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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
BOOKS BY JAMES JOYCE
"A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN"
"DUBLINERS" (Short stories)
"EXILES" (Drama)
'^CHAMBER MUSIC" (Poems)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
BY
JAMES JOYCE
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, Inc.
MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY B. W. HUEBSCH
First printing, December 1916 Second printing, April 1917 Third printing, June 1918 Fourth printing, September 1921
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
^^ Et ignotas animicm dimittit in artes/^
Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII., 18.
CHAPTER I
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this mooeow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .
His father told him that story : his father looked at him through a glass : he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived : she sold lemon platt.
0, the wild rose blossoms 0% the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe hotheth.
When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She
[1]
played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to danee. He danced:
Tralala lala, Tralala tralaladdy, Tralala lala, Tralala lala.
Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante.
Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a dif- ferent father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said :
— 0, Stephen will apologise. Dante said:
— 0, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. —
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise,
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologise,
Pull out his eyes.
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise. * * m m
[2]
The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the foot-ballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery. Body Kickham was not like that : he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.
Eody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Eody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blan- ket. And one day he had asked :
— What is your name ?
Stephen had answered : Stephen Dedalus. Then Nasty Roche had said:
— "What kind of a name is that?
And when Stephen had not been able to answer Nasty Roche had asked :
— What is your father ? Stephen had answered :
— A gentleman.
Then Nasty Roche had asked:
— Is he a magistrate ?
He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow had said to Cantwell :
[3]
— I'd give you such a belt in a second. Cantwell had answered:
X — Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I'd like to see you. He'd give you a toe in the rump for yourself.
That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother ! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five- shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, wav- ing their hands:
— Good-bye, Stephen, goodbye!
— Good-bye, Stephen, goodbye!
He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fear- ful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton's yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would
[4]
change the number pasted up inside his desk from sev- entyseven to seventysix.
It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which win- dow Hamilton Eowan had thrown his hat on the haha and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers' slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like some- thing in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornweirs Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.
Wolsey died in Leicester Ahhey Where the abbots buried him. Canker is a disease of plants, Cancer one of animals.
It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sen- tences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuffbox for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the con- queror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had
[5]
such a lovely warm smell ! Dante knew a lot of things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest but both his father and Uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a wellread woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth : that was heartburn. A voice cried far out on the playground :
— All in!
Then other voices cried from the lower and third lines :
— All in! All in!
The players closed around, flushed and muddy, and he went among them, glad to go in. Body Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. A fellow asked him to give it one last : but he walked on without even answering the fellow. Simon Moonan told him not to because the pre- fect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said :
— We all know why you speak. You are McGlade's suck.
Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect's false sleeves behind his back and the pre- fect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that : suck. Only louder.
[6]
To remember that and the white look of the lava- tory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out : cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot : and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.
And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Al- ways the same : and when the fellows stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.
It was the hour for sums. Father Arnall wrote a hard sum on the board and then said :
— Now then, who will win? Go ahead, York! Go ahead, Lancaster!
Stephen tried his best but the sum was too hard and he felt confused. The little silk badge with the white rose on it that was pinned on the breast of his jacket be- gan to flutter. He was no good at sums but he tried his best so that York might not lose. Father Arnall's face looked very black but he was not in a wax : he was laugh- ing. Then Jack Lawton cracked his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said :
— Right. Bravo Lancaster! The red rose wins. Come on now, York ! Forge ahead !
Jack Lawton looked over from his side. The little silk badge with the red rose on it looked very rich be- cause he had a blue sailor top on. Stephen felt his own face red too, thinking of all the bets about who would get first place in Elements, Jack Lawton or he. Some weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he got the card for first. His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked a^^ the next sum and heard
[7]
Father Arnall's voice. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and third place were beautiful colours too : pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those col- ours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blos- soms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.
The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the corridors towards the refec- tory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could not eat the damp bread. The table- cloth was damp and limp. , But he drank off the hot weak tea which the clumsy scullion, girt with a white apron, poured into his cup. He wondered whether the scullion 's apron was damp too or whether all white things were cold and damp. Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tins. They said they could not drink the tea ; that it was hogwash. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.
All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.
He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said :
— What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you?
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— I don't know, Stephen said.
— Sick in your bread basket — Fleming said — be- cause your face looks white. It will go away.
— 0 yes, Stephen said.
But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Flem- ing was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refec- tory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.
Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy Kath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the ta- bles of the third line. And every single fellow had a different way of walking.
He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominos and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The pre- fect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them some- thing about TuUabeg.
Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said :
[9]
— Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed ?
Stephen answered:
— I do.
Wells turned to the other fellows and said :
— 0, I say, here's a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.
The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said :
— I do not. Wells said :
— 0, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to bed.
They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of gram- mar. He tried to think of Wells's mother but he did not dare to raise his eyes to Wells's face. He did not like Wells's face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into the square ditch the day before because he would not swop his little snufifbox for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing to do ; all the fellows said it was. And how cold and slimy the water had been ! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.
The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and the lines filed out of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside his clothes. He still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother ? What did that mean, to kiss ?
[10]
You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek ; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek ; and they made a tiny little noise : kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?
Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy- seven to seventysix. But the Christmas vacation was very far away : but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.
There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography : a big ball in the middle of clouds. Flem- ing had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon. That was like the two brushes in Dante's press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush with the maroon velvet back for Michael Davitt. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours. Flem- ing had done it himself.
He opened the geography to study the lesson ; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.
He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there : himself, his name and where he was.
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
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Ireland Europe The World The Universe
That was in his writing : and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page :
Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation, Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation.
He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the uni- verse? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began ? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.
[12]
It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big. He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the mid- dle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it : Dante was on one side and his father and Mr. Casey were on the other side but his mother and Uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.
It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in Poetry and Rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation ; tunnel, out ; noise, stop. How far away it was ! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again. Night prayers and then bed : he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a
[13]
warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so warm and yet he shivered a little and still wanted to yawn.
The bell rang for night prayers and he filed out of the study hall after the others and down the staircase and along the corridors to the chapel. The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at night. The sea was cold day and night : but it was colder at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall beside his father's house. But the kettle would be on the hob to make punch.
The prefect of the chapel prayed above his head and his memory knew the responses :
0 Lord, open our lips
And our mouths shall announce Thy praise.
Incline unto our aid, 0 God!
0 Lord, make haste to help us!
There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed behind him on his neck and sighed as they prayed. They lived in Clane, a fellow said : there were little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing at the halfdoor of a cottage with a child in her arms, as the cars had come past from Sallins. It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smok-
[14]
iiig turf J in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But, 0, the road there between the trees was dark ! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think of how it was.
He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayer. He prayed it too against the dark out- side under the trees.
Visit, we beseech Thee, 0 Lord, this habitation and drive away from it all the snares of the enemy. May Thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace and m>ay Thy blessing be always upon us through Christ our Lord, Amen,
His fingers trembled as he undressed himself in the dormitory. He told his fingers to hurry up. He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers and be in bed before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died. He rolled his stockings off and put on his nightshirt quickly and knelt trembling at his bedside and repeated his prayers quickly, fearing that the gas would go down. He felt his shoulders shaking as he murmured :
God bless my father and my mother and spare them
to me! God bless my little brothers and sisters and spare
them to me ! God bless Dante and Uncle Charles and spare them
to me !
He blessed himself and climbed quickly into bed and, tucking the end of the nightshirt under his feet, curled
[15]
himself together under the cold white sheets, shaking and trembling. But he would not go to hell when he died ; and the shaking would stop. A voice bade the boys in the dormitory goodnight. He peered out for an instant over the coverlet and saw the yellow curtains round and before his bed that shut him off on all sides. The light was lowered quietly.
The prefect's shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as car- riagelamps ? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironingroom above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their master's face and cloak and knew that he had received his death wound. But only the dark was where they looked : only dark silent air. Their master had received his death wound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side ; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal.
0 how cold and strange it was to think of that ! All the dark was cold and strange. There were pale strange faces there, great eyes like carriagelamps. They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who had received their death wound on battlefields far away over
[16]
the sea. What did they wish to say that their faces were so strange ?
Visit, we beseech Thee, 0 Lord, this habitation and drive away from it all , , ,
Going home for the holidays ! That would be lovely : the fellows had told him. Getting up on the cars in the early wintry morning outside the door of the castle. The cars were rolling on the gravel. Cheers for the rec- tor!
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
The cars drove past the chapel and all caps were raised. They drove merrily along the country roads. The drivers pointed with their whips to Bodenstown. The fellows cheered. They passed the farmhouse of the Jolly Farmer. Cheer after cheer after cheer. Through Clane they drove, cheering and cheered. The peasant women stood at the halfdoors, the men stood here and there. The lovely smell there was in the wintry air: the smell of Clane : rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy.
The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings. The guards went to and fro opening, closing, locking, unlocking the doors. They were men in dark blue and silver; they had silvery whistles and their keys made a quick music : click, click : click, click.
And the train raced on over the flat lands and past the Hill of Allen. The telegraph poles were passing, pass- ing. The train went on and on. It knew. There were lanterns in the hall of his father's house and ropes of green branches. There were holly and ivy round the
[17]
pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers. There were red holly and green ivy round the old portraits on the walls. Holly and ivy for him and for Christmas.
Lovely . . .
All the people. Welcome home, Stephen! Noises of welcome. His mother kissed him. Was that right? His father was a marshal now : higher than a magistrate. Welcome home, Stephen !
Noises . . .
There was a noise of curtainrings running back along the rods, of water being splashed in the basins. There was a noise of rising and dressing and washing in the dormitory: a noise of clapping of hands as the prefect went up and down telling the fellows to look sharp. A pale sunlight showed the yellow curtains drawn back, the tossed beds. His bed was very hot and his face and body were very hot.
He got up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough feel. The sunlight was queer and cold.
Fleming said :
— Are you not well?
He did not know ; and Fleming said :
— Get back into bed. Ill tell McGlade you're not well.
— He 's sick.
— Who is?
— Tell McGlade.
— Get back into bed.
— Is he sick ?
A fellow held his arms while he loosened the stocking clinging to his foot and climbed back into the hot bed.
[18]
He crouched down between the sheets, glad of their tepid glow. He heard the fellows talk among themselves about him as they dressed for mass. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they were saying.
Then their voices ceased; they had gone. A voice at his bed said :
— Dedalus, don't spy on us, sure you won't ? Wells's face was there. He looked at it and saw that
Wells was afraid.
— I didn 't mean to. Sure you won 't ?
His father had told him, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. He shook his head and answered no and felt glad.
Wells said:
— I didn't mean to, honour bright. It was only for cod. I'm sorry.
The face and the voice went away. Sorry because he was afraid. Afraid that it was some disease. Canker was a disease of plants and cancer one of animals : or an- other different. That was a long time ago then out on the playgrounds in the evening light, creeping from point to point on the fringe of his line, a heavy bird flying low through the grey light. Leicester Abbey lit up. Wol- sey died there. The abbots buried him themselves.
It was not Wells's face, it was the prefect's. He was not foxing. No, no: he was sick really. He was not foxing. And he felt the prefect 's hand on his forehead ; and he felt his forehead warm and damp against the prefect's cold damp hand. That was the way a rat felt^ slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of. Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black slimy eyes to look out of., T^ey cqu14
[19j
understand how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things.
The prefect was there again and it was his voice that was saying that he was to get up, that Father Minister had said he was to get up and dress and go to the in- firmary. And while he was dressing himself as quickly as he could the prefect said :
— We must pack off to Brother Michael because we have the collywobbles !
He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks and lips were all shivery: and then the prefect had to laugh by himself.
The prefect cried :
— Quick march ! Hayf oot ! Strawf oot !
