all right. But. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried.
Gabriel asked her whether she had had a good crossing. But she did not seem to
be in ill humour: she had gone away laughing. He saw the darkening lands
slipping away past him, the silent telegraph-poles passing his window swiftly
every four seconds, the little glimmering stations, manned by a few silent
sentries, flung by the mail behind her and twinkling for a moment in the
darkness like fiery grains flung backwards by a runner. It would be lovely in
bed after the sheets got a bit hot. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be
put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of
Venantius Fortunatus. . . . He knew where he would meet the boys: Leonard and
O’Halloran and Nosey Flynn.

“When did you lend him the pound?” she asked, after a pause. “I think it
was one of those. ”

Mr Hynes laughed.

“Now, I ask you,” she said almost testily, “where is Julia going? Julia!
Julia! Where are you going?”

Julia, who had gone half way down one flight, came back and announced blandly:

“Here’s Freddy. There are many good believers who think as you do.

She waited on patiently, almost cheerfully, without alarm, her memories
gradually giving place to hopes and visions of the future. But Erin, list, his
spirit may Rise, like the Phœnix from the flames, When breaks the dawning of
the day,

The day that brings us Freedom’s reign. The working-man is not looking for
fat jobs for his sons and nephews and cousins. The voice, made plaintive by
distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of
the air with words expressing grief:



O, the rain falls on my heavy locks And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies
cold. In a few seconds he opened his eyes and looked about him. When we speak
of beauty in the second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in the
first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. 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
brilliant career in after life. Did he bring his crocodile? Is he the shining
light now? Well, I discovered him. “Rather! I heard him. . . . . . . . .
I’ll say a _Hail Mary_ for you. ”

“Right!” said Lenehan. I say, one and all,” he added with gruff charity
and turning to Mr Power. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen.

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. ”

“That’s true,” said Mr O’Connor. “The four of us together. ”

Mr Kernan was silent. He ordered the same again. 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.
But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east.
His hands were trembling and his soul trembled as he heard the priest pass with
the ciborium from communicant to communicant. An ecstasy of flight made radiant
his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept
limbs. Farrington gazed admiringly at the plump arm which she moved very often
and with much grace; and when, after a little time, she answered his gaze he
admired still more her large dark brown eyes. The oblique staring expression in
them fascinated him. He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of
the office window. Heron, however, nudged him expressively with his elbow and
said:

--You're a sly dog.



MY EXCELLENT FRIEND BOMBADOS. It was Heron who had called out and, as he
marched forward between his two attendants, he cleft the air before him with a
thin cane in time to their steps. Patience. Can you say with certitude by whom
the soul of your race was bartered and its elect betrayed--by the questioner or
by the mocker? Patience. Remember Epictetus. It is probably in his character to
ask such a question at such a moment in such a tone and to pronounce the word
SCIENCE as a monosyllable. ”

“Is that so?” asked Mr M’Coy. He was passing by the house. ’ But I
think he’ll be all right.

“But after all now,” said Mr Lyons argumentatively, “King Edward’s
life, you know, is not the very. When the dome was thinly covered his face
lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his
crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into
light. A few young men, wearing bright blue badges in their coats, stood idle
in the vestibule; none of them wore evening dress. He looked at it and saw that
Wells was afraid. 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
between the close-set prominent eyes which were light and inexpressive. He let
it rebound twice or thrice to his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly
towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its thud:

--Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. No help! No help! He--he
himself--his body to which he had yielded was dying.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name.

--About religion?

--Yes, Stephen answered. 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. MacCann went briskly to and fro among the students, talking rapidly,
answering rebuffs and leading one after another to the table. In the inner hall
the dean of studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin
gravely and nodding his head. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit
at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal
bank.

“‘Course he is,” said Mr Kernan, “and a damned decent Orangeman too.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight.

“One man is a plain honest man with no hunker-sliding about him.

“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.

--And were you happier then? Cranly asked softly, happier than you are now, for
instance?

--Often happy, Stephen said, and often unhappy. How could they have done that?

--A fat lot you know about it, Thunder! Wells said. In what style they had come
careering along the country roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the
genuine pulse of life and gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to
answer the bounding courses of the swift blue animal. Having first felt that it
is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex,
multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts
and their sum, harmonious. You know that.

Suck was a queer word. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason
and continued to caress her hand. Tell me would you rob?

--I would beg first, Stephen said.

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm
suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence; then copied them painfully
to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on his bolster. Ireland
is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly.
On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his
pace. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and
bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of
shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal
chanting of street-singers, who sang a _come-all-you_ about O’Donovan Rossa,
or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. When we were making the last
arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. The room had already
cleared and from the back room came the clatter of plates and knives.

“I’ll tell you my opinion,” said Ignatius Gallaher, emerging after some
time from the clouds of smoke in which he had taken refuge, “it’s a rum
world.

“That so, John?”

“Yes. Of course, I don't know if you believe in man.

--O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that
language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning
I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel
today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall
command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear
ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED,
INTO EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS!

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his
head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. The sky was
pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. His face was fleshy and
pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at
the wide wings of his nose.

“She’s a fine decent tart,” he said, with appreciation; “that’s what
she is. “I think it was one of those. ”

“And what way did you treat me?” asked Mrs Kearney.

“Yes,” said Mr Cunningham. They’re all gone. Eh?. . God forgive me,” he
added, “I thought he was the dozen of stout. He was still in the familiar
world of the school. Why?

He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to the thin
wooden bridge he felt the planks shaking with the tramp of heavily shod feet.
I’m trying to get that Mr D’Arcy to sing. ”

“Some day you will,” said Little Chandler calmly. The old man began to rake
more cinders together. They walked forward in silence. For how miserable will
all those pleasures seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages
and ages. There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go
away. The sea was cold day and night: but it was colder at night.

His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of THE COUNT
OF MONTE CRISTO.

--To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem.

--Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would
strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

--The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said.

--Three months, my child?

--Longer, father.

--To wit? said Lynch. Only sometimes, they say, he didn’t preach what was
quite orthodox. He saw again the small white house and the garden of
rose-bushes on the road that led to the mountains and he remembered the sadly
proud gesture of refusal which he was to make there, standing with her in the
moonlit garden after years of estrangement and adventure. He shook the poker
gravely and nodded his head at the fellow out of third of grammar. He shook the
poker gravely and nodded his head at the fellow out of third of grammar. The
implacable faces of his employer and of the Madam stared upon his discomfiture.

The old man opened another bottle grudgingly, and handed it to the boy.

He tore a sheet from his scribbler and passed it down, whispering:

--In case of necessity any layman or woman can do it. Play fair,” he said.

“Who’s not playing fair?” said the other. Father Arnall sat at a table to
the left of the altar. But his face was black-looking and his eyes were staring
though his voice was so quiet. But why was he then against the priests? Because
Dante must be right then. ”

Mr Power stood up. But she never would be said by me. Miss Kate and Miss Julia
were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the
head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to
ask her who had come.

A red-faced young woman, dressed in pansy, came into the room, excitedly
clapping her hands and crying:

“Quadrilles! Quadrilles!”

Close on her heels came Aunt Kate, crying:

“Two gentlemen and three ladies, Mary Jane!”

“O, here’s Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan,” said Mary Jane.

--You're a hypocrite, O'Keeffe, he said. What day of the week was it? He
stopped at a newsagent's to read the headline of a placard. Miss Gavan would be
glad. ”

“All right,” said Gabriel. In my heart I thought that what he said about
boys and sweethearts was reasonable. He looked at the circle of faces and then,
understanding, strove to rise to his feet.

--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. One answered:

--Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro. Now you talk against the
Irish informers. I tried to make him someway decent. P. _

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to
find myself at check. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through
them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made
her look like a little perverse madonna. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and
slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. She had been
told that Freddy had come and that he was nearly all right. ” But what would
grammar matter if he really loved her? He could not make up his mind whether to
like her or despise her for what she had done.

“To tell you my private and candid opinion,” he said, “I think he’s a
man from the other camp.

--PHTH! says I to her like that, right into her eye. They are right. Maria
superintended the distribution of the barmbrack and saw that every woman got
her four slices. ”

But Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something
they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake. “You
know, Miss Morkan, the reason they are so fond of me is----”

He did not finish his sentence, but, seeing that Aunt Kate was out of earshot,
at once led the three young ladies into the back room. Then they’ll make you
Lord Mayor.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

--Now that you have signed the petition for universal peace, said Stephen, I
suppose you will burn that little copybook I saw in your room.

--Give me a kiss, she said. I'm just twenty-seven years of age.

Brother Michael repeated:

--You'll get your walking papers.

One fellow said:

--They were caught near the Hill of Lyons. But all the same it was queer what
Athy said and the way he said it. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to
be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. The old servants were quiet.
Mr Fitzpatrick held a few banknotes in his hand.





Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of
runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He had to confess, to
speak out in words what he had done and thought, sin after sin. He was happy
and free; but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. His whole speech
was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure. He approached the young
woman and, without saluting, began at once to converse with her. Stephen sat
down at his right and the priest at the other side of the table closed his copy
of THE TABLET with an angry snap and stood up. The episode ended well, for both
Heron and Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence. 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. That was a belt round his pocket. They could all
have become high-up people in the world if they had not become jesuits. It was
the sixth of October, dismal and cold out of doors.

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. He has
gone round to the Adelphi to look for you and Moynihan. He suffered all the
pangs and thrills of his friend’s situation as well as those of his own.

The refectory was half empty and the fellows were still passing out in file.
Who is this boy? Why is he on his knees? What is your name, boy?

--Fleming, sir.

--Newman, I think. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn. She stuck her
ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco
juice.

--I let her bawl away, said Mr Casey.

--Hell, Temple said. They had a different father and mother. They discussed
with one another the chances of favourites and outsiders.

In one of the benches near the pulpit sat Mr Cunningham and Mr Kernan. HE THAT
WILL NOT HEAR THE CHURCHA LET HIM BE TO THEEA AS THE HEATHENA AND THE
PUBLICANA.

The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis in whose
mouthpiece the cigarette had become too tightly wedged.

Stephen pointed to the Tsar's photograph and said:

--He has the face of a besotted Christ. . _ Have you studied it? What have you
there in your pocket?”

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone
assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning. But
his face was black-looking and his eyes were staring though his voice was so
quiet. And if the minister did it he would go to the rector: and the rector to
the provincial: and the provincial to the general of the jesuits. It was hard
to think what because 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. Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his
own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love
our neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to
love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

--A day of dappled seaborne clouds. That's all I can say, said Mr Dedalus. Like
hell. The words of doom cried by the angel shattered in an instant his
presumptuous peace. He went as far as the clock of the College of Surgeons: it
was on the stroke of ten. p. ”

“O, yes, positively,” said Little Chandler. He said he believed in the old
saying: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Away then: it is time to go. That's quite rightly expressed. I could easily
catch hold of her when she comes up to my step: nobody is looking. For just and
unjust, for saint and sinner alike, may this retreat be a memorable one.

--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. I can find you a few in this
college. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then
analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the
only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. And now she had
nobody to protect her.

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with
good humour. I'm old enough to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said
the little old man to Stephen.

--Now what is the meaning of this word RETREAT and why is it allowed on all
hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and
in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a
withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday
world, in order to examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the
mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this
world. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. I said he was
terribly burned. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered
why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. There
were lanterns in the hall of his father's house and ropes of green branches.
Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said
something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out
at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so
she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book. Joe said he
wasn’t so bad when you knew how to take him, that he was a decent sort so
long as you didn’t rub him the wrong way. Mrs Donnelly played the piano for
the children and they danced and sang.

--Sit over, she said. She brought them up to his bedroom, the air of which was
impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at the fire. She was
sitting beside his desk now in an aroma of perfumes, smoothing the handle of
her umbrella and nodding the great black feather in her hat. I forgot whether I
answered yes or no. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the
station slowly. Farrington’s dark wine-coloured face flushed darker still
with anger and humiliation at having been defeated by such a stripling. There
was something striking in her appearance. A long thin cane would have a high
whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain like.

“Mr D’Arcy,” she said, “what is the name of that song you were
singing?”

“It’s called _The Lass of Aughrim_,” said Mr D’Arcy, “but I
couldn’t remember it properly. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to
leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction
of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the
field.

Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway.

--Will you? said Stephen. 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. 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 who stood watching the exodus and bowing and shaking hands with
the visitors. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. 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. p. , like a good fellow. _ </p>





Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down
along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens
little boy named baby tuckoo. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the
little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the
fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Shame covered him wholly like fine
glowing ashes falling continually. To say it in words! His soul, stifling and
helpless, would cease to be. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold
tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an
age but for ever. He began to mimic his son’s flat accent, saying half to
himself: _“At the chapel. It was Wells who had shouldered him into the square
ditch the day before because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's
seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It is very difficult. Give
it up, my child, for God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. Give it up,
my child, for God's sake. I'd like to see you.

--Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandy-bat over his
shoulder and he's not allowed to do that. Emerald and black and russet and
olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the
rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. 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. When he reported these dialogues he aspirated the
first letter of his name after the manner of Florentines. Then the season of
pleasure came to an end. She regarded the pillows for a long time and the sight
of them awakened in her mind secret amiable memories. Pray to Our Blessed Lady
when that sin comes into your mind. She will help you, my child. 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. Lenehan grew
lively. He was baffled and a note of menace pierced through his voice. Yes,
yes: that would happen very soon.

“But, of course, that doesn’t alter the contract,” she said. I quite see
your point. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. It was a
text which might seem to the casual observer at variance with the lofty
morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ. It was queer too that you could
not call him sir because he was a brother and had a different kind of look.
Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear. He chose the darkest and
narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread
about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering silent figures troubled him;
and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf.

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and
strange. He prayed it too against the dark outside under the trees. How? How?

--Father, I. . . . . . . Ah! WITHOUT A POSSIBILITY OF EVER APPROACHING NEARER.
That's another story. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up to my
step: nobody is looking. Hell is Roman, like the walls of the Romans, strong
and ugly. But what is limbo?

--Put him back into the perambulator, Cranly, O'Keeffe called out. But why was
he then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. For her only one
reparation could make up for the loss of her daughter’s honour: marriage.

--I don't care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of reach
of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen. All the other masters got into
dreadful waxes. I’m not going to eat her. ”

“I thought you were a lady,” said Mr Holohan, walking away from her
abruptly. The arch of its fair trailing moustache was repeated in the fair
eyebrows looped above pleasantly astonished eyes. 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.

When Paddy Leonard called him he found that they were talking about feats of
strength.

--My signature is of no account, he said politely. Of course you know
nothing,” said Mr Alleyne. But what else could she do? She appealed to the
second tenor who said he thought she had not been well treated. ”

Lenehan laughed again, noiselessly. The old man opened three bottles and was
handing back the corkscrew when Mr Henchy said to the boy:

“Would you like a drink, boy?”

“If you please, sir,” said the boy. Mr Kernan came of Protestant stock and,
though he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage,
he had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years. Freddy Malins
explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for
the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. At last she was
settled comfortably and Freddy Malins invited Mr Browne into the cab. The
syllables of the word _Araby_ were called to me through the silence in which my
soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.

The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings.
He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who
had married T.

The moist pungent perfume lay all the way up to Mr Alleyne’s room.
“That’ll be the most convenient place. ”

“But we mustn’t be late,” said Mr Power earnestly, “because it is sure
to be crammed to the doors. Then he said:

“For the love of God, Jack, bring us a bit of coal. 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.

Cranly made a swift step towards Temple, halted, stamping his foot, crying as
if to a fowl:

--Hoosh!

Temple moved away nimbly. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception
is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Amen.

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. He used to sing that song, _The
Lass of Aughrim_. He desired till his frame shook under the strain of his
desire and until the senses of his soul closed. They followed him in silence,
their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly carpeted stairs. . . . . Why
had he married the eyes in the photograph?

He caught himself up at the question and glanced nervously round the room. It
was a priest-like face, priest-like in its palor, in the wide winged nose, in
the shadowings below the eyes and along the jaws, priest-like in the lips that
were long and bloodless and faintly smiling; and Stephen, remembering swiftly
how he had told Cranly of all the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul,
day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend's listening
silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who
heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt
again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes. You have erred but you are
always my children. It was pitch dark almost. Call me what you will.

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched
Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in speech with others
as they were with him. Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered with
loud movements of his jaws.

--He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man. I disremember if it
was October or November. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and,
feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands
together until they trembled, murmuring: _“O love! O love!”_ many times.
His eyes searched the street: there was no sign of them. While he did so he
sang softly to himself with quaint accent and phrasing:



'Tis youth and folly Makes young men marry, So here, my love, I'll No longer
stay. Mr Holohan became very red and excited. 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. Of course, her father had found out the affair and had forbidden her
to have anything to say to him. I admire you, sir. As I did so I met the gaze
of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead.
”

“Right you are, Crofton!” said Mr Henchy fiercely. Then a bustling little
man with a snuffling nose and very cold ears pushed in the door.

Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary
Office in Dublin Castle. 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. His face was very truculent, grey and
massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. He
had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for
_The Irish Times_ and for _The Freeman’s Journal_, a town traveller for a
coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the
Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. They
followed him in silence, their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly
carpeted stairs.



Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey Where the abbots buried him.

--A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to
his priest. Three days' silence in the refectory and sending us up for six and
eight every minute. The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of
finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of
listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s
vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. A
rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. He wore the white
cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to
his side. When he met his friends he had always a good one to tell them and he
was always sure to be on to a good thing--that is to say, a likely horse or a
likely _artiste_. The room had already cleared and from the back room came the
clatter of plates and knives. His heart was brimming over with happiness.

His tram let him down at Shelbourne Road and he steered his great body along in
the shadow of the wall of the barracks.

“I know that game,” he said, “and it’s a mug’s game.

--Of course he did! said Fleming. 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.

Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time
unlit, unfelt, unlived.

--But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. He began to feel
ill at ease. One by one they were all becoming shades. 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.

--Ah, it's a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you'll
live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. As a boy he had imagined
the reins by which horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him
to feel at Stradbrooke the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him, too,
when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers the brittle
texture of a woman's stocking for, retaining nothing of all he read save that
which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own state, it was only amid
soft-worded phrases or within rose-soft stuffs that he dared to conceive of the
soul or body of a woman moving with tender life.

--Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically. But in a
moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and the two
players who had finished their game.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness.

--No. One by one the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was
singing. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it--not
like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs.

--You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. And the time
of dreaming Dreams is over-- As lover to lover,

Sweetheart, I come. IVORY, IVOIRE, AVORIO, EBUR. One of the first examples that
he had learnt in Latin had run: INDIA MITTIT EBUR; and he recalled the shrewd
northern face of the rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of
Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and
potsherds and chines of bacon. ”

“The Lord have mercy on his soul,” said Aunt Kate compassionately.

“O, but I know it for a fact,” said Mr Henchy. . Could he ask the cashier
privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no good, no damn good: he
wouldn’t give an advance. . . .

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession.
Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody
big spoon like a shovel. It was cruel and unfair to make him 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. Call me what
you will.

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched
Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in speech with others
as they were with him. You'd be afraid to open your lips.

--Afraid?

--Ay.

--Yes, father?

--Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?

--Yes, father. “God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are--we
wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it. ”

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall
asleep.

“But, however that may be, I can only ask you tonight to take the will for
the deed and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to
express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion.

“A chap. ”

“O now, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate, laughing, “he had a starch mill.

Mr M’Coy tasted his whisky contentedly and shook his head with a double
intention, saying:

“That’s no joke, I can tell you.

“I’m up to all their little tricks,” Corley confessed.

He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:

--A draught is said to be a help in these matters. They cry unto the night
their battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
Cheer after cheer after cheer. Through Clane they drove, cheering and cheered.
The peasant women stood at the half-doors, the men stood here and there. Their
hands and arms trembled under the stress. An unknown solitary woman with a pale
face walked through the room. He knew Corley would fail; he knew it was no go.
This fellow you’re working for only wants to get some job or other. The
evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to cross the line, was
knocked down by the engine of the ten o’clock slow train from Kingstown,
thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.
He was telling them something about Tullabeg. ” Miss Ivors had praised the
review. Her son-in-law brought them every year to the lakes and they used to go
fishing. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and
Holland; and they had one child.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. QUASI
PALMA EXALTATA SUM IN GADES ET QUASI PLANTATIO ROSAE IN JERICHO. SICUT
CINNAMOMUM ET BALSAMUM AROMATIZANS ODOREM DEDI ET QUASI MYRRHA ELECTA DEDI
SUAVITATEM ODORIS.



His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the
refuge of sinners. It is a base consent to the promptings of our corrupt nature
to the lower instincts, to that which is gross and beast-like; and it is also a
turning away from the counsel of our higher nature, from all that is pure and
holy, from the Holy God Himself. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the
founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man's hand, to be leaned on
in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a lady's nosegay
on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt. 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. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. 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.

Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim Tell no more
of enchanted days. He's the only man I see in this institution that has an
individual mind.

--Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man.

--Oh, come now, he said. 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 carriage-lamps? They said it was the
ghost of a murderer. That was to kiss. ”

“I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe,” said Mr
Power. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good
humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead. She was
standing right under the dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit up the
rich bronze of her hair, which he had seen her drying at the fire a few days
before. She hoped they would have a nice evening. She cried and threw her arms
round his neck, saying:

“O Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?”

She would put an end to herself, she said. The reporter called it a tragic
death. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the
Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils,
given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work
for Mr Tierney. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair:
and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first
girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. His line of
life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for short
periods he had been driven to live by his wits. A petticoat string dangled to
the floor. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease,
watching her as she undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements of her
perfumed head. 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 himself together under the cold white sheets,
shaking and trembling.

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. A voice
at his bed said:

--Dedalus, don't spy on us, sure you won't?

Wells's face was there. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the
fellow of it lay upon its side. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole
world if he suffer the loss of his immortal soul? Ah, my dear boys, believe me
there is nothing in this wretched world that can make up for such a loss. But
Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar. She had tried
to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her
rabbit’s eyes. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist.

Gabriel’s eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under
the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano.

“But why do you think it’s not good for children, Mr Cotter?” she asked.
A bell beat faintly very far away. Simon Moonan told him not to because the
prefect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said:

--We all know why you speak. He had been obliged to offer an abject apology to
Mr Alleyne for his impertinence but he knew what a hornet’s nest the office
would be for him. The light was lowered quietly.

“What’s that you were saying, Tom?” asked Mr M’Coy. If we must have a
Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus. Mass will be on Saturday morning at nine
o'clock and general communion for the whole college. Saturday will be a free
day. But Saturday and Sunday being free days some boys might be inclined to
think that Monday is a free day also. He turned landward and ran towards the
shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a
sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace
and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood. In the end he
would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s
dinner.

--I have to leave a message down in George's Street, he said to his father
quickly. Can you not combine the progressive tendency with a respect for
punctuality?

--That question is out of order, said Stephen. Strong farmer type. Pepper and
salt suit. Square feet. Unkempt, grizzled beard. Probably attends coursing
matches. His mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of
purple tabinet, with little foxes’ heads upon it, lined with brown satin and
having round mulberry buttons.

On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his
father meekly about the city from bar to bar. I don’t know his name. But the
roads must be knee-deep. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he
had taken.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival's flushed and mobile face,
beaked like a bird's. Jimmy had a respect for his father’s shrewdness in
business matters and in this case it had been his father who had first
suggested the investment; money to be made in the motor business, pots of
money. Moreover Ségouin had the unmistakable air of wealth. Jimmy set out to
translate into days’ work that lordly car in which he sat. But it was his own
fault for he frequently mistook his cards and the other men had to calculate
his I. The life of his body, ill clad, ill fed, louse-eaten, made him close his
eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair and in the darkness he saw the brittle
bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell. It
made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in
Greece outside houses like white temples. He turned over the flyleaf and looked
wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. She must
get her eight guineas. . ”

“It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him,” said my aunt. But
when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to
hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of
disorder alone seemed to offer me. Always the same: and when the fellows
stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it. Damn proofs and printers, I
say, for a few days. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old
country. Does a fellow good, a bit of a holiday. I feel a ton better since I
landed again in dear dirty Dublin. . . He began to cry. He desired with all his
will not to hear or see. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.

It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the
Pigeon House. No, I never heard your voice so good as it is tonight.

The fellows at his table stood up. First you must take your degree. 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. 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. When he reached the corner of Merrion Street he took
his stand in the shadow of a lamp and brought out one of the cigarettes which
he had reserved and lit it. The image, it is clear, must be set between the
mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. He loved
to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Yes. . ”

“That’s what ruins children,” said Mr O’Connor. ”

“But I’ve a nice partner for you, Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor. Then he
began to roll the tobacco again meditatively and after a moment’s thought
decided to lick the paper. They can wait. It was the sixth of October, dismal
and cold out of doors. But O, the road there between the trees was dark! You
would be lost in the dark. Time was to sin and to enjoy, time was to scoff at
God and at the warnings of His holy church, time was to defy His majesty, to
disobey His commands, to hoodwink one's fellow men, to commit sin after sin and
to hide one's corruption from the sight of men. At the last blast the souls of
universal humanity throng towards the valley of Jehoshaphat, rich and poor,
gentle and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked.

But Joe said it didn’t matter and made her sit down by the fire. I will not
let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here tonight. We are in Cork, in
Ireland. I'll never forget the first day he caught me smoking.

--He's sick.

--Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and
smiling and frowning upon it tolerantly. Lynch, recovering from his laughter,
answered his look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull
beneath the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a
hooded reptile. He could not touch him for more than a bob--and a bob was no
use. Eve yielded to the wiles of the archtempter. She ate the apple and gave it
also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her. The light from the
lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that
rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. They walked
northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise, while the
city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer evening.
There was to be supper, music, cards.

The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. He
stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare
soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding his head
often and repeating:

--Not a doubt of it, Mr Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it!

In the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was speaking
earnestly, in a soft querulous voice, with a boarder.

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 anyhow. 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. It was strange that
his mother had had no musical talent though Aunt Kate used to call her the
brains carrier of the Morkan family. Thanks to her, Constantine was now senior
curate in Balbrigan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his degree in
the Royal University.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father
and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past.

--Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes? answered
Heron.

As they passed along the railings of Trinity College, Lenehan skipped out into
the road and peered up at the clock. ”

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that
evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. “Must I have a
candle?”

“O yes,” said Mr Cunningham.

“No, damn it all,” said Mr Kernan sensibly, “I draw the line there.

“I was told to ask for the bottles. Go on yourself. That’s lively, if you
like, when the _cocottes_ begin to let themselves loose. . . He began to cry.
She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her white
instep shone in the opening of her furry slippers and the blood glowed warmly
behind her perfumed skin. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other
was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. He was a suave, elderly man who
balanced his imposing body, when at rest, upon a large silk umbrella. Blast it!
He couldn’t finish it in time. . _ Go on! What day? _‘Hardly had the day
dawned’. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a
habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like
a little perverse madonna. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then.
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. We shall
try to understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from
the understanding of them a lasting benefit to our souls. Leo Dillon was afraid
we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked,
very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We
were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by
collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own
sixpence. It was noon when we reached the quays and, as all the labourers
seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down
to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. Therefore when he saw Mr
Duggan he went over to him and asked:

“Are you in it too?”

“Yes,” said Mr Duggan. She brought him into the drawing-room, made him sit
down and brought out the decanter and the silver biscuit-barrel. How well she
remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the
main road where she used to visit. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a
million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a
million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in
thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand
multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the
mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the
vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a
little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of
that sand. He hurried onwards as if to overtake it.

“These yahoos coming up here,” he said, “think they can boss the people.
She brought them up to his bedroom, the air of which was impregnated with a
personal odour, and gave them chairs at the fire. Her eyes gave him no sign of
love or farewell or recognition. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as
the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the
sacraments. 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.

“Why isn’t it your business?” asked Mrs Kearney. Then Mr Power said,
point blank:

“To tell you the truth, Tom, we’re going to make a retreat. 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. To bear
even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. Said
religion was not a lying-in hospital. Not true. They are heard now far away,
hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping
fields to what journey's end--what heart?--bearing what tidings?

APRIL 11.

--That's all a bubble.

--Ha!

--For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of
Aristotle and Aquinas. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in
his arm-chair in state. His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of
women. His confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous and
unrepented imperfections. Most people considered Lenehan a leech but, in spite
of this reputation, his adroitness and eloquence had always prevented his
friends from forming any general policy against him. He had a brave manner of
coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the
borders of the company until he was included in a round. He would love God who
had made and loved him. Then he recognised Freddy Malins’ laugh. The children
of the avenue used to play together in that field--the Devines, the Waters, the
Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. Hot stuff! Not for a pious
chap like you, Tommy. ”

Little Chandler said nothing until the barman returned with two glasses: then
he touched his friend’s glass lightly and reciprocated the former toast.

“He told me: ‘What do you think of a Lord Mayor of Dublin sending out for a
pound of chops for his dinner? How’s that for high living?’ says he.

In palace, cabin or in cot The Irish heart where’er it be Is bowed with
woe--for he is gone Who would have wrought her destiny. Then he has a bloody
big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a
shovel.

“That’s the way it begins,” said the old man. At the same moment he
thought he saw a likeness between his father's mind and that of this smiling
well-dressed priest: and he was aware of some desecration of the priest's
office or of the vestry itself whose silence was now routed by loud talk and
joking and its air pungent with the smells of the gas-jets and the grease.

Just as they were naming their poisons who should come in but Higgins! Of
course he had to join in with the others.

He sang that song. I tell you. People began to look at us. She shook hands a
moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said. . Eh,
give it over, Dwyer, I'm telling you, or I'll give you a stuff in the kisser
for yourself. . . . . . . . . . I don’t say Hynes. ”

But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to
be frank and say like a man:

“Well, I have looked into my accounts.

“Sit down, Joe,” said Mr O’Connor, “we’re just talking about the
Chief. Are your doubts on that point too strong?

--I do not wish to overcome them, Stephen answered. Tell no more of enchanted
days.

And still you hold our longing gaze With languorous look and lavish limb! Are
you not weary of ardent ways? Tell no more of enchanted days. You must choose
the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it,
not to pour in more than the funnel can hold. Only for that.

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then
hot. “That’ll be the most convenient place. ”

“But we mustn’t be late,” said Mr Power earnestly, “because it is sure
to be crammed to the doors. I mentioned Father Burke’s name. Hell is Roman,
like the walls of the Romans, strong and ugly. But what is limbo?

--Put him back into the perambulator, Cranly, O'Keeffe called out. I can see
his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there
was a tree.

--I can't understand you, said Davin. Every other order of the Church had to be
reformed at some time or other but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said
with assumed carelessness:

--Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he
feared the contact of her sex. Possibly not.

--Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

--I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost
self-respect. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to
start he observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and
shouted, but, before he could reach her, she was caught by the buffer of the
engine and fell to the ground. 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. As he did not wish their last
interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they met
in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. Then he asked one of the young men to
move aside, and, taking hold of the decanter, filled out for himself a goodly
measure of whisky. She had taken off her hat and cloak and was standing before
a large swinging mirror, unhooking her waist. 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. But his fellow-travellers
had never consented to overlook his origin.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of
the weariness of school-life for one day at least. I wouldn't stand it. When
you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it
according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis
which is logically and esthetically permissible. At first she wanted to take it
back but when she tried it on she was delighted with it, especially with the
make of the sleeves, and kissed him and said he was very good to think of her.

When his hour had struck he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his
fellow-clerks punctiliously. “How does he expect us to work for him if he
won’t stump up?”

“I can’t help it,” said Mr Henchy. “I expect to find the bailiffs in
the hall when I go home. ”

“And what way did you treat me?” asked Mrs Kearney. The blush which had
risen to his face a few moments before was establishing itself. He had been
coffined. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey. There was silence for a
few moments.

We blessed ourselves and came away.

--How are you off, sir?

--Right as the mail, Simon.

“Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,” said Gabriel
awkwardly. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. As she passed through the doorway
she stopped and glared into Mr Holohan’s face. He halted a few paces from her
and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand
like a child.

“And the _artistes_!” said Mrs Kearney.

Then he thought for a moment and said:

--You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy.

A rogue in red and yellow dress Is knocking, knocking at the tree; And all
around our loneliness The wind is whistling merrily. Because they had fecked
cash out of the rector's room.

I would be ever in that heart (O soft I knock and soft entreat her!) Where only
peace might be my part. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died
for her sake. This was the end; and a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the
fog of his mind.

--Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity.

“It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, “named Michael Furey.
“I’d love to see Galway again. ”

“You can go if you like,” said Gabriel coldly.

“But, however that may be, I can only ask you tonight to take the will for
the deed and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to
express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion. The prefect was
at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He
had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives
had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their
support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr
Tierney.

Did that explain his friend's listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden
intrusions of rude speech with which he had shattered so often Stephen's ardent
wayward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for he had found this rudeness
also in himself. Uncle Charles dozed in a corner of the half furnished
uncarpeted room and near him the family portraits leaned against the wall. 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.

--Put it that way if you like, Dixon said. It broke up violently her fair image
and flung the fragments on all sides. He yawned again. 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
mistrust at his trainer's flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over
his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. To bear even the
sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment.

They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went on by
the trees.

--Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their
church alone. Did he sign, too?

Davin nodded and said:

--And you, Stevie?

Stephen shook his head. I----”

“Light the lamp. What do you mean by having the place in darkness? Are the
other children in bed?”

The man sat down heavily on one of the chairs while the little boy lit the
lamp. O why was that so? O why?

He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abasing himself in the awe of God Who
had made all things and all men.

--So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal.

The gentlemen drank from their glasses, set the glasses again on the table and
paused.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to jibing and wishing
to be out of the way before she offered her ware to another, a tourist from
England or a student of Trinity.

