Murphy

  A round took ten minutes, all being well. If all was not well, if a patient had cut his throat, or required attention, then the extra time taken by the round was levied on the pause. For it was an inflexible rule of the M.M.M., laid down in terms so strong as to be almost abusive, that every patient, and not merely those on parchment (or on caution), should be visited at regular intervals of not more than twenty minutes throughout the night. If things were so bad that the round took ten minutes longer than it should, then there was no pause and all was in order. But if things were still worse and the round took eleven minutes longer than it should, and as less than no pause was unfortunately beyond the powers of even the smartest attendant, then the painful fact had simply to be faced once more, that man proposed, but God disposed, even in the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat.

  The incidence of this higher law might have been reduced by the introduction at night of an emergency runner. But this would have run the Mercyseat into close on a pound a week, supposing the mug could have been found.

  A clean round, facetiously called a ‘virgin’, was simplicity itself. The nurse had merely to depress a switch before each door, flooding the cell with light of such ferocity that the eyes of the sleeping and waking opened and closed respectively, satisfy himself with a glance through the judas that the patient looked good for another twenty minutes, switch off the light, press the indicator and pass.

  The indicator was most ingenious. The indicator recorded the visit, together with the hours, minutes and seconds at which it was paid, on a switchboard in Bom’s apartment. The indicator would have been still more ingenious if it had been activated by the light switch, or even by the judas shutter. For many and many were the visits recorded for Bom’s inspection, and never paid, by nurses who were tired or indolent or sensitive or fed up or malicious or behind time or unwilling to shatter a patient’s repose.

  Bom was what is vulgarly called a sadist and encouraged what is vulgarly called sadism in his assistants. If during the day this energy could not be discharged with any great freedom even on those patients who submitted to it as part and parcel of the therapeutic voodoo, with still less freedom could it be discharged on those who regarded it as hors d’œuvre. These latter were reported to the R.M.S. as ‘uncooperative’, ‘not cooperating in the routine of the wards’ or, in extreme cases, ‘resistive’. They were liable to get hell at night.

  Murphy’s first round had shown him what a mere phrase was Neary’s ‘Sleep and Insomnia, the Phidias and Scopas of Fatigue’. It might have held good in the dormitory of a young ladies’ academy, where quite possibly also it had been inspired, but it had no sense in the wards of the M.M.M. Here those that slept and those that did not were quite palpably by the same hand, that of some rather later artist whose work could by no means have come down to us, say the Pergamene Barlach. And in his efforts to distinguish between the two groups Murphy was reminded of a wild waning winter afternoon in Toulon before the hôtel de ville and Puget’s caryatids of Strength and Weariness, and the tattered sky blackening above his perplexity as to which was which.

  Those that slept did so in the frozen attitudes of Herculaneum, as though sleep had pounced upon them like an act of God. And those that did not did not by the obvious grace of the same authority. The contortions of the resistive in particular seemed to Murphy not so much an entreaty to nature’s soft nurse as a recoil from her solicitations. The economy of care was better served, in the experience of the resistive, when they knit up the sleave by day.

  By day he had not felt the gulf so painfully as he did now, walking round and round the wreck. By day there was Bom and other staff, there were the doctors and the visitors, to stimulate his sense of kindred with the patients. There were the patients themselves, circulating through the wards and in the gardens. He could mix with them, touch them, speak to them, watch them, imagine himself one of them. But in the night of Skinner’s there were none of these adminicles, no loathing to love from, no kick from the world that was not his, no illusion of caress from the world that might be. It was as though the microcosmopolitans had locked him out. No sound reached him from the adjacent female wards but the infinite variety of those made by the female wardees, a faint blurred mockery, from which however as the night wore on a number of leading motifs emerged. Ditto for the male wards below. The cackle of a nightingale would have been most welcome, to explode his spirit towards its nightingaleless night. But the season seemed over.

  In short there was nothing but he, the unintelligible gulf and they. That was all. All. ALL.

  It was therefore with a heavy heart that he set out on round two. The first cell to be revisited, that at the south-westernmost corner of the nave, contained Mr. Endon, voted by one and all the most biddable little gaga in the entire institution, his preoccupation with apnoea notwithstanding. Murphy switched on the thousand candles, shot back the judas shutter and looked in. A strange sight met his eye.

