Murphy. Samuel Beckett
up to it, he knew that long before the end he would wish he had not begun. But it was perhaps better than lying there silent, watching her lick her lips, and waiting. He launched out.
“This love with a function gives me a pain in the neck—”
“Not in the feet?” said Celia.
“What do you love?” said Murphy. “Me as I am. You can want what does not exist, you can’t love it.” This came well from Murphy. “Then why are you all out to change me? So that you won’t have to love me,” the voice rising here to a note that did him credit, “so that you won’t be condemned to love me, so that you’ll be reprieved from loving me.” He was anxious to make his meaning clear. “Women are all the same bloody same, you can’t love, you can’t stay the course, the only feeling you can stand is being felt, you can’t love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery. My God, how I hate the charVenus and her sausage and mash sex.”
Celia put a foot to the ground.
“Avoid exhaustion by speech,” she said.
“Have I wanted to change you? Have I pestered you to begin things that don’t belong to you and stop things that do? How can I care what you DO?”
“I am what I do,” said Celia.
“No,” said Murphy. “You do what you are, you do a fraction of what you are, you suffer a dreary ooze of your being into doing.” He threw his voice into an infant’s whinge. “‘I cudden do annyting, Maaaammy.’ That kind of doing. Unavoidable and tedious.”
Celia was now fully seated on the edge of the bed, her back turned to him, making fast her Bollitoes.
“I have heard bilge,” she said, and did not bother to finish.
“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 goodbye 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.”
4
In Dublin a week later, that would be September 19th, Neary minus his whiskers was recognized 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 halfway 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