They went together down the staircase and along the corridor and past the bath. As he passed the door he remembered with a vague fear the warm turf -coloured bogwater, the warm moist air, the noise of plunges, the smell of the towels, like medicine.
Brother Michael was standing at the door of the in- firmary and from the door of the dark cabinet on his right came a smell like medicine. That came from the bottles on the shelves. The prefect spoke to Brother Michael and Brother Michael answered and called the prefect sir. He had reddish hair mixed with grey and a queer look. It was queer that he would always be a brother. It was queer too that you could not call him sir because he was a brother and had a different kind of look. Was he not holy enough or why could he not patch up on the others ?
[20]
There were two beds in the room and in one bed there was, a fellow : and when they went in he called out :
— Hello ! It 's young Dedalus ! "What 's up ? .
— The sky is up, Brother Michael said.
He was a fellow out of the third of grammar and, while Stephen was undressing, he asked Brother Michael to bring him a round of buttered toast.
— Ah, do! he said.
— Butter you up! said Brother Michael. You'll get your walking papers in the morning when the doctor comes.
— Will I? the fellow said. I'm not well yet. Brother Michael repeated :
— You'll get your walking papers. I tell you.
He bent down to rake the fire. He had a long back like the long back of a tramhorse. He shook the poker gravely and nodded his head at the fellow out of third of grammar.
Then Brother Michael went away and after a while the fellow out of third of grammar turned in towards the wall and fell asleep.
That was the infirmary. He was sick then. Had they written home to tell his mother and father? But it would be quicker for one of the priests to go himself to tell them. Or he would write a letter for the priest to bring.
Dear Mother,
I am sick. I want to go home. Please come and take me home. I am in the infirmary.
Your fond son,
Stephen
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How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered if he would die. You could die just the same on a sunny day. He might die before his mother came. Then he would have a dead mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died. All the fellows would be at the mass, dressed in black, all with sad faces. Wells too would be there but no fellow would look at him. The rector would be there in a cope of black and gold and there would be tall yellow candles on the altar and round the catafalque. And they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. And Wells would be sorry then for what he had done. And the bell would toll slowly.
He could hear the tolling. He said over to himself the song that Brigid had taught him.
Dingdong! The castle belli Farewell, my mother! Bury me in the old churchyard Beside my eldest brother. My coffin shall be black, Six angels at my back, Two to sing and two to pray And two to carry my soul away.
How beautiful and sad that was ! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old church- yard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself : for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music, The bell! The bell! Farewell! 0 farewell!
[22J
The cold sunlight was weaker and Brother Michael was standing at his bedside with a bowl of beeftea. He was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. He could hear them playing in the playgrounds. And the day was going on in the college just as if he were there.
Then Brother Michael was going away and the fellow out of third of grammar told him to be sure and come back and tell him all the news in the paper. He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very de- cent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle. There was every kind of news in the paper: accidents, shipwrecks, sports and politics.
— Now it is all about politics in the papers, he said. Do your people talk about that too?
— Yes, Stephen said.
— Mine too, he said.
Then he thought for a moment and said:
— You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy. My name is the name of a town. Your name is like Latin.
Then he asked :
— Are you good at riddles? Stephen answered:
— Not very good. Then he said :
— Can you answer me this one ? Why is the county of Kildare like the leg of a fellow's breeches?
Stephen thought what could be the answer and then ^aid:
[23]
— I give it up.
— Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke ? Athy is the town in the county Kildare, and a thigh is the other thigh.
— 0, I see, Stephen said.
— That's an old riddle, he said. After a moment he said:
— I say!
— What? asked Stephen.
— You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way.
— Can you? said Stephen.
— The same riddle, he said. Do you know the other way to ask it?
— No, said Stephen.
— Can you not think of the other way? he said.
He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said :
— There is another way but I won't tell you what it is.
Why did he not tell it ? His father, who kept the race- horses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Koche's father. He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys' fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them ? But his father had told him that he would be no stranger there because his granduncle had presented an address to the Liberator there fifty years before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It seemed to him a solemn time ; and he won- dered if that was the time when the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and yellow waistcoats
[24]
and caps of rabbit-skin and drank beer like grownup people and kept greyhounds of their own to course the hares with.
He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker. There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds. There was no noise on the play- grounds. The class must be doing the themes or per- haps Father Arnall was reading out of the book.
It was queer that they had not given him any medi- cine. Perhaps Brother Michael would bring it back when he came. They said you got stinking stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt bet- ter now th^n before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strange-looking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.
How pale the light was at the window ! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.
He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters' edge to see the ship that was entering their harbour. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards the flat dark land : and by the light at the pierhead he saw his face, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.
He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters :
[25]
— He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque. A wail of sorrow went up from the people.
— Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!
They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.
And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders walk- ing proudly and silently past the people who knelt by the waters' edge.
A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivy twined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread. They had come home a lit- tle late and still dinner was not ready : but it would be ready in a jiffy, his mother had said. They were waiting for the door to open and for the servants to come in, holding the big dishes covered with their heavy metal covers.
All were waiting : Uncle Charles, who sat far away in the shadow of the window, Dante and Mr Casey, who sat in the easy chairs at either side of the hearth, Stephen, seated on a chair between them, his feet resting on the toasted boss. Mr Dedalus looked at himself in the pier- glass above the mantelpiece, waxed out his moustache ends and then, parting his coat tails, stood with his back to the glowing fire : and still from time to time he with- drew a hand from his coat tail to wax out one of his moustache ends. Mr Casey leaned his head to one side and, smiling, tapped the gland of his neck with his fin- gers. And Stephen smiled too for he knew now that it was not true that Mr Casey had a purse of silver in his throat. He smiled to think how the silvery noise which Mr Casey used to make had deceived him. And when he had tried to open Mr Casey's hand to see if the purse
[26]
of silver was hidden there he had seen that the fingers could not be straightened out: and Mr Casey had told him that he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria.
Mr Casey tapped the gland of his neck and smiled at Stephen with sleepy eyes : and Mr Dedalus said to him :
— Yes. Well now, that's all right. 0, we had a good walk, hadn't we, John? Yes ... I wonder if there's any likelihood of dinner this evening. Yes. . . . 0, well now, we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today. Ay, bedad.
He turned to Dante and said :
— You didn't stir out at all, Mrs Riordan? Dante frowned and said shortly :
— No.
Mr Dedalus dropped his coat tails and went over to the sideboard. He brought forth a great stone jar of whisky from the locker and filled the decanter slowly, bending now and then to see how much he had poured in. Then replacing the jar in the locker he poured a little of the whisky into two glasses, added a little water and came back with them to the fireplace.
— A thimbleful, John, he said, just to whet your appetite.
Mr Casey took the glass, drank, and placed it near him on the mantelpiece. Then he said :
— Well, I can't help thinking of our friend Christo- pher manufacturing . . .
He broke into a fit of laughter and coughing and added :
— . . . manufacturing that champagne for those fellows.
Mr Dedalus laughed loudly. [27]
— Is it Christy? he said. There's more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes.
He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began to speak with the voice of the hotel keeper.
— And he has such a soft mouth when he's speaking to you, don't you know. He's very moist and watery about the dewlaps, God bless him.
Mr Casey was still struggling through his fit of cough- ing and laughter. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel keeper through his father's face and voice, laughed.
Mr Dedalus put up his eyeglass and, staring down at him, said quietly and kindly:
— What are you laughing at, you little puppy, you ? The servants entered and placed the dishes on the
table. Mrs Dedalus followed and the places were ar- ranged.
— Sit over, she said.
Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said :
— Now, Mrs Kiordan, sit over. John, sit you down, my hearty.
He looked round to where Uncle Charles sat and said :
— Now then, sir, there's a bird here waiting for you. "When all had taken their seats he laid his hand on the
cover and then said quickly, withdrawing it :
— Now, Stephen.
Stephen stood up in his place to say the grace before meals :
Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which through Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ our Lord. Amen.
[28]
All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.
Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn's of D 'Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the breastbone to show how good it was : and he remem- bered the man's voice when he had said :
— Take that one, sir. That's the real Ally Daly. Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandy-
bat a turkey? But Clongowes was far away: and the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high and red in the grate and the green ivy and red holly made you feel so happy and when dinner was ended the big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top.
It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel queer and oldish : and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass, his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And Uncle Charles had said so too.
Mr Dedalus covered the dish and began to eat hun- grily. Then he said :
— Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery.
[29]
— Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you haven't given Mrs Riordan any sauce.
Mr Dedalus seized the saueeboat.
— Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind.
Dante covered her plate with her hands and said :
— No, thanks.
Mr Dedalus turned to Uncle Charles.
— How are you off, sir?
— Right as the mail, Simon.
— You, Uohn?
— I'm all right. Go on yourself.
— Mary? Here, Stephen, here's something to make your hair curl.
He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked Uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full but he nodded that it was.
— That was a good answer our friend made to the canon. What ? said Mr Dedalus.
— I didn't think he had that much in him, said Mr Casey.
— I^ll pay your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a polling-'booth,
— A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest.
— They have only themselves to blame, said Mr Dedalus suavely. If they took a fool's advice they would confine their attention to religion.
— It is religion, Dante said. They are doing their duty in warning the people.
— We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all
[30]
humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election addresses.
— It is religion, Dante said again. They are right. They must direct their flocks.
— And preach politics from the altar, is it ? asked Mr Dedalus.
— Certainly, said Dante. It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong.
Mrs Dedalus laid down her knife and fork, saying :
— For pity sake and for pity sake let us have no po- litical discussion on this day of all days in the year.
— Quite right, ma'am, said Uncle Charles. Now Simon, that's quite enough now. Not another word now.
— Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus quickly. He uncovered the dish boldly and said :
— Now then, who's for more turkey? Nobody answered. Dante said :
— Nice language for any catholic to use !
— Mrs Riordan, I appeal to you, said Mrs Dedalus, to let the matter drop now.
Dante turned on her and said:
— And am I to sit here and listen to the pastors of my church being flouted?
— Nobody is saying a word against them, said Mr Dedalus, so long as they don't meddle in politics.
— The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.
— Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey ; or the people may leave their church alone.
— You hear ? said Dante turning to Mrs Dedalus.
— Mr Casey ! Simon ! said Mrs Dedalus, let it end now,
[31]
— Too bad ! Too bad ! said Uncle Charles.
— What? cried Mr Dedalus. Were we to desert him at the bidding of the English people ?
. — He was no longer worthy to lead, said Dante. He was a public sinner.
— We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly.
— Woe be to the man by whom the scandal cometh! said Mrs Riordan. It would be better for him that a millstone were tied about his neck and that he were cast into the depths of the sea rather than that he should scandalise one of these, my least little ones. That is the language of the Holy Ghost.
— And very bad language if you ask me, said Mr Dedalus coolly.
— Simon ! Simon ! said Uncle Charles. The boy.
— Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus. I me^t about the . . . I was thinking about the bad language of that railway porter. Well now, that's all right. Here, Stephen, show me your plate, old chap. Eat away now. Here.
He heaped up the food on Stephen's plate and served Uncle Charles and Mr Casey to large pieces of turkey and splashes of sauce. Mrs Dedalus was eating little and Dante sat with her hands in her lap. She was red in the face. Mr Dedalus rooted with the carvers at the end of the dish and said :
— There's a tasty bit here we call the pope's nose. If any lady or gentleman . . .
He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carv- ingfork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate, saying:
— Well, you can't say but you were asked. I think I
[32]
had better eat it myself because I'm not well in my health lately.
He winked at Stephen and, replacing the dish-cover, began to eat again.
There was a silence while he ate. Then he said :
— Well now, the day kept up fine after all. There were plenty of strangers down too.
Nobody spoke. He said again :
— I think there were more strangers down than last Christmas.
