Murphy (11 page)

C
ELIA
’s triumph over Murphy, following her confidence to her grandfather, was gained about the middle of September, Thursday the 12th to be pedantic, a little before the Ember Days, the sun being still in the Virgin. Wylie rescued Neary, consoled and advised him, a week later, as the sun with a sigh of relief passed over into the Balance. The encounter, on which so much unhinges, between Murphy and Ticklepenny, took place on Friday, October the 11th (though Murphy did not know that), the moon being full again, but not nearly so near the earth as when last in opposition.

Let us now take Time that old fornicator, bald though he be behind, by such few sad short hairs as he has, back to Monday, October the 7th, the first day of his restitution to the bewitching Miss Greenwich.

Respectable people were going to bed.

Mr. Willoughby Kelly lay back. The sail of his kite was crimson silk, worn and wan with much exposure. He had been mending it with needle and thread, he could do no more, it lay a large hexagon of crimson on the counterpane, freed from its asterisk of sticks. Mr. Kelly himself did not look a day over ninety, cascades of light from the bed-lamp fell on the hairless domes and bosses of his skull, scored his ravaged face with shadow. He found it hard to think, his body seemed spread over a vast area, parts would wander away and get lost if he did not keep a sharp look-out, he felt them fidgeting to be off. He was vigilant and agitated, his vigilance was agitated, he made snatches and darts in his mind at this part and that. He found it hard to think, impossible to expand the sad pun (for he had excellent French):
Celia, s’il y a, Celia, s’il y a
, throbbing steadily behind his eyes. To be punning her name consoled him a little, a 
very little. What had he done to her, that she did not come to see him any more? Now I have no one, said Mr. Kelly, not even Celia. The human eyelid is not teartight, the craters between nose and cheekbones trapped the precious moisture, no other lachrymatory was necessary.

Neary also had no one, not even Cooper. He sat in Glasshouse Street, huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy,
inundating
with green tea a bellyful of bird’s-nest soup, chop suey, noodles, sharks’ fins and ly-chee syrup. He was sad, with the snarling sadness of the choleric man. With the chop-sticks held like bones between his fingers he kept up a low battuta of anger.

His problem was not only how to find Murphy, but how to find him without being found himself by Ariadne née Cox. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack full of vipers. The town was alive with her touts, with her multitudinous self, and he was alone. In a moment of fury he had cast off Cooper, whom now when he longed to have back he could not find. He had written begging Wylie to come and support him, with his resource, his practical ingenuity, his
savoir faire
, his
savoir ne pas faire
, all those vulpine endowments that Neary did not possess. To which Wylie had replied, very truly, that Miss Counihan was a wholetime job and the straightening of Neary’s way a harder nut to crack than he had anticipated. This letter filled Neary with a new misgiving. He had been let down by Cooper, a tried and trusted servant; with how much more likelihood then by Wylie, whom he scarcely knew. All of a sudden Murphy, his quarry, seemed the only man of all his acquaintance, of all the men he had ever known, who would not fail in his trust to a man, however badly he might seem to treat women. Thus his need for Murphy changed. It could not be more urgent than it was, it had to lose with reference to the rival what it gained with reference to the friend. The horse leech’s daughter was a closed system.

He sat on, shaking his head like a perhaps empty bottle, muttering bitterly with the chopsticks, and a sorer lack than any wife or even mistress, were she Yang Kuei-fei herself, was a mind 
to pillow his beside. The Oriental milieu had no doubt to do with this aberration. The ly-chee, of which he had taken three portions, continued to elaborate its nameless redolence, a dusk of lute music behind his troubles.

Miss Counihan sat on Wylie’s knees,
not
in Wynn’s Hotel lest an action for libel should lie, and oyster kisses passed between them. Wylie did not often kiss, but when he did it was a serious matter. He was not one of those lugubrious persons who insist on removing the clapper from the bell of passion. A kiss from Wylie was like a breve tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers. Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slowmotion osmosis of love’s spittle.

The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.

For an Irish girl Miss Counihan was quite exceptionally anthropoid. Wylie was not sure that he cared altogether for her mouth, which was a large one. The kissing surface was greater than the rosebud’s, but less highly toned. Otherwise she did. It is superfluous to describe her, she was just like any other beautiful Irish girl, except, as noted, more markedly anthropoid. How far this constitutes an advantage is what every man must decide for himself.