The old piano plays an air, Sedate and slow and gay; She bends upon the yellow
keys, Her head inclines this way. We banded ourselves together, some boldly,
some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the
reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I
was one.

Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the doorway, and
said in a swift whisper:

--Do you know that he is a married man? he was a married man before they
converted him. He said again:

--I think there were more strangers down than last Christmas. As the husband
was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr Duffy had many
opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. They seemed to him a band of
tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with
dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first
chill of night bid them arise, shake themselves and begone.

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them.
”

“And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with--Irish?” asked
Miss Ivors. Then he mumbled good-night and went out.

Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel. The right time now is twenty past ten.
Yes, and it was not darkness that fell from the air.

--Yes, do.

For there, as in some mossy nest The wrens will divers treasures keep, I laid
those treasures I possessed Ere that mine eyes had learned to weep. One
answered:

--Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.

Still another removal! A boy named Fallon in Belvedere had often asked him with
a silly laugh why they moved so often. He was unheeded, happy and near to the
wild heart of life. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?
They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. He leaned
against the lamp-post and kept his gaze fixed on the

His mind became active again. ”

As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the
window. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King
Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on
or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk
round the statue. When I handed her back the mug at last she took my hand to
draw me in over the threshold and said: 'COME IN AND STAY THE NIGHT HERE. He
had forgotten. Face? There was no face seen. The brother's face was bent upon
her fair rain-fragrant hair. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to
people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad. 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 tram-men nor of the
horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. It made you feel so happy. Both she
and Julia had always seemed a little proud of their serious and matronly
sister. Her photograph stood before the pierglass. It was just as well. It will
calm my heart. But God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. What birds
were they? He thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the
south. The affair would be sure to be talked of and his employer would be
certain to hear of it.

As he sat at his desk in the King’s Inns he thought what changes those eight
years had brought. I was born to be a monk. And I admit it that I am. The
letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another
surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence. Then he is the
precursor. She regarded the pillows for a long time and the sight of them
awakened in her mind secret amiable memories. ”

Mr Holohan pointed desperately towards the hall where the audience was clapping
and stamping. ”

“Well, glue or starch,” said Gabriel, “the old gentleman had a horse by
the name of Johnny. The veins stood out on Farrington’s forehead, and the
pallor of Weathers’ complexion changed to peony. At the first landing she
stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the
dead-room. God, who had long been merciful, would then be just. In this life we
have not a very clear idea of what such a loss must be, but the damned in hell,
for their greater torment, have a full understanding of that which they have
lost, and understand that they have lost it through their own sins and have
lost it for ever.

--I have to leave a message down in George's Street, he said to his father
quickly.

--The affair doesn't interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily.

--You really broke your glasses by accident, didn't you? Nasty Roche asked. I'm
old enough to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old
man to Stephen.

--A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a
vision of hell.

--Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. A
frightful hole he said it was. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light,
curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
The women followed with keen eyes the faded blue dress which was stretched upon
a meagre body. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a
mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of
existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The proprietor sprawled on the
counter reading the _Herald_ and yawning. 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. 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. One got the prayer-book and the other three got the
water; and when one of the next-door girls got the ring Mrs Donnelly shook her
finger at the blushing girl as much as to say: _O, I know all about it!_ They
insisted then on blindfolding Maria and leading her up to the table to see what
she would get; and, while they were putting on the bandage, Maria laughed and
laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. The big
student turned on him, frowning. O, what agony then for the miserable sinners!
Friend is torn apart from friend, children are torn from their parents,
husbands from their wives.

--And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of
this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it
has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul
and body alike. He started with delight and, keeping close to his lamp-post,
tried to read the result in their walk.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his soul.
TOUCH THEM NOT, says Christ, FOR THEY ARE THE APPLE OF MY EYE.

--And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. But a man's country
comes first.

--I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth time, just at the
corner of the square. He came of an old and illustrious Spanish family and you
remember that he was one of the first followers of saint Ignatius. There was
silence for a few moments. 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. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written
by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves.
He laughed as he heard it for it made him think of McCann, and he saw him a
squat figure in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing
in the wind at Hopkins' corner, and heard him say:

--Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. While they were
speaking the noise in the hall grew louder. His arbour, as he called the
reeking outhouse which he shared with the cat and the garden tools, served him
also as a sounding-box: and every morning he hummed contentedly one of his
favourite songs: O, TWINE ME A BOWER 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. He too returned to his old life at school and all his
novel enterprises fell to pieces. I was going to reply indignantly that we were
not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent.

--Tell us why.

“Well, isn’t Freddy terrible?” said Mary Jane. I quite see your point.
Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying
relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is
appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in
the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect
itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. ”

Mr Browne took another sip of his whisky and said, with sidling mimicry:

“Well, you see, I’m like the famous Mrs Cassidy, who is reported to have
said: ‘Now, Mary Grimes, if I don’t take it, make me take it, for I feel I
want it.

“We both believe in----”

He hesitated for a moment. Perhaps Brother Michael would bring it back when he
came. . . . . Did she think of leaving any dinner for me?”

“Yes, pa. By hell, I saw that at once.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something.

There is no word nor any sign Can make amend-- He is a stranger to me now Who
was my friend. Go on. For God's sake, go home. Their children, his writing, her
household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire. 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.

He listened without sympathy to his father's evocation 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. Eternity! O, dread and dire word.
Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity
of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet
they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. It may have
been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments
their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was,
with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen
grains, was quite inefficacious.

--O yes, Stephen said. The poor lady sang _Killarney_ in a bodiless gasping
voice, with all the old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation
which she believed lent elegance to her singing. Aunt Kate wrinkled her brows
and made signs to the others to drop the subject. Her face, healthier than her
sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her
hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.
One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel cooked it for
their dinner. He had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in
expression, staring blue eyes and a grizzled moustache. He could not feel her
near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. Those venal and furtive
loves filled him with despair.

--And they're a very rich order, aren't they, Simon?

--Rather. “You can never know women. ”

“O yes, you get some good ones, I admit,” said Mr Kernan, satisfied. He was
a Castle official only during office hours. He found it and pushed it open and
went in. We might have had, we all had from time to time, our temptations: we
might have, we all had, our failings. . . manufacturing that champagne for
those fellows.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly. Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face
began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were
melancholy as those of a monkey. O what a dreadful memory will that be! In the
lake of all-devouring flame the proud king will remember the pomps of his
court, the wise but wicked man his libraries and instruments of research, the
lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and pictures and other art treasures,
he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his gorgeous feasts, his dishes
prepared with such delicacy, his choice wines; the miser will remember his
hoard of gold, the robber his ill-gotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and
merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in which they revelled,
the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they
delighted. IN THE DARK NIGHT, ACROSS THE BLEAK WILDERNESS GUIDE US ON TO OUR
LORD JESUS, GUIDE US HOME.



His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for
the innocence he had lost. But not there in the chapel of the college. He
looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old
tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

“Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the
priesthood. By Christ, I’ll go myself and see what they’re like. The moment
they were through the doorway Cranly seized him rudely by the neck and shook
him, saying:

--You flaming floundering fool! I'll take my dying bible there isn't a bigger
bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world!

Temple wriggled in his grip, laughing still with sly content, while Cranly
repeated flatly at every rude shake:

--A flaming flaring bloody idiot!

They crossed the weedy garden together. 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.

The car halted before a small house on the Glasnevin road and Mr Kernan was
helped into the house.

My book was closed, I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor.

Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous titter
in his voice and moving his umbrella at every word:

--And, as you remark, if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this
thusness.

As the old man said nothing further, the boy took the bottle and said:
“Here’s my best respects, sir,” to Mr Henchy, drank the contents, put the
bottle back on the table and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

--And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did
so little harm.

--I will not serve, answered Stephen.

--And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend,
more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

When evening had fallen he left the house, and the first touch of the damp dark
air and the noise of the door as it closed behind him made ache again his
conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. And just finish what you have there and
we'll have another.

--But that was stealing. Then I stood up abruptly. She would turn and look at
him. Her husband called out to her:

“And have you nothing for me, duckie?”

“O, you! The back of my hand to you!” said Mrs Kernan tartly. Her
husband’s great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. It was an oval face
with strongly marked features.

Then their voices ceased; they had gone.

--I see it, said Lynch. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he
foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the
cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North
Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would
recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by
Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow
through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that
passing a grimy marine dealer's shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song
by Ben Jonson which begins:

I was not wearier where I lay. The children--two girls and a boy, conscious of
their father’s helplessness and of their mother’s absence, began some
horseplay with him. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. He
turned his olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to
speak again.

Often he had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt
herself in the way (though Joe’s wife was ever so nice with her) and she had
become accustomed to the life of the laundry. He stood up to put on his coat
and waistcoat, more helpless than ever. Why could he not remember 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. Was she annoyed, too, about something? If she would
only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would
be brutal. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness
of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail
hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite
and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity,
his freedom.

--Well, they drank that and it was found out who did it by the smell. The
injured man said again as well as he could:

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir. The first tenor and the baritone
arrived together. Look at all the factories down by the quays there, idle! Look
at all the money there is in the country if we only worked the old industries,
the mills, the ship-building yards and factories. It’s capital we want.
It’s just kind of a friendly talk, you know, in a common-sense way. ”

“But look here, John,” said Mr O’Connor. He was still discomposed by the
girl’s bitter and sudden retort. He shook the poker gravely and nodded his
head at the fellow out of third of grammar. Melancholy was the dominant note of
his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of
faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a
book of poems perhaps men would listen. The bobbins are saturated in hot
paraffin wax. A gentle kick from the tall boy in the bench behind urged Stephen
to ask a difficult question.

The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish fire from
the heavy boots of those students who sat on the highest tier of the gloomy
theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. But I wish you had not told me. He
had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken. She _was_ a
little vulgar; sometimes she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known. At
the pause in the chain of hands her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft
merchandise. There was a good deal of confused talk, and then Mr Browne got
into the cab. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the
sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him
strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

--Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.

--Underdone's?

--Yes. It was not a dream from which he would wake.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. He left the church.

The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the
girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale
sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of
quiet joy.

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump
clean hand he displayed at moments a signet ring. He’s a spy of Colgan’s,
if you ask me. ”

Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had
come on the scene by the merest accident. “Bartell D’Arcy and Miss
O’Callaghan aren’t gone yet. ”

“Someone is fooling at the piano anyhow,” said Gabriel. Tiresome old
red-nosed imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding
to me as a child, I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished
sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey
face of the paralytic. 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 porters and the
rumbling carts and the ill-dressed bearded policeman. He was very delicate. And
at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been
wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging headlong through
space.

Mr Dedalus covered the dish and began to eat hungrily.

No sound of strife disturb his sleep! Calmly he rests: no human pain Or high
ambition spurs him now The peaks of glory to attain. Father Arnall sat at a
table to the left of the altar. He wore about his shoulders a heavy cloak; his
pale face was drawn and his voice broken with rheum. ”

“Good idea,” said Mr Power. ”

“What?” said Mr Kernan. . . . . But tell me something about yourself. “I
heard something. ”

“It’s a very nice air,” said Mary Jane. His face was heated.

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. While he had been full of
memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire,
she had been comparing him in her mind with another.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had waited in
vain.

“What do you think of that, Crofton?” cried Mr Henchy.

--And here's the wiseacre, said Temple. It made him feel his head very big.

“And why can’t you?” I asked.

Moynihan, on his way to the table, said in Stephen's ear:

--MacCann is in tiptop form.

“Well, you know,” said Mr M’Coy, “isn’t the photograph wonderful when
you come to think of it?”

“O, of course,” said Mr Power, “great minds can see things. Come, my
beloved, where I may Speak to your heart.







XXXIII

Now, O now, in this brown land Where Love did so sweet music make We two shall
wander, hand in hand, Forbearing for old friendship' sake, Nor grieve because
our love was gay Which now is ended in this way.

“Half-seven at M’Auley’s be it!”

There was a short silence. But a man's country comes first.

--Other hand! shouted the prefect of studies. “Did it come off?”

They had reached the corner of Ely Place. Still without answering, Corley
swerved to the left and went up the side street. I sat staring at the clock for
some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. But I am
as good as you any day. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling
like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

The French, moreover, were virtual victors.

--Freedom! Cranly repeated. Is it on account of that certain young lady and
Father Moran? But that's all in your own mind, Stevie.

--Lord Leitrim's coachman, yes, said Mr Dedalus.

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the coiling and
uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectre-like symbols of force and
velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen's mind. “I bar the magic-lantern
business. He’s a clever chap, too, with the pen. ”

“There’s no tumblers,” said the old man. What did he care that his aunts
were only two ignorant old women?

A murmur in the room attracted his attention.

My love she's handsome, My love she's bony: She's like good whisky When it is
new; But when 'tis old And growing cold It fades and dies like The mountain
dew. When he had finished his recitation there was a silence and then a burst
of clapping: even Mr Lyons clapped. I’m going to have my fling first and see
a bit of life and the world before I put my head in the sack--if I ever do. ”

“Well, you’re the comical girl, Molly,” said Mrs Conroy frankly.

“I know that,” said Eliza. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the
ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine
vengeance. He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself.

In a few minutes an apologetic “Pok!” was heard as the cork flew out of Mr
Lyons’ bottle.

He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the
table. Even if he sent her the verses she would not show them to others. In a
whisper Mr Cunningham drew Mr Kernan’s attention to Mr Harford, the
moneylender, who sat some distance off, and to Mr Fanning, the registration
agent and mayor maker of the city, who was sitting immediately under the pulpit
beside one of the newly elected councillors of the ward. Not so in hell. Not at
all.

--Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus quickly. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you
drop out of the league class after the first lesson?

--You know one reason why, answered Stephen. In the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Ghost. 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. I was quite
bad.

He winked at Stephen and, replacing the dish-cover, began to eat again.
“Better not keep Mrs Malins standing in the draught. ”

Mrs Malins was helped down the front steps by her son and Mr Browne and, after
many manœuvres, hoisted into the cab. ”

He uttered the metaphor with a certain homely energy and, encouraged by his own
voice, proceeded:

“You see, we may as well all admit we’re a nice collection of scoundrels,
one and all. He said he believed in the old saying: “All work and no play
makes Jack a dull boy. He could remember the way in which Mr Alleyne had
hounded little Peake out of the office in order to make room for his own
nephew. The question was: What reparation would he make?

There must be reparation made in such cases. I answered that I had none. . . no
candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!”

He shook his head with farcical gravity.

“Listen to that!” said his wife. You have asked me what I would do and what
I would not do. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. . . . . And what do
you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his
confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself?”

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the
church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country.
Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. She held an
open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who,
dressed in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet. She put the sleeping child
deftly in his arms and said:

“Here. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen
also. It sounded so genuine that a little colour struggled into Aunt Julia’s
face as she bent to replace in the music-stand the old leather-bound songbook
that had her initials on the cover. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it
would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her
for all. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old
woman’s mutterings distracted me. When you have apprehended that basket as
one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as
a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically
permissible. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

“Till tomorrow, mates!”

That night I slept badly. 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. When they heard I
was from Ireland they were ready to eat me, man. A few days later he received a
parcel containing his books and music. Cranly took a small grey handball from
his pocket and began to examine it closely, turning it over and over.

--Next business? said MacCann. When they had gone on so for some time Stephen
said:

--Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening. The workmen’s
discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question
of wages was inordinate.

Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave
evidence. He felt it descend and, seeing himself as he lay, smiled. No social
revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries. A
crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon.

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. We were serious to the point of
solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed.

Pok! The tardy cork flew out of Mr Crofton’s bottle.

He selected one of the cards and read what was printed on it:



MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS ---------- ROYAL EXCHANGE WARD ----------

Mr Richard J.

I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the
gloom. . . here’s a little. . .

A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:

--Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied
science. The phrase had been spoken lightly with design and he felt that his
face was being searched by the eyes in the shadow. Heron, beside Stephen, began
to hum tunelessly.



MY EXCELLENT FRIEND BOMBADOS. She had tact.

Mrs Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as
soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George’s
Church had stopped ringing. ”

“But how can you get home?” asked Mrs Conroy.

“But, however that may be, I can only ask you tonight to take the will for
the deed and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to
express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion. The devil, once
a shining angel, a son of the morning, now a foul fiend came in the shape of a
serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt.

They turned to the left and walked on as before. Were we to desert him at the
bidding of the English people?

--He was no longer worthy to lead, said Dante.

--And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel
sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?

--I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said.

But he was not sick there. When he was down they turned on him to betray him
and rend him like rats in a sewer. The applause continued for a little time. He
heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost
conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed
to recede, to recede, to recede, and from each receding trail of nebulous music
there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of
silence. He had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, spent all his
money; and he had not even got drunk. 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 and staring out of the left eye that he
could make out the full curves of the capital. So long and cruel they were,
though the white fattish hands were not cruel but gentle. ”

Mr Kernan’s expression changed. She declined it, saying she was ironing
downstairs, and, after having exchanged a nod with Mr Cunningham behind Mr
Power’s back, prepared to leave the room. It is a beautiful evening now in
heaven. The ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the
sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the words--ever, never;
ever, never.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had
called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.

--Don't argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. The gossip of his
fellow-students which strove to render the flat life of the college significant
at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. That was because he was
thinking of his own father. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt.

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl.

Dr Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that
the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions
of the right shoulder. We saw him lying upon the catafalque.

At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out:

--Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!

--O, get out! said Heron. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. They agreed to
break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. My
heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have
you left me alone?



















DUBLINERS

By James Joyce





Contents



THE SISTERS

AN ENCOUNTER

ARABY

EVELINE

AFTER THE RACE

TWO GALLANTS

THE BOARDING HOUSE

A LITTLE CLOUD

COUNTERPARTS

CLAY

A PAINFUL CASE



A MOTHER

GRACE

THE DEAD





DUBLINERS





THE SISTERS

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. ”

At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor. Mr M’Coy
said:

“Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!”

“O, Father Tom Burke,” said Mr Cunningham, “that was a born orator. Mrs
Kearney said that she didn’t know anything about Mr Fitzpatrick. She was red
in the face. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used
to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun
to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s
sake. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth with a sharpened
match, listening to some companions.

--He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man. He said that my
friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school. God
could see that he was sorry. He was still in the familiar world of the school.
While they were speaking the noise in the hall grew louder. Of course the girl
or woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all
things. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies
that used to come to Dublin--Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great
Trebelli, Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. All I can say is I never heard her sing
half so well as long as I am coming here. And that’s the honest truth.

--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. She made beef-tea for him and scolded him roundly.

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but with a
fresh breeze blowing. Though nobody 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.
But it’s labour produces everything.

His arm was taken in a strong grip and Cranly's voice said:

--Let us eke go.

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. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant
and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with him a third part of
the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his rebellious angels into
hell. What his sin was we cannot say. It must be. The ticking went on
unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the
ceaseless repetition of the words--ever, never; ever, never.

She was walking on before him with Mr Bartell D’Arcy, her shoes in a brown
parcel tucked under one arm and her hands holding her skirt up from the slush.

--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 knew that people went there after
the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard that the
waiters there spoke French and German. No one wanted him; he was outcast from
life’s feast. A crape bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. 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.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham.

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.
Leave him to his Maker.

With ribbons streaming He sings the bolder; In troop at his shoulder

The wild bees hum. You remember the pigs and forget that. The radiance of which
he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. The eyes, too,
were reptile-like in glint and gaze. He got out the Delacour correspondence and
passed out of the office. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning
for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. He had to decide.
The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures.

In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their things:
the party was over. “Poor old Larry Hynes! Many a good turn he did in his
day! But I’m greatly afraid our friend is not nineteen carat. Damn it, I can
understand a fellow being hard up, but what I can’t understand is a fellow
sponging. Damn him one way or the other!

APRIL 14. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old country.
”

Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters. Mrs Kearney said
that the Committee had treated her scandalously. I know you’re a friend of
his, not like some of the others he does be with. It may be uphill pedalling at
first. Some mothers would be content to patch up such an affair for a sum of
money; she had known cases of it. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels
and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture
differed from his.

She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen in reply
to Cranly's greeting.

--Will you? said Stephen.

--Too bad! Too bad! said uncle Charles.

My book was closed, I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor. He
felt completely out-generalled. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full
they are of passion, of voluptuous longing!. He gnawed the rectitude of his
life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming.

--God bless you, my child. Then Cranly said:

--That blithering idiot, Temple! I swear to Moses, do you know, that I'll be
the death of that fellow one time. This means to leave church by back door of
sin and re-enter through the skylight of repentance. Cannot repent. Told her so
and asked for sixpence. Can see him. Strong farmer type. Pepper and salt suit.
Square feet. Unkempt, grizzled beard. Probably attends coursing matches. His
mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabinet,
with little foxes’ heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round
mulberry buttons. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding
brow, tumid and protruded lips. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to
kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to
say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. But God
was not in it of course when they stole it. He would confess all, every sin of
deed and thought, sincerely; but not there among his school companions. He was
unassuming and spoke little. In spite of all he had done it. Of course she had
to work hard, both in the house and at business. As long as this one roof
shelters the good ladies aforesaid--and I wish from my heart it may do so for
many and many a long year to come--the tradition of genuine warm-hearted
courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and
which we in turn must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us.
When she came to the age of marriage she was sent out to many houses where her
playing and ivory manners were much admired. If my uncle was seen turning the
corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. He would never
be popular: he saw that. 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. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland. When the cinders had
caught he laid the piece of cardboard against the wall, sighed and said:

“That’s better now, Mr O’Connor. He leaned against the lamp-post and kept
his gaze fixed on the

His mind became active again.

There was no answer. He named it with humility and shame and repented of it
once more. He would love his neighbour. Forester and Forster are the same name.
A descendant of Baldwin the First, captain Francis Forster, settled in Ireland
and married the daughter of the last chieftain of Clanbrassil. Ten thousand
souls won for God in a single month! That is a true conqueror, true to the
motto of our order: AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM! A saint who has great power in
heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief; power to obtain
whatever we pray for if it be for the good of our souls; power above all to
obtain for us the grace to repent if we be in sin. It was the last tram; the
lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in
admonition. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Once or twice I
stopped by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was
thick I'd have stretched out there and slept.

Lenehan observed them for a few minutes.

--Yes, Cranly said. Welcome to our trusty friend!

This welcome 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. . .
he was a splendid man,” said Mr M’Coy.

“I heard him once,” Mr Kernan continued. I gaze upon them as the swallow
gazes Upon the nest under the eave before He wander the loud waters. People
began to look at us. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she
had pawned the furniture on him. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a
month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He was so enraged that
he wrote _Bernard Bernard_ instead of _Bernard Bodley_ and had to begin again
on a clean sheet. 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. His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his
large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out
of another. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew
that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale
before. ’ But I think he’ll be all right. ”

“What?” said Mr Henchy and Mr O’Connor. He avoided her eyes for he had
seen a sour expression on her face.

I waited till his monologue paused again. His wife, who had been a soprano,
still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. He lay back and,
tearing open the packet, placed the last cigarette on the window ledge and
began to write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the
rough cardboard surface. I objected that the boys were too small and so we
walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: _“Swaddlers! Swaddlers!”_
thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned,
wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. Do these correspond to the
phases of apprehension? Are you following?

--Of course, I am, said Lynch.

--Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth. The man went up
by the houses until he reached the door of the office, wondering whether he
could finish his copy in time. The student's body shook all over and, to ease
his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly over his groins. Look at all
the factories down by the quays there, idle! Look at all the money there is in
the country if we only worked the old industries, the mills, the ship-building
yards and factories. Temple turned on him bravely, saying:

--Cranly, you're always sneering at me. A squat young man came out of the
porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit.

The rector did not ask for a catechism to hear the lesson from. ”

He spoke roughly in order to belie his air of gentility for his entry had been
followed by a pause of talk.

“Round and round he went,” said Gabriel, “and the old gentleman, who was
a very pompous old gentleman, was highly indignant. ”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling. ”

“Good-night, all. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the
roadway, playing to a little ring of listeners. ”

The three men left the bar and the crowd sifted through the doors into the
laneway. His face was heated. He jumped up from his chair and walked hastily up
and down the room with the child in his arms. Twelve, thirteen: for two came
wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round
and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right,
circling about a temple of air.

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them.
The poor lady sang _Killarney_ in a bodiless gasping voice, with all the
old-fashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation which she believed
lent elegance to her singing. The citizens of Dublin will benefit by it. Polly
Mooney, the Madam’s daughter, would also sing. She sang:



_I’m a.

“But only for ten minutes, Molly,” said Mrs Conroy. A formula was given
out. A lean student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between
the two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to
catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth. Now, at the name of the
fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a
winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. Here’s this
chap come to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man
was grey. He’s a man of the world, and he means well by us. ”

We said nothing further to each other. “I remember now there was a policeman.
”

“Maybe so,” said Mr Browne. His face was heated. He took the greatest care
of his fair silken hair and moustache and used perfume discreetly on his
handkerchief. . I’ll say a _Hail Mary_. I’ll do the retreat business and
confession, and.

He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went upstairs,
laughing, to the ladies’ dressing-room.

“I suppose you squared the constable, Jack,” said Mr M’Coy. 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.

--But that was stealing.

“Time enough,” said Corley. 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 college is known all his life on account of it.

“Good-evening, Freddy,” said Aunt Julia. ”

He set to his supper and took no part in the conversation with which the table
covered Lily’s removal of the plates.

He sipped a little of his drink while Ignatius Gallaher finished his boldly.
And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn’t be let out
and his people in Oughterard were written to. That was called the order: and he
had heard his father say that they were all clever men. The prefect spoke to
Brother Michael and Brother Michael answered and called the prefect sir. They
began then to gather in what they had won. She came up to his step many times
between their phrases and went down again and once or twice remained beside him
forgetting to go down and then went down. Yes, it was true. It was falling on
every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly
upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark
mutinous Shannon waves. It is a solemn question, Stephen, because on it may
depend the salvation of your eternal soul. I don't know what you wish to do in
life. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know. The life of his body, ill
clad, ill fed, louse-eaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of
despair and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling
from the air and turning often as they fell.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. Then, with a snort of
disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps. The boys answered him phrase
by phrase.

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.

--The story, John, said Mr Dedalus smiling. His eyes fixed themselves on a
paragraph in the evening paper which he had propped against the water-carafe.
He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a canvasser for advertisements for
_The Irish Times_ and for _The Freeman’s Journal_, a town traveller for a
coal firm on commission, a private inquiry agent, a clerk in the office of the
Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become secretary to the City Coroner. What was
the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed.

“So far as owing money goes. The five young men strolled along Stephen’s
Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. Its rays burned up the world,
consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her
wilful heart.

The heavy scowl faded from Cranly's face as MacCann marched briskly towards
them from the other side of the hall. He emerged from under the feudal arch of
the King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta
Street. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they
were saying. She wore a loose open combing-jacket of printed flannel. The ends
of her tulle collarette had been carefully disordered and a big bunch of red
flowers was pinned in her bosom, stems upwards. ”

He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures. “The four of us together.
None of your modern trumpery. .

“O,” exclaimed Mary Jane.

--Why not? Cranly said. They entered the grounds of the college and were led by
the garrulous porter across the quadrangle.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. Then he said:

--Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery. They had cried to
him from the car, waving their hands:

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and
muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. As the fellows in number one
were undistinguished dullards, Stephen and Heron had been during the year the
virtual heads of the school. When she came to the age of marriage she was sent
out to many houses where her playing and ivory manners were much admired. She
asked me was I going to _Araby_. In the purse were two half-crowns and some
coppers. The man passed through the crowd, looking on the spectacle generally
with proud satisfaction and staring masterfully at the office-girls. The
president, wrapped in a heavy loose cloak, was coming towards them along one of
the walks, reading his office. The wind of the last day blew through his mind,
his sins, the jewel-eyed harlots of his imagination, fled before the hurricane,
squeaking like mice in their terror and huddled under a mane of hair. It knew.
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.

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. ”

“Were you dancing?” asked Gabriel. “The General of the Jesuits stands
next to the Pope. And then his life was, you might say, crossed. We’ll have a
family party. ”





A very sullen-faced man stood at the corner of O’Connell Bridge waiting for
the little Sandymount tram to take him home.

“He is dead,” she said at length.

It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was in number
six.

Stephen's moment of anger had already passed.

He uncovered the dish boldly and said:

--Now then, who's for more turkey?

Nobody answered. Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the
city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no
caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly now as they
come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the darkened windows, the
silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. There, by reason of the great number
of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the
walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so
utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in
his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm
that gnaws it.

--They lie in exterior darkness. “Fine jolly fellow! He’s a man of the
world like ourselves. ”

“Ah,.

Gabriel having finished, the huge pudding was transferred to the table. Ten
years before she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of
her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road. It
was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the
clear night in admonition. But how so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of
seeing. It was lovely to be tired. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning
it made a light noise like a little song. If so, Cranly would not have spoken
as he did. He would never be popular: he saw that. 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 innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness
of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with
brutish joy. 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.
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.

He was walking down along the matting and he saw the door before him.

--Ah, John, he said.

He nodded curtly to Mr Hynes and sat down on the chair which the old man
vacated.

The tiny flame which the priest's allusion had kindled upon Stephen's cheek had
sunk down again and his eyes were still fixed calmly on the colourless sky. In
the bench behind sat Mr M’Coy alone: and in the bench behind him sat Mr Power
and Mr Fogarty. 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. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset him, routing his
thoughts. Why was he kneeling there like a child saying his evening prayers? To
be alone with his soul, to examine his conscience, to meet his sins face to
face, to recall their times and manners and circumstances, to weep over them.
They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. As
the fellows in number one were undistinguished dullards, Stephen and Heron had
been during the year the virtual heads of the school. Then he asked one of the
young men to move aside, and, taking hold of the decanter, filled out for
himself a goodly measure of whisky.

“O Lily,” he said, thrusting it into her hands, “it’s Christmas-time,
isn’t it? Just. It was a terrible game. They stopped just before the end of
it to drink for luck. Jack Mooney, the Madam’s son, who was clerk to a
commission agent in Fleet Street, had the reputation of being a hard case. He
was fond of using soldiers’ obscenities: usually he came home in the small
hours. He recalled only names. All the leisure which his school life left him
was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of
speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his
crude writings. Wells too would be there but no fellow would look at him. So
down with your breeches And out with your bum. Apply to the jesuit theologian,
Juan Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain to you in what circumstances
you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had better hand him his poison
in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or his saddlebow. Ask me rather
would I suffer others to rob me, or if they did, would I call down upon them
what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular arm?

--And would you?

--I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed.

--I see, Cranly said. He turned into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up
the staircase and passed in through the clicking turnstile. The golden sunset
was waning and the air had grown sharp.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt.



* * * * *



The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light,
leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly
dangling and looping the cord of the other blind, Stephen stood before him,
following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight
above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. I will not
let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here tonight. ”

He imitated with his mouth the act of tasting and made a wry face. “I never
even heard of him. Crofton and I were in the back of the. . They say it was the
boy’s fault.

Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going
out at night to buy spirits.

My aunt brought the dish from the safe and put it on the table. “There was
some life in it then. ”

The room was silent again.

“Don’t you know they want to present an address of welcome to Edward Rex if
he comes here next year? What do we want kowtowing to a foreign king?”

“Our man won’t vote for the address,” said Mr O’Connor. When they
passed through the passage beside Kildare house they found many students
sheltering under the arcade of the library. A slap on the hand or a box on the
ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. A lean student
with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing
from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying
phrase in his open moist mouth. He admired the dexterity with which their host
directed the conversation. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he
had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions
beneath him. Lenehan’s eyes noted approvingly her stout short muscular body.
Frank rude health glowed in her face, on her fat red cheeks and in her
unabashed blue eyes. Her features were blunt. It was an oval face with strongly
marked features. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Old as they
were, her aunts also did their share. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and
Mulrennan spoke English. You could know the people of that time by their old
dress. Come to facts.

They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. Go on.

--I'm an emotional man, said Temple. He opened it cautiously with his left hand
lest he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book:



_Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom, Not e’en a Zephyr wanders
through the grove, Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb And scatter
flowers on the dust I love. He held an extinguished cigar in his hand and the
aroma of cigar smoke floated near him.

He was hungry for, except some biscuits which he had asked two grudging curates
to bring him, he had eaten nothing since breakfast-time. We never can say what
is in us. 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. O, 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
HAD A HEARTY LAUGH TOGETHER OVER IT. ”

“O do, Mary Jane,” said Aunt Kate. Now, won’t you have a little something
before you go?”

“I don’t mind,” said Mr Hendrick. What did it mean? Was it a quaint
device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a
hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been
born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and
boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the
sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his
limbs as though he was soaring sunward. . . But I could not remember the end of
the dream.

“There’s nothing to touch a good slavey,” he affirmed.

--A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. Wells looked
round to see if anyone was coming. Then he said secretly:

--You know the altar wine they keep in the press in the sacristy?

--Yes. ‘I don’t think that that’s a fair question to put to me,’ says
I. ”

Nosey Flynn was sitting up in his usual corner of Davy Byrne’s and, when he
heard the story, he stood Farrington a half-one, saying it was as smart a thing
as ever he heard. “But I may tell you I doubt it strongly. ”

“O, I’d give anything to hear Caruso sing,” said Mary Jane. . . . . .

He could not speak with fright. Mr Kernan waited to see whether he would be
taken into his friends’ confidence. His room still bore witness of the
orderliness of his mind. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.
People would treat her with respect then. Mrs Kearney was well content at this.
”

After a swift struggle of tongues Mr Holohan hobbled out in haste.

“Why, man alive,” said Ignatius Gallaher, vehemently, “do you know what
it is? I’ve only to say the word and tomorrow I can have the woman and the
cash.

