Murphy

  ‘Either the gas is not on,’ said Murphy, ‘or the connexion is broken.’

  ‘Amn’t I after trying?’ said Ticklepenny. A lie. Ticklepenny was worn out.

  ‘Try again,’ said Murphy. ‘Show me the sparks.’

  Ticklepenny crawled down the ladder. Murphy crouched before the radiator. In a moment came a faint hiss, then a faint smell. Murphy averted his head and pulled the trigger. The radiator lit with a sigh and blushed, with as much of its asbestos as had not perished.

  ‘How’s that?’ called Ticklepenny from the foot of the ladder.

  Murphy went down, to prevent Ticklepenny, whose immediate usefulness seemed over, from coming up and to be shown the tap.

  ‘Is she going?’ said Ticklepenny.

  ‘Yes,’ said Murphy. ‘Where’s the tap?’

  ‘Well, that beats all,’ said Ticklepenny.

  What beat all was how the tap, which he really had turned on, came to be turned off.

  The dismantled jet projected high up in the wall of the w.c. and what Ticklepenny called the tap was one of those double chain and ring arrangements designed for the convenience of dwarfs.

  ‘As I hope to be saved,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘I swear I turned the little b— on.’

  ‘Perhaps a little bird flew in,’ said Murphy, ‘and lit on it.’

  ‘How could he with the window shut?’ said Ticklepenny.

  ‘Perhaps he shut it behind him,’ said Murphy.

  They returned to the foot of the ladder.

  ‘A million thanks,’ said Murphy.

  ‘Well, that beats everything,’ said Ticklepenny.

  Murphy tried to pull the ladder up after him. It was fastened down.

  ‘Come on down to the club for a bit,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘why don’t you?’

  Murphy closed the trap.

  ‘Well, that beats the band,’ said Ticklepenny, shambling away.

  Murphy moved the radiator as close to the bed as it would reach, sagged willingly in the middle according to the mattress and tried to come out in his mind. His body being too active with its fatigue to permit of this, he submitted to sleep, Sleep son of Erebus and Night, Sleep half-brother to the Furies.

  When he awoke the fug was thick. He got up and opened the skylight to see what stars he commanded, but closed it again at once, there being no stars. He lit the tall thick candle from the radiator and went down to the w.c. to shut off the flow. What was the etymology of gas? On his way back he examined the foot of the ladder. It was only lightly screwed down, Ticklepenny could rectify it. He undressed to the regulation shirt, stuck the candle by its own tallow to the floor at the head of the bed, got in and tried to come out in his mind. But his body was still too busy with its fatigue. And the etymology of gas? Could it be the same word as chaos? Hardly. Chaos was yawn. But then cretin was Christian. Chaos would do, it might not be right but it was pleasant, for him hence-forward gas would be chaos, and chaos gas. It could make you yawn, warm, laugh, cry, cease to suffer, live a little longer, die a little sooner. What could it not do? Gas. Could it turn a neurotic into a psychotic? No. Only God could do that. Let there be Heaven in the midst of the waters, let it divide the waters from the waters. The Chaos and Waters Facilities Act. The Chaos, Light and Coke Co. Hell. Heaven. Helen. Celia.

  In the morning nothing remained of the dream but a postmonition of calamity, nothing of the candle but a little coil of tallow.

  ∗

  Nothing remained but to see what he wanted to see. Any fool can turn the blind eye, but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

  He would not have admitted that he needed a brotherhood. He did. In the presence of this issue (psychiatric-psychotic) between the life from which he had turned away and the life of which he had no experience, except as he hoped inchoately in himself, he could not fail to side with the latter. His first impressions (always the best), hope of better things, feeling of kindred, etc., had been in that sense. Nothing remained but to substantiate these, distorting all that threatened to belie them. It was strenuous work, but very pleasant.

  Thus it was necessary that every hour in the wards should increase, together with his esteem for the patients, his loathing of the text-book attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being. Every hour did.

  The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman’s muzzy contact, was a rare privilege.

  On this basis the patients were described as ‘cut off’ from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman’s reality, if not altogether, as in the severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.

  All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco. If his mind had been on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts, then no doubt the suppression of these would have seemed a deprivation. But since it was not, since what he called his mind functioned not as an instrument but as a place, from whose unique delights precisely those current facts withheld him, was it not most natural that he should welcome their suppression, as of gyves?

  The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favour of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. ‘I am not of the big world, I am of the little world’ was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave? In the beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis.

