He looked for somewhere to sit down. There was nowhere. There had once been a small public garden south of the Royal Free Hospital, but now part of it lay buried under one of those malignant proliferations of urban tissue known as service flats and the rest was reserved for the bacteria.
At this moment Murphy would willingly have waived his expectation of Antepurgatory for five minutes in his chair, renounced the lee of Belacqua’s rock and his embryonal repose, looking down at dawn across the reeds to the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose, immune from expiation until he should have dreamed it all through again, with the downright dreaming of an infant, from the spermarium to the crematorium. He thought so highly of this post-mortem situation, its advantages were present in such detail to his mind, that he actually hoped he might live to be old. Then he would have a long time lying there dreaming, watching the dayspring run through its zodiac, before the toil up hill to Paradise. The gradient was outrageous, one in less than one. God grant no godly chandler would shorten his time with a good prayer.
This was his Belacqua fantasy and perhaps the most highly systematised of the whole collection. It belonged to those that lay just beyond the frontiers of suffering, it was the first landscape of freedom.
He leaned weakly against the railings of the Royal Free Hospital, multiplying his vows to erase this vision of Zion’s antipodes for ever from his repertory if only he were immediately wafted to his rocking-chair and allowed to rock for five minutes. To sit down was no longer enough, he must insist now on lying down. Any old clod of the well-known English turf would do, on which he might lie down, cease to take notice and enter the landscapes where there were no chandlers and no exclusive residential cancers, but only himself improved out of all knowledge.
The nearest place he could think of was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The atmosphere there was foul, a miasma of laws. Those of the cozeners, crossbiting and conycatching and sacking and figging; and those of the cozened, pillory and gallows. But there was grass and there were plane trees.
After a few steps in the direction of this lap that was better than none, Murphy leaned again against the railings. It was clear that he had as much chance of walking to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in his present condition as he had of walking to the Cockpit, and very much less incentive. He must sit down before he could lie down. Walk before you run, sit down before you lie down. He thought for a second of splashing the fourpence he allowed himself to be allowed for his lunch on a conveyance back to Brewery Road. But then Celia would think he was quitting on the strength of her promise not to leave him, even though she had to return to her work. The only solution was to take his lunch at once, more than an hour before he was due to salivate.
Murphy’s fourpenny lunch was a ritual vitiated by no base thoughts of nutrition. He advanced along the railings by easy stages until he came to a branch of the caterers he wanted. The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.
The waitress stood before, with an air of such abstraction that he did not feel entitled to regard himself as an element in her situation. At last, seeing that she did not move, he said:
‘Bring me,’ in the voice of an usher resolved to order the chef’s special selection for a school outing. He paused after this preparatory signal to let the fore-period develop, that first of the three moments of reaction in which, according to the Külpe school, the major torments of response are undergone. Then he applied the stimulus proper.
‘A cup of tea and a packet of assorted biscuits.’ Twopence the tea, twopence the biscuits, a perfectly balanced meal.
As though suddenly aware of the great magical ability, or it might have been the surgical quality, the waitress murmured, before the eddies of the main-period drifted her away: ‘Vera to you, dear.’ This was not a caress.
Murphy had some faith in the Külpe school. Marbe and Bühler might be deceived, even Watt was only human, but how could Ach be wrong?
Vera concluded, as she thought, her performance in much better style than she had begun. It was hard to believe, as she set down the tray, that it was the same slavey. She actually made out the bill there and then on her own initiative.
Murphy pushed the tray away, tilted back his chair and considered his lunch with reverence and satisfaction. With reverence, because as an adherent (on and off) of the extreme theophanism of William of Champeaux he could not but feel humble before such sacrifices to his small but implacable appetite, nor omit the silent grace: On this part of himself that I am about to indigest may the Lord have mercy. With satisfaction, because the supreme moment in his degradations had come, the moment when, unaided and alone, he defrauded a vested interest. The sum involved was small, something between a penny and twopence (on the retail valuation). But then he had only fourpence worth of confidence to play with. His attitude simply was, that if a swindle of from twenty-five to fifty per cent of the outlay, and effected while you wait, was not a case of the large returns and quick turnover indicated by Suk, then there was a serious flaw somewhere in his theory of sharp practice. But no matter how the transaction were judged from the economic point of view, nothing could detract from its merit as a little triumph of tactics in the face of the most fearful odds. Only compare the belligerents. On the one hand a colossal league of plutomanic caterers, highly endowed with the ruthless cunning of the sane, having at their disposal all the most deadly weapons of the postwar recovery; on the other, a seedy solipsist and fourpence.
The seedy solipsist then, having said his silent grace and savoured his infamy in advance, drew up his chair briskly to the table, seized the cup of tea and half emptied it at one gulp. No sooner had this gone to the right place than he began to splutter, eructate and complain, as though he had been duped into swallowing a saturated solution of powdered glass. In this way he attracted to himself the attention not only of every customer in the saloon but actually of the waitress Vera, who came running to get a good view of the accident, as she supposed. Murphy continued for a little to make sounds as of a flushing-box taxed beyond its powers and then said, in an egg and scorpion voice:
‘I ask for China and you give me Indian.’
