‘I repeat my question,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘and am prepared to do so again if necessary.’
‘If the cock does not crow then,’ said Wylie, ‘depend upon it the hen has not laid.’
‘But have I not said,’ said Neary, ‘now we can part? Surely that is a great advantage.’
‘Do you really mean to sit there and tell me,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘me, that you consider we are now met?’
Wylie covered his ears, threw back his head and cried:
‘Stop it! Or is it too late?’
High above his head he tossed his arms, set off in a rapid shuffle, seized Miss Counihan’s hands, raised them gently clear of her rump. In a moment they would hit the trail.
‘Who ever met,’ said Miss Counihan, not in the least perturbed apparently, ‘if it comes to that, that met not at first sight?’
‘There is only one meeting and parting,’ said Wylie. ‘The act of love.’
‘Fancy that!’ said Miss Counihan.
‘Then each with and from himself,’ said Wylie, ‘as well as with and from the other.’
‘With and from him and herself,’ said Neary, ‘have a little conduction, Wylie. Remember a lady is present.’
‘You,’ said Wylie bitterly, ‘I was to find you not ungrateful. As no doubt also this poor girl.’
‘Not quite,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘I was merely not to find him ungrateful.’
‘Point three,’ said Neary in reply. ‘I do not ask to speak to Murphy. Show him only to these eyes of flesh and the money is yours.’
‘He may feel,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘you can never tell, that having deceived him once, we are capable of doing so again.’
‘An obole on account,’ begged Wylie. ‘Charity edifieth.’
‘Point one,’ said Neary. ‘It does not require even as little as this celebrated act of love, if acts indeed can ever be of love, or love survive in acts, to bid one’s neighbour the time of day, the smile and the nod on the way in at evening, the scowl and no nod on the way out at morning, in the way described by Wylie. And to meet and part in my sense exceeds the power of feeling, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert.’
He paused to be asked what his sense was. Wylie was the mug.
‘The repudiation of the known,’ said Neary, ‘a purely intellectual operation of unspeakable difficulty.’
‘Perhaps you hadn’t heard,’ said Wylie, ‘Hegel arrested his development.’
‘Point two,’ said Neary. ‘Far be it from me to sit here and suggest to Miss Counihan that we are now met. There are still things that even I do not say to a lady. But I think it is not a naiveté to hope that the ice has been broken, nor a presumption to count on the Almighty to pull off the rest.’
The light in the corridor went out with a crash, Wylie reined in Miss Counihan against an abyss of blackness. Neary cast his voice into the dying ache of echoes:
‘There He blows, or I am greatly mistaken.’
Wylie felt suddenly tired of holding Miss Counihan’s hands at precisely the same moment as she did of having them held, a merciful coincidence. He let them go and the dark swallowed her up. She leaned against the outer wall and sobbed distinctly. It had been a trying experience.
‘Till to-morrow at ten,’ said Wylie. ‘Leave out your cheque-book.’
‘Do not leave me alone like this,’ said Neary, ‘crackling with sins, my lips still moist with impieties tossed off in the heat of controversy.’
‘You hear that storm of snivelling,’ said Wylie, ‘yet all you think of is yourself.’
‘Tell her from an old flicker,’ said Neary, ‘when you have licked them all away, that not one was idle.’
After some further reproaches, to which he received no answer, Wylie went away with Miss Counihan.
A curious feeling had come over Neary, namely that he would not get through the night. He had felt this before, but never quite so strongly. In particular he felt that to move a muscle or utter a syllable would certainly prove fatal. He breathed with heavy caution through the long hours of darkness, trembled uncontrollably and clutched the chair-arms. He did not feel cold, far from it, nor unwell, not in pain; he simply had this alarming conviction that every second was going to announce itself the first of his last ten minutes or a quarter of an hour on earth. The number of seconds in one dark night is a simple calculation that the curious reader will work out for himself.
