Murphy by Samuel Beckett

he could lay his hands on, then walk carefully to the Cockpit and there eat the biscuits. Someone in Oxford Street might offer him a position of the highest trust. He settled down to plan how exactly he would get from where he was to Tottenham Court Road, what cutting reply he would make to the magnate and in what order he would eat the biscuits when the time came. He had proceeded no further than the British Museum and was recruiting himself in the Archaic Room before the Harpy Tomb, when a sharp surface thrust against his nose caused him to open his eyes. This proved to be a visiting-card which was at once withdrawn so that he might read:
    Austin Ticklepenny
Pot Poet
From the County of Dublin
    This creature does not merit any particular description. The merest pawn in the game between Murphy and his stars, he makes his little move, engages an issue and is swept from the board. Further use may conceivably be found for Austin Ticklepenny in a child’s halma or a book-reviewer’s snakes and ladders, but his chess days are over. There is no return game between a man and his stars.
    ‘When I failed to gain your attention,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘by means of what the divine son of Ariston calls the vocal stream issuing from the soul through the lips, I took the liberty as you notice.’
    Murphy drained his cup and made to rise. But Ticklepenny trapped his legs under the table and said:
    ‘Fear not, I have ceased to sing.’
    Murphy had such an enormous contempt for rape that he found it no trouble to go quite limp at the first sign of its application. He did so now.
    ‘Yes,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘ nulla linea sine die . Would I be here if I were not on the water-tumbril? I would not.’
    He worked up to such a pitch his gambadoes under the table that Murphy’s memory began to vibrate.
    ‘Didn’t I have the dishonour once in Dublin,’ he said. ‘Can it have been at the Gate?’
    ‘ Romiet ,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘ and Juleo . ‘Take him and cut him out in little stars …’ Wotanope!’
    Murphy dimly remembered an opportune apothecary. 
    ‘I was snout drunk,’ said Ticklepenny. ‘You were dead drunk.’
    Now the sad truth was that Murphy never touched it. This was bound to come out sooner or later.
    ‘Unless you want me to call a policewoman,’ said Murphy, ‘cease your clumsy genustuprations.’
    Woman was the keyword here.
    ‘My liver dried up,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘so I had to hang up my lyre.’
    ‘And let yourself go fundamentally,’ said Murphy.
    ‘Messrs. Melpomene, Calliope, Erato and Thalia,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘in that order, woo me in vain since my change of life.’
    ‘Then you know how I feel,’ said Murphy.
    ‘That same Ticklepenny,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘who for more years than he cares to remember turned out his steady pentameter per pint, day in, day out, is now degraded to the position of male nurse in a hospital for the better-class mentally deranged. It is the same Ticklepenny, but God bless my soul quantum mutatus .’
    ‘ Ab illa ,’ said Murphy.
    ‘I sit on them that will not eat,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘jacking their jaws apart with the gag, spurning their tongues aside with the spatula, till the last tundish of drench is absorbed. I go round the cells with my shovel and bucket, I—’
    Ticklepenny broke down, took indeed a large draught of his lemon phosphate, and altogether ceased his wooing under the table. Murphy could not take advantage of this to go, being stunned by the sudden clash between two hitherto distinct motifs in Suk’s delineations, that of lunatic in paragraph two and that of custodian in paragraph seven.
    ‘I cannot stand it,’ groaned Ticklepenny, ‘it is driving me mad.’
    It is hard to say where the fault lies in the case of Ticklepenny, whether with the soul, the stream or the lips, but certainly the quality of his speech is most wretched. Celia’s confidence to Mr. Kelly, Neary’s to Wylie, had to be given for the most part obliquely.