Though disappointed that it was nothing more interesting, Vera made no bones about making good her mistake. She was a willing little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.
With the fresh cup of tea Murphy adopted quite a new technique. He drank not more than a third of it and then waited till Vera happened to be passing.
‘I am most fearfully sorry,’ he said, ‘Vera, to give you all this trouble, but do you think it would be possible to have this filled with hot?’
Vera showing signs of bridling, Murphy uttered winningly the sesame.
‘I know I am a great nuisance, but they have been too generous with the cowjuice.’
Generous and cowjuice were the keywords here. No waitress could hold out against their mingled overtones of gratitude and mammary organs. And Vera was essentially a waitress.
That is the end of how Murphy defrauded a vested interest every day for his lunch, to the honourable extent of paying for one cup of tea and consuming 1.83 cups approximately.
Try it sometime, gentle skimmer.
He was now feeling so much better that he conceived the bold project of reserving the biscuits for later in the afternoon. He would finish the tea, then have as much free milk and sugar as he could lay his hands on, then walk carefully to the Cockpit and there eat the biscuits. Someone in Oxford Stree
t might offer him a position of the highest trust. He settled down to plan how exactly he would get from where he was to Tottenham Court Road, what cutting reply he would make to the magnate and in what order he would eat the biscuits when the time came. He had proceeded no further than the British Museum and was recruiting himself in the Archaic Room before the Harpy Tomb, when a sharp surface thrust against his nose caused him to open his eyes. This proved to be a visiting-card which was at once withdrawn so that he might read:
Austin Ticklepenny
Pot Poet
From the County of Dublin
This creature does not merit any particular description. The merest pawn in the game between Murphy and his stars, he makes his little move, engages an issue and is swept from the board. Further use may conceivably be found for Austin Ticklepenny in a child’s halma or a book-reviewer’s snakes and ladders, but his chess days are over. There is no return game between a man and his stars.
‘When I failed to gain your attention,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘by means of what the divine son of Ariston calls the vocal stream issuing from the soul through the lips, I took the liberty as you notice.’
Murphy drained his cup and made to rise. But Ticklepenny trapped his legs under the table and said:
‘Fear not, I have ceased to sing.’
Murphy had such an enormous contempt for rape that he found it no trouble to go quite limp at the first sign of its application. He did so now.
‘Yes,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘nulla linea sine die. Would I be here if I were not on the water-tumbril? I would not.’
He worked up to such a pitch his gambadoes under the table that Murphy’s memory began to vibrate.
‘Didn’t I have the dishonour once in Dublin,’ he said. ‘Can it have been at the Gate?’
‘Romiet,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘and Juleo. ‘Take him and cut him out in little stars …’ Wotanope!’
Murphy dimly remembered an opportune apothecary.
‘I was snout drunk,’ said Ticklepenny. ‘You were dead drunk.’
Now the sad truth was that Murphy never touched it. This was bound to come out sooner or later.
‘Unless you want me to call a policewoman,’ said Murphy, ‘cease your clumsy genustuprations.’
Woman was the keyword here.
‘My liver dried up,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘so I had to hang up my lyre.’
‘And let yourself go fundamentally,’ said Murphy.
‘Messrs. Melpomene, Calliope, Erato and Thalia,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘in that order, woo me in vain since my change of life.’
‘Then you know how I feel,’ said Murphy.
‘That same Ticklepenny,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘who for more years than he cares to remember turned out his steady pentameter per pint, day in, day out, is now degraded to the position of male nurse in a hospital for the better-class mentally deranged. It is the same Ticklepenny, but God bless my soul quantum mutatus.’
‘Ab illa,’ said Murphy.
‘I sit on them that will not eat,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘jacking their jaws apart with the gag, spurning their tongues aside with the spatula, till the last tundish of drench is absorbed. I go round the cells with my shovel and bucket, I—’
Ticklepenny broke down, took indeed a large draught of his lemon phosphate, and altogether ceased his wooing under the table. Murphy could not take advantage of this to go, being stunned by the sudden clash between two hitherto distinct motifs in Suk’s delineations, that of lunatic in paragraph two and that of custodian in paragraph seven.
‘I cannot stand it,’ groaned Ticklepenny, ‘it is driving me mad.’
It is hard to say where the fault lies in the case of Ticklepenny, whether with the soul, the stream or the lips, but certainly the quality of his speech is most wretched. Celia’s confidence to Mr. Kelly, Neary’s to Wylie, had to be given for the most part obliquely. With all the more reason now, Ticklepenny’s to Murphy. It will not take many moments.