*
When Wylie called the following afternoon, four or five hours late, Neary’s hair was white as snow, but he felt better in himself.
‘A curious feeling came over me,’ he said, ‘just as you were leaving, that I was going to start dying.’
‘So you have,’ said Wylie. ‘You look like a Junior Fellow already.’
‘I think perhaps if I were to go out now,’ said Neary, ‘and mix a little with the canaille, it might do me good.’
‘Bloomsbury is on our way,’ said Wylie. ‘Don’t forget your cheque-book.’
In Gower Street Wylie said:
‘How do you feel now?’
‘I thank you,’ said Neary, ‘life does not seem so precious.’
Miss Counihan was handing it out to her Hindu in a steady stream. He stood before her in an attitude of considerable dejection, his hands pressed tightly over his eyes. As Neary and Wylie approached he made a wild gesture of metaphysical liquidation and sprang into a taxi that happened to be passing or, as he firmly believed, was clocking off an inscrutable schedule from all eternity.
‘Poor fellow,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘He is off to Millbank.’
‘And how are we this morning?’ said Neary with horrible solicitude and a leer at Wylie. ‘Lassata?’
Wylie simpered.
They set off for Brewery Road in a taxi. For fully one minute not a word was spoken. Then Wylie said:
‘After all, there is nothing like dead silence. My one dread was lest our conversation of last night should resume us where it left us off.’
Miss Carridge flew to the window at the unwonted sound. No taxi had ever stopped in good faith at her door, though one had done so once by error, and another in derision. She appeared on the threshold with a Bible in one hand and a poker in the other.
‘Have you a Mr. Murphy staying here?’ said Wylie.
‘We have come all the way from Cork,’ said Neary, ‘we have torn ourselves away from the groves of Blarney, for the sole purpose of cajoling him in private.’
‘We are his very dear friends,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘and our news his good, what is more.’
‘Mr. Murphy,’ said Wylie, ‘the ruins of the ruins of the broth of a boy.’
‘Mr. Murphy is away on business,’ said Miss Carridge.
Wylie crammed his handkerchief into his mouth.
‘Do not watch him too narrowly,’ said Neary, ‘and you will see him take it out of his ear.’
‘We expect him hourly,’ said Miss Carridge.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Miss Counihan. ‘Sweating his soul out in the East End, so that I may have all the little luxuries to which I am accustomed.’
Wylie took advantage of the confusion that followed these words, Neary and Miss Carridge not knowing where to look and the eyes of Miss Counihan closed in an ecstasy of some kind, to take the silk handkerchief out of his ear, blow his nose, wipe his eyes and return it to his pocket. It might truly be said to have done the rounds, Wylie’s silk handkerchief.
‘But if you care to step in,’ said Miss Carridge, moving sportingly to one side, ‘Mrs. Murphy would see you I haven’t a doubt, not a doubt.’
Miss Counihan congratulated herself on having closed her eyes when she did. With closed eyes, she said to herself, one cannot go far wrong. Unless one is absolutely alone. Then it is not necessary to – er – blink at such a rate.
‘If you are quite sure you are quite sure,’ said Wylie.
It was at this moment that they all caught simultaneously for the first time, and with common good breeding refrai
ned from remarking, a waft of Miss Carridge’s peculiarity. But now there was no turning back. They all felt that, as the door closed behind them.
So all things hobble together for the only possible.
Miss Carridge ushered them into the big room, where Murphy and Celia had met and parted so often, in a very house-proud manner. For the char had never been in better form. The lemon of the walls whined like Vermeer’s; and even Miss Counihan, collapsed on one of the Balzac chairs, was inclined to regret her reflection in the linoleum. Similarly before Claude’s Narcissus in Trafalgar Square, highclass whores with faces lately lifted have breathed a malediction on the glass.
Without warning Neary exclaimed:
‘At the best, nothing; at the worst, this again.’
Miss Carridge looked shocked, as well she might. Wester than the Isle of Man she had never set foot.
