Murphy (14 page)

They caused Murphy no horror. The most easily identifiable of his immediate feelings were respect and unworthiness. Except for the manic, who was like an epitome of all the self-made plutolaters who ever triumphed over empty pockets and clean hands, the impression he received was of that self-immersed indifference to the contingencies of the contingent world which he had chosen for himself as the only felicity and achieved so seldom.

The tour being over and all Bim’s precepts exemplified, Bom led the way back to the crossing and said:

‘That is all now. Report in the morning at eight.’

He waited to be thanked before he opened the door. Ticklepenny nudged Murphy.

‘A million thanks,’ said Murphy.

‘Don’t thank me,’ said Bom. ‘Any questions?’

Murphy knew better, but made a show of consulting with himself.

‘He would like to start in straight away,’ said Ticklepenny.

‘That is a matter for Mr. Tom,’ said Mr. Tim.

‘Oh, it’s all O.K. with Mr. Tom,’ said Ticklepenny.

‘My instructions are he doesn’t come on till the morning,’ said Bom.

Ticklepenny nudged Murphy, this time unnecessarily. For Murphy was only too anxious to test his striking impression that here was the race of people he had long since despaired of finding. Also he wanted Ticklepenny to be free to rig up his fire. He would have played up unprompted. 

‘Of course I know my month only counts from to-morrow,’ he said, ‘but Mr. Clinch very kindly had no objection to my starting in straight away if I wanted to.’

‘And do you?’ said Bom, very incredulous, having seen the nudge (the second nudge).

‘What he wants—’ said Ticklepenny.

‘You,’ said Bom with a sudden ferocity that put Murphy’s heart across him, ‘you shut your bloody choke, we all know what you want.’ He mentioned one or two of the things that Ticklepenny most wanted. Ticklepenny wiped his face. Two sorts of reprimand were familiar to Ticklepenny, those that left him in the necessity of wiping his face and those that did not. He used no other principle of differentiation.

‘Yes,’ said Murphy, ‘I should like very much to start in at once, if I might.’

Bom gave up. When the fool supports the knave the good man may fold his hands. The fool in league with the knave against himself is a combination that none may withstand. Oh, monster of humanity and enlightenment, despairing of a world in which the only natural allies are the fools and knaves, a mankind sterile with self-complicity, admire Bom feeling dimly for once what you feel acutely so often, Pilate’s hands rustling in his mind.

Thus Bom released Ticklepenny and delivered Murphy to his folly.

Feeling just the same old Wood’s halfpenny in the regulation shirt and suit, perhaps because he refused to leave off the lemon bow, Murphy reported to Bom at two o’clock and entered upon that experience from which already he hoped for better things, without exactly knowing why or what things or in what way better.

He was sorry when eight o’clock came and he was sent off duty, having been loudly abused by Bom for his clumsiness in handling things (trays, beds, thermometers, syringes, pans, jacks, spatulas, screws, etc.) and silently commended for his skill in handling the patients themselves, whose names and more 
flagrant peculiarities he had fully co-ordinated by the end of the six hours, what he might expect from them and what never hope.

Ticklepenny was lying all over the garret floor, struggling with a tiny old-fashioned gas radiator, firing a spark-pistol with a kind of despair, in the light of the candle. He related how the crazy installation had developed, step by step, typically, from the furthest-fetched of visions to a reality that would not function.

It had taken him an hour to perfect the vision. It had taken him another hour to unearth the radiator, the key-piece of the whole contraption, with spark-pistol ironically attached.

‘I should have thought,’ said Murphy, ‘that the radiator was secondary to the gas.’

He had brought the radiator to the garret, set it down on the floor and stood back to imagine it lit. Rusty, dusty, derelict, the coils of asbestos falling to pieces, it seemed to defy ignition. He went dismally away to look for gas.

It had taken him another hour to find what might be made to serve, a disused jet in the w.c., now lit by electricity, on the floor below.

The extremes having thus been established, nothing remained but to make them meet. This was a difficulty whose fascinations were familiar to him from the days when as a pot poet he had laboured so long and so lovingly to join the ends of his
pentameters
. He solved it in less than two hours by means of a series of discarded feed tubes eked out with cæsuræ of glass, thanks to which gas was now being poured into the radiator. Yet the asbestos would not kindle, pepper it with sparks as he might.

‘You speak of gas,’ said Murphy, ‘but I smell no gas.’

This was where he was at a disadvantage, for Ticklepenny did smell gas, faintly but distinctly. He described how he had turned it on in the w.c. and raced it back to the garret. He explained how the flow could only be regulated from the w.c., as there was no tap and no provision for a tap at the radiator’s seat of entry. That was perhaps the chief inconvenience of his machine. A more dignified way for Murphy to light his fire, in default of an 
assistant to turn on the gas below while he waited above ready with the spark-pistol, would be to fix an asbestos nozzle on his end of the connexion, descend with this to the source of supply, light up in the w.c. and carry the fire back to the radiator at his leisure. Or if he preferred he could bring the whole radiator down to the w.c. and to hell with a special nozzle. But those were minor points. The main point was that he, Ticklepenny, had turned on the gas more than ten minutes before and been firing sparks into the radiator ever since, without result. This was true.

‘Either the gas is not on,’ said Murphy, ‘or the connexion is broken.’

‘Amn’t I after trying?’ said Ticklepenny. A lie. Ticklepenny was worn out.

