Murphy

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘Darling,’ said Bim, ‘you will get your one-six-eight as soon as your Murphy has given a month’s satisfaction and no sooner.’

  ‘Then make it one-ten,’ said Ticklepenny. ‘Have a heart.’

  ‘That is entirely up to you,’ said Bim.

  Thus Murphy’s appointment, as though to a position of the highest trust, was a foregone conclusion. His own merits were so recondite, in spite of the magical eye, that he obviously could not be appointed on them, but only on the demerits, or by-merits, of Ticklepenny. So it was that a few minutes after his arrival he found himself being signed on and admonished by Bim, who did not like the look of him in the least.

  He would be expected to make beds, carry trays, clean up regular messes, clean up casual messes, read thermometers, write charts, wash the bedridden, give medicine, hound down its effects, warm bedpans, cool fevers, boil gags, sterilize when in doubt, honour and obey the male sister, wait hand, foot and mouth on the doctor when he came, look pleasant.

  He would never lose sight of the fact that he was dealing with patients not responsible for what they did or said.

  He would never on any account allow himself to be affected by the abuse, no matter how foul and unmerited, that would be poured out upon him. The patients seeing so much of the nurses and so little of the doctor, it was natural that they should regard the former as their persecutors and the latter as their saviour.

  He would never on any account be rough with a patient. Restraint and coercion were sometimes unavoidable, but must always be exerted with the utmost tenderness. After all it was a mercyseat. If singlehanded he could not handle a patient without hurting him, let him call the other nurses to his assistance.

  He would never lose sight of the fact that he was a creature without initiative. He had no competence to register facts on his own account. There were no facts in the M.M.M. except those sanctioned by the doctor. Thus, to take a simple example, when a patient died suddenly and flagrantly, as was sometimes bound to happen even in the M.M.M., let him assume nothing of the kind when sending for the doctor. No patient was dead till the doctor had seen him.

  He would never on any account neglect to keep his mouth shut. The mercies of the Mercyseat were private and confidential.

  These were the main points to be kept constantly in mind. Other routine details would be explained to him as he went along.

  He was assigned to Skinner’s House, male side, first floor. His hours would be 8 to 12 and 2 to 8. He would start the following morning. He would be on day duty the first week, on night duty the second week. The peculiar features of night duty would be explained to him when the time came.

  A less remarkable outfit would be issued to him.

  Had he any questions before he was passed on to Ticklepenny?

  There was a silence, Bim liking the look of Murphy less and less, Murphy racking his brains for a plausible curiosity.

  ‘In that case—’ said Bim.

  ‘Are they all certified?’ said Murphy.

  ‘That is not your business,’ said Bim. ‘You are not paid to take an interest in the patients, but to fetch for them, carry for them and clean up after them. All you know about them is the work they give you to do. Make no mistake about it.’

  Murphy learned later that about 15 per cent of the patients were certified, a little band select only in name, treated with exactly the same sanguine punctilio as the 85 per cent that were not certified. For the M.M.M. was a sanatorium, not a madhouse nor a home for defectives, and as such admitted only those cases whose prognoses were not hopeless. If the effect of treatment was to render the prognosis hopeless, as was sometimes bound to happen even in the M.M.M., then out went the patient, except in very special extenuating circumstances. Thus if the chronic (the soft impairment having been admitted) was a really charming chap, quiet, clean, biddable and solvent, he might be allowed to settle down in the M.M.M. for the rest of his natural. There were a few such fortunate cases, certified and uncertified, enjoying all the amenities of a mental hospital, from peraldehyde to slosh, without any of its therapeutic vexations.

  Cringing with relief, Ticklepenny took Murphy first to his sleeping quarters, then to Skinner House.

  Two large buildings, one for males, the other for females, remote from the main block and still more so from each other, housed the nursing staff and other menials. Married nurses, both male and female, lived out. No female nurse had taken a male nurse to husband within living memory, though one had once been almost obliged to.

  Murphy had the choice of sharing a room with Ticklepenny or having a garret to himself. They climbed the ladder to the latter and Murphy chose it with such decision that even Ticklepenny felt a little slighted. It was not usual for Ticklepenny to feel slighted at all, it was unprecedented for him to do so without cause, as was the present case. For had he been Cleopatra herself, in the last years of her father’s reign, Murphy would have made the same choice.

  The reason for this eccentricity does not seem a very good one. Fewer years ago than he cared to remember, while still in the first cyanosis of youth, Murphy had occupied a garret in Hanover, not for long, but for long enough to experience all its advantages. Since then he had sought high and low for another, even half as good. In vain. What passed for a garret in Great Britain and Ireland was really nothing more than an attic. An attic! How was it possible for such a confusion to arise? A basement was better than an attic. An attic!

  But the garret that he now saw was not an attic, nor yet a mansarde, but a genuine garret, not half, but twice as good as the one in Hanover, because half as large. The ceiling and the outer wall were one, a superb surge of white, pitched at the perfect angle of furthest trajectory, pierced by a small frosted skylight, ideal for closing against the sun by day and opening by night to the stars. The bed, so low and gone in the springs that even unfreighted the middle grazed the ground, was wedged lengthways into the cleft of floor and ceiling, so that Murphy was saved the trouble of moving it into that position. The garret contained, in addition to the bed, one chair and one chest, not of drawers. An immense candle, stuck to the floor by its own tallow, pointed its snuff to heaven at the head of the bed. This, the only means of light, was more than enough for Murphy, a strict non-reader. But he objected very strongly to there being no means of heat.

  ‘I must have fire,’ he said to Ticklepenny, ‘I cannot live without fire.’