--No. I just waited till I caught his eye, and said: ‘About that little
matter I was speaking to you about.

--Tell us why. .

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork.

There is no word nor any sign Can make amend-- He is a stranger to me now Who
was my friend.

--I don't care what he was, cried Stephen hotly. I'll stand you a pint after.

--He's sick. We have all his poetry at home in a book. 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 reasonably. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the
straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.

--The next business is to sign the testimonial.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to jibing and wishing
to be out of the way before she offered her ware to another, a tourist from
England or a student of Trinity.

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump
clean hand he displayed at moments a signet ring.

--I do not, Stephen said. “Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an
expression in them--an expression!”

“O then, you were in love with him?” said Gabriel.

“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway.

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. 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. Lead him home with a sugan the way you'd lead a bleating goat.

--Limbo! Temple cried.

--And here's the wiseacre, said Temple. Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

--I am sure I could not light a fire. The gang made forays into the gardens of
old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on the shaggy
weed-grown 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. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how
his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish
love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies
stank under his very nostrils. 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. And Fleming had said he would not because it
was best of his play not to. And he thought of what Cecil Thunder had said:
that Mr Gleeson would not flog Corrigan hard. You know that?”

“I know that,” said Little Chandler. O Johnny!

He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping
noise with his lips. Royal persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed
like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been
judged. 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. And still as the years roll by,
bringing with them changes for good and bad, the memory of the great saint is
honoured by the boys of this college who make every year their annual retreat
on the days preceding the feast day set apart by our Holy Mother the Church to
transmit to all the ages the name and fame of one of the greatest sons of
catholic Spain.

--I will take the risk, said Stephen. Of course, I don't know if you believe in
man.

Neither of the others spoke.

He enunciated the word and then drank gravely. ”

“‘ant we have a little.

“Quite right, Gabriel, quite right,” she said. Little Chandler pushed one
glass towards his friend and took up the other boldly. Her companionship was
like a warm soil about an exotic. Its resident population was made up of clerks
from the city. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he
suffered the agony of its penetration. He had spoken of a mother's love. 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 sudden-risen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled
desire. They had five children. No, it was best to forget all about it and
perhaps the prefect of studies had only said he would come in. He was not
foxing. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. He was no
good at sums, but he tried his best so that York might not lose. He set off
briskly along the northern side of the Green hurrying for fear Corley should
return too soon. His harp, too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about
her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master’s
hands. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He
ran after them a little way and then stopped. He desired with all his will not
to hear or see. Mr Alleyne would never give him an hour’s rest; his life
would be a hell to him. She was invariably friendly and advising--homely, in
fact. There were worse husbands. Stephen's heart leapt up in fear.

The rector went on gravely:

--You are all familiar with the story of the life of saint Francis Xavier, I
suppose, the patron of your college. Joe was there, having come home from
business, and all the children had their Sunday dresses on. She had nursed him
and Alphy too; and Joe used often say:

“Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother. She thought her plans over.
Their conversation was evidently about Kathleen for they both glanced at her
often as she stood chatting to one of her Nationalist friends, Miss Healy, the
contralto. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: “Why is
it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no
word tender enough to be your name?”

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne
towards him from the past. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's
weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him
across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection
than in the days of the thingmote. He longed to recall to her those moments, to
make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only
their moments of ecstasy. He felt the death chill touch the extremities and
creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright
centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing
upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and
wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but
vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit,
sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. 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.

His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to
suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as he sank, a faint prayer.

The porter pointed to the tap of the electric-light and began a muttered
apology but Gabriel cut him short.

“The late lamented Patrick Morkan, our grandfather, that is,” explained
Gabriel, “commonly known in his later years as the old gentleman, was a
glue-boiler.

--In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps two or
three boys whom God calls to the religious life.

The grin broadened on Nash's freckled face as he turned to Stephen and said:

--And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?

--O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the other two
in explanation, of course he's not a poet. He came up the hill, smiling, and
clambered up beside me on the bridge. His temperament might be said to be just
at the point of maturity. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.
You could know the people of that time by their old dress. That is CONSONANTIA.
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.
Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was
nearly always down somewhere in the country. Her father was becoming old
lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Many times she allowed the dark to fall
upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their
isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them.

Lenehan hurried on in the same direction.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand.



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. We want
no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers. He won't be in till after
half two. Gallaher’s accent and way of expressing himself did not please him.
There was something vulgar in his friend which he had not observed before. I'm
taking botany too.

Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. 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 Newcombe's coffee-house, where Mr
Dedalus's 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.

--Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said. Stephen
watched him in silence. Towards Findlater's church a quartet of young men were
striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to the agile
melody of their leader's concertina. 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. The falsehood of his position did not pain him.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had
called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.

Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid; and he would hold upon his
tongue the host and God would enter his purified body. God and the Blessed
Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed
Virgin too pure and holy. But he imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide
land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.

He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said:

--What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you?

--I don't know, Stephen said.

--I can see, he said, that you are about to make obvious remarks. Frank was
very kind, manly, open-hearted. Her features were blunt. Tears of joy and
relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not
speak.

She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.

“Where is Gabriel?” she cried. The seats were being filled up rapidly and a
pleasant noise circulated in the auditorium. The deceased had been in the habit
of crossing the lines late at night from platform to platform and, in view of
certain other circumstances of the case, he did not think the railway officials
were to blame.

--Anything else, my child?

Sins of anger, envy of others, gluttony, vanity, disobedience. And Father
Arnall had said that he need not study till the new glasses came. That was
called the order: and he had heard his father say that they were all clever
men. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping;
roaring again, stopping. Maria did not understand why Joe laughed so much over
the answer he had made but she said that the manager must have been a very
overbearing person to deal with. There was a great deal of laughing and joking
during the meal. A pale sunlight showed the yellow curtains drawn back, the
tossed beds. After a while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a
big mug of milk. Our Uncrowned King is dead. Victoria and Stephen and Simon.
Simon and Stephen and Victoria. 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. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he
was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man's hand, to
be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a
lady's nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin. The priest's
voice, too, had a hard jingling tone.

--Lynch is awake, said Cranly.

“Beautiful?” said Ignatius Gallaher, pausing on the word and on the flavour
of his drink.

--I wouldn't stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead.

A rogue in red and yellow dress Is knocking, knocking at the tree; And all
around our loneliness The wind is whistling merrily. When children see things
like that, you know, it has an effect. 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 brilliant career in
after life. He desired with all his will not to hear or see. If he went on with
the fellows he could never go up to the rector because he could not leave the
playground for that. .
. out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached _ex cathedra_ a word of
false doctrine. Now isn’t that an astonishing thing?”

“That is,” said Mr Kernan.

“Yes, because when the Pope speaks _ex cathedra_,” Mr Fogarty explained,
“he is infallible. I disremember if it was October or November. All my senses
seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from
them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring:
_“O love! O love!”_ many times. 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. But
while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably
intense, unbearably extensive. Mrs Donnelly told her husband it was a great
shame for him to speak that way of his own flesh and blood but Joe said that
Alphy was no brother of his and there was nearly being a row on the head of it.
”

“Browne is out there, Aunt Kate,” said Mary Jane. “He hasn’t got those
little pigs’ eyes for nothing. You wouldn’t hear him in the house any more
than now. Why do you make a scene about it?

--Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You mean I am a monster. I showed him
a bit about London when he was over there. ‘y na’e is Kernan. ”

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him.

“But yet,” continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection,
“there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur
to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that
we miss here tonight. 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. Give
it up, my child, for God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. Idle and
embittering, finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that
the commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbour as ourselves with the
same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same
kind of love.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

“One night, man,” he said, “I was going along Dame Street and I spotted a
fine tart under Waterhouse’s clock and said good-night, you know. One of
these gentlemen was Mr O’Madden Burke, who had found out the room by
instinct.

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! _‘Hardly had the
day’. 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 remembered the man's voice when he had said:

--Take that one, sir.

--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. Cranly's heavy boots were
heard loudly charging across the quadrangle and then returning heavily, foiled
and spurning the gravel at each step.

His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick back
into Stephen's hand. As he did so the flame lit up a leaf of dark glossy ivy in
the lapel of his coat. A keen east wind hit them, blowing from the mouth of the
river.

“Mr D’Arcy,” she said, “what is the name of that song you were
singing?”

“It’s called _The Lass of Aughrim_,” said Mr D’Arcy, “but I
couldn’t remember it properly. He prayed beside them but it was hard. . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And when I ask when my daughter is going to
be paid I can’t get a civil answer. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant
because it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his
own person or that the ritual should assign to him so clear and final an
office. The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. The
day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops musty biscuits
lay bleaching. The lovely smell there was in the wintry air: the smell of
Clane: rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy. But no other
sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight he had followed with idle
eyes were sleeping.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice
was singing and gazing up at his wife.

--God and religion before everything! Dante cried. “That’s the latest.
Whenever it’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. Tonight even he wanted
me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he’ll buy me will be a
diving suit. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall
man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the
planks fell:

“All right! All right!”

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend.

--But there are many eminent French critics, said the priest, who consider that
even Victor Hugo, great as he certainly was, had not so pure a French style as
Louis Veuillot. Then he smiled and said:

--O, well, it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know. People would
treat her with respect then. Mrs Kearney was well content at this. Therefore
she was not surprised when one day Mr Holohan came to her and proposed that her
daughter should be the accompanist at a series of four grand concerts which his
Society was going to give in the Antient Concert Rooms. She brought him into
the drawing-room, made him sit down and brought out the decanter and the silver
biscuit-barrel. Mrs Kearney bought some lovely blush-pink charmeuse in Brown
Thomas’s to let into the front of Kathleen’s dress. He listened carefully
and said that perhaps it would be better if he went with her on Saturday night.

Darkness, accompanied by a thick fog, was gaining upon the dusk of February and
the lamps in Eustace Street had been lit. It might be difficult for you to live
here now. Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet only with a
disinterred sweetness like the figseeds Cranly rooted out of his gleaming
teeth. If he could only write a book and get it published, that might open the
way for him. He had his mind set on that.

As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched
his. She stood at the door, haggard with rage, arguing with her husband and
daughter, gesticulating with them. Mrs Kearney wrapped the cloak round her
daughter and followed him. Her house had a floating population made up of
tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, _artistes_ from
the music-halls. 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. Folly indeed! Her
brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page from each other with their
strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated in his arm-chair,
would hold the page at arm's length, read it smiling and approve of the
literary form.

“André. He's the only man I see in this institution that has an individual
mind. There are twenty subjects. . . . . Cranly interrupted himself for an
instant, and then said: I don't want to pry into your family affairs.

--The Forster family, Temple said, is descended from Baldwin the First, king of
Flanders. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and
to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. He
had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these
Continentals. He did not like Wells's face. . Ah! WITHOUT A POSSIBILITY OF EVER
APPROACHING NEARER. That's another story.

--From Baldhead, king of Flanders, Cranly repeated, rooting again deliberately
at his gleaming uncovered teeth. A full hour had passed since his father had
gone in with Dan Crosby, the tutor, to find out for him something about the
university. The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round
the hall from his scattered fellow students. ”

“God have mercy on his soul,” said my aunt piously. But she never would be
said by me. 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. His
father, remonstrative, but covertly proud of the excess, had paid his bills and
brought him home.

O bend no more in revery When he at eventide is calling. When they had gone on
so for some time Stephen said:

--Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening. I ran to the hall, seized
my books and followed her. Attacked me on the score of love for one's mother.
Tried to imagine his mother: cannot. Told me once, in a moment of
thoughtlessness, his father was sixty-one when he was born. Just then my father
came up. The first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of
past pleasures. The door of the bar opened and an immense constable entered. It
was with difficulty that he won back his old consciousness of his state of
grace by telling himself that he had prayed to God at every temptation and that
the grace which he had prayed for must have been given to him inasmuch as God
was obliged to give it. Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his
own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love
our neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to
love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

--A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. All serene,
Simon, said the old man tranquilly. ”

“Lovely voice, lovely voice!” said Aunt Kate.

“You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy,” said Ignatius Gallaher.
The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be
seen. When it had ceased all the auditors drank from their bottles in silence.
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 brilliant career in after life. He was unassuming and
spoke little. 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 recognize the smiling face of a
priest.

An old man was dozing in a great hooded chair in the hall. After having drunk
each placed his bottle on the mantelpiece within hand’s reach and drew in a
long breath of satisfaction. I have. I could interpret these signs. Do these
correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

--Of course, I am, said Lynch. . _ Have you studied it? What have you there in
your pocket?”

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone
assumed an innocent face. He felt the rhythm of the verse about him in the
room. As the husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons
Mr Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. This he did
by raising his hand vaguely and pensively changing the angle of position of his
hat.

--I will try to learn it, said Stephen. In the silence of the soft grey air he
heard the cricket bats from here and from there: pock. This vision made him
feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit. The mind in that mysterious
instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. They began to exchange
stories. The drivers pointed with their whips to Bodenstown. The lean young man
in a long overcoat, who was to give a special display of intricate club
swinging, stood near watching with interest, his silver-coated clubs peeping
out of his deep side-pockets. Kathleen played a selection of Irish airs which
was generously applauded. On special Sundays, when Mr Kearney went with his
family to the pro-cathedral, a little crowd of people would assemble after mass
at the corner of Cathedral Street. The sudden legend startled his blood: he
seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him and to shrink from
their company. He had been thrown by the fellow's machine lightly on the cinder
path and his spectacles had been broken in three pieces and some of the grit of
the cinders had gone into his mouth. First of all it had been an excitement for
her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. Set that before you as
your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every
sense, your way in life and in thinking. People began to look at us. Mrs
Kearney was well content at this. I know you’re a friend of his, not like
some of the others he does be with. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated
me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son.

It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the
Pigeon House. I thought you were Josephine, Stephen.

--I am afraid you are a heretic. Temple, after a few moments, sidled across to
Stephen and said:

--Excuse me, I wanted to ask you, do you believe that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was
a sincere man?

Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask from
the grass at his feet, turned swiftly and said sternly:

--Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you know, to
anybody on any subject, I'll kill you SUPER SPOTTUM.

--He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man. Mrs Dedalus
followed and the places were arranged. Dante covered her plate with her hands
and said:

--No, thanks.

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.

As they passed through a lane of the tables Stephen said:

--Cranly, I want to speak to you.

--I don't know if you know where that is--at a hurling match between the
Croke's Own Boys and the Fearless Thurles and by God, Stevie, that was the hard
fight.

Little Chandler blushed again.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. The platinoid
wire is insulated and the covering of silk that insulates it is wound on the
ebonite bobbins just where my finger is. The brandy was forced down the man’s
throat. It knew. He listened to Father Arnall's low and gentle voice as he
corrected the themes. She listened to all. She danced lightly in the round. She
looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear. There was
one thing she didn’t like and that was the tracts on the walks; but the
matron was such a nice person to deal with, so genteel.

--Now it is all about politics in the papers, he said.

“No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that
last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got
out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after
we passed Merrion.

The odorous winds are weaving A music of sighs: Arise, arise, My dove, my
beautiful one!

I wait by the cedar tree, My sister, my love, White breast of the dove, My
breast shall be your bed.

--That remark was made before, Cranly said calmly.

The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the classroom
when the voices paused and the silence was filled by the sound of softly
browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches tranquilly, lulled his
aching soul. She made beef-tea for him and scolded him roundly. He was drawing
her into them: he would drown her.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. Father Arnall rose from his seat and
went among them, helping the boys with gentle words and telling them the
mistakes they had made. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then
put up her hand to her mouth: that was heartburn. He said that there was
nothing in this world he would like so well as that. Annie had chosen it
herself and it reminded him of her. It too was prim and pretty. She was leaning
on the banisters, listening to something. As he passed Lenehan took off his cap
and, after about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute to the air.

Brother Michael was standing at the door of the infirmary and from the door of
the dark cabinet on his right came a smell like medicine.

--Give me a kiss, she said.

--But, sir--

--Yes?

--Father Dolan came in today and pandied me because I was not writing my theme.
That has the true scholastic stink.

--Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Then he asked uncle Charles was it
tender. ”

Mrs Kearney had to go back to the dressing-room. ”

He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily led his
wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:

“Miss Kate, here’s Mrs Conroy.

“But, however that may be, I can only ask you tonight to take the will for
the deed and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to
express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion. She went to the
priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. He was a
serious young man, not rakish or loud-voiced like the others. By Christ, I’ll
go myself and see what they’re like. One night he went for his wife with the
cleaver and she had to sleep in a neighbour’s house. We kept the ball rolling
anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse
of it either.

--He had, faith, Temple said. I asked him again now, but he was leaning on the
counter in his shirt-sleeves having a deep goster with Alderman Cowley. Though
there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was
sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father
Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was
discovered with a copy of _The Halfpenny Marvel_. Then a man from Belfast
bought the field and built houses in it--not like their little brown houses but
bright brick houses with shining roofs. ”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Mr Cunningham, “Jack and I and M’Coy
here--we’re all going to wash the pot. ”

“And tell me, Martin.