‘Try again,’ said Murphy. ‘Show me the sparks.’

Ticklepenny crawled down the ladder. Murphy crouched before the radiator. In a moment came a faint hiss, then a faint smell. Murphy averted his head and pulled the trigger. The radiator lit with a sigh and blushed, with as much of its asbestos as had not perished.

‘How’s that?’ called Ticklepenny from the foot of the ladder.

Murphy went down, to prevent Ticklepenny, whose
immediate
usefulness seemed over, from coming up and to be shown the tap.

‘Is she going?’ said Ticklepenny.

‘Yes,’ said Murphy. ‘Where’s the tap?’

‘Well, that beats all,’ said Ticklepenny.

What beat all was how the tap, which he really had turned on, came to be turned off.

The dismantled jet projected high up in the wall of the w.c. and what Ticklepenny called the tap was one of those double chain and ring arrangements designed for the convenience of dwarfs.

‘As I hope to be saved,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘I swear I turned the little b— on.’

‘Perhaps a little bird flew in,’ said Murphy, ‘and lit on it.’

‘How could he with the window shut?’ said Ticklepenny. 

‘Perhaps he shut it behind him,’ said Murphy.

They returned to the foot of the ladder.

‘A million thanks,’ said Murphy.

‘Well, that beats everything,’ said Ticklepenny.

Murphy tried to pull the ladder up after him. It was fastened down.

‘Come on down to the club for a bit,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘why don’t you?’

Murphy closed the trap.

‘Well, that beats the band,’ said Ticklepenny, shambling away.

Murphy moved the radiator as close to the bed as it would reach, sagged willingly in the middle according to the mattress and tried to come out in his mind. His body being too active with its fatigue to permit of this, he submitted to sleep, Sleep son of Erebus and Night, Sleep half-brother to the Furies.

When he awoke the fug was thick. He got up and opened the skylight to see what stars he commanded, but closed it again at once, there being no stars. He lit the tall thick candle from the radiator and went down to the w.c. to shut off the flow. What was the etymology of gas? On his way back he examined the foot of the ladder. It was only lightly screwed down, Ticklepenny could rectify it. He undressed to the regulation shirt, stuck the candle by its own tallow to the floor at the head of the bed, got in and tried to come out in his mind. But his body was still too busy with its fatigue. And the etymology of gas? Could it be the same word as chaos? Hardly. Chaos was yawn. But then cretin was Christian. Chaos would do, it might not be right but it was
pleasant
, for him hence-forward gas would be chaos, and chaos gas. It could make you yawn, warm, laugh, cry, cease to suffer, live a little longer, die a little sooner. What could it not do? Gas. Could it turn a neurotic into a psychotic? No. Only God could do that. Let there be Heaven in the midst of the waters, let it divide the waters from the waters. The Chaos and Waters Facilities Act. The Chaos, Light and Coke Co. Hell. Heaven. Helen. Celia.

In the morning nothing remained of the dream but a
postmonition
of calamity, nothing of the candle but a little coil of tallow.

Nothing remained but to see what he wanted to see. Any fool can turn the blind eye, but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

He would not have admitted that he needed a brotherhood. He did. In the presence of this issue (psychiatric-psychotic) between the life from which he had turned away and the life of which he had no experience, except as he hoped inchoately in himself, he could not fail to side with the latter. His first
impressions
(always the best), hope of better things, feeling of kindred, etc., had been in that sense. Nothing remained but to
substantiate
these, distorting all that threatened to belie them. It was strenuous work, but very pleasant.

Thus it was necessary that every hour in the wards should increase, together with his esteem for the patients, his loathing of the text-book attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being. Every hour did.

The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman’s muzzy contact, was a rare privilege.

On this basis the patients were described as ‘cut off’ from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman’s reality, if not altogether, as in the severer cases, then in certain
fundamental
respects. The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.

All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what 
the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a
colossal
fiasco. If his mind had been on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts, then no doubt the suppression of these would have seemed a deprivation. But since it was not, since what he called his mind functioned not as an instrument but as a place, from whose unique delights precisely those current facts withheld him, was it not most natural that he should welcome their suppression, as of gyves?

The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. ‘I am not of the big world, I am of the little world’ was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave? In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx:
Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis
.

But it was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which alone he could love himself, because there alone he was lovable. It had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These
dispositions
and others ancillary, pressing every available means (e.g. the rocking-chair) into their service, could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it. It continued to divide him, as witness his deplorable susceptibility to Celia, ginger, and so on. The means of clinching it were lacking. Suppose he were to clinch it now, in the service of the Clinch clan! That would indeed be very pretty.

The frequent expressions apparently of pain, rage, despair and in fact all the usual, to which some patients gave vent, suggesting a fly somewhere in the ointment of Microcosmos, Murphy either 
disregarded or muted to mean what he wanted. Because these outbursts presented more or less the same features as those current in Mayfair and Clapham, it did not follow that they were identically provoked, any more than it was possible to argue the livers of those areas from the gloomy panoply of melancholia. But even if the Eton and Waterloo causes could be established behind these simulacra of their effects, even if the patients did sometimes feel as lousy as they sometimes looked, still no
aspersion
was necessarily cast on the little world where Murphy presupposed them, one and all, to be having a glorious time. One had merely to ascribe their agitations, not to any flaw in their self-seclusion, but to its investment by the healers. The melancholic’s melancholy, the manic’s fits of fury, the paranoid’s despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark.