Murphy (6 page)

‘Hear a little more,’ said Murphy, ‘and then I expire. If I had to work out what you are from what you do, you could skip out of here now and joy be with you. First of all you starve me into terms that are all yours but the jossy, then you won’t abide by them. The arrangement is that I enter the jaws of a job
according
to the celestial prescriptions of Professor Suk, then when I won’t go against them you start to walk out on me. Is that the way you respect an agreement? What more can I do?’

He closed his eyes and fell back. It was not his habit to make out cases for himself. An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless than Murphy defending his courses of inaction, as he did not require to be told. He had been carried away by his passion for Celia and by a most curious feeling that he should not collapse without at least the form of a struggle. This grisly relic from the days of nuts, balls and sparrows astonished himself. To die fighting was the perfect antithesis of his whole practice, faith and intention. 

He heard her rise and go to the window, then come and stand at the foot of the bed. So far from opening his eyes he sucked in his cheeks. Was she perhaps subject to feelings of compassion?

‘I’ll tell you what more you can do,’ she said. ‘You can get up out of that bed, make yourself decent and walk the streets for work.’

The gentle passion. Murphy lost all his yellow again.

‘The streets!’ he murmured. ‘Father forgive her.’

He heard her go to the door.

‘Not the slightest idea,’ he murmured, ‘of what her words mean. No more insight into their implications than a parrot into its profanities.’

As he seemed likely to go on mumbling and marvelling to himself for some time, Celia said good-bye and opened the door.

‘You don’t know what you are saying,’ said Murphy. ‘Let me tell you what you are saying. Close the door.’

Celia closed the door but kept her hand on the handle.

‘Sit on the bed,’ said Murphy.

‘No,’ said Celia.

‘I can’t talk against space,’ said Murphy, ‘my fourth highest attribute is silence. Sit on the bed.’

The tone was that adopted by exhibitionists for their last words on earth. Celia sat on the bed. He opened his eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, and with great magical ability sunk their shafts into hers, greener than he had ever seen them and more hopeless than he had ever seen anybody’s.

‘What have I now?’ he said. ‘I distinguish. You, my body and my mind.’ He paused for this monstrous proposition to be granted. Celia did not hesitate, she might never have occasion to grant him anything again. ‘In the mercantile gehenna,’ he said, ‘to which your words invite me, one of these will go, or two, or all. If you, then you only; if my body, then you also; if my mind, then all. Now?’

She looked at him helplessly. He seemed serious. But he had seemed serious when he spoke of putting on his gems and 
lemon, etc. She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

‘You twist everything,’ she said. ‘Work needn’t mean any of that.’

‘Then is the position unchanged?’ said Murphy. ‘Either I do what you want or you walk out. Is that it?’

She made to rise, he pinioned her wrists.

‘Let me go,’ said Celia.

‘Is it?’ said Murphy.

‘Let me go,’ said Celia.

He let her go. She rose and went to the window. The sky, cool, bright, full of movement, anointed her eyes, reminded her of Ireland.

‘Yes or no?’ said Murphy. The eternal tautology.

‘Yes,’ said Celia. ‘Now you hate me.’

‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘Look is there a clean shirt.’

I
N
Dublin a week later, that would be September 19th, Neary minus his whiskers was recognised by a former pupil called Wylie, in the General Post Office contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain. Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant something to him. Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are. The Civic Guard on duty in the building, roused from a tender reverie by the sound of blows, took in the situation at his leisure, disentangled his baton and advanced with measured tread, thinking he had caught a vandal in the act. Happily Wylie, whose reactions as a street bookmaker’s stand were as rapid as a zebra’s, had already seized Neary round the waist, torn him back from the sacrifice and smuggled him half-way to the exit.

‘Howlt on there, youze,’ said the C.G.

Wylie turned back, tapped his forehead and said, as one sane man to another:

‘John o’ God’s. Hundred per cent harmless.’

