Murphy by Samuel Beckett Page A

me? So that you won’t have to love me,’ the voice rising here to a note that did him credit, ‘so that you won’t be condemned to love me, so that you’ll be reprieved from loving me.’ He was anxious to make his meaning clear. ‘Women are all the same bloody same, you can’t love, you can’t stay the course, the only feeling you can stand is being felt, you can’t love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery. My God, how I hate the char Venus and her sausage and mash sex.’
    Celia put a foot to the ground.
    ‘Avoid exhaustion by speech,’ she said.
    ‘Have I wanted to change you? Have I pestered you to begin things that don’t belong to you and stop things that do? How can I care what you DO ?’
    ‘I am what I do,’ said Celia.
    ‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘You do what you are, you do a fraction of what you are, you suffer a dreary ooze of your being into doing.’ He threw his voice into an infant’s whinge. ‘“I cudden do annyting, Maaaammy.” That kind of doing. Unavoidable and tedious.’
    Celia was now fully seated on the edge of the bed, her back turned to him, making fast her Ballitoes.
    ‘I have heard bilge,’ she said, and did not bother to finish.
    ‘Hear a little more,’ said Murphy, ‘and then I expire. If I had to work out what you are from what you do, you could skip out of here now and joy be with you. First of all you starve me into terms that are all yours but the jossy, then you won’t abide by them. The arrangement is that I enter the jaws of a job according to the celestial prescriptions of Professor Suk, then when I won’t go against them you start to walk out on me. Is that the way you respect an agreement? What more can I do?’
    He closed his eyes and fell back. It was not his habit to make out cases for himself. An atheist chipping the deity was not more senseless than Murphy defending his courses of inaction, as he did not require to be told. He had been carried away by his passion for Celia and by a most curious feeling that he should not collapse without at least the form of a struggle. This grisly relic from the days of nuts, balls and sparrows astonished himself. To die fighting was the perfect antithesis of his whole practice, faith and intention. 
    He heard her rise and go to the window, then come and stand at the foot of the bed. So far from opening his eyes he sucked in his cheeks. Was she perhaps subject to feelings of compassion?
    ‘I’ll tell you what more you can do,’ she said. ‘You can get up out of that bed, make yourself decent and walk the streets for work.’
    The gentle passion. Murphy lost all his yellow again.
    ‘The streets!’ he murmured. ‘Father forgive her.’
    He heard her go to the door.
    ‘Not the slightest idea,’ he murmured, ‘of what her words mean. No more insight into their implications than a parrot into its profanities.’
    As he seemed likely to go on mumbling and marvelling to himself for some time, Celia said good-bye and opened the door.
    ‘You don’t know what you are saying,’ said Murphy. ‘Let me tell you what you are saying. Close the door.’
    Celia closed the door but kept her hand on the handle.
    ‘Sit on the bed,’ said Murphy.
    ‘No,’ said Celia.
    ‘I can’t talk against space,’ said Murphy, ‘my fourth highest attribute is silence. Sit on the bed.’
    The tone was that adopted by exhibitionists for their last words on earth. Celia sat on the bed. He opened his eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull’s, and with great magical ability sunk their shafts into hers, greener than he had ever seen them and more hopeless than he had ever seen anybody’s.
    ‘What have I now?’ he said. ‘I distinguish. You, my body and my mind.’ He paused for this monstrous proposition to be granted. Celia did not hesitate, she might never have occasion to grant him anything again. ‘In the mercantile gehenna,’ he said, ‘to which your words invite me, one of these will go,