Enter Cooper. Like a mollusc torn from its rock Wylie came away. Miss Counihan staunched her mouth. Wylie would not have broken off his love game for Cooper, any more than for an animal, but he feared lest Neary also were at hand.

‘I do be turned off,’ said Cooper.

Wylie grasped the situation in a flash. He turned reassuringly to the still panting Miss Counihan and said:

‘Do not be alarmed, my dear. This is Cooper, Neary’s man. He never knocks, nor sits, nor takes his hat off. No doubt he has news of Murphy.’

‘Oh, if you have,’ cried Miss Counihan, ‘if you have news of my love, speak, speak I adjure you.’ She was an omnivorous reader. 

It was true that Cooper never sat, his acathisia was
deep-seated
and of long standing. It was indifferent to him whether he stood or lay, but sit he could not. From Euston to Holyhead he had stood, from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire, lain. Now he stood again, bolt upright in the centre of the room, his bowler hat on his head, his scarlet choker tightly knotted, his glass eye bloodshot, sliding his middle fingers up and down the seams of his baggy moleskins just above the knee, saying, ‘I do be turned off, I do be turned off,’ over and over again.

‘Rather say,’ said Wylie, who unlike Murphy preferred the poorest joke to none, provided it was he who made it, ‘you do be turned on.’

He poured out a large whiskey and handed it to him, saying:

‘This will help the needle off the crack.’

The large whiskey was the merest smell of a cork to Cooper, who did not however turn up his nose at it on that account. Most of the corks he was offered were odourless.

Cooper’s account, expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced, of how he came to be turned off, gives the following.

After many days he picked up Murphy in the Cockpit late one afternoon and tracked him to the mew in West Brompton. At the corner of the mew a glorious gin-palace stood foursquare, a pub that had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it. As Cooper passed, hard on Murphy’s heels, the grille parted, the shutters rolled up, the doors swung open. Cooper kept on his way, Murphy’s way, until that ended in the house that Murphy entered. He let himself in, therefore he lived there. Cooper made a mental note of the number and hastened back the way he had come, devising as he went the wire to Neary.

At the corner he paused to admire the pub, superior to any he had ever seen. Suddenly a man was standing in the porch, radiant in his shirt-sleeves and an apron of fine baize, holding fast a bottle of whiskey. His face was as the face of an angel, he stretched out his hand upon Cooper.

When he came out five hours later his thirst was firmly
established
. The doors closed, the shutters rattled down, the wings of 
the grille came together. The defence of West Brompton, by West Brompton, against West Brompton, was taking no chances.

He raged, Pantagruel had him by the throat. The moon, by a striking coincidence full and at perigee, bathed the palatial tantalus in an ironical radiance. He ground his jaws, he clenched fiercely the slack of his trouser knees, he was ripe for mischief. He thought of Murphy, his quarry, therefore his enemy. The door of the house was ajar, he closed it behind him and stood in the dark hall. He struck a fusee. The one room opening off the hall was doorless, no sound nor light came from the basement. He climbed the stairs. He opened a door on the mezzanine, only to behold, in the eerie flicker of the fusee, an earth closet. Two rooms opened off the first-floor landing, one was doorless, a long gasp of despair issued from the other. Cooper entered, found Murphy in the appalling position described in section three, assumed that a murder had been bungled and retreated headlong. As he burst out of the door the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen slipped in.

‘Alas!’ cried Miss Counihan. ‘False and cruel!’

He took tube to Wapping, whose defence of itself, by itself, against itself, was less implacable than West Brompton’s, and there drank for a week. His thirst and money ended together, a merciful coincidence. He rifled poor-box after poor-box until he had scraped together a few shillings. He hurried back to West Brompton, only pausing on the way to wire the good news to Neary, that Murphy was found. The ruins of the mew were being carted away, to make room for an architecture more in keeping with the palace on the corner. He hurried back to his stew, only pausing on the way to wire the bad news to Neary, that Murphy was lost.

Neary arrived the following morning. Cooper threw himself on his mercy, abated not one tittle of the truth and was turned off with contumely.