  Mr. Endon, an impeccable and brilliant figurine in his scarlet gown, his crest a gush of vivid white against the black shag, squatted tailor-fashion on the head of his bed, holding his left foot in his right hand and in his left hand his right foot. The purple poulaines were on his feet and the rings were on his fingers. The light spurted off Mr. Endon north, south, east, west and in fifty-six other directions. The sheet stretched away before him, as smooth and taut as a groaning wife’s belly, and on it a game of chess was set up. The little blue and olive face, wearing an expression of winsome fiat, was up-turned to the judas.

  Murphy resumed his round, gratified in no small measure. Mr. Endon had recognised the feel of his friend’s eye upon him and made his preparations accordingly. Friend’s eye? Say rather, Murphy’s eye. Mr. Endon had felt Murphy’s eye upon him. Mr. Endon would have been less than Mr. Endon if he had known what it was to have a friend; and Murphy more than Murphy if he had not hoped against his better judgment that his feeling for Mr. Endon was in some small degree reciprocated. Whereas the sad truth was, that while Mr. Endon for Murphy was no less than bliss, Murphy for Mr. Endon was no more than chess. Murphy’s eye? Say rather, the chessy eye. Mr. Endon had vibrated to the chessy eye upon him and made his preparations accordingly.

  Murphy completed his round, an Irish virgin. (Finished on time a round was called a virgin; ahead of time, an Irish virgin.) The hypomanic it is true, in pad since morning with a big attack blowing up, had tried to come at his tormentor through the judas. This distressed Murphy, though he rather disliked the hypomanic. But it did not delay him. Quite the reverse.

  He hastened back westward down the nave with his master key at the ready. He stopped short of the wreck, switched on Mr. Endon’s light and entered bodily into his cell. Mr. Endon was in the same position all but his head, which was now bowed, whether over the board or merely on his chest it was hard to say. Murphy sank down on his elbow on the foot of the bed and the game began.

  Murphy’s functions were scarcely affected by this break with the tradition of night duty. All it meant was that he took his pauses with Mr. Endon instead of in the wreck. Every ten minutes he left the cell, pressed the indicator with heartfelt conviction and did a round. Every ten minutes and sometimes even sooner, for never in the history of the M.M.M. had there been such a run of virgins and Irish virgins as on this Murphy’s maiden night, he returned to the cell and resumed the game. Sometimes an entire pause would pass without any change having been made in the position; and at other times the board would be in an uproar, a torrent of moves.

  The game, an Endon’s Affence, or Zweispringerspott, was as follows:

  White (MURPHY) Black (MR. ENDON) (a)

  1. P–K4 (b) 1. Kt–KR3

  2. Kt–KR3 2. R–KKt1

  3. R–KKt1 3. Kt–QB3

  4. Kt–QB3 4. Kt–K4

  5. Kt–Q5 (c) 5. R–KR1

  6. R–KR1 6. Kt–QB3

  7. Kt–QB3 7. Kt–KKt1

  8. Kt–QKt1 8. Kt–QKt1 (d)

  9. Kt–KKt1 9. P–K3

  10. P–KK
t3 (e) 10. Kt–K2

  11. Kt–K2 11. Kt–KKt3

  12. P–KKt4 12. B–K2

  13. Kt–KKt3 13. P–Q3

  14. B–K2 14. Q–Q2

  15. P–Q3 15. K–Q1 (f)

  16. Q–Q2 16. Q–K1

  17. K–Q1 17. Kt–Q2

  18. Kt–QB3 (g) 18. R–QKt1

  19. R–QKt1 19. Kt–QKt3

  20. Kt–QR4 20. B–Q2

  21. P–QKt3 21. R–KKt1

  22. R–KKt1 22. K–QB1 (h)

  23. B–QKt2 23. Q–KB1

  24. K–QB1 24. B–K1

  25. B–QB3 (i) 25. Kt–KR1

  26. P–QKt4 26. B–Q1

  27. Q–KR6 (j) 27. Kt–QR1 (k)

  28. Q–KB6 28. Kt–KKt3

  29. B–K5 29. B–K2

  30. Kt–QB5 (l) 30. K–Q1 (m)

  31. Kt–KR1 (n) 31. B–Q2

  32. K–QKt2!! 32. R–KR1

  33. K–QKt3 33. B–QB1

  34. K–QR4 34. Q–K1 (o)

  35. K–R5 35. Kt–QKt3

  36. B–KB4 36. Kt–Q2

  37. Q–QB3 37. R–QR1

  38. Kt–QR6 (p) 38. B–KB1

  39. K–QKt5 39. Kt–K2

  40. K–QR5 40. Kt–QKt1

  41. Q–QB6 41. Kt–KKt1

  42. K–QKt5 42. K–K2 (q)

  43. K–R5 43. Q–Q1 (r)

  And White surrenders.