  Ticklepenny was sorry, he thought it most unlikely that Murphy would be granted a fire in the garret. There were no tubes or wires to that remote aery. A brazier seemed the only chance, but Bim would hardly allow a brazier. Murphy would find that a fire was really unnecessary in so confined a space. The flame within would work up a fine fug in no time.

  ‘I come here to oblige you,’ said Murphy, ‘and I am still prepared to do so, but not without fire.’

  He went on to speak of tubes and wires. Was it not just the beauty of tubes and wires, that they could be extended? Was it not their chief characteristic, the ease with which they could be extended? What was the point of going in for tubes and wires at all, if you did not extend them without compunction whenever necessary? Did they not cry out for extension? Ticklepenny thought he would never stop, saying feverishly the same thing in slightly different ways.

  ‘You should see my fire,’ said Ticklepenny.

  This infuriated Murphy. Was he to find a garret after all these years, just as all hope seemed dead, a garret that was actually not an attic, nor a mansarde, only to lose it again at once for want of a few yards of tube or wire? He broke into sweat, lost all his yellow, his heart pounded, the garret spun round, he could not speak. When he could he said, in a voice new to Ticklepenny:

  ‘Have fire in this garret before night or—’

  He stopped because he could not go on. It was an aposiopesis of the purest kind. Ticklepenny supplied the missing consequences in various versions, each one more painful than any that Murphy could have specified, terrifying taken all together. Suk’s indi
cation of silence as one of Murphy’s highest attributes could not have been more strikingly justified.

  It seems strange that neither of them thought of an oil-stove, say a small Valor Perfection. Bim could hardly have objected and all the trouble with tubes and wires would have been avoided. The fact remains that the idea of an oil-stove did not occur to either of them at the time, though it did long afterwards to Ticklepenny.

  ‘Now for the wards,’ said Ticklepenny.

  ‘Did you catch what I said,’ said Murphy, ‘by any chance?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Ticklepenny.

  ‘It makes no difference to me,’ said Murphy, ‘whether I go or stay.’

  He was mistaken.

  On the way to Skinner’s House they passed a bijou edifice of mellow brick with a forecourt of lawn and flowers, its façade a profusion of traveller’s joy and self-clinging ampelopsis, set in a bay of clipped yews.

  ‘Is that the nursery?’ said Murphy.

  ‘No,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘the mortuary.’

  Skinner’s was a long, grey, two-storied building, dilated at both ends like a double obelisk. The females were thrown all together to the west, the males to the east, and on the strength of this it was called a mixed house, as distinct from the two convalescent houses, which very properly were not mixed. Similarly, some public baths are called mixed where the bathing is not.

  Skinner’s was the cockpit of the M.M.M. and here the battle raged most fiercely, whenever it could be engaged, between the psychotic and psychiatric points of view. Patients left Skinner’s better, dead or chronic, for a convalescent house, the mortuary or the exit, as the case might be.

  They mounted directly to the first floor and Murphy was submitted to the male sister, Mr. Timothy (‘Bom’) Clinch, younger twin and dead spit of Bim. Bom, primed by Bim, expected nothing from Murphy, and Murphy, ex hypothesi, nothing from Bom, with the result that neither was disappointed.

  Bim Clinch had no fewer than seven male relations, linear and collateral, serving under him, of whom the greatest was Bom and perhaps the least an aged uncle (‘Bum’) in the bandage-winding department, as well as an elder sister, two nieces and a by-blow on the female side. There was nothing old-fashioned or half-hearted about the nepotism of Bim Clinch, there was no more resolute and successful pope to his family in the south of England, and even in the south of Ireland there were still some who might have studied his methods with profit.

  ‘This way,’ said Bom.

  The wards consisted of two long corridors, intersecting to form a T, or more correctly a decapitated potence, the three extremities developed into spacious crutch-heads, which were the reading-, writing- and recreation-rooms or ‘wrecks’, known to the wittier ministers of mercy as the sublimatoria. Here the patients were encouraged to play billiards, darts, ping-pong, the piano and other less strenuous games, or simply to hang about doing nothing. The great majority preferred simply to hang about doing nothing.

  To adopt for a moment as a purely descriptive convenience the terms and orientation of church architecture, the layout of the wards was that of nave and transepts, with nothing east of the crossing. There were no open wards in the ordinary sense, but single rooms, or as some would say, cells, or as Boswell said, mansions, opening south off the nave and east and west off the transepts. North of the nave were the kitchens, patients’ refectory, nurses’ refectory, drug arsenal, patients’ lavatory, nurses’ lavatory, visitors’ lavatory, etc. The bedridden and more refractory cases were kept together as far as possible in the south transept, off which opened the padded cells, known to the wittier as the ‘quiet rooms’, ‘rubber rooms’ or, in a notable clip, ‘pads’. The whole place was overheated and stank of peraldehyde and truant sphincters.

  There were not many patients about as Murphy followed Bom through the wards. Some were at matins, some in the gardens, some could not get up, some would not, some simply had not. But those that he did see were not at all the terrifying monsters that might have been imagined from Ticklepenny’s account. Melancholics, motionless and brooding, holding their heads or bellies according to type. Paranoids, feverishly covering sheets of paper with complaints against their treatment or verbatim reports of their inner voices. A hebephrenic playing the piano intently. A hypomanic teaching slosh to a Korsakow’s syndrome. An emaciated schizoid, petrified in a toppling attitude as though condemned to an eternal tableau vivant, his left hand rhetorically extended holding a cigarette half smoked and out, his right, quivering and rigid, pointing upward.

  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 wi
th 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.