‘I hope,’ she said, ‘you like my little apartment, to let, if I may say so.’
‘The considered verdict on the greater life,’ said Wylie, ‘of one who can imagine nothing worse than the lesser. Hardly the artistic type, you will say.’
‘We are the Engels sisters,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘come to stay.’
Miss Carridge left her little apartment.
‘Hark!’ said Wylie, pointing upward.
A soft swaggering to and fro was audible.
‘Mrs. M.,’ said Wylie, ‘never still, made restless by the protracted absence of her young, her ambitious husband.’
The footfalls came to an end.
‘She pauses to lean out of the window,’ said Wylie. ‘Nothing will induce her to throw herself down till he actually heaves into view. She has a sense of style.’
Neary’s associations were normal to the point of tedium. He thought of salts of lemon on the steps of Wynn’s Hotel, the livid colours of that old vision closed his eyes, a wild evening’s green and yellow seen in a puddle.
‘The Engels sisters,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘craving a word with you.’
Celia, thank God for a Christian name at last, dragged her tattered bust back into the room, the old boy’s.
‘Bosom friends of Mr. Murphy,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘they came in a taxi.’
Celia raised her face. This caused Miss Carridge to add, in some confusion:
‘But I needn’t tell you that. Forgive me.’
‘Ah yes, you need,’ said Celia, ‘omit no material circumstance, I implore you. I have been so busy, so busy, so absorbed, my swan crossword you know, Miss Carridge, seeking the rime, the panting syllable to rime with breath, that I have been dead to the voices of the street, dead and damned, Miss Carridge, the myriad voices.’
Miss Carridge did not know which arm to feel more thankful for, the Bible or the poker. She tightened her hold evenly on each and said:
‘Do not give way to despair, it is most wrong.’
‘When I think of what I was,’ said Celia, ‘who I was, what I am, and now dead, on a Sunday afternoon, with the sun singing, and the birds shining, to the voices of the STREET, then—’
‘Be sober,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘hope to the end. Give yourself a bit of a wipe and come down.’
Celia wrapped a waterproof of pale blush buff about her, but did not give herself the wipe.
‘I have nothing to be ashamed of, or to lose.’
Descending the stairs Miss Carridge pondered this saying. On the landing outside the big room, the landing where Celia had seen the old boy for the first time and last, she held up the poker and said:
‘But everything to gain.’
‘Nothing to lose,’ said Celia. ‘Therefore nothing to gain.’
A long look of fellow-feeling filled the space between them, with calm, pity and a touch of contempt. They leaned against it as against a solid wall of wool and looked at each other across it. Then they continued on their ways, Miss Carridge down what stairs remained, Celia into their old room.
Bereft of motion, their lees of finer feeling in a sudden swirl, Neary and Wylie sat and stared. Miss Counihan took one look and returned her gaze hastily to the linoleum. Wylie staggered reverently to his feet. Celia exposed herself formally with her back to the door, then walked right through them and sat down on the edge of the bed nearer the window, so that throughout the scene that follows Murphy’s half of the bed is between her and them. Neary staggered reverently to his feet.
‘I fear you are ill, Mrs. Murphy,’ said Miss Counihan.
‘You wished to see me,’ said Celia.
Neary and Wylie, feeling more and more swine before a pearl, stood and stared. Miss Counihan advanced to the edge of the bed nearer the door, developing as she did so a small bundle of Murphy’s letters into a fan. With this in her two hands she reached out across the bed, flirted it open and shut in a manner carefully calculated to annoy and said:
‘Here at a glance you have our bonam fidem; and on closer inspection, whenever you please, my correspondent’s deficiency in same.’
Celia looked dully from the letters to Miss Counihan, and from Miss Counihan to her companions, and from those petrified figures to the letters again, and finally right away from so much dark flesh and word to the sky, under which she had nothing to lose. Then she lay down on the bed, not with any theatrical intention, but in pure obedience to a sudden strong desire to do so. The likelihood of its appearing theatrical, or even positively affected, would not have deterred her, if it had occurred to her. She stretched herself out at the ease of her body as naturally as though her solitude had been without spectators.