“Round and round he went,” said Gabriel, “and the old gentleman, who was
a very pompous old gentleman, was highly indignant.

Stephen pointed to the Tsar's photograph and said:

--He has the face of a besotted Christ.

Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan's snoutish face, outlined on the grey
light, was impassive. My coffin shall be black, Six angels at my back, Two to
sing and two to pray And two to carry my soul away.

Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father's eyes were full
of tears.

--Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the half chewed fig and
jerking it towards the squat student's mouth in sign that he should eat. Rody
Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called
the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket.

Two nights after his friends came to see him.

“It doesn’t pain you now?” asked Mr M’Coy.

“I remember reading,” said Mr Cunningham, “that one of Pope Leo’s poems
was on the invention of the photograph--in Latin, of course. “That’ll be
the most convenient place. ”

“But we mustn’t be late,” said Mr Power earnestly, “because it is sure
to be crammed to the doors.

“O no, sir!” cried the girl, following him. Each of his senses was brought
under a rigorous discipline. In one of these trimly built cars was a party of
four young men whose spirits seemed to be at present well above the level of
successful Gallicism: in fact, these four young men were almost hilarious. He
longed to be alone with her. Supreme Judge, from His sentence there will be and
can be no appeal. He calls the just to His side, bidding them enter into the
kingdom, the eternity of bliss prepared for them.

--Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus. “They believe in enjoying life--and
don’t you think they’re right? If you want to enjoy yourself properly you
must go to Paris. And, mind you, they’ve a great feeling for the Irish there.
When they heard I was from Ireland they were ready to eat me, man. A low murmur
of curiosity ran round the chapel at the discovery of this girlish figure. A
broad-shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a
jack-knife, seriously.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. I'll tell
McGlade you're not well.

Without waiting for his father's questions he ran across the road and began to
walk at breakneck speed down the hill. Just as in dead bodies worms are
engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a
perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the
worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. Introduction.
Father polite and observant. 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. And
if the minister did it he would go to the rector: and the rector to the
provincial: and the provincial to the general of the jesuits.

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. Only he
doesn't know it. ”

“Out from the mansion of his forefathers,” continued Gabriel, “he drove
with Johnny.

“Very well, then,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “let us have another one as a
_deoc an doruis_--that’s good vernacular for a small whisky, I believe.

At the corner of Hume Street a young woman was standing.

Aunt Kate and Gabriel laughed too. The squalid scene composed itself around
him; the common accents, the burning gas-jets in the shops, odours of fish and
spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. He stood still, gazing fixedly
at the head upon the pile of papers.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. There was grace and mystery in
her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. Lizzie Fleming said Maria
was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow
Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either; and
when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the
tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. Then Ginger Mooney lifted up
her mug of tea and proposed Maria’s health while all the other women
clattered with their mugs on the table, and said she was sorry she hadn’t a
sup of porter to drink it in. Ségouin, perhaps, would not think it a great sum
but Jimmy who, in spite of temporary errors, was at heart the inheritor of
solid instincts knew well with what difficulty it had been got together. This
knowledge had previously kept his bills within the limits of reasonable
recklessness, and, if he had been so conscious of the labour latent in money
when there had been question merely of some freak of the higher intelligence,
how much more so now when he was about to stake the greater part of his
substance! It was a serious thing for him. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin
English. Subject: B. V. 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 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 who stood
watching the exodus and bowing and shaking hands with the visitors. A
remembrance of some of his lines made a sudden flush rise to his painted
cheeks. The rivals were school friends.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. I was born to be a monk. ”

“And did he go home?” asked Gabriel. “It’s six of one and half-a-dozen
of the other. ”

“The opera, is it?” said Mr Kernan. Now that the hall-door was closed the
voice and the piano could be heard more clearly. When he saw Freddy Malins
coming across the room to visit his mother Gabriel left the chair free for him
and retired into the embrasure of the window. I was quite bad. I could not call
my wandering thoughts together.

--Yes, said Cecil Thunder, and the prefect of studies was in second of grammar
this morning. He stated that the deceased was his wife. 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. Nobody could find the
nutcrackers and Joe was nearly getting cross over it and asked how did they
expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker. But Maria said she didn’t
like nuts and that they weren’t to bother about her. The eyes see the thing,
without having wished first to see. A horde of grimy children populated the
street. He had loose red-brown hair and tender shapely strong freckled hands.
He hoped Mr Alleyne would not discover that the last two letters were missing.
Soon he would sleep.

He had written verses for her again after ten years.

--My signature is of no account, he said politely. The gossip of his
fellow-students which strove to render the flat life of the college significant
at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. They passed the farmhouse
of the Jolly Farmer. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls were
in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God loved them, seeing them.
Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.

The rector went on gravely:

--You are all familiar with the story of the life of saint Francis Xavier, I
suppose, the patron of your college.

--The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord.

Our broken cries and mournful lays Rise in one eucharistic hymn Are you not
weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise The chalice flowing to the brim.

--Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the
classical school and the romantic school and all that. Mr Alleyne and Miss
Delacour were standing outside the counter and all the clerks had turn round in
anticipation of something.

“That’s a nice lady!” he said. But if you wait a minute I’ll send round
to Fogarty’s at the corner. Listening tonight to the names of all those great
singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a
less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious
days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in
gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection,
still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose
fame the world will not willingly let die. Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers
tapped the cold pane of the window. Midway down they were held up by Mary Jane,
who replenished them with raspberry or orange jelly or with blancmange and jam.
The pudding was of Aunt Julia’s making and she received praises for it from
all quarters. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had tan boots. The shop
was very quiet.

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether.
When he awoke the train had passed out of Mallow and his father was stretched
asleep on the other seat. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her.
‘y na’e is Kernan. ”

The shock and the incipient pain had partly sobered him. “I think her voice
has greatly improved. Crofton and I were in the back of the. . . . . . ?



He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment.

--Um, Cranly said as before. It's like gunpowder, by God. Do you use a holder?

--I don't smoke, answered Stephen. ”

“Do you hear me now?. He had the body taken to the waiting-room pending the
arrival of the ambulance. 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. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen.

--I will take the risk, said Stephen. 1 D. Coat. 3 Articles and White. 1 Man's
Pants. Coat. 3 Articles and White. 1 Man's Pants. Coat. 3 Articles and White. 1
Man's Pants.

Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box, speckled
with louse marks, and asked vaguely:

--How much is the clock fast now?

His mother straightened the battered alarm clock that was lying on its side in
the middle of the mantelpiece until its dial showed a quarter to twelve and
then laid it once more on its side.

--The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected. Get it out in bits!

Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures as he spoke.

--I'm a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair.

While sweetly, gently, secretly, The flowery bells of morn are stirred And the
wise choirs of faery Begin (innumerous!) to be heard. One answered:

--Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.

After that they lived apart.

“Not at all,” said Mr Power.

--Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into my
ear. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for whatever he
had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible.

His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice before he
answered. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand. There were plenty
of strangers down too. There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and holly
and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers. Yet eternity had no end.
Meek and abased by this consciousness of the one eternal omnipresent perfect
reality his soul took up again her burden of pieties, masses and prayers and
sacraments and mortifications, and only then for the first time since he had
brooded on the great mystery of love did he feel within him a warm movement
like that of some newly born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of
rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as
of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer,
humiliated and faint before her Creator.

“God help me,” he said, smiling, “it’s the doctor’s orders.
Good-night, Mrs Conroy. Good-night, Aunt Julia. ”

“O, good-night, Gretta, I didn’t see you. ”

“I often told Julia,” said Aunt Kate emphatically, “that she was simply
thrown away in that choir.

“Thats a nice how-do-you-do,” said Mr O’Connor. She seemed to him so
frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with
her. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. Her husband
was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they
had one child. From her hands and wrists too as she lit and steadied her candle
a faint perfume arose. It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in
stone. I tried to unite my will with the will of God instant by instant. Damn
the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his
own language or to learn it from us. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get
back to the old country. ”

Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters.

“We’re all going to make a retreat together and confess our sins--and God
knows we want it badly. His hands were trembling and his soul trembled as he
heard the priest pass with the ciborium from communicant to communicant. His
thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. Tierney, P. L. G.
On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to
write: To E-- C--. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but
there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their
tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming
instinct in others but often disappointed. Once you are married you are done
for, it said.

A powerful-looking figure, the upper part of which was draped with a white
surplice, was observed to be struggling into the pulpit.

He used the phrase broadly and loudly as he often used technical expressions,
as if he wished his hearer to understand that they were used by him without
conviction. He scarcely knew what he was eating, feeling her beside him alone,
at night, in the sleeping house.

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. ,” said Mr
Cunningham, “was one of the lights of the age. His great idea, you know, was
the union of the Latin and Greek Churches. Most people considered Lenehan a
leech but, in spite of this reputation, his adroitness and eloquence had always
prevented his friends from forming any general policy against him. He had a
brave manner of coming up to a party of them in a bar and of holding himself
nimbly at the borders of the company until he was included in a round. 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.

--But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me.

“Why don’t you put him to something?”

“Sure, amn’t I never done at the drunken bowsy ever since he left school?
‘I won’t keep you,’ I says. For him there was nothing amusing in a girl's
interest and regard. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking
consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an
obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts
to impresarios?

He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their
evenings alone.

Stephen raised his hat in acknowledgement.

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir,” said the injured man. Stephen's
heart began slowly to fold and fade with fear like a withering flower.

--Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall? cried the prefect of studies.
Miss Ivors promptly took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly
tone:

“Of course, I was only joking. The baritone was asked what did he think of
Mrs Kearney’s conduct. Was it the raw reddish glow he had so often seen on
wintry mornings on the shaven gills of the priests? The face was eyeless and
sour-favoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger. That was
to kiss. But they were very holy peasants. 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. It would be splendid for Gretta too if she’d come. That was
a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. Every rat had two eyes to look
out of.

The door closed behind him. And therefore the air was silent save for one soft
hiss that fell.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar.
“To feed and clothe these ignorant bostooms. I didn’t think you were a West
Briton. ”

“Strange,” said Mr Bartell D’Arcy.

“O, it’s only two steps up the quay.

--Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into my
ear. Our day will come yet, believe me. But the sulphurous brimstone which
burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and
for ever with unspeakable fury. Mrs Donnelly told her husband it was a great
shame for him to speak that way of his own flesh and blood but Joe said that
Alphy was no brother of his and there was nearly being a row on the head of it.
She had spared neither trouble nor expense and this was how she was repaid. To
keep the audience continually diverted she slipped the doubtful items in
between the old favourites. Gabriel applauded loudly with all the others at the
close of the song and loud applause was borne in from the invisible
supper-table. He looked down into the street in order that his emotion might
calm a little. It was nothing, he said: only a little accident. Why did you
sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn
aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the
occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not
give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the
counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the
first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of
your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve
you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. 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. They must have gone home by another way. The air
of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies
flying clearly against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of smoky tenuous
blue. She herself said that it was not quite brown enough. He held a programme
in his hand and, while he was talking to her, he chewed one end of it into a
moist pulp. ”

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had
not interested me. I say, one and all,” he added with gruff charity and
turning to Mr Power.

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.
When they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew
forth his orders on the governor 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. . ”

“But who knows?” said Ignatius Gallaher considerately. The old man began to
rake more cinders together.

Mr Doran was very anxious indeed this Sunday morning. But why? Her passage
through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening
sound, rich and lutelike?

He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade,
beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery from the students
whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back to itself the age of
Dowland and Byrd and Nash. You're a born sneerer, Stevie. Hurry up, you better.

--Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. He was excited and breathless. In the end
he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying
Sunday’s dinner. Amen.

The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within his soutane and,
having considered its dial for a moment in silence, placed it silently before
him on the table.

Mr Dedalus threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate. “He’s really
terrible. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it!. The first
tenor and the baritone arrived together. 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. Even once was a mortal sin. In a
whisper Mr Cunningham drew Mr Kernan’s attention to Mr Harford, the
moneylender, who sat some distance off, and to Mr Fanning, the registration
agent and mayor maker of the city, who was sitting immediately under the pulpit
beside one of the newly elected councillors of the ward. When we speak of
beauty in the second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in the first
place by the art itself and by the form of that art. Farrington looked very
serious and determined. The oblique staring expression in them fascinated him.
He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the
others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the
fainting sickness of his stomach. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery
of Blackrock, the passage 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. The noise of
children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more
keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. 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. He was in
another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

“O, pa!” he cried. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly
disputing with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. She
looked at him from under her brows for a moment quizzically until he smiled.
”

Mr Holohan pointed desperately towards the hall where the audience was clapping
and stamping.

He returned to his desk in the lower office and counted the sheets which
remained to be copied. Stephen heard but could feel no pity. The episode ended
well, for both Heron and Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence. And lo,
the supreme judge is coming! No longer the lowly Lamb of God, no longer the
meek Jesus of Nazareth, no longer the Man of Sorrows, no longer the Good
Shepherd, He is seen now coming upon the clouds, in great power and majesty,
attended by nine choirs of angels, angels and archangels, principalities,
powers and virtues, thrones and dominations, cherubim and seraphim, God
Omnipotent, God Everlasting.

--Give us that stick here, Cranly said. He stared before him out of his dark
flaming eyes, repeating:

--Away with God, I say!

Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her
napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the
foot of an easy-chair. No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full
of a present joy.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

“Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world.

--A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. Mrs Kearney,
with her husband and daughter, arrived at the Antient Concert Rooms
three-quarters of an hour before the time at which the concert was to begin.
Therefore she was not surprised when one day Mr Holohan came to her and
proposed that her daughter should be the accompanist at a series of four grand
concerts which his Society was going to give in the Antient Concert Rooms.

Mr Bell laughed at his fellow-sufferer, held out his hand and said:

“Shake!”

Mrs Kearney passed by these two young men and went to the edge of the screen to
view the house.

There, where the gay winds stay to woo The young leaves as they pass, My love
goes slowly, bending to Her shadow on the grass;

And where the sky's a pale blue cup Over the laughing land, My love goes
lightly, holding up Her dress with dainty hand. The veiled autumnal evenings
led him from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet
avenues of Blackrock.

--Good evening, gentlemen, said the stubble-grown monkeyish face.

He wished the details of the incident to remain vague. “Good-night, Mrs
Kernan. ”





Mrs Kernan’s puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight. But Miss
Ivors, who had put on her hat and was buttoning her cloak, would not stay.
Hurry up and finish the first part.

--He's coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he
wants to.

--Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would
strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

--The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. He would be
at one with others and with God.

Now that he was alone his face looked older. I needn’t tell you, Martin, what
kind of men they are. _

But no one tried to show her her mistake; and when she had ended her song Joe
was very much moved. .

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he
had a hairy face. We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little schemers.
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 reasonably. It gave him an intense sense of power to
know that he could, by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo
all that he had done. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a
light noise like a little song. And on that day may Erin well Pledge in the cup
she lifts to Joy One grief--the memory of Parnell. They were like poetry but
they were only sentences to learn the spelling from. When they were grown up he
was going to marry Eileen. The cold light of the dawn lay over the country,
over the unpeopled fields and the closed cottages. Statues of women, if Lynch
be right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling
regretfully her own hinder parts.

APRIL 6, LATER.

Cranly smiled and said kindly:

--The captain has only one love: sir Walter Scott. I'm old enough to be his
grandfather. But that's you all out.

“There’s a lineal descendant of Major Sirr for you if you like! O, the
heart’s blood of a patriot! That’s a fellow now that’d sell his country
for fourpence--ay--and go down on his bended knees and thank the Almighty
Christ he had a country to sell. Isn't that so, captain?

--What are you reading now, captain? Dixon asked. THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR?

--I love old Scott, the flexible lips said, I think he writes something lovely.
There is no writer can touch sir Walter Scott. Polly began to grow a little
strange in her manner and the young man was evidently perturbed. She sang:



_I’m a.

Few people passed. The recollection brightened his eyes. One got the
prayer-book and the other three got the water; and when one of the next-door
girls got the ring Mrs Donnelly shook her finger at the blushing girl as much
as to say: _O, I know all about it!_ They insisted then on blindfolding Maria
and leading her up to the table to see what she would get; and, while they were
putting on the bandage, Maria laughed and laughed again till the tip of her
nose nearly met the tip of her chin. Oh, honest to God, if the crook of it
caught him that time he was done for.

--I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely that's not
the strange thing that happened you?

--Well, I suppose that doesn't interest you, but leastways there was such noise
after the match that I missed the train home and I couldn't get any kind of a
yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it, there was a mass meeting
that same day over in Castletownroche and all the cars in the country were
there.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice between two teeth.

--Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story. Lazy little schemer.
I see schemer in your face. A voice asked who was there and I answered I was
over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that I'd be thankful
for a glass of water.

No escape. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could
not eat the damp bread. They had been married for twenty-two years and had
lived happily until about two years ago when his wife began to be rather
intemperate in her habits. But their progress across the gravel was brought to
a halt after every dozen or so paces by some reply of the porter's. She did not
feel in the least hungry and she had already overstayed her time. It is a
beautiful evening now in heaven.