He looked round at the others whose faces were bent towards their plates and, receiving no reply, waited for a moment and said bitterly:
— Well, my Christmas dinner has been spoiled any- how.
— There could be neither luck nor grace, Dante said, in a house where there is no respect for the pastors of the church.
Mr Dedalus threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate.
— Eespect ! he said. Is it for Billy with the lip or for the tub of guts up in Armagh ? Eespect !
— Princes of the church, said Mr Casey with slow scorn.
— Lord Leitrim's coachman, yes, said Mr Dedalus.
— They are the Lord's anointed, Dante said. They are an honour to their country.
— Tub of guts, said Mr Dedalus coarsely. He has a handsome face, mind you, in repose. You should see that fellow lapping up his bacon and cabbage of a cold winter's day. 0 Johnny!
He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bes- tiality and made a lapping noise with his lips.
[33]
— E^ally, Simon, you should not speak that way be- fore Stephen. It's not right.
— O, he'll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly — the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home.
— Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows up.
— Sons of bitches ! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Lowlived dogs ! And they look it ! By Christ, they look it!
— They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them !
— Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes !
Uncle Charles raised his hands mildly and said :
— Come now, come now, come now ! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper and this bad language? It is too bad surely.
Mrs Dedalus spoke to Dante in a low voice but Dante said loudly:
— I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on by rene- gade catholics.
Mr Casey pushed his plate rudely into the middle of the table and, resting his elbows before him, said in a hoarse voice to his host :
— Tell me, did I tell you that story about a very fa- mous spit?
[34]
— You did not, John, said Mr Dedalus.
— Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story. It happened not long ago in the county Wicklow where we are now.
He broke off and, turning towards Dante, said with quiet indignation:
— And I may tell you, ma'am, that I, if you mean me, am no renegade catholic. I am a catholic as my father was and his father before him and his father before him again when we gave up our lives rather than sell our faith.
— The more shame to you now, Dante said, to speak as you do.
— The story, John, said Mr Dedalus smiling. Let us have the story anyhow.
— Catholic indeed! repeated Dante ironically. The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the lan- guage I have heard this evening.
Mr Dedalus began to sway his head to and fro, croon- ing like a country singer.
— I am no protestant, I tell you again, said Mr Casey flushing.
Mr Dedalus, still crooning and swajdng his head, began to sing in a grunting nasal tone :
O, come all you Roman catholics That never went to mass.
He took up his knife and fork again in good humour and set to eating, saying to Mr Casey :
— Let us have the story, John. It will help us to digest.
Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey's face which [35]
stared across the table over his joined hands. He liked to sit near him at the fire, Rooking up at his dark fierce face. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his slow voice was good to listen to. But why was he then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the Alleghanies when her brother had got the money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. Perhaps that made her severe against Parnell. And she did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was a protes- tant and when she was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower, of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then ? And he remembered the evening in the infirmary in Clongowes, the dark waters, the light at the pierhead and the moan of sorrow from the people when they had heard.
Eileen had long white hands. One evening when play- ing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.
— The story is very short and sweet, Mr Casey said. It was one day down in Arklow, a cold bitter day, not long before the chief died. May God have mercy on him!
He closed his eyes wearily and paused. Mr Dedalus took a bone from his plate and tore some meat from it with his teeth, saying:
— Before he was killed, you mean,
[36]
Mr Casey opened his eyes, sighed and went on :
— He was down in Arklow one day. We were down there at a meeting and after the meeting w£is over we had to make our way to the railway station through the crowd. Such booing and baaing, man, you never heard. They called us all the names in the world. Well there was one old lady, and a drunken old harridan she was surely, that paid all her attention to me. She kept dancing along beside me in the mud bawling and scream- ing into my face: Priest hunter! The Paris Funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O'Shea!
— And what did you do, John ? asked Mr Dedalus.
— I let her bawl away, said Mr. Casey. It was a cold day and to keep up my heart I had (saving your pres- ence, ma'am) a quid of Tullamore in my mouth and sure I couldn't say a word in any case because my mouth was full of tobacco juice.
— Well, John?
— Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart's content, Kitty O'Shea and the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won't sully this Christmas board nor your ears, ma'am, nor my own lips by repeating.
He paused. Mr Dedalus, lifting his head from the bone, asked:
— And what did you do, John?
— Do ! said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of to- bacco juice. I bent down to her and Phth! says I to her like that.
He turned aside and made the act of spitting.
— Phth ! says I to her like that, right into her eye. He clapped a hand to his eye and gave a hoarse scream
of pain.
[37]
— O Jesus, Mary and Joseph! says she. I'm ilinded! I'm blinded and drownded!
He stopped in a fit of coughing and laughter, re- peating :
— Pm blinded entirely.
Mr Dedalus laughed loudly and lay back in his chair while Uncle Charles swayed his head to and fro.
Dante looked terribly angry and repeated while they laughed :
— Very nice ! Ha ! Very nice !
It was not nice about the spit in the woman's eye.
But what was the name the woman had called Kitty O'Shea that Mr Casey would not repeat? He thought of Mr Casey walking through the crowds of people and making speeches from a wagonette. That was what he had been in prison for and he remembered that one night Sergeant O'Neill had come to the house and had stood in the hall, talking in a low voice with his father and chewing nervously at the chinstrap of his cap. And that night Mr Casey had not gone to Dublin by train but a car had come to the door and he had heard his father say something about the Cabinteely road.
He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father : and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God save the Queen at the end.
Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.
— Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and al- ways will be till the end of the chapter.
Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:
[38]
— A bad business ! A bad business ! Mr Dedalus repeated :
— A priestridden Godforsaken race !
He pointed to the portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his tight.
— Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahog- any.
Dante broke in angrily:
— If we are a priestridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God's eye. Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of My eye.
— And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us ?
— A traitor to his country ! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.
— Were they, faith? said Mr Casey.
He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protrudeji one finger after another.
— Didn't the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn't the bish- ops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn't they denounce the f enian movement from the pulpit and in the confession box? And didn't they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus ?
[39];
His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.
— 0, by God — he cried — I forgot little old Paul Cullen ! Another apple of God 's eye !
Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey :
— Eight ! Eight ! They were always right ! God and morality and religion come first.
Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her :
— Mrs Eiordan, don't excite yourself answering them.
— God and religion before everything ! Dante cried. God and religion before the world !
Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.
— Very well, then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland !
— John ! John ! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve.
Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.
— No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God !
— Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.
Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides rea- sonably. He stared before him out of his ^ark flaming eyes, repeating:
— Away with God, I say !
Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along
[40]
the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy- chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her to- wards the door. At the door Dante turned round vio- lently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage :
— Devil out of hell ! We won ! We crushed him to death ! Fiend !
The door slammed behind her.
Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.
— Poor Parnell ! he cried loudly. My dead king ! He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father's eyes were full of tears.
The fellows talked together in little groups. One fellow said :
— They were caught near the Hill of Lyons.
— Who caught them ?
— Mr Gleeson and the minister. They were on a car. The same fellow added :
— A fellow in the higher line told me. Fleming asked:
— But why did they run away, tell us ?
— I know why, Cecil Thunder said. Because they had fecked cash out of the rector's room.
— Who fecked it?
— Kickham's brother. And they all went shares in it. But that was stealing. How could they have done
that?
— A fat lot you know about it, Thunder ! Wells said. I know why they scut.
[41]
— Tell us why.
— I was told not to, Wells said.
— 0, go on, Wells, all said. You might tell us. We won't let it out.
Stephen bent forward his head to hear. Wells looked round to see if anyone was coming. Then he said se- cretly :
— You know the altar wine they keep in the press in the sacristy?
— Yes.
— Well, they drank that and it was. found out who did it by the smell. And that's why they ran away, if you want to know.
And the fellow who had spoken first said :
— Yes, that's what I heard too from the fellow in the higher line.
The fellows were all silent. Stephen stood among them, afraid to speak, listening. A faint sickness of awe made him feel weak. How could they have done that? He thought of the dark silent sacristy. There were dark wooden presses there where the crimped sur- plices lay quietly folded. It was not the chapel but still you had to speak under your breath. It was a holy place. He remembered the summer evening he had been there to be dressed as boat-bearer, the evening of the procession to the little altar in the wood. A strange and holy place. The boy that held the censer had swung it gently to and fro near the door with the silvery cap lifted by the middle chain to keep the coals lighting. That was called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour smell. And then when all were vested he had stood holding out the boat to the rector and the rector had
[42]
put a spoonful of incense in and it had hissed on the red coals.
The fellows were talking together in little groups here and there on the playground. The fellows seemed to him to have grown smaller : that was because a sprinter had knocked him down the day before, a fellow out of second of grammar. He had been thrown by the fel- low ^s machine lightly on the cinderpath and his spec- tacles had been broken in three pieces and some of the grit of the cinders had gone into his mouth.
That was why the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away and the goalposts so thin and far and the soft grey sky so high up. But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming: and some said that Barnes would be the prof and some said it would be Flowers. And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air. They said : pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.
Athy, who had been silent, said quietly :
— You are all wrong.
All turned towards him eagerly.
— Why?
— Do you know ?
— Who told you?
— Tell us, Athy.
Athy pointed across the playground to where Simon Moonan was walking by himself kicking a stone before him.
— Ask him, he said.
The fellows looked there and then said : [43]
— Why him ?
— Is he in it ?
Athy lowered his voice and said:
— Do you know why those fellows scut? I will tell you but you must not let on you know.
— Tell us, Athy. Go on. You might if you know. He paused for a moment and then said mysteriously:
— They were caught with Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle in the square one night.
The fellows looked at him and asked :
— Caught?
— What doing? Athy said:
— Smugging.
All the fellows were silent : and Athy said :
— And that's why?
Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the playground. He wanted to ask somebody about it. What did that mean about the smugging in the square ? Why did the five fellows out of the higher line run away for that ? It was a joke, he thought. Simon Moonan had nice clothes and one night he had shown him a ball of creamy sweets that the fel- lows of the football fifteen had rolled down to him along the carpet in the middle of the refectory when he was at the door. It was the night of the match against the Bective Rangers and the ball was made just like a red and green apple only it opened and it was full of the creamy sweets. And one day Boyle had said that an elephant had two tuskers instead of two tusks and that was why he was called Tusker Boyle but some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at his nails, paring them.
[44]
Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. They were like ivory ; only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold, By thinking of things you could understand them.
But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. It was all thick slabs of slate and water trickled all day out of tiny pinholes and there was a queer smell of stale water there. And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing :
Balhus was 'building a wall.
Some fellows had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard. And on the wall of another closet there was written in back- hand in beautiful writing:
Julius Caesar wrote The Calico Belly,
Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod. But all the same it was queer what Athy said and the way he said it. It was not a cod because they had run away.
[45]
He looked with the others across the playground and began to feel afraid. At last Fleming said :
— And we are all to be punished for what other fel- lows did?
— I won't come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said. Three days' silence in the refectory and sending us up for six and eight every minute.
— Yes, said Wells. And old Barrett has a new way of twisting the note so that you can't open it and fold it again to see how many ferulae you are to get. I won't come back too.
— Yes, said Cecil Thunder, and the prefect of studies was in second of grammar this morning.
— Let us get up a rebellion, Fleming said. Will we ? All the fellows were silent. The air was very silent
and you could hear the cricket bats but more slowly than before : pick, pock. Wells asked:
— What is going to be done to them?
— Simon Moonan and Tusker are going to be flogged, Athy said, and the fellows in the higher line got their choice of flogging or being expelled.
— And which are they taking? asked the fellow who had spoken first.
— All are taking expulsion except Corrigan, Athy an- swered. He's going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson.
— I know why, Cecil Thunder said. He is right and the other fellows are wrong because a flogging wears off after a bit but a fellow that has been expelled from col- lege is known all his life on account of it. Besides Gleeson won't flog him hard.
— It's best of his play not to, Fleming said.
[46]
— I wouldn't like to be Simon Moonan and Tusker, Cecil Thunder said. But I don't believe they will be flogged. Perhaps they will be sent up for twice nine.
— No, no, said Athy. They'll both get it on the vital spot.
Wells rubbed himself and said in a crying voice :
— Please, sir, let me off !
Athy grinned and turned up the sleeves of his jacket, saying :
It can't be helped;
It must be done.
So down with your breeches
And out with your bum.
The fellows laughed ; but he felt that they were a little afraid. In the silence of the soft grey air he heard the cricket bats from here and from there : pock. That was a sound to hear but if you were hit then you would feel a pain. The pandybat made a sound too but not like that. The fellows said it was made of whalebone and leather with lead inside : and he wondered what was the pain like. There were different kinds of sounds. A long thin cane would have a high whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain like. It made him shivery to think of it and cold: and what Athy said too. But what was there to laugh at in it ? It made him shivery : but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers. It was the same in the bath when you undressed yourself. He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself. 0 how could they laugh about it that way?
He looked at Athy 's roUed-up sleeves and knuckly inky hands. He had rolled up his sleeves to show how Mr
[47]
Gleeson would roll up his sleeves. But Mr Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he pared them too like Lady Boyle. But they were terribly long and pointed nails. So long and cruel they were though the white fattish hands were not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. And he thought of what Cecil Thunder had said; that Mr Gleeson would not flog Corrigan hard. And Fleming had said he would not because it was best of his play not to. But that was not why. A voice from far out on the playground cried :
— All in!
And other voices cried :
— All in! All in!
During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford went to and fro making little signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him how to hold his pen. He had tried to spell out the headline for himself though he knew already what it was for it was the last of the book. Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift. But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital.
But Mr Harford was very decent and never got into a wax. All the other masters got into dreadful waxes.
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But why were they to suffer for what fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with it and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the press and be found out by the smell was a sin too: but it was not terrible and strange. It only made you feel a little sickish on account of the smell of the wine. Because on the day when he had made his first holy communion in the chapel he had shut his eyes and opened his mouth and put out his tongue a little: and when the rector had stooped down to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector's breath after the wine of the mass. The word was beautiful: wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples. But the faint smell off the rector's breath had made him feel a sick feeling on the morning of his first communion. The day of your first communion was the happiest day of your life. And once a lot of generals had asked Napo-
[49]
leon what was the happiest day of his life. They thought he would say the day he won some great battle or the day he was made an emperor. But he said :
— Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first holy communion.
Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still leaning on the desk with his arms folded. Father Arnall gave out the theme-books and he said that they were scandalous and that they were all to be written out again with the corrections at once. But the worst of all was Fleming's theme because the pages were stuck together by a blot : and Father Arnall held it up by a corner and said it was an insult to any master to send him up such a theme. Then he asked Jack Lawton to decline the noun mare and Jack Lawton stopped at the ablative singular and could not go on with the plural.
— You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. You, the leader of the class !
Then he asked the next boy and the next and the next. Nobody knew. Father Arnall became very quiet, more and more quiet as each boy tried to answer it and could not. But his face was black looking and his eyes were staring though his voice was so quiet. Then he asked Fleming and Fleming said that that word had no plural. Father Arnall suddenly shut the book and shouted at him:
— Kneel out there in the middle of the class. You are one of the idlest boys I ever met. Copy out your themes again the rest of you.
Fleming moved heavily out of his place and knelt be- tween the two last benches. The other boys bent over their theme-books and began to write. A silence filled
[50]
the classroom and Stephen, glancing timidly at Father Arnairs dark face, saw that it was a little red from the wax he was in.
Was that a sin for Father Arnall to be in a wax or was he allowed to get into a wax when the boys were idle because that made them study better or was he only letting on to be in a wax? It was because he was al- lowed because a priest would know what a sin was and would not do it. But if he did it one time by mistake what would he do to go to confession? Perhaps he would go to confession to the minister. And if the min- ister did it he would go to the rector : and the rector to the provincial : and the provincial to the general of the Jesuits. That was called the order : and he had heard his father say that they were all clever men. They could all have become high-up people in the world if they had not become Jesuits. And he wondered what Father Arnall and Paddy Barrett would have become and what Mr McGlade and Mr Gleeson would have become if they had not become Jesuits. It was hard to think what be- cause you would have to think of them in a different way with different coloured coats and trousers and with beards and moustaches and different kinds of hats.
The door opened quietly and closed. A quick whisper ran through the class : the prefect of studies. There was an instant of dead silence and then the loud crack of a pandybat on the last desk. Stephen's heart leapt up in fear.
— Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall ? cried the prefect of studies. Any lazy idle loafers that want flogging in this class?
He came to the middle of the class and saw Fleming on his knees.
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— Hoho ! he cried. Who is this boy ? Why is he on his knees ? What is your name, boy ?
— Fleming, sir.
— Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. I can see it in your eye. Why is he on his knees, Father Ar- nall?
— He wrote a bad Latin theme. Father Arnall said, and he missed all the questions in grammar.
— Of course he did! cried the prefect of studies, of course he did ! A bom idler ! I can see it in the corner of his eye.
He banged his pandybat down on the desk and cried :
— Up, Fleming ! Up, my boy ! Fleming stood up slowly.
— Hold out ! cried the prefect of studies.
Fleming held out his hand. The pandybat came down on it with a loud smacking sound : one, two, three, four, five, six.
— Other hand !
The pandybat came down again in six loud quick smacks.
— Kneel down! cried the prefect of studies. Fleming knelt down squeezing his hands under his
armpits, his face contorted with pain, but Stephen knew how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great pain for the noise of the pandybat was terrible. Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.
— At your work, all of you! shouted the prefect of studies. We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers. At your work, I tell you. Father Dolan will be in to see you eYery day, Father Dolan livill be in tomorrow.
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He poked one of the boys in the side with the pandy- bat, saying :
— You, boy ! When will Father Dolan be in again ?
— Tomorrow, sir, said Tom Furlong's voice.
— Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, said the prefect of studies. Make up your minds for that. Every day Father Dolan. Write away. You, boy, who are you?
Stephen's heart jumped suddenly.
— Dedalus, sir.
— Why are you not writing like the others? — I . . . my ...
He could not speak with fright.
— Why is he not writing, Father Arnall ?
— He broke his glasses, said Father Arnall, and I exempted him from work.
— Broke? What is this I hear? What is this? Your name is? said the prefect of studies.
— ^ Dedalus, sir.
— Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses ?
Stephen stumbled into the middle of the class, blinded by fear and haste.
— Where did you break your glasses? repeated the prefect of studies.
— The cinderpath, sir.
— Hoho! The cinderpath! cried the prefect of studies. I know that trick.
Stephen lifted his eyes in wonder and saw for a mo- ment Father Dolan 's whitegrey not young face, his baldy whitegrey head with fluff at the sides of it, the steel rims of his spectacles and his uo-coloured eyes look-
[53]
ing through the glasses. Why did he say he knew that trick?
— Lazy idle little loafer ! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment !
Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry that scalded his throat.
— Other hand ! shouted the prefect of studies. Stephen drew back his maimed and quivering right
arm and held out his left hand. The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together with the palms and fingers in a livid quivering mass. The scalding water burst forth from his eyes and, burning with shame and agony and fear, he drew back his shaking arm in terror and burst out into a whine of pain. His body shook with a palsy of fright and in shame and rage he felt the scalding cry come from his throat and the scalding tears falling out of his eyes and down his flaming cheeks.
[54]
— Kneel down ! cried the prefect of studies. Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands
to his sides. To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else's that he felt sorry for. And as he knelt, calming the last sobs in his throat and feeling the burning tingling pain pressed in to his sides, he thought of the hands which he had held out in the air with the palms up and of the firm touch of the prefect of studies when he had steadied the shaking fingers and of the beaten swollen reddened mass of palm and fingers that shook helplessly in the air.
— Get at your work, all of you, cried the prefect of studies from the door. Father Dolan will be in every day to see if any boy, any lazy idle little loafer wants flogging. Every day. Every day.
The door closed behind him.
The hushed class continued to copy out the themes. Father Arnall rose from his seat and went among them, helping the boys with gentle words and telling them the mistakes they had made. His voice was very gentle and soft. Then he returned to his seat and said to Fleming and Stephen:
— You may return to your places, you two. Fleming and Stephen rose and, walking to their seats,
sat down. Stephen, scarlet with shame, opened a book quickly with one weak hand and bent down upon it, his face close to the page.
It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home to his father that morning to send him a new pair. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study till the new glasses came. Then to be called a schemer before
[55]
the class and to be pandied when he always got the card for first or second and was the leader of the Yorkists! How could the prefect of studies know that it was a trick? He felt the touch of the prefect's fingers as they had steadied his hand and at first he had thought he was going to shake hands with him because the fingers were soft and firm : but then in an instant he had heard the swish of the soutane sleeve and the crash. It was cruel and unfair to make liim kneel in the middle of the class then: and Father Arnall had told them both that they might return to their places without making any difference between them. He listened to Father Arnall's low and gentle voice as he corrected the themes. Per- haps he was sorry now and wanted to be decent. But it was unfair and cruel. The prefect of studies was a priest but that was cruel and unfair. And his white- grey face and the no-coloured eyes behind the steel rimmed spectacles were cruel looking because he had steadied the hand first with his firm soft fingers and that was to hit it better and louder.
— It's a stinking mean thing, that's what it is, said Fleming in the corridor as the classes were passing out in file to the refectory, to pandy a fellow for what is not his fault.
— You really broke your glasses by accident, didn't you? Nasty Eoche asked.
Stephen felt his heart filled by Fleming's words and did not answer.
— Of course he did! said Fleming. I wouldn't stand it. I'd go up and tell the rector on him.
— Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandybat over his shoulder and he's not allowed to do that,
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— Did they hurt much ? Nasty Roche asked.
— Very much, Stephen said.
— I wouldn't stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldy- head or any other Baldyhead. It's a stinking mean low trick, that's what it is. I'd go straight up to the rector and tell him about it after dinner.
— Yes, do. Yes, do, said Cecil Thunder.
— Yes, do. Yes, go up and tell the rector on him, Dedalus, said Nasty Roche, because he said that he'd come in tomorrow again and pandy you.
— Yes, yes. Tell the rector, all said.
And there were some fellows out of second of gram- mar listening and one of them said :
— The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished.
It was wrong ; it was unfair and cruel : and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair.
He could not eat the blackish fish fritters they got on Wednesdays in Lent and one of his potatoes had the mark of the spade in it. Yes, he would do what the fellows had told him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in the books of his- tory. And the rector would declare that he had been wrongly punished because the senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been wrongly punished. Those were the great men
[57]
whose names were in Riehmal Magnall's Questions. History was all about those men and what they did and that was what Peter Parley's Tales about Greece and Eome were all about. Peter Parley himself was on the first page in a picture. There was a road over a heath with grass at the side and little bushes : and Peter Parley had a broad hat like a protestant minister and a big stick and he was walking fast along the road to Greece and Rome.
It was easy what he had to do. All he had to do was when the dinner was over and he came out in his turn to go on walking but not out to the corridor but up the staircase on the right that led to the castle. He had nothing to do but that; to turn to the right and walk fast up the staircase and in half a minute he would be in the low dark narrow corridor that led through the castle to the rector's room. And every fellow had said that it was unfair, even the fellow out of second of grammar who had said that about the senate and the Roman people.
