Murphy. Samuel Beckett
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—hie—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 towards 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