‘One of the innumerable small retail redeemers,’ sneered Miss Counihan, ‘lodging her pennyworth of pique in the post-golgothan kitty.’
But for Murphy’s horror of the mental belch, Celia would have recognised this phrase, if she had heard it.
Miss Counihan brought her letters together with the sound of a sharp faint explosion and marched back to her place. Neary fetched his chair resolutely to the head of the bed, in very fair imitation of a man whose mind is made up. And Wylie sat down with the air of a novice at Divine Service, uncertain as to whether the congregation ceasing in a soft perturbation to stand is about to sit or kneel, and looking about him wildly for a sign.
All four are now in position. They will not move from where they now are until they find a formula, a status quo agreeable to all.
‘My dear Mrs. Murphy,’ said Neary in a voice dripping with solicitude.
‘If one of you would tell me simply what you want,’ said Celia. ‘I cannot keep up with fine words.’
When Neary had finished it was dark in the room. Simplicity is as slow as a hearse and as long as a last breakfast.
‘Errors and omissions excepted,’ said Miss Counihan.
Wylie’s eyes began to pain him.
‘I am a prostitute,’ began Celia, speaking from where she lay, and when she had finished it was night in the room, that black night so rich in acoustic properties, and on the landing, to the infinite satisfaction of Miss Carridge.
‘You poor thing,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘how you must have suffered.’
‘Shall I put on the light?’ said Wylie, his ravenous eyes in torment.
‘If you do I shall close my eyes,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘It is only in the dark that one can meet.’
Few ditches were deeper than Miss Counihan, the widow woman’s cruse was not more receptive. But Celia had not spoken and Wylie was raising his arm when the calm voice resumed its fall, no less slowly than before, but perhaps less surely. He withheld his hand, the little temporary gent and pure in heart.
‘At first I thought I had lost him because I could not take him as he was. Now I do not flatter myself.’
A rest.
‘I was a piece out of him that he could not go on without, no matter what I did.’
A rest.
‘I was the last exile.’
A rest.
‘The last, if we are lucky.’
So love is wont to end, in protasis, if it be love.
&nbs
p; From where he sat Wylie switched on the light, the high dim yellow glim that Murphy, a strict non-reader, had installed, and glutted his eyes. While Miss Counihan on the contrary closed hers with an ostentation that flattened her face, to show that when she said a thing she meant it.
‘I cannot believe he has left you,’ said Wylie.
‘He will come back,’ said Neary.
‘We shall be here to receive him,’ said Miss Counihan.
Her cot had a high rail all the way round. Mr. Willoughby Kelly came, smelling strongly of drink, knelt, grasped the bars and looked at her through them. Then she envied him, and he her. Sometimes he sang.
‘Neary and I upstairs,’ said Wylie.
‘I here with you,’ said Miss Counihan.
‘Call the woman,’ said Neary. Sometimes he sang:
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee,
etc. Other times:
Love is a prick, love is a sting,
Love is a pretty pretty thing,
etc. Other times, other songs. But most times he did not sing at all.
‘She is at hand,’ said Wylie, ‘and has been for some little time, unless there is a real goat in the house as well.’
It was Sunday, October the 20th, Murphy’s night of duty had come. So all things limp together for the only possible.
11
LATE that afternoon, after many fruitless hours in the chair, it would be just about the time Celia was telling her story, M.M.M. stood suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly. Murphy interpreted this in his favour, for he had seldom been in such need of encouragement.
But in the night of Skinner’s House, walking round and round at the foot of the cross among the shrouded instruments of recreation, having done one round and marking the prescribed pause of ten minutes before the next, he felt the gulf between him and them more strongly than at any time during his week of day duty. He felt it was very likely with them that craved to cross it as with them that dreaded to – they never did.