What would happen? He heard the fellows of the higher line stand up at the top of the refectory and heard their steps as they came down the matting : Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard and the Portuguese and the fifth was big Corrigan who was going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson. That was why the prefect of studies had called him a schemer and pandied him for nothing: and, straining his weak eyes, tired with the tears, he watched big Corrigan 's broad shoulders and big hanging black head passing in the file. But he had done something and besides Mr Gleeson would not flog him hard : and he remembered how big Corrigan looked in the bath. He had skin the same colour as the turf-
[58]
coloured bogwater in the shallow end of the bath and when he walked along the side his feet slapped loudly on the wet tiles and at every step his thighs shook a little because he was fat.
The refectory was half empty and the fellows were still passing out in file. He could go up the staircase because there was never a priest or a prefect outside the refectory door. But he could not go. The rector would side with the prefect of studies and think it was a schoolboy trick and then the prefect of studies would come in every day the same, only it would be worse be- cause he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to the rector about him. The fellows had told him to go but they would not go themselves. They had forgotten all about it. No, it was best to forget all about it and perhaps the prefect of studies had only said he would come in. No, it was best to hide out of the way because when you were small and young you could often escape that way.
The fellows at his table stood up. He stood up and passed out among them in the file. He had to decide. He was coming near the door. If he went on with the fellows he could never go up to the rector because he could not leave the playground for that. And if he went and was pandied all the same all the fellows would make fun and talk about young Dedalus going up to the rector to tell on the prefect of studies.
He was walking down along the matting and he saw the door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with the cruel no-coloured eyes looking at him and he heard the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what his name was. Why could he not remember
[59]
the name when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the first time or was it to make fun out of the name? The great men in the history had names like that and nobody made fun of them. It was his own name that he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan : it was like the name of a woman who washed clothes.
He had reached the door and, turning quickly up to the right, walked up the stairs; and, before he could make up his mind to come back, he had entered the low dark narrow corridor that led to the castle. And as he crossed the threshold of the door of the corridor he saw, without turning his head to look, that all the fellows were looking after him as they went filing by.
He passed along the narrow dark corridor, passing little doors that were the doors of the rooms of the com- munity. He peered in front of him and right and left through the gloom and thought that those must be portraits. It was dark and silent and his eyes were weak and tired with tears so that he could not see. But he thought they were the portraits of the saints and great men of the order who were looking down on him silently as he passed : Saint Ignatius Loyola holding an open book and pointing to the words Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam in it, saint Francis Xavier pointing to his chest, Lorenzo Ricci with his berretta on his head like one of the prefects of the lines, the three patrons of holy youth, saint Stanislaus Kostka, saint Aloysius Gonzaga and Blessed John Berchmans, all with young faces because they died when they were young, and Father Peter Kenny sitting in a chair wrapped in a big cloak.'
He came out on the landing above the entrance hall and looked about him. That was where Hamilton
[60]
Kowan had passed and the marks of the soldiers' slugs were there. And it was there that the old servants had seen the ghost in the white cloak of a marshal.
An old servant was sweeping at the end of the land- ing. He asked him where was the rector's room and the old servant pointed to the door at the far end and looked after him as he went on to it and knocked.
There was no answer. He knocked again more loudly and his heart jumped when he heard a muffled voice say :
— Come in !
He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He found it and pushed it open and went in.
He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the room like the old leather of chairs.
His heart was beating fast on account of the solemn place he was in and the silence of the room: and he looked at the skull and at the rector's kind-looking face.
— Well, my little man, said the rector, what is it? Stephen swallowed down the thing in his throat and
said :
— I broke my glasses, sir.
The rector opened his mouth and said :
— 0!
Then he smiled and said:
— Well, if we broke our glasses we must write home for a new pair.
— I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Amall said I am not to study till they come.
— Quite right ! said the rector.
Stephen swallowed down the thing again and tried to keep his legs and his voice from shaking.
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— But, sir . . .
— Yes?
— Father Dolan came in today and pandied me be- cause I was not writing my theme.
The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to his eyes.
The rector said :
— Your name is Dedalus, isn't it?
— Yes, sir.
— And where did you break your glasses?
— On the cinderpath, sir. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got broken. I don't know the fellow's name.
The rector looked at him again in silence. Then he smiled and said :
— 0, well, it was e mistake, I am sure Father Dolan did not know.
— But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me.
— • Did you tell him that you had written home for a new pair ? the rector asked.
— No, sir.
— 0 well then, said the rector. Father Dolan did not understand. You can say that I excuse you from your lessons for a few days.
Stephen said quickly for fear his trembling would prevent him :
— Yes, sir, but Father Dolan said he will come in to- morrow to pandy me again for it.
— Very well, the rector said, it is a mistake and I shall speak to Father Dolan myself. Will that do now?
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Stephen felt the tears wetting his eyes and mur- mured :
— 0 yes sir, thanks.
The rector held his hand across the side of the desk where the skull was and Stephen, placing his hand in it for a moment, felt a cool moist palm.
— Good day now, said the rector, withdrawing his hand and bowing.
— Good day, sir, said Stephen.
He bowed and walked quietly out of the room, closing the doors carefully and slowly.
But when he had passed the old servant on the land- ing and was again in the low narrow dark corridor he began to walk faster and faster. Faster and faster he hurried on through the gloom excitedly. He bumped his elbow against the door at the end and, hurrying down the staircase, walked quickly through the two corridors and out into the air.
He could hear the cries of the fellows on the play- grounds. He broke into a run and, running quicker and quicker, ran across the cinderpath and reached the third line playground, panting.
The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear.
— Tell us! Tell us!
— What did he say?
— Did you go in ?
— What did he say ?
— Tell us ! Tell us !
He told them what he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung their caps spinning up into the air and cried :
— Hurroo !
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They caught their caps and sent them up again spin- ning skyhigh and cried again :
— Hurroo ! Hurroo !
They made a cradle of their locked hands and hoisted him up among them and carried him along till he struggled to get free. And when he had escaped from them they broke away in all directions, flinging their caps again into the air and whistling as they went spin- ning up and crying:
— Hurroo !
And they gave three groans for Baldyhead Dolan and three cheers for Conmee and they said he was the de- centest rector that was ever in Clongowes.
The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient : and he wished that he could do some- thing kind for him to show him that he was not proud.
The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out for a walk to Major Barton's, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts were.
The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats : pick, pack, pock, puck : like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.
[64]
CHAPTER II
Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse at the end of the garden.
— Very good, Simon. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly. Anywhere you like. The outhouse will do me nicely: it will be more salubrious.
— Damn me, said Mr Dedalus frankly, if I know how you can smoke such villainous awful tobacco. It's like gunpowder, by God.
— It's very nice, Simon, replied the old man. Very cool and mollifying.
Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had creased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat. While he smoked the brim of his tall hat and the bowl of his pipe were just visible beyond the jambs of the outhouse door. His arbour, as he called the reek- ing outhouse which he shared with the cat and the garden tools, served him also as a soundingbox : and every morn- ing he hummed contentedly one of his favourite songs: O, twine me a hower or Blue eyes and golden hair or The Groves of Blarney while the grey and blue coils of smoke rose slowly from his pipe and vanished in the pure air.
During the first part of the summer in Blackrock uncle Charles was Stephen's constant companion. Uncle
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Charles was a hale old man with a well tanned skin, rugged features and white side whiskers. On week days he did messages between the house in Carysfort Avenue and those shops in the main street of the town with which the family dealt. Stephen was glad to go with him on these errands for uncle Charles helped him very liber- ally to handfuls of whatever was exposed in open boxes and barrels outside the counter. He would seize a hand- ful of grapes and sawdust or three or four American apples and thrust them generously into his grand- nephew 's hand while the shopman smiled uneasily ; and, on Stephen's feigning reluctance to take them, he would frown and say:
— Take them, sir. Do you hear me, sir? They're good for your bowels.
When the order list had been booked the two would go on to the park where an old friend of Stephen's father, Mike Flynn, would be found seated on a, bench, waiting for them. Then would begin Stephen's run round the park. Mike Flynn would stand at the gate near the railway station, watch in hand, while Stephen ran round the track in the style Mike Flynn favoured, his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and his hands held straight down by his sides. When the morning practice was over the trainer would make his comments and sometimes illustrate them by shuffling along for a yard or so comically in an old pair of blue canvas shoes. A small ring of wonderstruck children and nursemaids would gather to watch him and linger even when he and uncle Charles had sat down again and were talking athletics and politics. Though he had heard his father say that Mike Flynn had put some of the best runners of modern times through his hands Stephen often glanced
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at his trainer's flabby stubble-covered face, as it bent over the long stained fingers through which he rolled his cigarette, and with pity at the mild lustreless blue eyes which would look up suddenly from the task and gaze vaguely into the blue distance while the long swollen fingers ceased their rolling and grains and fibres of tobacco fell back into the pouch.
On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel and, as the font was above Stephen's reach, the old man would dip his hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen's clothes and on the floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumb blackened prayer-book wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page. Stephen knelt at his side respecting, though he did not share, his piety. He often wondered what his granduncle prayed for so seriously. Perhaps he prayed for the souls in purgatory or for the grace of a happy death or perhaps he prayed that God might send him back a part of the big fortune he had squandered in Cork.
On Sundays Stephen with his father and his grand- Uncle took their constitutional. The old man was a nimble walker in spite of his corns and often ten or twelve miles of the road were covered. The little village of Stillorgan was the parting of the ways. Either they went to the left towards the Dublin mountains or along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum, coming home by Sandyford. Trudging along the road or stand- ing in some grimy wayside public house his elders spoke constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear. Words
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which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended-
His evenings were his own ; and he pored over a ragged translation of The Cauni of Monte Cristo. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for what- ever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible. At night he built up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseilles, of simny trellises and of Mercedes.
Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the moun- tains, stood a small whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes : and in this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this landmark : and in his imagination he lived through a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder, standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying :
— Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.
He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a gang of adventurers in the avenue.
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Aubrey carried a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs. Stephen, who had read of Napoleon's plain style of dress, chose to remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his lieu- tenant before gi\^g orders. The gang made forays in- to the gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on the shaggy weedgrown rocks, coming home after it weary stragglers with the stale odours of the foreshore in their nostrils and the rank oils of the seawrack upon their hands and in their hair.
Aubrey and Stephen had a common milkman and often they drove out in the milkcar to Carrickmines where the cows were at grass. While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare round the field. But when autumn came the cows were driven home from the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowj-ard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs sickened Stephen's heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded.
The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk: and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cow-
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yard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman's coat. Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she. would close the door. He thought it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every even- ing to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mis- trust at his trainer's flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clon- gowes. For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering along the tram- track on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.
He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made
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him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsub- stantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by dark- ness and silence : and in that moment of supreme tender- ness he would be transfigured. He would fade into some- thing impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.
Two great yellow caravans had halted one morning before the door and men had come tramping into the house to dismantle it. The furniture had been hustled out through the front garden which was strewn with wisps of straw and rope ends and into the huge vans at the gate. When all had been safely stowed the vans had set off noisily down the avenue : and from the window of the railway carriage, in which he had sat with his red eyed mother, Stephen had seen them lumbering along the Merrion Eoad.
The parlour fire would not draw that evening and Mr Dedalus rested the poker against the bars of the grate to attract the flame. Uncle Charles dozed in a corner of the half furnished uncarpeted room and near him the family portraits leaned against the wall. The lamp on the table shed a weak light over the boarded floor, mud-
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died by the feet of the vanmen. Stephen sat on a foot- stool beside his father listening to a long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware, that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place. He felt, too, that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his shoulders. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery of Blackrock, the pas- sage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare cheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy : and again an intuition, a foreknowledge of the future came to him. He understood also why the servants had often whispered together in the hall and why his father had often stood on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, talking loudly to uncle Charles who urged him to sit down and eat his dinner.
