. It felt no issue between its light and dark, no need for its light to devour its dark. The need was now to be in the light, now in the half light, now in the dark. That was all.

Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed from the other. He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one. Perhaps the knowledge was related to the fact of the kick as two magnitudes to a third. Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-mental non-physical Kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick
in intellectu
and the kick
in re
. But where then was the supreme Caress?

However that might be, Murphy was content to accept this partial congruence of the world of his mind with the world of his body as due to some such process of supernatural determination. The problem was of little interest. Any solution would do that did not clash with the feeling, growing stronger as Murphy grew older, that his mind was a closed system, subject to no principle of change but its own, self-sufficient and impermeable to the vicissitudes of the body. Of infinitely more interest than how this came to be so was the manner in which it might be exploited.

He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. 
The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the man sleeping.

Murphy could think and know after a fashion with his body up (so to speak) and about, with a kind of mental
tic douloureux
sufficient for his parody of rational behaviour. But that was not what he understood by consciousness.

His body lay down more and more in a less precarious abeyance than that of sleep, for its own convenience and so that the mind might move. There seemed little left of this body that was not privy to this mind, and that little was usually tired on its own account. The development of what looked like collusion between such utter strangers remained to Murphy as
unintelligible
as telekinesis or the Leyden Jar, and of as little interest. He noted with satisfaction that it existed, that his bodily need ran more and more with his mental.

As he lapsed in body he felt himself coming alive in mind, set free to move among its treasures. The body has its stock, the mind its treasures.

There were the three zones, light, half light, dark, each with its speciality.

In the first were the forms with parallel, a radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the elements of physical experience available for a new arrangement. Here the pleasure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing the physical experience. Here the kick that the physical Murphy received, the mental Murphy gave. It was the same kick, but corrected as to direction. Here the chandlers were available for slow depilation, Miss Carridge for rape by Ticklepenny, and so on. Here the whole physical fiasco became a howling success.

In the second were the forms without parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. This system had no other mode in which to be out of joint and therefore did not need to be put right in this. Here was the Belacqua bliss and others scarcely less precise. 

In both these zones of his private world Murphy felt sovereign and free, in the one to requite himself, in the other to move as he pleased from one unparalleled beatitude to another. There was no rival initiative.

The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line.

Matrix of surds.

It was pleasant to kick the Ticklepennies and Miss Carridges simultaneously together into ghastly acts of love. It was pleasant to lie dreaming on the shelf beside Belacqua, watching the dawn break crooked. But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.

Thus as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to spending less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of the world; and less in the half light, where the choice of bliss introduced an element of effort; and more and more and more in the dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom.

This painful duty having now been discharged, no further bulletins will be issued.