He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his
ears. A power, akin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from
him, brought his steps to rest. It was slushy underfoot; and only streaks and
patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area
railings.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but
at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it.

--Mr Cranly!

A smile flew across Stephen's face as he thought of his friend's studies. He
said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at
school. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years
before. This, it seemed, was the only love and that the only hate his soul
would harbour.

The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is the pain
of conscience. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. The
rivals were school friends. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the
misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable
life, which was to win the day in his soul. 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. All at once the idea struck him that perhaps Corley had seen her
home by another way and given him the slip. 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.
No! They wouldn’t have it!”

“Ha!” said Mr M’Coy.

“And they were a German cardinal by the name of Dolling. But not there in the
chapel of the college. For her only one reparation could make up for the loss
of her daughter’s honour: marriage. It leads you out of the maze into a new
gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and
the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great
flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and
admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her
children and yours. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it
grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from
under the boughs and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet pattering like
rain upon the leaves.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but
at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it.

--Why is he not writing, Father Arnall?

--He broke his glasses, said Father Arnall, and I exempted him from work.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's
hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled
and rattling metal. All through his boyhood he had mused upon that which he had
so often thought to be his destiny and when the moment had come for him to obey
the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward instinct. Anywhere you like.
The outhouse will do me nicely: it will be more salubrious. 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. When
it had ceased all the auditors drank from their bottles in silence. We revenged
ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he
would get at three o’clock from Mr Ryan. Mahony, at last, jumped down and
said:

“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.

--It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where
they speak the best English. He stood up to put on his coat and waistcoat, more
helpless than ever. He is said to have baptized as many as ten thousand
idolaters in one month. Four young men, who had come from the refreshment-room
to stand in the doorway at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in
couples after a few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music
were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it
at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate
standing at her elbow to turn the page. Dante gave him a cachou every time he
brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven.

--Because there is a thigh in it, he said. I wouldn’t like to face your
journey home at this hour. I admire the mind of man independent of all
religions. I say--

Lynch halted and said bluntly:

--Stop! I won't listen! I am sick. P. _

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to
find myself at check. . . . ?” I said. “Do you know what my private and
candid opinion is about some of those little jokers? I believe half of them are
in the pay of the Castle. ”

“There’s no knowing,” said the old man. Good-night, Miss O’Callaghan.
”

“Good-night, Miss Morkan.

The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:

“Well, thank you, sir. When they reached Stephen’s Green they crossed the
road. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer.
After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. He was
sober, thrifty and pious; he went to the altar every first Friday, sometimes
with her, oftener by himself.

--Sorry! Sorry! O sorry!

The slide clicked back and his heart bounded in his breast. Tell me now what is
CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

--And if you got nothing, would you rob?

--You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are
provisional, and that in certain circumstances it is not unlawful to rob. But
she would show them their mistake. What birds were they? He thought that they
must be swallows who had come back from the south. It must be. Even as he
raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled
through his fingers over the front of his coat. No, no; she could not. He was
not foxing. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery of Blackrock, the
passage 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. The lower teeth and gums were covered
with clotted blood and a minute piece of the tongue seemed to have been bitten
off. That was because he was thinking of his own father. ”

She thought she would have to stand in the Drumcondra tram because none of the
young men seemed to notice her but an elderly gentleman made room for her. “I
never even heard of him. . rrm. . . And when I ask when my daughter is going to
be paid I can’t get a civil answer. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the
church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country.
Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her.

Her husband called after her:

“Nothing for poor little hubby!”

He assumed such a comical face and voice that the distribution of the bottles
of stout took place amid general merriment.

Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan's snoutish face, outlined on the grey
light, was impassive. The fog had begun to chill him and he wondered could he
touch Pat in O’Neill’s. Here was congenial ground for all.

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. The bass and the second tenor
had already come. ”

Mr Browne took another sip of his whisky and said, with sidling mimicry:

“Well, you see, I’m like the famous Mrs Cassidy, who is reported to have
said: ‘Now, Mary Grimes, if I don’t take it, make me take it, for I feel I
want it.

“We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He thought that he was
sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. He had fallen on his feet
in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a
holiday. Had it been any terrible crime but that one sin! Had it been murder!
Little fiery flakes fell and touched him at all points, shameful thoughts,
shameful words, shameful acts. Or he would write a letter for the priest to
bring. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. A
little troop of Neapolitan peasants 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 curtsying.

The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had
stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he
might be subject to them and serve their ends. What was their languid grace but
the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the
scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. The
threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a
reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked
his stomach. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a
white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The bed was
clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. He
entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. I
was silent. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the
point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. I will
ask you now, all of you, to repeat after me the act of contrition, kneeling
here in this humble chapel in the presence of God.

He turned aside and made the act of spitting. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the
straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.

--The next business is to sign the testimonial. I suppose it is for the good of
the Church if the pope does it. When I reached the top of the slope I turned
round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the field:

“Murphy!”

My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry
stratagem.

--Of course, said Lynch. ”

“Who did you get?” asked Mr Lyons.

“Tell me, Lily,” he said in a friendly tone, “do you still go to
school?”

“O no, sir,” she answered.

From the door of Byron's public-house to the gate of Clontarf Chapel, from the
gate of Clontail Chapel to the door of Byron's public-house and then back again
to the chapel and then back again to the public-house he had paced slowly at
first, planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the
footpath, then timing their fall to the fall of verses.

--In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates
the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. Fill
it out, you, Maggy.

When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and the old
washing glove flung on the side of it he allowed his mother to scrub his neck
and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of
his nose.

Cranly did not answer. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first
luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it. His parents went to
eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of
Mrs Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. There were so many different
moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. It made you feel so
happy. It was a terrible and a sad thing to sin. Even as he raised his large
trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers
over the front of his coat.

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. Let us have the
story anyhow. Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for
him who has walked in the right path, fulfilling the duties of his station in
life, attending to his morning and evening prayers, approaching the holy
sacrament frequently and performing good and merciful works.

Mr H.

At the corner of Hume Street a young woman was standing. “That’s history.
It’s some of those secular priests, ignorant, bumptious----”

“They’re all good men,” said Mr Cunningham, “each in his own way. ”

“Very well,” said Little Chandler, “the next time you come we must have
an evening together. ”

“Yes.

“Well, I couldn’t go over while he was talking to Alderman Cowley.

--To wit? said Lynch. “That’s the latest. It’s some of those secular
priests, ignorant, bumptious----”

“They’re all good men,” said Mr Cunningham, “each in his own way. I’m
a great fellow fol-the-diddle-I-do. ”

Gabriel went to the stairs and listened over the banisters. I mentioned Father
Burke’s name. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay
there in his coffin. They halted too on the steps below him.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. When we met in
the street the houses had grown sombre. I mixed with fine decent fellows.

--The more shame to you now, Dante said, to speak as you do. We have had too
much God In Ireland. _Kernan_, he said, _we worship at different altars_, he
said, _but our belief is the same_. Struck me as very well put. ”

“There’s a good deal in that,” said Mr Power. “Is it John of Tuam?”

“Are you sure of that now?” asked Mr Fogarty dubiously. A few steps behind
her were Mr Bartell D’Arcy and Miss O’Callaghan. But Corley’s brow was
soon smooth again.

--I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly. They spoke of two friends
who had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of getting places
on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices. And the voices say with them: We
are your kinsmen.

Then Brother Michael was going away and the fellow out of the third of grammar
told him to be sure and come back and tell him all the news in the paper. He
mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which
seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. There were four French delegates
in a brake and one, a plump smiling young man, held, wedged on a stick, a card
on which were printed the words: VIVE L'IRLANDE!

But the trees in Stephen's Green were fragrant of rain and the rain-sodden
earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the
mould from many hearts. Somebody said something about the garden, and at last
Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told
her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was
wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the
prayer-book. ”

But Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something
they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake. The boldest
said:

“O, now, Mr Browne, I’m sure the doctor never ordered anything of the kind.
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 telegraph-poles
held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars. 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. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of his heart
was broken.

His household returned to its usual way of life. I told you that one day I
wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the
Museum. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then
analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the
only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You talk to me
of nationality, language, religion. O Johnny!

He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping
noise with his lips. How beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when
God looked upon it with love!

Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets.

“True bill,” said Mr Kernan, equally gravely. Yes, do, said Cecil Thunder.

--Yes, do. “What we want in this country, as I said to old Ward, is capital.
The King’s coming here will mean an influx of money into this country. Soon
all would be dark and sleeping. People said that she was very clever at music
and a very nice girl and, moreover, that she was a believer in the language
movement. Of course, he did mix with a rakish set of fellows at that time,
drank freely and borrowed money on all sides. “Tell me,” he added, glancing
first for approval to the lady beside him, “do you take me for a fool? Do you
think me an utter fool?”

The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back
again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous
moment:

“I don’t think, sir,” he said, “that that’s a fair question to put to
me. ”

There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Then she withdrew them,
went into the house and emptied her husband’s pockets. We went out to
Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there. He was going to study singing
only for his health. It was his wife. Once or twice I stopped by the way under
a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was thick I'd have stretched out
there and slept. At last, after a bend of the road, I spied a little cottage
with a light in the window. There was a good deal of confused talk, and then Mr
Browne got into the cab. ”

The old man went out of the room.

“You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy,” said Ignatius Gallaher.
Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the temptress of his
villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor, were opening to his
eyes.

Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of
enchanted days. 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.

--Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the
classical school and the romantic school and all that. The priest's voice, too,
had a hard jingling tone. The battered silk hat was placed on the man’s head.
His blood was in revolt. Once or twice he pulled down his cuffs with one hand
while he held the brim of his hat lightly, but firmly, with the other hand.

Lenehan observed them for a few minutes. Six o’clock on Christmas morning!
And all for what?”

“Well, isn’t it for the honour of God, Aunt Kate?” asked Mary Jane,
twisting round on the piano-stool and smiling.

Aunt Kate turned fiercely on her niece and said:

“I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it’s not at all
honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have
slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their
heads. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost
in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were
afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. He was going to
study singing only for his health. Three days’ reddish beard fringed his jaws
and every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to
take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief.

--I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly. The fire rose and fell on
the wall. The harm was done. Heron, beside Stephen, began to hum tunelessly.



MY EXCELLENT FRIEND BOMBADOS. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

“How do I know? To see him, perhaps. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it
was a poet’s soul. He seemed to be fairly old for his moustache was
ashen-grey. 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.

O bend no more in revery When he at eventide is calling.

He assumed a thick provincial accent and said in a tone of command:

“65, catch your cabbage!”

Everyone laughed. I’ll follow,” called out Gabriel from the dark. . . . . .
. . . my. . . ”

“He’s round at the _Black Eagle_,” said Mr Henchy. Take them in, Julia,
with Miss Daly and Miss Power. He was a long time before he got to the top. He
could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. At those moments the soft
speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest.

--How long is it since your last confession, my child?

--A long time, father.

How sweet to lie there, Sweet to kiss, Where the great pine-forest Enaisled is!

Thy kiss descending Sweeter were With a soft tumult Of thy hair.





EVELINE

SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.

Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of MacCann's flushed
blunt-featured face. “I’m done schooling this year and more. ”

Miss Healy had to smile. Mr M’Coy said:

“Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!”

“O, Father Tom Burke,” said Mr Cunningham, “that was a born orator.

“That’s a nice lady!” he said. “He’s really terrible. ”

Gabriel said nothing but pointed up the stairs towards where his wife was
standing.

“It’ll be all right when King Eddie comes,” he said. Year after year, for
much longer than any of you, my dear little boys, can remember or than I can
remember, the boys of this college have met in this very chapel to make their
annual retreat before the feast day of their patron saint. Time has gone on and
brought with it its changes. Even in the last few years what changes can most
of you not remember? Many of the boys who sat in those front benches a few
years ago are perhaps now in distant lands, in the burning tropics, or immersed
in professional duties or in seminaries, or voyaging over the vast expanse of
the deep or, it may be, already called by the great God to another life and to
the rendering up of their stewardship.

He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an
endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children and
heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and
pain. Shall we not be as wise as they Though love live but a day?







XXIV

Silently she's combing, Combing her long hair Silently and graciously, With
many a pretty air.

The sun is in the willow leaves And on the dapplled grass, And still she's
combing her long hair Before the looking-glass. Stephen watched him in silence.
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 knew
that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain
and throat were too dry for such a task. He had not intended to stay a moment
because concerts and _artistes_ bored him considerably but he remained leaning
against the mantelpiece. 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. He went from country to country in the east, from
Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptizing the people.

--We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly. He lived in an
old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery
or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. Modern business
methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe
Street on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the
address--London, E. C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden
battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood
four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. If any
boys have special confessors perhaps it will be better for them not to change.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his
head.

--Did they hurt you much? Nasty Roche asked. He was neither flattered nor
confused, but simply wished the banter to end.

The imagery through which the nature and kinship of the Three Persons of the
Trinity were darkly shadowed forth in the books of devotion which he read--the
Father contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His Divine Perfections
and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son and the Holy Spirit proceeding
out of Father and Son from all eternity--were easier of acceptance by his mind
by reason of their august incomprehensibility than was the simple fact that God
had loved his soul from all eternity, for ages before he had been born into the
world, for ages before the world itself had existed. He remembered well, with
the curious patient memory of the celibate, the first casual caresses her
dress, her breath, her fingers had given him.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything
else was idle and alien.

They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss

“Of course, you’ve no answer. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to
his buff that day minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the
forwards half the time and shouting like mad.

Eastward the gradual dawn prevails Where softly-burning fires appear, Making to
tremble all those veils Of grey and golden gossamer. ”

“Get behind me, Satan!” said Mr Fogarty, laughing and looking at the
others. ”

She laughed herself this time good-humouredly and then added quickly:

“But tell him to come in, Mary Jane, and close the door.

“I don’t know anything about Mr Fitzpatrick,” repeated Mrs Kearney. Now,
aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

“Why should I be ashamed of myself?” asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and
trying to smile. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal
his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. 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. I pray to God
through the merits of His zealous servant Francis Xavier, that such a soul may
be led to sincere repentance and that the holy communion on saint Francis's day
of this year may be a lasting covenant between God and that soul.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

--Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public
but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologized for him.
A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Soon the whole
bridge was trembling and resounding.

He had written verses for her again after ten years. ”

“But tell me, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate, with brisk tact.

“But yet,” continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection,
“there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur
to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that
we miss here tonight.

--Ah, John, he said. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the
league class after the first lesson?

--You know one reason why, answered Stephen. He could not weep. He moaned to
himself like some baffled prowling beast. Anxiety and his swift run made him
pant. He called out:

“Hallo, Corley!”

Corley turned his head to see who had called him, and then continued walking as
before. He suffered all the pangs and thrills of his friend’s situation as
well as those of his own.

“I haven’t such a bad opinion of the Jesuits,” he said, intervening at
length.

They went down to a discreet part of the corridor.

--I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among the
capuchins themselves of doing away with it and following the example of the
other franciscans. It surprised him however to find that at the end of his
course of intricate piety and self-restraint he was so easily at the mercy of
childish and unworthy imperfections. Boland, his friend, marched beside him, a
large grin on his face, while Nash came on a few steps behind, blowing from the
pace and wagging his great red head.

As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Road 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.

“O, of course, nothing wrong, you know.

--Warm weather for March, said Cranly. Ireland is the old sow that eats her
farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly.
The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever
subjected his fellow creatures. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in
the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding
hall. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his
head and that his accent was flat.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her
head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Then he
said:

--Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery. They had cried to
him from the car, waving their hands:

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and
muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. They drove by the crowd,
blended now into soft colours, to a music of merry bells. But the minds of rats
could not understand trigonometry. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the
same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its
duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which
it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is
always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless,
shoreless and bottomless. The man out of the last house passed on his way home;
she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards
crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses.

Mr Dedalus began to sway his head to and fro, crooning like a country singer. A
formula was given out. The near slide was drawn.

But he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation and did not
allow himself to desist from even the least or lowliest devotion, striving also
by constant mortification to undo the sinful past rather than to achieve a
saintliness fraught with peril.

--And he has such a soft mouth when he's speaking to you, don't you know. It
broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on all sides. The
ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the
ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the words--ever, never; ever, never.
The firmament was as a scroll rolled away. The match was blown out. He saw her
approach him in a lull of the talk and beg him to sing one of his curious
songs. The half-moons of his nails were perfect and when he smiled you caught a
glimpse of a row of childish white teeth. A spasm of rage gripped his throat
for a few moments and then passed, leaving after it a sharp sensation of
thirst. Then first her soul had begun to live as his soul had when he had first
sinned, and a tender compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail
pallor and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark shame of womanhood.

“O Lily,” he said, thrusting it into her hands, “it’s Christmas-time,
isn’t it? Just.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. Then he smiled and said:

--O, well, it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know.