— There's a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with fierce energy. "We're not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) nor half dead.
Dublin was a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands and the disorder in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in Blackrock. In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down one of the side streets: but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the Custom House. He passed unchallenged among the docks and along the quays wondering at the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the surface of the water in a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay
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porters and the rumbling carts and the ill dressed bearded policeman. The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had ^ent him wandering in the evening from garden to gar- den in search of Mercedes. And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied himself in another Marseilles but that he missed the bright sky and the sun-warmed trellisses of the wineshops. A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies and yet he continued to wander up and down day after day as if he really sought someone that eluded him.
He went once or twice with his mother to visit their relatives : and though they passed a jovial array of shops lit up and adorned for Christmas his mood of embittered silence did not leave him. The causes of his embitter- ment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, de- taching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret.
He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt's kitchen. A lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees. She looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said musingly :
— The beautiful Mabel Hunter ! [73]
A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly :
— What is she in, mud ?
— In a pantomime, love.
The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother's sleeve, gazing on the picture and murmured as if fascinated :
— The beautiful Mabel Hunter !
As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those de- murely taunting eyes and she murmured devotedly:
— Isn't she an exquisite creature?
And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words. He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see.
He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old dark windowed house. The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river. Before the fire an old woman was busy making tea and, as she bustled at the task, she told in a low voice of what the priest and the doctor had said. She told too of certain changes they had seen in her of late and of her odd ways and sayings. He sat listening to the words and following the ways of ad- venture that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults and winding galleries and jagged caverns.
Suddenly he became aware of something in the door- way. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. A feeble creature like a monkey was there, drawn there by the sound of voices at the fire. A whin- ing voice came from the door asking :
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— Is that Josephine ?
The old bustling woman answered cheerily from the fireplace :
— No, Ellen, it's Stephen.
— 0 ... 0, good evening, Stephen.
He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in the doorway.
— Do you want anything, Ellen ? asked the old woman at the fire.
But she did not answer the question and said,
— I thought it was Josephine. I thought you wei'e Josephine, Stephen.
And, repeating this several times, she fell to laughing feebly.
He was sitting in the midst of a children's party at Harold's Cross. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.
But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the* room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like a soothing air to him-, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flatter- ing, taunting, searching, exciting his heart.
In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their things: the party was over. She had thrown a shawl about her and, as they went together
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towards the tram, sprays of her fresh warm breath flew gaily above her cowled head and her shoes tapped blithely on the glassy road.
It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.
They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from be- neath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his han^. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the Hotel Grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him.
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— She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That's why she came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my step : nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.
But he did neither : and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard.
The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the initial letters of the Jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he
was trying to write : To E C . He knew it was
right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. "When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into a day dream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at the Christ- mas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of one of his father's second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates:
Eoderick Kickham John Lawton ' Anthony MacSwiney Simon Moonan
Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the incident, he thought himself into con-
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fidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some un- defined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protago- nists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the letters L. D. S. were written at the foot of the page and, having hidden the book, he went into his mother's bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing table.
But his long spell of leisure and liberty was drawing to its end. One evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy all through dinner. Stephen had been awaiting his father's return for there had been mutton hash that day and he knew that his father would make him dip his bread in the gravy. But he did not relish the hash for the mention of Clongowes had coated his palate with a scum of disgust.
— I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth cime, just at the corner of the square.
— Then I suppose, said Mrs Dedalus, he will be able to arrange it. I mean about Belvedere.
— Of course, he will, said Mr Dedalus. Don't I tell you he 's provincial of the order now ?
— I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers myself, said Mrs Dedalus.
— Christian brothers be damned! said Mr Dedalus. Is it with Paddy Stink and Mickey Mud ? No, let him stick to the Jesuits in God's name since he began with
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them. They 11 be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position.
— And they're a very rich order, aren't they, Simon?
— Bather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes. Fed up, by God, like game- cocks.
Mr Dedalus pushed his plate over to Stephen and bade him finish what was on it.
— Now then, Stephen, he said, you must put your shoulder to the wheel, old chap. YouVe had a fine long holiday.
— 0, I'm sure hell work very hard now, said Mrs Dedalus, especially when he has Maurice with him.
— 0, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus. Here, Maurice ! Come here, you thick-headed ruffian ! Do you know I 'm going to send you to a college where they 11 teach you to spell c.a.t. cat. And 111 buy you a nice little penny handkerchief to keep your nose dry. Won't that be grand fun?
Maurice grinned at his father and then at his brother. Mr Dedalus screwed his glass into his eye and stared hard at both of his sons. Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his father's gaze.
— By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector or provincial rather, was telling me that story about you and Father Dolan. You're an impudent thief, he said.
— -0, he didn't, Simon!
— Not he ! said Mr Dedalus. But he gave me a great account of the whole affair. We were chatting, you know, and one word borrowed another. And, by the way, who do you think he told me will get that job in the corporation? But I'll tell you that after. Well, as I was saying, we were chatting away quite friendly and
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he asked me did our friend here wear glasses still and then he told me the whole story.
— And was he annoyed, Simon ?
— Annoyed! Not he! Manly little chap! he said. Mr Dedalus imitated the mincing nasal tone of the
provincial.
— Father Dolan and I, when- 1 told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. You better mind yourself , Father Dolan, said I, or young Dedalus will send you up for twice nine. We had a famous laugh together over it. Ha ! Ha ! Ha !
Mr Dedalus turned to his wife and interjected in his natural voice :
— Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. 0, a Jesuit for your life, for diplomacy !
He reassumed the provincial's voice and repeated:
— I told them all at dinner about it and Father Dolan and I and all of us we all had a hearty laugh together over it. Ha I Ha ! Ha !
The night of the Whitsuntide play had come and Stephen from the window of the dressing room looked out on the small grassplot across which lines of Chinese lanterns were stretched. He watched the visitors come down the steps from the house and pass into the theatre. Stewards in evening dress, old Belvedereans, loitered in groups about the entrance to the theatre and ushered in the visitors with ceremony. Under the sudden glow of a lantern he could recognise the smiling face of a priest.
The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the tabernacle and the first benches had been driven back so as to leave the dais of the altar and the space before it free. Against the walls stood companies of barbells and Indian clubs ; the dumb bells were piled in one cor-
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ner : and in the midst of countless hillocks of gymnasium shoes and sweaters and singlets in untidy brown parcels there stood the stout leather jacketed vaulting horse wait- ing its turn to be carried up on the stage and set in the middle of the winning team at the end of the gymnastic display.
Stephen, though in deference to his reputation for essay writing he had been elected secretary to the gym- nasium, had had no part in the first section of the programme, but in the play which formed the second section he had the chief part, that of a farcical pedagogue. He had been cast for it on account of his stature and grave manners for he was now at the end of his second year at Belvedere and in number two.
A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came pattering down from the stage, through the vestry and into the chapel. The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The plump bald sergeant major was testing with his foot the spring- board of the vaulting horse. The lean young man in a long overcoat, who was to give a special display of in- tricate club swinging, stood near watching with interest, his silver coated clubs peeping out of his deep sidepockets. The hollow rattle of the wooden dumb bells was heard as another team made ready to go up on the stage : and in another moment the excited prefect was hustling the boys through the vestry like a flock of geese, flapping the wings of his soutane nervously and crying to the lag- gards to make haste. A little troop of Neapolitan peas- ants were practising their steps at the end of the chapel, some circling their arms above their heads, some swaying their baskets of paper violets and curtseying. In a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the altar a stout
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old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts. When she stood up a pink dressed figure, wearing a curly golden wig and an old fashioned straw sunbonnet, with black pencilled eyebrows and cheeks delicately rouged and powdered, was discovered. A low murmur of curiosity ran round the chapel at the discovery of this girlish figure. One of the prefects, smiling and nodding his head, approached the dark corner and, having bowed to the stout old lady, said pleasantly :
— Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs Tallon 1
Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf of the bonnet, he exclaimed :
— No! Upon my word I believe it's little Bertie Tallon after all!
Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest laugh together and heard the boys' mur- murs of admiration behind him as they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the sunbonnet dance by himself. A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.
He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theatre op- posite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A side door of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grassplots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when
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the side door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the open- ing bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumb bell team on the stage.
At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed in the darkness and as he walked to- wards it he became aware of a faint aromatic odour. Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway, smoking, and before he reached them he had recognised Heron by his voice.
— Here comes the noble Dedalus ! cried a high throat}^ voice. Welcome to our trusty friend !
This w^elcome ended in a soft peal of mirthless laughter as Heron salaamed and then began to poke the ground with his cane.
— Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his friend.
The latter was a stranger to him but in the darkness, by the aid of the glowing cigarette tips, he could make out a pale dandyish face, over which a smile was travel- ling slowly, a tall overcoated figure and a hard hat. Heron did not trouble himself about an introduction but said instead :
— I was just telling my friend Wallis what a lark it would be tonight if you took off the rector in the part of the schoolmaster. It would be a ripping good joke,
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Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector's pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do it.
— Go on, Dedalus, he urged, you can take him off rippingly. He that will not hear the churcha let him be to theea as the heathena and the puhlicana.
The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis in whose mouthpiece the cigarette had become too tightly wedged.
— Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and smiling and frowning upon it toler- antly. It's always getting stuck like that. Do you use a holder 1
— I don 't smoke, answered Stephen.
— No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn't smoke and he doesn't go to bazaars and he doesn't flirt and he doesn't damn anything or damn all.
Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival's flushed and mobile face, beaked like a bird's. He had often thought it strange that Vincent Heron had a bird's face as well as a bird's name. A shock of pale hair lay on the forehead like a ruffled crest : the forehead was narrow and bony and a thin hooked nose stood out be- tween the closeset prominent eyes which were light and inexpressive. The rivals were school friends. They sat together in class, knelt together in the chapel, talked to- gether after beads over their lunches. As the fellows in number one were undistinguished dullards Stephen and Heron had been during the year the virtual heads of the school. It was they who went up to the rector to- gether to ask for a free day or to get a fellow off.
— O by the way, said Heron suddenly, I saw your governor going in.
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The smile waned on Stephen's face. Any allusion made to his father by a fellow or by a master put his calm to rout in a moment. He waited in timorous silence to hear what Heron might say next. Heron, however, nudged him expressively with his elbow and said :
— You're a sly dog.
— Why so ? said Stephen. '
— You'd think butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, said Heron. But I'm afraid you're a sly dog.
— Might I ask you what you are talking about ? said Stephen urbanely.
— Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn't we? And deucedly pretty she is too. And inquisitive! And what part does Stephen take, Mr Dedalusf And will Stephen not sing, Mr Dedalus? Your governor was staring at her through that eyeglass of his for all he was worth so that I think the old man has found you out too. I wouldn't care a bit, by Jove. She's ripping, isn't she, Wallis?
— Not half bad, answered Wallis quietly as he placed his holder once more in a corner of his mouth.
A shaft of momentary anger flew through Stephen's mind at these indelicate allusions in the hearing of a stranger. For him there was nothing amusing in a girl 's interest and regard. All day he had thought of nothing but their leavetaking on the steps of the tram at Harold's Cross, the stream of moody emotions it had made to course through him, and the poem he had written about it. All day he had imagined a new meeting with her for he knew that she was to come to the play. The old restless moodiness had again filled his breast as it had done on the night of the party but had not found an out- let in verse. The growth and knowledge of two years
[85]
of boyhood stood between them and now, forbidding such an outlet : and all day the stream of gloomy tenderness within him had started forth and returned upon itself in dark courses and eddies, wearying him in the end until the pleasantry of the prefect and the painted little boy had drawn from him a movement of impatience.
— So you may as well admit, Heron went on, that we've fairly found you out this time. You can't play the saint on ine any more, that's one sure five.