Some days later he was taken up for begging without singing and given ten days. The leisure hours of his confinement, which would otherwise have hung most heavy on his hands, he devoted 
to bringing up to date the return half of his monthly ticket, so that he might lose no time, the moment he was free, in returning to the dear land of his birth. He had been some days in Dublin, looking for Miss Counihan, who had not left an address at Wynn’s Hotel. Now at last he found her, with pleased surprise in the arms of Mr. Wylie, whom of course he remembered from the G.P. days, those happy days now gone for ever. He wiped away a tear.

All the puppets in this book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet.

Wylie browbeat:

‘Could you find Murphy again?’

‘Maybe,’ said Cooper.

‘Could you find Neary?’

‘Handy,’ said Cooper.

‘Did you know that Neary had deserted his wife?’

‘I did,’ said Cooper.

‘Did you know she was in London?’

‘I did,’ said Cooper.

‘Why didn’t you go to her when Neary turned you off?’

Cooper did not like this question at all. He presented his profiles, between which there was little resemblance, many times in rapid succession to his tormentor.

‘Why not?’ said Wylie.

‘I do be too fond of Mr. Neary,’ said Cooper.

‘Liar,’ said Wylie.

This was not a question. Cooper waited for the next question.

‘Neary knows too much,’ said Wylie. Cooper waited.

‘You split on him,’ said Wylie, ‘he splits on you. Isn’t that it?’

Cooper admitted nothing.

‘All you need,’ said Wylie, ‘is a little kindness, and in a short time you will be sitting down and taking off your hat and doing all the things that are impossible at present. Miss Counihan and I are your friends.’

Cooper could not have looked more gratified if he had been Frankenstein’s dæmon and Wylie De Lacey. 

‘Now, Cooper,’ said Wylie, ‘will you be so kind as to leave the room and wait outside till I am so courteous as to call you?’

Wylie’s first care, when Cooper had left the room, was to kiss Miss Counihan’s tears away. He had a special kiss for this purpose, an astringent kiss, with a movement like a barber’s
clippers
. Not the thought of Murphy upside down and bleeding, but that of the beautiful female visitor, had upset Miss Counihan. Mindful of Neary’s blunder by the grave of Father Prout (F. S. Mahony), Wylie pointed out that there was nothing whatever to connect Murphy with the young woman seen by Cooper on his way out. But Miss Counihan was offended, not mollified, by this suggestion, which seemed to her a disparagement of Murphy. For what could beauty’s business be in Murphy’s vicinity, if not with Murphy? She increased the flow of tears, partly to show how offended she was, partly because the kisses she was now getting were quite a new experience.

When the effort of shedding tears finally became greater than the pleasure of having them kissed away, Miss Counihan
discontinued
it. Wylie restored himself with a little whiskey and gave out the following as his considered opinion, which indeed it was.

The time had come to remove, one way or another, once and for all, Miss Counihan’s uncertainty, which was also that of her well-wishers, meaning himself. Neary without Cooper would never find Murphy. But even supposing he did, would Miss Counihan be in any way relieved? On the contrary. For if Murphy had not already of his own free imbecility turned down Miss Counihan in his mind, Neary would bully or bribe him into doing so in black and white, or, failing that, have him removed. A man capable of bigamous designs on Miss Counihan was capable of anything.

Even Wylie did not know of the first Mrs. Neary, alive and well, though officially languishing, in Calcutta.

‘Though I hold no brief for Mr. Neary,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘yet I am loath to think he is the dastard you describe. If, as you say, on what grounds I do not inquire, he has deserted his wife, no doubt he had excellent reasons for doing so.’ 

Miss Counihan could not think too harshly of a man whom her charms had brought to the brink of bigamy, if indeed they had. Nor was any good purpose to be served by her concurring in Wylie’s denigrations of a suitor more solvent, if – er – personally less interesting than himself. She would not identify herself more closely with Wylie than was convenient to her purpose (Murphy) or agreeable to her appetite. If she treated him with less rigour than she had Neary, it was simply because the latter took away her appetite. But she had made it as clear to the one as she had to the other, that so long as any hope of Murphy remained her affections were to be regarded as in a state of suspension. Wylie accepted this with a very good grace. He found her suspended affections so cordial that he did not greatly care if they were never released.