‘Come back in here owwathat,’ said the C.G.

Wylie, a tiny man, stood at a loss. Neary, almost as large as the C.G. though not of course so nobly proportioned, rocked blissfully on the right arm of his rescuer. It was not in the C.G.’s nature to bandy words, nor had it come into any branch of his training. He resumed his steady advance.

‘Stillorgan,’ said Wylie. ‘Not Dundrum.’

The C.G. laid his monstrous hand on Wylie’s left arm and exerted a strong pull along the line he had mapped out in his mind. They all moved off in the desired direction, Neary shod with orange-peel. 

‘John o’ God’s,’ said Wylie. ‘As quiet as a child.’

They drew up behind the statue. A crowd gathered behind them. The C.G. leaned forward and scrutinised the pillar and draperies.

‘Not a feather out of her,’ said Wylie. ‘No blood, no brains, nothing.’

The C.G. straightened up and let go Wylie’s arm.

‘Move on,’ he said to the crowd, ‘before yer moved on.’

The crowd obeyed, with the single diastole-systole which is all the law requires. Feeling amply repaid by this superb symbol for the trouble and risk he had taken in issuing an order, the C.G. inflected his attention to Wylie and said more kindly:

‘Take my advice, mister—’ He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? And before a hostile audience! His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie’s face, clamped there by the promise of advice.

‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Wylie, and held his breath.

‘Run him back to Stillorgan,’ said the C.G. Done it!

Wylie’s face came asunder in gratification.

‘Never fear, sergeant,’ he said, urging Neary towards the exit, ‘back to the cell, blood heat, next best thing to never being born, no heroes, no fisc, no—’

Neary had been steadily recovering all this time and now gave such a jerk to Wylie’s arm that that poor little man was nearly pulled off his feet.

‘Where am I?’ said Neary. ‘If and when.’

Wylie rushed him into the street and into a Dalkey tram that had just come in. The crowd dispersed, the better to gather elsewhere. The C.G. dismissed the whole sordid episode from his mind, the better to brood on a theme very near to his heart.

‘Is it the saloon,’ said Neary, ‘or the jugs and bottles?’ 

Wylie wet his handkerchief and applied it tenderly to the breaches of surface, a ministration immediately poleaxed by Neary, who now saw his saviour for the first time. Punctured by those sharp little features of the fury that had sustained him, he collapsed in a tempest of sobbing on that sharp little shoulder.

‘Come, come,’ said Wylie, patting the large heaving back. ‘Needle is at hand.’

Neary checked his sobs, raised a face purged of all passion, seized Wylie by the shoulders, held him out at arm’s length and exclaimed:

‘Is it little Needle Wylie, my scholar that was. What will you have?’

‘How do you feel?’ said Wylie.

It dawned on Neary that he was not where he thought. He rose.

‘What is the finest tram in Europe,’ he said, ‘to a man consumed with sobriety?’ He made the street under his own power with Wylie close behind him.

‘But by Mooney’s clock,’ said Wylie, ‘the sad news is
two-thirty
-three.’

Neary leaned against the Pillar railings and cursed, first the day in which he was born, then – in a bold flash-back – the night in which he was conceived.

‘There, there,’ said Wylie. ‘Needle knows no holy hour.’

He led the way to an underground café close by, steered Neary into an alcove and called for Cathleen. Cathleen came.

‘My friend Professor Neary,’ said Wylie, ‘my friend Miss Cathleen na Hennessey.’

‘Pleased,’ said Cathleen.

‘Why the—,’ said Neary, ‘is light given to a man whose way is hid.’

‘Pardon,’ said Cathleen.

‘Two large coffees,’ said Wylie. ‘Three star.’

One gulp of this and Neary’s way was clearer.

‘Now tell us all about it,’ said Wylie. ‘Keep back nothing.’ 

‘The limit of Cork endurance had been reached,’ said Neary. ‘That Red Branch bum was the camel’s back.’