  (a) Mr. Endon always played Black. If presented with White he would fade, without the least trace of annoyance, away into a light stupor.

  (b) The primary cause of all White’s subsequent difficulties.

  (c) Apparently nothing better, bad as this is.

  (d) An ingenious and beautiful début, sometimes called the Pipe-opener.

  (e) Ill-judged.

  (f) Never seen in the Café de la Régence, seldom in Simpson’s Divan.

  (g) The flag of distress.

  (h) Exquisitely played.

  (i) It is difficult to imagine a more deplorable situation than poor White’s at this point.

  (j) The ingenuity of despair.

  (k) Black has now an irresistible game.

  (l) High praise is due to White for the pertinacity with which he struggles to lose a piece.

  (m) At this point Mr. Endon, without as much as ‘j’adoube’, turned his King and Queen’s Rook upside down, in which position they remained for the rest of the game.

  (n) A coup de repos long overdue.

  (o) Mr. Endon not crying ‘Check!’, nor otherwise giving the slightest indication that he was alive to having attacked the King of his opponent, or rather vis-à-vis, Murphy was absolved, in accordance with Law 18, from attending to it. But this would have been to admit that the salute was adventitious.

  (p) No words can express the torment of mind that goaded White to this abject offensive.

  (q) The termination of this solitaire is very beautifully played by Mr. Endon.

  (r) Further solicitation would be frivolous and vexatious, and Murphy, with fool’s mate in his soul, retires.

  Following Mr. Endon’s forty-third move Murphy gazed for a long time at the board before laying his Shah on his side, and again for a long time after that act of submission. But little by little his eyes were captured by the brilliant swallow-tail of Mr. Endon’s arms and legs, purple, scarlet, black and glitter, till they saw nothing else, and that in a short time only as a vivid blur, Neary’s big blooming buzzing confusion or ground, mercifully free of figure. Wearying soon of this he dropped his head on his arms in the midst of the chessmen, which scattered with a terrible noise. Mr. Endon’s finery persisted for a little in an after-image scarcely inferior to the original. Then this also faded and Murphy began to see nothing, that colourlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. His other senses also found themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not the numb peace of their own suspension, but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real. Time did not cease, that would be asking too much, but the wheel of rounds and pauses did, as Murphy with his head among the armies continued to suck in, through all the posterns of his withered soul, the accidentless One-and-Only, conveniently called Nothing. Then this also vanished, or perhaps simply came asunder, in the familiar variety of stenches, asperities, ear-splitters and eye-closers, and Murphy saw that Mr. Endon was missing.

  For quite some little time Mr. Endon had been drifting about the corridors, pressing here a light-switch and there an indicator, in a way that seemed haphazard but was in fact determined by an amental pattern as precise as any of those that governed his chess. Murphy found him in the south transept, gracefully stationed before the hypomanic’s pad, ringing the changes on the various ways in which the indicator could be pressed and the light turned on and off. Beginning with the light turned off to begin with he had: lit, indicated, extinguished; lit, extinguished, indicated; indicated, lit, extinguished. Continuing then with the light turned on to begin with he had: extinguished, lit, indicated; extinguished, indicated, lit; indicated, extinguished and was seriously thinking of lighting when Murphy stayed his hand.

  The hypomanic bounced off the walls like a bluebottle in a jar.

  Bom’s switchboard the following morning informed him that the hypomanic had been visited at regular intervals of ten minutes from 8 p.m. till shortly after 4 a.m., then for nearly an hour not at all, then six times in the space of one minute, then no more. This unprecedented distribution of visits had a lasting effect on Bom and continued to baffle his ingenuity up to and including the day of his death. He gave it out that Murphy had gone mad, and even went so far as to say that he was not surprised. This went some way towards saving the credit of his department, but none at all towards setting his own mind at rest. And the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat remembers Murphy to this day, with pity, derision, contempt and a touch of awe, as the male nurse that went mad with his colours nailed to the mast. This affords him no consolation. He is in no need of any.

  Mr. Endon went quietly, back to his cell. It was of no consequence to Mr. Endon that his hand had been stayed from restoring his Shah to his square, and the hypomanic’s light from off to on. It was a fragment of Mr. Endon’s good fortune not to be at the mercy of the hand, whether another’s or his own.