  But it was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which alone he could love himself, because there alone he was lovable. It had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dispositions and others ancillary, pressing every available means (e.g. the rocking-chair) into their service, could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it. It continued to divide him, as witness his deplorable susceptibility to Celia, ginger, and so on. The means of clinching it were lacking. Suppose he were to clinch it now, in the service of the Clinch clan! That would indeed be very pretty.

  The frequent expressions apparently of pain, rage, despair and in fact all the usual, to which some patients gave vent, suggesting a fly somewhere in the ointment of Microcosmos, Murphy either disregarded or muted to mean what he wanted. Because these outbursts presented more or less the same features as those current in Mayfair and Clapham, it did not follow that they were identically provoked, any more than it was possible to argue the livers of those areas from the gloomy panoply of melancholia. But even if the Eton and Waterloo causes could be established behind these simulacra of their effects, even if the patients did sometimes feel as lousy as they sometimes looked, still no aspersion was necessarily cast on the little world where Murphy presupposed them, one and all, to be having a glorious time. One had merely to ascribe their agitations, not to any flaw in their sel
f-seclusion, but to its investment by the healers. The melancholic’s melancholy, the manic’s fits of fury, the paranoid’s despair, were no doubt as little autonomous as the long fat face of a mute. Left in peace they would have been as happy as Larry, short for Lazarus, whose raising seemed to Murphy perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark.

  With these and even less weighty constructions he saved his facts against the pressure of those current in the Mercyseat. Stimulated by all those lives immured in mind, as he insisted on supposing, he laboured more diligently than ever before at his own little dungeon in Spain. Three factors especially encouraged him in this and in the belief that he had found his kindred at last. The first was the absolute impassiveness of the higher schizoids, in the face of the most pitiless therapeutic bombardment. The second was the padded cells. The third was his success with the patients.

  The first of these, after what has been said of Murphy’s own bondage, speaks for itself. What more vigorous fillip could be given to the wallows of one bogged in the big world than the example of life to all appearances inalienably realised in the little?

  The pads surpassed by far all he had even been able to imagine in the way of indoor bowers of bliss. The three dimensions, slightly concave, were so exquisitely proportioned that the absence of the fourth was scarcely felt. The tender luminous oyster-grey of the pneumatic upholstery, cushioning every square inch of ceiling, walls, floor and door, lent colour to the truth, that one was a prisoner of air. The temperature was such that only total nudity could do it justice. No system of ventilation appeared to dispel the illusion of respirable vacuum. The compartment was windowless, like a monad, except for the shuttered judas in the door, at which a sane eye appeared, or was employed to appear, at frequent and regular intervals throughout the twenty-four hours. Within the narrow limits of domestic architecture he had never been able to imagine a more creditable representation of what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world.

  His success with the patients was little short of scandalous. According to the text-book psychotic, with his tendency to equate those objects, ideas, persons, etc., evincing the least element in common, the patients should have identified Murphy with Bom & Co., simply because he resembled them in the superficial matters of function and clothing. The great majority failed to do so. The great majority discriminated so unmistakably in Murphy’s favour that even Bom lost a little of his high colour. Whatever they were in the habit of doing for Bom & Co., they did more readily for Murphy. And in certain matters where Bom & Co. were obliged to coerce them, or restrain them, they would suffer Murphy to persuade them. One patient, a litigious case of doubtful category, refused to exercise unless accompanied by Murphy. Another, a melancholic with highly developed delusions of guilt, would not get out of his bed unless on Murphy’s invitation. Another melancholic, convinced that his intestines had turned to twine and blotting-paper, would only eat when Murphy held the spoon. Otherwise he had to be force-fed. All this was highly irregular, little short of scandalous.

  Murphy was revolted by Suk’s attribution of this strange talent solely to the moon in the Serpent at the hour of his birth. The more his own system closed round him, the less he could tolerate its being subordinated to any other. Between him and his stars no doubt there was correspondence, but not in Suk’s sense. They were his stars, he was the prior system. He had been projected, larval and dark, on the sky of that regrettable hour as on a screen, magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was his meaning. The moon in the Serpent was no more than an image, a fragment of vitagraph.

  Thus the sixpence worth of sky changed again, from the poem that he alone of all the living could write to the poem that he alone of all the born could have written. So far as the prophetic status of the celestial bodies was concerned Murphy had become an out-and-out preterist.

  Free therefore to inspect for the first time in situ that ‘great magical ability of the eye to which the lunatic would easy succumb’, Murphy was gratified to find how well it consisted with what he knew already of his idiosyncrasy. His success with the patients was the signpost at last on the way he had followed so long and so blindly, with nothing to sustain him but the conviction that all other ways were wrong. His success with the patients was a signpost pointing to them. It meant that they felt in him what they had been and he in them what he would be. It meant that nothing less than a slap-up psychosis could consummate his life’s strike. Quod erat extorquendum.