‘Drink a little more of your coffee,’ said Wylie.

Neary drank a little more.

‘What are you doing in this kip at all?’ said Wylie. ‘Why aren’t you in Cork?’

‘My grove on Grand Parade,’ said Neary, ‘is wiped as a man wipeth a plate, wiping it and turning it upside down.’

‘And your whiskers?’ said Wylie.

‘Suppressed without pity,’ said Neary, ‘in discharge of a vow, never again to ventilate a virility denied discharge into its predestined channel.’

‘These are dark sayings,’ said Wylie.

Neary turned his cup upside down.

‘Needle,’ he said, ‘as it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places. Here are the pudenda of my psyche.’

‘Cathleen,’ cried Wylie.

‘But betray me,’ said Neary, ‘and you go the way of Hippasos.’

‘The Akousmatic, I presume,’ said Wylie. ‘His retribution slips my mind.’

‘Drowned in a puddle,’ said Neary, ‘for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal.’

‘So perish all babblers,’ said Wylie.

‘And the construction of the regular dodeca – hic – dodecahedron,’ said Neary. ‘Excuse me.’

Neary’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced, of how he came to reach the end of Cork endurance, gives the following.

No sooner had Miss Dwyer, despairing of recommending herself to Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, made Neary as happy as a man could desire, than she became one with the ground against which she had figured so prettily. Neary wrote to Herr Kurt Koffka demanding an immediate explanation. He had not yet received an answer. 

The problem then became how to break with the morsel of chaos without hurting its feelings. The
plaisir de rompre
, for Murphy the rationale of social contacts, was alien to Neary. He insisted, by word and deed, that he was not worthy of her, a hackneyed device that had the desired effect. And it was not long before Miss Dwyer had made Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, despairing of recommending himself to Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, as happy as a Flight-Lieutenant could desire.

Then Neary met Miss Counihan, in the month of March, ever since when his relation toward her had been that
post-mortem
of Dives to Lazarus, except that there was no Father Abraham to put in a good word for him. Miss Counihan was sorry, her breast was preoccupied. She was touched and flattered, but her affections were in bond. The happy man, since Neary would press his breast to the thorn, was Mr. Murphy, one of his former scholars.

‘Holy God!’ said Wylie.

‘That long hank of Apollonian asthenia,’ groaned Neary, ‘that schizoidal spasmophile, occupying the breast of angel Counihan. Can such things be!’

‘A notable wet indeed,’ said Wylie. ‘He addressed me once.’

‘The last time I saw him,’ said Neary, ‘he was saving up for a Drinker artificial respiration machine to get into when he was fed up breathing.’

‘He expressed the hope, I remember,’ said Wylie, ‘that I might get safely back to my bottle of hay before someone found me.’

Neary’s heart (when not suspended) not only panted after Miss Counihan, but bled for her into the bargain, for he was convinced that she had been abandoned. He recalled how Murphy had boasted of conducting his amours on the lines laid down by Fletcher’s Sullen Shepherd. And the terms he had used in speaking of Miss Counihan did not suggest that he had earmarked her for special treatment.

Murphy had left the Gymnasium the previous February, about a month before Neary met Miss Counihan. Since then the only news of him was that he had been seen in London on 
Maundy Thursday late afternoon, supine on the grass in the Cockpit in Hyde Park, alone and plunged in a torpor from which all efforts to rouse him had proved unsuccessful.

Neary besieged Miss Counihan with attentions, sending her mangoes, orchids, Cuban cigarettes and a passionately
autographed
copy of his tractate,
The Doctrine of the Limit
. If she did not acknowledge these gifts, at least she did not return them, so that Neary continued to hope. Finally she gave him a forenoon appointment at the grave of Father Prout (F. S. Mahony) in Shandon Churchyard, the one place in Cork she knew of where fresh air, privacy and immunity from assault were reconciled.