  Murphy put the men back into the box, took off Mr. Endon’s gown and slippers and tucked him up in bed. Mr. Endon lay back and fixed his eyes on some object immeasurably remote, perhaps the famous ant on the sky of an airless world. Murphy kneeled beside the bed, which was a low one, took Mr. Endon’s head in his hands and brought the eyes to bear on his, or rather his on them, across a narrow gulf of air, the merest hand’s-breadth of air. Murphy had often inspected Mr. Endon’s eyes, but never with such close and prolonged attention as now.

  In shape they were remarkable, being both deep-set and protuberant, one of Nature’s jokes involving sockets so widely splayed that Mr. Endon’s brows and cheekbones seemed to have subsided. And in colour scarcely less so, having almost none. For the whites, of which a sliver appeared below the upper lid, were very large indeed and the pupils prodigiously dilated, as though by permanent excess of light. The iris was reduced to a thin glaucous rim of spawnlike consistency, so like a ballrace between the black and white that these could have started to rotate in opposite directions, or better still the same direction, without causing Murphy the least surprise. All four lids were everted in an ectropion of great expressiveness, a mixture of cunning, depravity and rapt attention. Approaching his eyes still nearer Murphy could see the red frills of mucus, a large point of suppuration at the root of an upper lash, the filigree of veins like the Lord’s Prayer on a toenail and in the cornea, horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image. They were all set, Murphy and Mr. Endon, for a butterfly kiss, if that is still the correct expression.

  Kneeling at the bedside, the hair starting in thick bl
ack ridges between his fingers, his lips, nose and forehead almost touching Mr. Endon’s, seeing himself stigmatised in those eyes that did not see him, Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken that he spoke them, right into Mr. Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in the ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then.

  ‘the last at last seen of him

  himself unseen by him

  and of himself’

  A rest.

  ‘The last Mr. Murphy saw of Mr. Endon was Mr. Murphy unseen by Mr. Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy.’

  A rest.

  ‘The relation between Mr. Murphy and Mr. Endon could not have been better summed up than by the former’s sorrow at seeing himself in the latter’s immunity from seeing anything but himself.’

  A long rest.

  ‘Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endon’s unseen.’

  That was the whole extent of the little afflatulence. He replaced Mr. Endon’s head firmly on the pillow, rose from his knees, left the cell, and the building, without reluctance and without relief.

  In contrast with the foredawn which was pitch black, cold and damp, Murphy felt incandescent. An hour previously the moon had been obliged to set, and the sun could not rise for an hour to come. He raised his face to the starless sky, abandoned, patient, the sky, not the face, which was abandoned only. He took off his shoes and socks and threw them away. He set off slowly, trailing his feet, through the long grass among the trees towards the male nurses’ quarters. He took off his clothes one by one as he went, quite forgetting they did not belong to him, and threw them away. When he was naked he lay down in a tuft of soaking tuffets and tried to get a picture of Celia. In vain. Of his mother. In vain. Of his father (for he was not illegitimate). In vain. It was usual for him to fail with his mother; and usual, though less usual, for him to fail with a woman. But never before had he failed with his father. He saw the clenched fists and rigid upturned face of the Child in a Giovanni Bellini Circumcision, waiting to feel the knife. He saw eyeballs being scraped, first any eyeballs, then Mr. Endon’s. He tried again with his father, his mother, Celia, Wylie, Neary, Cooper, Miss Dew, Miss Carridge, Nelly, the sheep, the chandlers, even Bom and Co., even Bim, even Ticklepenny and Miss Counihan, even Mr. Quigley. He tried with the men, women, children and animals that belong to even worse stories than this. In vain in all cases. He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat. It was his experience that this should be stopped, whenever possible, before the deeper coils were reached. He rose and hastened to the garret, running till he was out of breath, then walking, then running again, and so on. He drew up the ladder, lit the dip sconced in its own grease on the floor and tied himself up in the chair, dimly intending to have a short rock and then, if he felt any better, to dress and go, before the day staff were about, leaving Ticklepenny to face the music, MUSIC, MUSIC, back to Brewery Road, to Celia, serenade, nocturne, albada. Dimly, very dimly. He pushed off. A phrase from Suk joined in the rhythm. ‘The square of Moon and Solar Orb afflicts the Hyleg. Herschel in Aquarius stops the water.’ At one of the rock’s dead points he saw, for a second, far beneath, the dip and radiator, gleam and grin; at the other the skylight, open to no stars. Slowly he felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion. The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the gleam was gone, the grin was gone, the starlessness was gone, soon his body would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower and then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be quiet, soon he would be free.