After much hesitation Ticklepenny consulted a Dublin physician, a Dr. Fist more philosophical than medical, German on his father’s side. Dr. Fist said: ‘Giff de pooze ub or go kaputt.’ Ticklepenny said he would give up the booze. Dr. Fist laughed copiously and said: ‘I giff yous a shit to Killiecrrrankie.’ Dr. Angus Killiecrankie was R.M.S. to an institution on the outskirts of London known as the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. The chit proposed that Ticklepenny, a distinguished indigent drunken Irish bard, should make himself useful about the place in return for a mild course of dipsopathic discipline.
Ticklepenny responded so rapidly to this arrangement that the rumour of a misdiagnosis began to raise its horrid head in the M.M.M., until Dr. Fist wrote from Dublin explaining that the curative factor at work in this interesting case was to be sought neither in the dipsopathy nor in the bottlewashing, but in the freedom from poetic composition that these conferred on his client, whose breakdown had been due less to the pints than to the pentameters.
This view of the matter will not seem strange to anyone familiar with the class of pentameter that Ticklepenny felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rimes) and at the cæsura as hard and fast as his own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish’s porter. No wonder he felt a new man washing the bottles and emptying the slops of the better-class mentally deranged.
But all good things come to an end and Ticklepenny was offered a job in the wards at the seneschalesque figure of five pounds a month all found. He accepted. He no longer had the spirit to refuse. The Olympian sot had reverted to the temperate potboy.
Now after a bare week in the wards he felt he could not go on. He did not mind having his pity and even his terror titillated within reason, but the longing to vomit with compassion and anxiety struck him as repugnant to the true catharsis, especially as he could never bring anything up.
Ticklepenny was immeasurably inferior to Neary in every way, but they had certain points of contrast with Murphy in common. One was this pretentious fear of going mad. Another was the inability to look on, no matter what the spectacle. These were connected, in the sense that the painful situation could always be reduced to onlooking of one kind or another. But even here Neary was superior to Ticklepenny, at least according to the tradition that ranks the competitor’s spirit higher than the huckster’s and the man regretting what he cannot have higher than the man sneering at what he cannot understand. For Neary knew his great master’s figure of the three lives, whereas Ticklepenny knew nothing.
Wylie came a little closer to Murphy, but his way of looking was as different from Murphy’s as a voyeur’s from a voyant’s, though Wylie was no more the one in the indecent sense than Murphy was the other in the supradecent sense. The terms are only taken to distinguish between the vision that depends on light, object, viewpoint, etc., and the vision that all those things embarrass. In the days when Murphy was concerned with seeing Miss Counihan, he had had to close his eyes to do so. And even now when he closed them there was no guarantee that Miss Counihan would not appear. That was Murphy’s really yellow spot. Similarly he had seen Celia for the first time, not when she revolved before him in the way that so delighted Mr. Kelly, but while she was away consulting the Reach. It was as though some instinct had withheld her from accosting him in form until he should have obtained a clear view of her advantages, and warned her that before he could see it had to be not merely dark, but his own dark. Murphy believed there was no dark quite like his own dark.
Ticklepenny’s pompous dread of being driven mad by the spectacle constantly before him of those that were so already, made him long most heartily to throw up his job as male nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. But as he had been admitted on probation for the term of one month, nothing less than a month’s service would produce any pay. To throw up the job at the end of a week or a fortnight or any period less than the period of probation w
ould mean no compensation for all he had suffered. And between going mad and having the rest of his life poisoned by the thought of having once worked for a week for nothing, Ticklepenny found little to choose.
Even the M.M.M. found it no easier than other mental hospitals to procure nurses. This was one reason for the enlistment of Ticklepenny, whose only qualifications for handling the mentally deranged were the pot poet’s bulk and induration to abuse. For even in the M.M.M. there were not many patients so divorced from reality that they could not discern and vituperate a Ticklepenny in their midst.
When Ticklepenny had quite done commiserating himself, in a snivelling antiphony between the cruel necessity of going mad if he stayed and the cruel impossibility of leaving without his wages, Murphy said:
‘Supposing you were to produce a substitute of my intelligence’ (corrugating his brow) ‘and physique’ (squaring the circle of his shoulders), ‘what then?’
These words sent the whole of Ticklepenny into transports, but no part of him so horribly as his knees, which began to fawn under the table. Even so a delighted dog will sometimes forget himself.
When this had exhausted itself he begged Murphy to accompany him without a moment’s delay to the M.M.M. and be signed on, as though the possibility of opposition on the part of the authorities to this lightning change in their personnel were too remote to be considered. Murphy also was inclined to think that the arrangement would find immediate favour, assuming that Ticklepenny had concealed no material factor in the situation, such as a liaison with some high official, the head male nurse for example. Short of being such a person’s minion, Murphy was inclined to think there was nothing Ticklepenny could do that he could not do a great deal better, especially in a society of psychotics, and that they had merely to appear together before the proper authority for this to be patent.
But what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven. Of these considered separately up to date the first had seemed a mere monthly prognosticator’s tag, compelled by the presence of the moon in the Serpent, and the second a truism on the part of his stars. Now their union made the nativity appear as finely correlated in all its parts as the system from which it purported to come.
Murphy Page 8