Neary arrived with a superb bunch of cattleyas, which on her arrival two hours later she took graciously from him and laid on the slab. She then made a statement designed to purge the unhappy man of such remaining designs on her person as he might happen to cherish.

She was set aside for Murphy, who had torn himself away to set up for his princess, in some less desolate quarter of the globe, a habitation meet for her. When he had done this he would come flying back to claim her. She had not heard from him since his departure, and therefore did not know where he was, or what exactly he was doing. This did not disquiet her, as he had explained before he left that to make good and love, were it only by letter, at one and the same time, was more than he could manage. Consequently he would not write until he had some tangible success to report. She would not inflict needless pain on Neary by enlarging on the nature of her feeling for Mr. Murphy, enough had been said to make it clear that she could not tolerate his propositions. If he were not gentleman enough to desist on his own bottom, she would have him legally restrained.

At this point Neary paused and buried his face in his hands.

‘My poor friend,’ said Wylie.

Neary reached forward with his hands across the marble top to Wylie, who seized them in an ecstasy of compassion and began to massage them. Neary closed his eyes. In vain. The 
human eye-lid is not teartight (happily for the human eye). In the presence of such grief Wylie felt purer than at any time since his second communion.

‘Do not tell me any more,’ he said, ‘if it gives you so much pain.’

‘Two in distress,’ said Neary, ‘make sorrow less.’

To free the hand from sympathetic pressure is an operation requiring such an exquisite touch that Neary decided he had better not attempt it. The ruse he adopted so that Wylie might not be wounded was to beg for a cigarette. He went further, he suffered his cup to be replenished.

Miss Counihan, her statement concluded, turned to go. Neary sank on one knee, on both knees, and begged her to hear him in a voice so hoarse with anguish that she turned back.

‘Mr. Neary,’ she said, almost gently, ‘I am sorry if I have seemed to speak unfeelingly. Believe me, I have nothing against you personally. If I were not – er – disposed of, I might even learn to like you, Mr. Neary. But you must understand that I am not free to – er – do justice to your addresses. Try and forget me, Mr. Neary.’

Wylie rubbed his hands.

‘Things are looking up,’ he said.

Again she turned to go, again Neary stayed her, this time with the assurance that what he had to say concerned not himself but Murphy. He described the position in which that knighterrant had last been heard of.

‘London!’ exclaimed Miss Counihan. ‘The Mecca of every young aspirant to fiscal distinction.’

This was a balloon that Neary quickly punctured, with a sketch of the phases through which the young aspirant in London had to pass before he could call himself an old
suspirant
. He then made what he would always regard as the greatest blunder of his career. He began to disparage Murphy.

That afternoon he shaved off his whiskers.

He did not see her again for nearly four months, when she knocked into him skilfully in the Mall. She looked ill (she was 
ill). It was August and still she had no news of Murphy. Was there no means of getting in touch with him. Neary, who had already gone deeply into this question, replied that he could not think of any. He seemed to have only one person belonging to him, a demented uncle who spent his time between Amsterdam and Scheveningen. Miss Counihan went on to say that she could not very well renounce a young man, such a nice young man, who for all she knew to the contrary was steadily amassing a large fortune so that she might not be without any of the little luxuries to which she was accustomed, and whom of course she loved very dearly, unless she had superlative reasons for doing so, such for example as would flow from a legally attested certificate of his demise, a repudiation of her person under his own hand and seal, or overwhelming evidence of infidelity and economic failure. She welcomed the happy chance that allowed her to communicate this – er – modified view of the situation to Mr. Neary, looking so much more – er – youthful without his whiskers, on the very eve of her departure to Dublin, where Wynn’s Hotel would always find her.

The next morning Neary closed the Gymnasium, put a padlock on the Grove, sunk both keys in the Lee and boarded the first train for Dublin, accompanied by his
âme damnée
and man-of-all-work, Cooper.