A soft peal of mirthless laughter escaped from his lips and, bending down as before, he struck Stephen lightly across the calf of the leg with his cane, as if in jesting reproof.
Stephen's movement of anger had already passed. He was neither flattered nor confused but simply wished the banter to end. He scarcely resented what had seemed to him a silly indelicateness for he knew that the ad- venture in his mind stood in no danger from these words : and his face mirrored his rival's false smile.
— Admit ! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the calf of the leg.
The stroke was playful but not so lightly given as the first one had been. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost painlessly; and, bowing sub- missively, as if to meet his companion's jesting mood, began to recite the Confiteor. The episode ended well for both Heron and Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence.
The confession came only from Stephen's lips and, while they spoke the words, a sudden memory had carried him to another scene called up, as if by magic, at the moment when he had noted the faint cruel dimples at the corners of Heron's smiling lips and had felt the
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familiar stroke of the cane against his calf and had heard the familiar word of admonition :
— Admit.
It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of reverie to find him- self in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed iii the com- pany of subversive writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.
The essay was for him the chief labour of his week and every Tuesday, as he marched from home to the school, he read his fate in the incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him and quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the pathway and telling himself that he would be first and not first in the weekly essay.
On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly :
— This fellow has heresy in his essay.
A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his hand between his thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about his neck and wrists.
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Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.
A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.
— Perhaps you didn't know that, he said.
— Where? asked Stephen.
Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.
— Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrm . . . rrm . . . rrm. . . . Ah! without a possibility of ever approaching Clearer. That's heresy.
Stephen murmured:
— I meant without a possibility of ever reaching.
It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him, saying :
— O . . . Ah! ever reaching. That's another story.
But the class was not so soon appeased. Though no- body spoke to him of the affair after class he could feel about him a vague general malignant joy.
A few nights after this public chiding he was walking with a letter along the Drumcondra Road when he heard a voice cry:
— Halt!
He turned and saw three boys of his own class coming towards him in the dusk. It was Heron who had called out and, as he marched forward between his two at- tendants, he cleft the air before him with a thin cane, in time to their steps. Boland, his friend, marched be- side him, a large grin on his face, while Nash came on a
[88]
few steps behind, blowing from the pace and wagging his great red head.
As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Koad together they began to speak about books and writers, saying what books they were reading and how many books there were in their fathers' bookcases at home. Stephen listened to them in some wonderment for Boland was the dunce and Nash the idler of the class. In fact after some talk about their favourite writers Nash de- clared for Captain Marryat who, he said, was the greatest writer.
— Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus ?
Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said :
— Of prose do you mean ?
— Yes.
— Newman, I think.
— Is it Cardinal Newman ? asked Boland.
— Yes, answered Stephen.
The grin broadened on Nash's freckled face as he turned to Stephen and said :
— And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus ?
— 0, many say that Newman has the best prose style. Heron said to the other two in explanation; of course he's not a poet.
— And who is the best poet, Heron ? asked Boland.
— Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron.
— O, yes. Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book.
At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out :
— Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!
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— 0, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet.
— And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbour.
— Byron, of course, answered Stephen.
Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.
— What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.
— You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people.
— He must be a fine poet ! said Boland.
— You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turn- ing on him boldly. All you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard and were going to be sent to the loft for.
Boland, in fact, was said to have written on the slates in the yard a couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from, the college on a pony :
As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem He fell and hurt his Alec Kafoozelum,
This thrust put the two lieutenants to silence but Heron went on :
— In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too.
— I don't care what he was, cried Stephen hotly.
— You don't care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.
— What do you know about it ? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans or Boland either.
— I know that Byron was a bad man, said Boland.
— Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out.
[90]
In a moment Stephen was a prisoner.
— Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy in your essay.
— Ill tell him tomorrow, said Boland.
— ^Will you? said Stephen. You'd be afraid to open your lips.
— Afraid?
— Ay. Afraid of your life.
— Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen's legs with his cane.
It was the signal for their onset. Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter. Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence.
— Admit that Byron was no good.
— No.
— Admit.
— No.
— Admit.
— No. No.
At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, half blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists madly and sobbing.
"While he was still repeating the Confiteor amid the indulgent laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All
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the description of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.
He remained standing with his two companions at the end of the shed listening idly to their talk or to the bursts of applause in the theatre. She was sitting there among the others perhaps waiting for him to appear. He tried to recall her appearance but could not. He could re- member only that she had worn a shawl about her head like a cowl and that her dark eyes had invited and un- nerved him. He wondered had he been in her thoughts or she had been in his. Then in the dark and unseen by the other two he rested the tips of the fingers of one hand upon the palm of the other hand, scarcely touching it lightly. But the pressure of her fingers had been lighter and steadier: and suddenly the memory of their touch traversed his brain and body like an invisible wave.
A boy came towards them, running along under the shed. He was excited and breathless.
— 0, Dedalus, he cried, Doyle is in a great bake about you. You're to go in at once and get dressed for the play. Hurry up, you better.
— He's coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he wants to.
The boy turned to Heron and repeated :
— But Doyle is in an awful bake.
— Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes ? answered Heron.
— Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of honour.
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— I wouldn't, said Heron, damn me if I would. That's no way to send for one of the senior boys. In a bake, indeed! I think it's quite enough that you're taking a part in his bally old play.
This spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the tur- bulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. The question of honour here raised was, like all such questions, trivial to him. While his mind had been pur- suing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow sounding in his ears. When the gym- nasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father's fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school-comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollowsounding voices that made him halt ir- resolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.
[93]
In the vestry a plump freshfaeed Jesuit and an elderly man, in shabby blue clothes, were dabbling in a case of paints and chalks. The boys who had been painted walked about or stood still awkwardly, touching their faces in a gingerly fashion with their furtive fingertips. In the middle of the vestry a young Jesuit, who was then on a visit to the college, stood rocking himself rhythmi- cally from the tips of his toes to his heels and back again, his hands thrust well forward into his side pockets. His small head set off with glossy red curls and his newly shaven face agreed well with the spotless decency of his soutane and with his spotless shoes.
As he watched this swaying form and tried to read for himself the legend of the priest's mocking smile there came into Stephen's memory a saying which he had heard from his father before he had been sent to Clongowes, that you could always tell a Jesuit by the style of his clothes. At the same moment he thought he saw a like- ness between his father's mind and that of this smiling welldressed priest : and he was aware of some desecration of the priest's oflSce or of the vestry itself whose silence was now routed by loud talk and joking and its air pungent with the smells of the gasjets and the grease.
While his forehead was being wrinkled and his jaws painted black and blue by the elderly man he listened distractedly to the voice of the plump young Jesuit which bade him speak up and make his points clearly. He could hear the band playing The Lily of Killarney and knew that in a few moments the curtain would go up. He felt no stage fright but the thought of the part he had to play humiliated him. A remembrance of some of his lines made a sudden flush rise to his painted cheeks. He saw her serious alluring eyes watching him
[94]
from among the audience and their image at once swept away his scruples, leaving his will compact. Another nature seemed to have been lent him : the infection of the excitement and youth about him entered into and trans- formed his moody mistrustfulness. For one rare mo- ment he seemed to be clothed in the real apparel of boy- hood : and, as he stood in the wings among the other players, he shared the common mirth amid which the drop scene was hauled upwards by two ablebodied priests with violent jerks and all awry.
A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in a side scene, saw the simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups.
He left the stage quickly and rid himself of his mum- mery and passed out through the chapel into the college garden. Now that the play was over his nerves cried for some further adventure. He hurried onwards as if to overtake it. The doors of the theatre were all open and the audience had emptied out. On the lines which he had fancied the moorings of an ark a few lanterns swung in the night breeze, flickering cheerlessly. He mounted the steps from the garden in haste, eager that some prey should not elude him, and forced his way through the crowd in the hall and past the two Jesuits
[95]
who stood watching the exodus and bowing and shaking hands with the visitors. He pushed onward nervously, feigning a still greater haste and faintly conscious of the smiles and stares and nudges which his powdered head left in its wake.
When he came out on the steps he saw his family waiting for him at the first lamp. In a glance he noted that every figure of the group was familiar and ran down the steps angrily.
— I have to leave a message down in George's Street, he said to his father quickly. I'll be home after you.
Without waiting for his father's questions he ran across the road and began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he was walking. Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.
A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.
— That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought.
It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart.
My heart is quite calm now. I will go back. # * * *
[96]
Stephen was once again seated beside his father in the ^.orner of a railway carriage at Kingsbridge. He was ^.ravelling with his father by the night mail to Cork. As the train steamed out of the station he recalled his childish wonder of years before and every event of his first day at Clongowes. But he felt no wonder now. He saw the darkening lands slipping away past him, the silent telegraphpoles passing his window swiftly every fouf' seconds, the little glimmering stations, manned by a few silent sentries, flung by the mail behind her and twi-^kling for a moment in the darkness like fiery grains flung backwards by a runner.
He listened without sympathy to his father's evoca- tbn of Cork and of scenes of his youth — a tale broken by sighs or draughts from his pocket flask whenever the image of some dead friend appeared in it, or whenever the evoker remembered suddenly the purpose of his actual visit. Stephen heard, but could feel no pity. The images of the dead were all strangers to him save that of Uncle Charles, an image which had lately been fading out of memory. He knew, however, that his father's property was going to be sold by auction and in the manner of his own dispossession he felt the world give the lie rudely to his phantasy.
At Maryborough he fell asleep. When he awoke the train had passed out of Mallow and his father was stretched asleep on the other seat. The cold light of the dawn lay over the country, over the unpeopled fields and the closed cottages. The terror of sleep fascinated his mind as he watched the silent country or heard from time to time his father's deep breath or sudden sleepy movement. The neighbourhood of unseen sleepers filled him with strange dread, as though they could harm him,
[97]
and he prayed that the day might come quickly. His prayer, addressed neither to God nor saint, began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze crept through the chink of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in a trail of foolish words which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of the train; and silently, at intervals of four seconds, the telegraphpoles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars. This furious music allayed his dread and, leaning against the window ledge, he let his eyelids close again.
They drove in a jingle across Cork while it was still early morning and Stephen finished his sleep in a bed- room of the Victoria Hotel. The bright warm sunlight was streaming through the window and he could hear the din of traffic. His father was standing before the dress- ingtable, examining his hair and face and moustache with great care, craning his neck across the water jug and drawing it back sideways to see the better. While he did so he sang softly to himself with quaint accent and phrasing :
<<
li
'Tis youth and folly Makes young men marry. So here, my love. 111
No longer stay. What can't be cured, sure, Must be injured, sure,
So 111 go to Amerikay.
My love she's handsome, My love she 's bony : She's like good whisky When it is new; [98]
But when 'tis old And growing cold It fades and dies like The mountain dew."
The consciousness of the warm sunny city outside his window and the tender tremors with which his father's voice festooned the strange sad happy air, drove off all the mists of the night's ill humour from Stephen's brain. He got up quickly to dress and, when the song had ended, said:
— That's much prettier than any of your other come- all-yous.
— Do you think so ? asked Mr Dedalus.
— I like it, said Stephen.
— It's a pretty old air, said Mr Dedalus, twirling the points of his moustache. Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it! Poor Mick Lacy! He had little turns for it, grace notes he used to put in that I haven't got. That was the boy who could sing a come-all-you, if you like.
Mr Dedalus had ordered drisheens for breakfast and during the meal he cross-examined the waiter for local news. For the most part they spoke at cross purposes when a name was mentioned, the waiter having in mind the present holder and Mr Dedalus his father or perhaps his grandfather.
Well, I hope they haven't moved the Queen's College anyhow, said Mr Dedalus, for I want to show it to this youngster of mine.