  It seemed to Murphy that of all his friends among the patients there was none quite like his ‘tab’, Mr. Endon his ‘tab’. It seemed to Murphy that he was bound to Mr. Endon, not by the tab only, but by a love of the purest possible kind, exempt from the big world’s precocious ejaculations of thought, word and deed. They remained to one another, even when most profoundly one in spirit, as it seemed to Murphy, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Endon.

  A ‘tab’ was a patient ‘on parchment’ (or ‘on caution’). A patient was put on parchment (or on caution) whenever there was occasion to suspect him of serious suicidal leanings. The occasion might be threats uttered by the patient or it might be simply the general tenor of his behaviour. Then a tab was issued in his name, specifying in all cases where a preference had been expressed the form of suicide contemplated. Thus: ‘Mr. Higgins. The bellycut, or any other available means.’ ‘Mr. O’Connor. Venom, or any other available means.’ ‘Any other available means’ was a saving clause. The tab was then passed on to the male sister, who having endorsed it passed it on to one of his male nurses, who having endorsed it was from that time forward responsible for the natural death of the bastard in question. Of the special duties entailed by this responsibility, perhaps the chief was the control of the suspect at regular intervals of not more than twenty minutes. For it was the experience of the Mercyseat that only the most skilful and determined could do the trick in less time than that.

  Mr. Endon was on parchment and Murphy had his tab: ‘Mr. Endon. Apnoea, or any other available means.’

  Suicide by apnoea has often been tried, notably by the condemned to death. In vain. It is a physiological impossibility. But the Mercy-seat was not disposed to take unnecessary chances. Mr. Endon had insisted that if he did it at all, it would be by apnoea, and not otherwise. He said his voice would not hear of any other method. But Dr. Killiecrankie, the Outer Hebridean R.M.S., had some experience of the schizoid voice. It was not like a real voice, one minute it said one thing and the next minute something quite different. Nor was he entirely satisfied as to the physiological impossibility of suicide by apnoea. Dr. Killiecrankie had been too often had by the resources of organic matter ever again to draw the Canutian line.

  Mr. Endon was a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety, at least for the purposes of such a humble and envious outsider as Murphy. The languor in which he passed his days, while deepening every now and then to the extent of some charming suspension of gesture, was never so profound as to inhibit all movement. His inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations. The bizarrerie of his attitudes never exceeded a stress laid on their grace. In short, a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Murphy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain.

  The tiny body was perfect in every detail and extremely hairy. The features were most delicate, regular and winning, the complexion olive except where blue with beard. The skull, large for any body, immense for this, crackled with stiff black hair broken at the crown by one wide tress of bright white. Mr. Endon did not dress, but drifted about the wards in a fine dressing-gown of scarlet byssus faced with black braid, black silk pyjamas and neo-merovingian poulaines of deepest purple. His fingers blazed with rings. He held tight in his little fist the butt, varying in length according to the hour, of an excellent cigar. This Murphy would light for him in the morning and keep on lighting throughout the day. Yet evening found it still unfinished.

  It was the same with chess
, Mr. Endon’s one frivolity. Murphy would set up the game, as soon as he came on in the morning, in a quiet corner of the wreck, make his move (for he always played white), go away, come back to Mr. Endon’s reply, make his second move, go away, and so on throughout the day. They came together at the board but seldom. One or two minutes was as long as Mr. Endon cared to pause in his drifting, longer than Murphy dared snatch from his duties and the vigilance of Bom. Each made his move in the absence of the other, inspected the position with what time remained, and went away. So the game wore on, till evening found it almost as level as when begun. This was due not so much to their being evenly matched, or to the unfavourable conditions of play, as to the very Fabian methods that both adopted. How little the issue was really engaged may be judged from the fact that sometimes, after eight or nine hours of this guerrilla, neither player would have lost a piece or even checked the other. This pleased Murphy as an expression of his kinship with Mr. Endon and made him if possible more chary of launching an attack than by nature he was.

  He was sorry for himself, very sorry, when eight o’clock came and he had to leave the wards, Mr. Endon and the lesser friends and exemplars, the warmth and smell of peraldehyde, etc., to face the twelve hours of self, unredeemed split self, now more than ever the best he could do and less than ever good enough. The end degrades the way into a means, a sceneless tedium. Yet he had to welcome the inkling of the end.

  The garret, the fug, sleep, these were the poor best he could do. Ticklepenny had unscrewed the ladder, so that now he could draw it up after him. Do not come down the ladder, they have taken it away.