Along the Mardyke the trees were in bloom. They entered the grounds of the college and were led by the garrulous porter across the quadrangle. But their
[99]
progress across the gravel was brought to a halt after every dozen or so paces by some reply of the porter 's —
— Ah, do you tell me so? And is poor Pottlebelly dead?
— Yes, sir. Dead, sir.
During these halts Stephen stood awkwardly behind the two men, weary of the subject and waiting restlessly for the slow march to begin again. By the time they had crossed the quadrangle his restlessness had risen to fever. He wondered how his father, whom he knew for a shrewd suspicious man, could be duped by the servile manners of the porter; and the lively southern speech which had entertained him all the morning now irritated his ears.
They passed into the anatomy theatre where Mr Dedalus, the porter aiding him, searched the desks for his initials. Stephen remained in the background, de- pressed more than ever by the darkness and silence of the theatre and by the air it wore of jaded and formal study. On the desk he read the word Foetus cut several times in the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood : he seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him' and to shrink from their company. A vision of their life, which his father's words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk. A broad shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jack knife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.
Stephen's name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so as to be as far away from the
[100]
vision as he could be and, peering closely at his father's initials, hid his flushed face.
But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back across the quadrangle and towards the college gate. It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His monstrous reveries came thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him, suddenly and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given in to them, and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble to- wards others, restless and sickened of himself when they had swept over him.
— Ay, bedad! And there's the Groceries sure enough! cried Mr Dedalus. You often heard me speak of the Groceries, didn't you, Stephen. Many's the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of us, Harry Peard and little Jack Mountain and Bob Dyas and Maurice Moriarty, the Frenchman, and Tom 0 'Grady and Mick Lacy that I told you of this morning and Joey Corbet and poor little good hearted Johnny Keevers of the Tantiles.
The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket bag. In a quiet by street a German band of five players in faded uni- forms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs and leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of lime-
[101]
stone in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale rising into the treble.
Stephen walked on at his father's side, listening to stories he had heard before, hearing again the names of the scattered and dead revellers who had been the companions of his father's youth. And a faint sickness sighed in his heart. He recalled his own equivocal posi- tion in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind. The letters cut in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness and futile enthusiasms and making him loathe himself for his own mad and filthy orgies. The spittle in his throat grew bitter and foul to swallow and the faint sickness climbed to his brain so that for a moment he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness.
He could still hear his father's voice — — When you kick out for yourself, Stephen — as I daresay you will one of those days — remember, what- ever you do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen — at least I hope we were — and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That's the kind of fellows I want you to associate with, fellows of the
[102]
right kidney. I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don't believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son. I'll never forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of the South Terrace one day with some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the corners of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn't say a word, or stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we were out for a walk together and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and said: — By the by, Simon, I didn't know you smoked, or something like that. Of course I tried to carry it off as best I could. — If you want a good smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An Ameri- can captain made me a present of them last night in Queenstown.
Stephen heard his father's voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob.
— He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was ! The women used to stand to look after him in the street.
He heard the sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it
[103]
an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and in- sensible to the call of summer and gladness and com- panionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice. He could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself :
— I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.
The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of lines. But he had not died then. Par- nell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel, and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death, but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe ! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment : a little boy in a grey belted
1104]
suit. His hands were in his side pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.
On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his father meekly about the city from bar to bar. To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for a lob Mr Dedalus told the same tale, that he was an old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up in Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen.
They had set out early in the morning from New- combe's coffeehouse, where Mr Dedalus' cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father's drinking-bout of the night before by moving his chair and coughing. One humiliation had succeeded another — the false smiles of the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the bar- maids with whom his father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father's friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. One of them, in order to put his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages from Dilectus, and asked him whether it was correct to say: Tempora mutanhtr nos et muiamur in illis, or Tempora muiantur et nos mutamur in illis. Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus called Johnny Cashman, had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.
— He 's not that way built, said Mr Dedalus. Leave [105]
him alone. He's a levelheaded thinking boy who doesn't bother his head about that kind of nonsense.
— Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man.
— I don't know, I'm sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.
— ^Tour father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the city of Cork in his day. Do you know that?
Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which they had drifted.
— Now don't be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him to his Maker.
— Yerra, sure I wouldn't put any ideas into his head. I'm old enough to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old man to Stephen. Do you know that?
— Are you? asked Stepheij.
— Bedad I am, said the little old man. I have two bouncing grandchildren out at Sunday's Well. Now, then ! What age do you think I am ! And I remember seeing your grandfather in his red coat riding out to hounds. That was before you were bom.
— Ay, or thought of, said Mr Dedalus.
— Bedad I did, repeated the little old man. And, more than that, I can remember even your great grand- father, old John Stephen Dedalus, and a fierce old fire- eater he was. Now, then! There's a memory for you!
— That's three generations — four generations, said another of the company. Why, Johnny Cashman, you must be nearing the century.
— Well, I'll tell you the truth, said the little old man. I'm just twentyseven years of age.
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— We're as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus.
— And just finish what you have there, and we'll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatevei: your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don't feel more than eighteen myself. There's that son of mine there not half my age and I'm a better man than he is any day of the week.
— Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it's time for you to take a back seat, said the gentleman who had spoken before.
— No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. I'll sing a tenor song against him or I'll vault a fire-barred gate against him or I'll run with him after the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the Kerry Boy and the best man for it.
— But he'll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his forehead and raising his glass to drain it.
— Well, I hope he'll be as good a man as his father. That's all I can say, said Mr Dedalus.
— If he is, he'll do, said the little old man.
— And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.
— But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.
Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs : it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of com-
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panionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.
** Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless ? ..."
He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast in- human cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. # ^ # «
Stephen 'y mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew forth his orders on the gov- ernor of the bank of Ireland for thirty and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and in coin respectively. He bestowed them in his pockets with feigned composure and suffered the friendly teller, to whom his father chatted, to take his hand across the broad counter and wish him a bril- liant career in after life. He was impatient of their voices and could not keep his feet at rest. But the teller still deferred the serving of others to say he was living in changed times and that there was nothing like giving
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a boy the best education that money could buy. Mr Dedalus lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the roof and telling Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing in the house of commons of the old Irish parliament.
— God help us ! he said piously, to think of the men of those times, Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn't be seen dead in a ten acre field with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I'm sorry to say that they are only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet July.
A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures standing at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery eyes. Stephen looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a few days before he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the windows of Barnardo's.
— Well that 's done, said Mr Dedalus.
— We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where ?
— Dinner ? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what ?
— Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.
— Underdone 's ?
— Yes. Some quiet place.
— Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn't matter about the dearness.
He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness.
— Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We're not out for the half mile, are we?
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For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through Stephen's fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons, In his coat pockets he carried squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers' pockets bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a form of common- wealth for the household by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams. Then the season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave out and the wainscot of his bedroom remained with its unfinished and ill plastered coat.
His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no further occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He, too, returned to his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell to pieces. The commonwealth fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and its books on a sensible loss, the rules of life which he had drawn about himself fell into desuetude.
How foolish his aim had been ! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tide within him. Useless.
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* Prom without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers : their tides began once more to jostle fiercely- above the crumbled mole.
He saw clearly, too, his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, foster child and foster brother.
He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Be- side the savage desire within him to realise the enor- mities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynicially with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience what- ever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and inno- cent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgi- astic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at times, in the pauses of his desire, when the lux- ury that was wasting him gave room to a softer languor,
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the image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the garden of rosebushes on the road that led to the moun- tains and he remembered the sadly proud gesture of re- fusal which he was to make there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of estrangement and ad- venture. At those moments the soft speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.
Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips.
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It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the ooz- ing wall of a urinal.
He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, undismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.
He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring against his bosom in a tumult. A young woman dressed in a long pink gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face. She said gaily:
— Good night, Willie dear !
Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easychair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, not- ing the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.
As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced him gaily and gravely. Her
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round arms held him firmly to her and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysteri- cal weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his de- lighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not speak.
She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.
— Give me a kiss, she said.
His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her.
With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech ; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.
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CHAPTER III
The swift December dusk had come tumbling clown- ishly after its dull day and as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flour-fattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly coun- selled him.
It would be a gloomy secret night. After early night- fall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner. The whores would be just coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair. He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to his sin-loving soul from their soft perfumed flesh. Yet as he prowled in quest of that call, his senses, stultified only by his desire, would note keenly all that wounded or shamed them ; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to attention on a gaudy playbill; his ears, the drawling jargon of greeting :
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— Hello, Bertie, any good in your mind ?
— Is that you, pigeon ?
— Number ten. Fresh Nelly is waiting on you.
— Good night, husband ! Coming in to have a short time?
The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a pea- cock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accom- panying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering com- panionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crum- ble and a cloud of fine star-dust fell through space.
The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched : and the cold darkness filled chaos.
A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had car- ried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded : and no part (jf body or soul had been
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maimed, but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the foun- tains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul. At most, by an alms given to a beggar whose blessing he fled from, he might hope wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace. Devotion had gone by the board. What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the AUseeing and Allknowing.
— Well now, Ennis, I declare you have a head and so has my stick! Do you mean to say that you are not able to tell me what a surd is ?
The blundering answer stirred the embers of his con- tempt of his fellows. Towards others he felt neither shame nor fear. On Sunday mornings as he passed the church door he glanced coldly at the worshippers who stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church, morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor hear. Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hair oil with which they had anointed their heads r^-
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pelled him from the altar they prayed at. He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.
On the wall of his bedroom hung an illuminated scroll, the certificate of his prefecture in the college of the sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On Saturday mornings when the sodality met in the chapel to recite the little office his place was a cushioned kneeling-desk at the right of the altar from which he led his wing of boys through .the responses. The falsehood of his posi- tion did not pain him. If at moments he felt an impulse to rise from his post of honour and, confessing before them all his unworthiness, to leave the chapel, a glance at their faces restrained him. The imagery of the psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride. The glories of Mary held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolising her royal lineage, her emblems, the late-flowering plant and late-blossom- ing tree, symbolising the agelong gradual growth of her cultus among men. When it fell to him to read the lesson towards the close of the office he read it in a veiled voice, lulling his conscience to its music.
Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libanon et quasi cu- pressus in monte Sion. Quasi palma exaltata sum in Gades et quasi plantatio rosae in Jericho. Quasi uliva speciosa in campis et quasi plantanus exaltata sum juxta aquam in plateis. Sicut cinnamomum et halsamum aromatizans odorem dedi et quasi m^rrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris.
His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyeg
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seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent, the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, re-entering her dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself, was turned towards her whose emblem is the morning star, ** bright and musical, telling of heaven and infusing peace,'' it was when her names were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss.
That was strange. He tried to think how it could be but the dusk, deepening in the schoolroom, covered over his thoughts. The bell rang. The master marked the sums and cuts to be done for the next lesson and went out. Heron, beside Stephen, began to hum tunelessly.
My excellent friend Bombados.
Ennis, who had gone to the yard, came back, saying :
— The boy from the house is coming up for the rector. A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said :
— That's game ball. We can scut the whole hour. He won't be in till after half two. Then you can ask him questions on the catechism, Dedalus.
Stephen, leaning back and drawing idly on his scribbler, listened to the talk about him which Heron checked from time to time by saying :
— Shut up, will you. Don't make such a bally racket ! It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in
following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only
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to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sentence of Saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth : pride in himself and contempt of others, covetous- ness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, glut- tonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spir- itual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk. As he sat in his bench gazing calmly at the rector's shrewd harsh face his mind wound itself in and out of the curious questions proposed to it. If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the child baptised? Is baptism with a mineral water valid ? How comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart, the second beatitude prom- ises also to the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble
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into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?
— Here he is ! Here he