--You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. You can't play
the saint on me any more, that's one sure five. That time is gone: gone for
ever. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England.
Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her
home.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two
images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she
had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. Only he doesn't know it. He
tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God.
His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy. Yet it was surely
half-an-hour since he had seen the clock of the College of Surgeons. 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 peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices
had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again.

--I can see, he said, that you are about to make obvious remarks. The white
spray nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on
her cheek. An old woman was about to cross the street, an oilcan in her hand.

--Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same.

The gentlemen drank from their glasses, set the glasses again on the table and
paused. He's going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson. There are twenty subjects. The
verses told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the
moon. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at
either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

“No, thank you.

--Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. Father Arnall sat at a table to the left
of the altar. Every day. Every day. It had always sounded strangely in my ears,
like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. I
tried to unite my will with the will of God instant by instant.

Eliza resumed:

“Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. He has a handsome face, mind you,
in repose. He desired with all his will not to hear or see. It was a mean thing
to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they were saying. He was standing
at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled
forward over a face of bronze. He felt only an ache of soul and body, his whole
being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary. They were
walking quickly, the young woman taking quick short steps, while Corley kept
beside her with his long stride. Their faces were powdered and they caught up
their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas. The pupil
reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the
reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain
fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely. At the end of the walk
he halted before turning and raised his eyes. He repeated his phrases over and
over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice.
Supreme Judge, from His sentence there will be and can be no appeal. He calls
the just to His side, bidding them enter into the kingdom, the eternity of
bliss prepared for them. Later on he had become the partner of a very fat short
gentleman, Mr Goldberg, in the Liffey Loan Bank. Though he had never embraced
more than the Jewish ethical code his fellow-Catholics, whenever they had
smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of him bitterly as an
Irish Jew and an illiterate and saw divine disapproval of usury made manifest
through the person of his idiot son. At other times they remembered his good
points. Father Dolan will be in to see you every day. Then Jack Lawton cracked
his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said:

--Right. But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the
most subtle beast of the field. ”

“Who was he, Miss Morkan?” asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy politely. Gabriel
glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the
ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead. It is a tradition that is
unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places
abroad) among the modern nations. The water would rise inch by inch, covering
the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and
the mountain tops.

As he sat at his desk in the King’s Inns he thought what changes those eight
years had brought.

--You, said Heron. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare
and a thigh is the other thigh.

--Mine too, he said. A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his easily
embittered heart for this faithful serving-man of the knightly Loyola, for this
half-brother of the clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of
soul than they, one whom he would never call his ghostly father; and he thought
how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands
not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during
all their history, at the bar of God's justice for the souls of the lax and the
lukewarm and the prudent. The walls of the room were bare except for a copy of
an election address. At a smaller sideboard in one corner two young men were
standing, drinking hop-bitters. The syllables of the word _Araby_ were called
to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern
enchantment over me.

“Ah, yes,” he said, continuing, “it’s hard to know what way to bring up
children.

“Tommy,” he said, “I see you haven’t changed an atom. What is that
beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen
coldly. He was so different when he took any drink. Soon, perhaps, he would be
sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees.
The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him,
crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. The working-man
is not going to drag the honour of Dublin in the mud to please a German
monarch. They agreed that the gentleman must have missed his footing. But only
the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air.

--It might clear up, sir.

Stephen, recognizing the harsh tone of MacAlister's voice did not turn in the
direction of the voice. In a moment Stephen was a prisoner. Amen. So be it.
Apply to the jesuit theologian, Juan Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain
to you in what circumstances you may lawfully kill your king and whether you
had better hand him his poison in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or
his saddlebow. Ask me rather would I suffer others to rob me, or if they did,
would I call down upon them what I believe is called the chastisement of the
secular arm?

--And would you?

--I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed.

--I see, Cranly said. He sauntered across the road swaying his head from side
to side. Had it been any terrible crime but that one sin! Had it been murder!
Little fiery flakes fell and touched him at all points, shameful thoughts,
shameful words, shameful acts. A cold sadness was there. It made him shivery to
think of it and cold: and what Athy said too. At Westland Row Station a crowd
of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back,
saying that it was a special train for the bazaar.

--You are a great stranger now. She felt sure she would win. ”

“I’m surprised at you, Mrs Kearney,” said Mr Holohan. ”

The other leaned over the well of the car and peered into Mr Kernan’s mouth
but he could not see. He ordered the same again. Stephen sat down at his right
and the priest at the other side of the table closed his copy of THE TABLET
with an angry snap and stood up. The episode ended well, for both Heron and
Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence. From time to time everyone
glanced at Mrs Kearney. 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. The plump bald sergeant major
was testing with his foot the springboard of the vaulting horse. A trifle made
him blush at any time: and now he felt warm and excited. To retrieve the
consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to earth, lived
and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the
cross. Mr Holohan called to see her every day to have her advice on some point.
He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism. It had a horrid
rough feel. Freddy Malins, who had listened with his head perched sideways to
hear her better, was still applauding when everyone else had ceased and talking
animatedly to his mother who nodded her head gravely and slowly in
acquiescence.

“I could only get one cab,” he said.

The squat student did not eat it but, indulging his special humour, said
gravely, still tittering and prodding his phrase with his umbrella:

--Do you intend that. She moved her hand about here and there in the air and
descended on one of the saucers. She danced lightly in the round. She thought
her plans over.

When they had taken their places she said abruptly:

“I have a crow to pluck with you. Now who’d think he’d turn out like
that! I sent him to the Christian Brothers and I done what I could for him, and
there he goes boosing about.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two
images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she
had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. We can scut the whole hour.
She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about
me. She was sure they would but she could not help thinking what a pity it was
Alphy and Joe were not speaking. The blood went bounding along his veins; and
the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous.
The middle of the month was passed and, if he could get the copy done in time,
Mr Alleyne might give him an order on the cashier. If it were wound single an
extra current would be induced in the coils.

Jesus Christ was not a hard taskmaster. It was too much for him. Their feet
passed in pattering tumult over his mind, the feet of hares and rabbits, the
feet of harts and hinds and antelopes, until he heard them no more and
remembered only a proud cadence from Newman:

--Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms.
After a long struggle Weathers again brought his opponent’s hand slowly on to
the table. Farrington’s dark wine-coloured face flushed darker still with
anger and humiliation at having been defeated by such a stripling. There was
something striking in her appearance. He stretched his arm wearily towards the
foot of the bed, groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung
there. I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys
to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent. ”

Mrs Kearney rewarded his very flat final syllable with a quick stare of
contempt, and then said to her daughter encouragingly:

“Are you ready, dear?”

When she had an opportunity, she called Mr Holohan aside and asked him to tell
her what it meant.

“No, no,” said Mr Cunningham in an evasive tone, “it’s just a little.

“He’s not so bad, is he?” said Aunt Kate to Gabriel. He is more like a
son of God than a son of Mary. He walked with one hand upon his hip and in the
other hand he held a stick with which he tapped the turf lightly. He tried to
pull on his stocking.

The snares of the world were its ways of sin.

“Me, pa. I asked him again now, but he was leaning on the counter in his
shirt-sleeves having a deep goster with Alderman Cowley. I'd go up and tell the
rector on him. He'd give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

That was not a nice expression. His day began with an heroic offering of its
every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff
and with an early mass. 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. Among them William Ewart Gladstone, just then dead. I liked the last
best because its leaves were yellow. It may be uphill pedalling at first. But
Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom
upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room.

When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for
fully half a minute.

“No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that
last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got
out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after
we passed Merrion. The face of an old priest was at the grating, averted from
him, leaning upon a hand.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. I fear more than that the
chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol
behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in
the evening. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step,
his threadbare soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care,
nodding his head often and repeating:

--Not a doubt of it, Mr Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it!

In the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was speaking
earnestly, in a soft querulous voice, with a boarder. He went from country to
country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptizing the
people. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice. Again a wave.
His brain began to glow.

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. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us
an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It
awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic
stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and
at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. ”

A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind. She declined it, saying she was ironing
downstairs, and, after having exchanged a nod with Mr Cunningham behind Mr
Power’s back, prepared to leave the room. The ends of her tulle collarette
had been carefully disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her
bosom, stems upwards. Yes, the preacher was right.

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger
deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it.

--The cinder-path, sir. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous conversions,
a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit
history when that strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle
and indignity had been all but given through--a late-comer, a tardy spirit. He
saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. He felt only an ache of soul and
body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary.
He had opened a small shop on Glasnevin Road where, he flattered himself, his
manners would ingratiate him with the housewives of the district. If he went on
with the fellows he could never go up to the rector because he could not leave
the playground for that. Of course she was sorry for the sake of the
_artistes_. Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. 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. The pandybat made a sound too but not like
that.

The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and yet the
shaft came back to its bowstring; for he saw in a moment the student's
whey-pale face.

As Davin did not answer, Stephen began to quote:

--Long pace, fianna! Right incline, fianna! Fianna, by numbers, salute, one,
two!

--That's a different question, said Davin. She brought them up to his bedroom,
the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at
the fire. ”

After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in the _Dublin by
Lamplight_ laundry, and she liked it. “The General of the Jesuits stands next
to the Pope. ”

“There’s no mistake about it,” said Mr M’Coy, “if you want a thing
well done and no flies about it you go to a Jesuit. . . . . ”





AN ENCOUNTER

IT was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He did not wish her to
think that he was interested in this delicate boy. ”

She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in
silence.

“I met some of the old gang today,” said Ignatius Gallaher. Hell is the
centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than
at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to
temper or soften in the least the pains of hell. He asked himself what is a
woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a
symbol of.

--We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly. Very jolly it
was.

Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before
he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on
his tall hat. 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. 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:

Roderick 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 confidence.

A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he
had fallen, to feel that those souls were dearer to God than his. 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. A thing like that had
been done before by somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in
the books of history.

The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish fire from
the heavy boots of those students who sat on the highest tier of the gloomy
theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. His wife, who had been a soprano,
still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. He was laughing
heartily in a high key at a story which he had been telling Gabriel on the
stairs and at the same time rubbing the knuckles of his left fist backwards and
forwards into his left eye. The half-moons of his nails were perfect and when
he smiled you caught a glimpse of a row of childish white teeth. At the corner
of Grafton Street a short fat man was putting two handsome ladies on a car in
charge of another fat man. The syllables of the word _Araby_ were called to me
through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment
over me. ”

“The same to you,” said Gabriel cordially.

“God!” he exclaimed, resuming his natural face, “I never saw such an eye
in a man’s head. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse
with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?

He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade,
beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery from the students
whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back to itself the age of
Dowland and Byrd and Nash. A match of four was arranged, Cranly insisting,
however, that his ball should be used. Mr Kernan was huddled together with
cold. Stephen did not look up. 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. ”

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Religion for her was a habit
and she suspected that a man of her husband’s age would not change greatly
before death. She was tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his accident
and, but that she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, she would have told the
gentlemen that Mr Kernan’s tongue would not suffer by being shortened. This
was only to gain time. Besides Villona’s humming would confuse anybody; the
noise of the car, too.

--It's best of his play not to, Fleming said. 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.
What, then, had become of that deep-rooted shyness of his which had made him
loth to eat or drink under a strange roof? What had come of the pride of his
spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every
order?

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.

His name in that new life leaped into characters before his eyes and to it
there followed a mental sensation of an undefined face or colour of a face. I
will not let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here tonight. Hardly had he
sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat which had escaped him, sprang
up and pursued her across the field. It was well for her she had not to attend
to the ladies also.

--What is that exactly? asked Lynch. There were five or six workingmen in the
shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare. He asked
himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to
distant music, a symbol of. He longed to ascend through the roof and fly away
to another country where he would never hear again of his trouble, and yet a
force pushed him downstairs step by step. Three days’ reddish beard fringed
his jaws and every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that
he had to take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief.

--Yes, said Wells.

And mine? Is it not too? Then into Nile mud with it!

APRIL 1. He’s a spy of Colgan’s, if you ask me. ”

Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible, that he had
come on the scene by the merest accident.

“Well, I got Parkes for one, and I got Atkinson for two, and got Ward of
Dawson Street. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would have lots of
time to have the matter out with Mr Doran and then catch short twelve at
Marlborough Street. He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for
God but he died of fever on the island of Sancian. What was it that stood in
his way? His unfortunate timidity! He wished to vindicate himself in some way,
to assert his manhood. O why was that so? O why?

He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abasing himself in the awe of God Who
had made all things and all men.

--Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen.

“I’ll teach you to let the fire out!” he said, rolling up his sleeve in
order to give his arm free play. “I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as
good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned. ”

Mr Hynes laughed and, shoving himself away from the mantelpiece with the aid of
his shoulders, made ready to leave. . . He knew where he would meet the boys:
Leonard and O’Halloran and Nosey Flynn. All the descriptions of fierce love
and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. The
granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with
my hands in time to an air in my head. I’m surprised at boys like you,
educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were.

APRIL 10. 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. . . so clear and
fresh, never. ”

Aunt Julia smiled broadly and murmured something about compliments as she
released her hand from his grasp. He could hear two persons talking in the
pantry.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes.

--The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. Then
he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big
spoon like a shovel. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims
of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself
idly in his memory. Gabriel’s wife served out spoonfuls of the pudding and
passed the plates down the table. Midway down they were held up by Mary Jane,
who replenished them with raspberry or orange jelly or with blancmange and jam.
The pudding was of Aunt Julia’s making and she received praises for it from
all quarters.

--Anything else, my child?

Sins of anger, envy of others, gluttony, vanity, disobedience. 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. However, when she drew near the limit and her
friends began to loosen their tongues about her, she silenced them by marrying
Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay. The scheme might do good and,
at least, it could do no harm. Her beliefs were not extravagant. Her nakedness
yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavish-limbed, enfolded him like a
shining cloud, enfolded him like water with a liquid life; and like a cloud of
vapour or like waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech,
symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain. That was a long
time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was
dead. And it was there that the old servants had seen the ghost in the white
cloak of a marshal. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn
the spelling from.











The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly 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.

--A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to
his priest.

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump
clean hand he displayed at moments a signet ring.

Mr Power did not relish the use of his Christian name. And therefore the air
was silent save for one soft hiss that fell.

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. “That’s my opinion!”

Mrs Kernan entered the room and, placing a tray on the table, said:

“Help yourselves, gentlemen. ”

“Look at their church, too,” said Mr Power. ”

“And when we are thirsty we are also quarrelsome,” added Mr Browne.

“What have you done to him?” she cried, glaring into his face. 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. All day he had imagined a new meeting with her for he knew that she was
to come to the play. They blush better. Divine justice insists that the
understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the sins of
which they were guilty, and moreover, as saint Augustine points out, God will
impart to them His own knowledge of sin, so that sin will appear to them in all
its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of God Himself. They will behold
their sins in all their foulness and repent but it will be too late and then
they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected. This young and
brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the ideas of
our glorious founder and you know that he, at his own desire, was sent by saint
Ignatius to preach to the Indians. The evidence showed that the deceased lady,
while attempting to cross the line, was knocked down by the engine of the ten
o’clock slow train from Kingstown, thereby sustaining injuries of the head
and right side which led to her death. They walked forward in silence. Read
what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion. Would she like it? I
think so. It is the whole mass of those born into it. And you will set her mind
at rest. That was all very well; but now comes the tragic part about Johnny.
One fine day the old gentleman thought he’d like to drive out with the
quality to a military review in the park. At this Lenehan said that he had been
with Mac the night before in Egan’s. The soul of every human being that has
ever existed, the souls of all those who shall yet be born, all the sons and
daughters of Adam, all are assembled on that supreme day.

Gabriel’s eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under
the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano. But I don't believe
they will be flogged.

--What was he? Cranly asked after a pause. I can see it in your eye. No, I
treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more
like brothers than father and son. 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. Little
Chandler looked at his friend enviously. He lent her books, provided her with
ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. He was shabbily dressed in a suit
of greenish-black and wore what we used to call a jerry hat with a high crown.

_A juror_.

--Go to sleep again, Temple, said O'Keeffe.

--But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like me. Not
like the other tinker. Have read little and understood less. Then she said I
would come back to faith because I had a restless mind.

APRIL 13. We saw him lying upon the catafalque. Mahony’s big sister was to
write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was
sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then
to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. It was noon
when we reached the quays and, as all the labourers seemed to be eating their
lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal
piping beside the river.

Mr O’Connor tore a strip off the card and, lighting it, lit his cigarette.
The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit.

“Now, you’ll let the fire out the next time!” said the man striking at
him vigorously with the stick. Special puffs appeared in all the evening
papers, reminding the music-loving public of the treat which was in store for
it on the following evening. Mrs Kearney was somewhat reassured, but she
thought well to tell her husband part of her suspicions. ”

“Browne is out there, Aunt Kate,” said Mary Jane.

“Well,” said Gabriel, “if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my
language.

“Did you serve Aungier Street?” he asked Mr O’Connor. He felt completely
out-generalled.

“I haven’t such a bad opinion of the Jesuits,” he said, intervening at
length. Leave dreams to the dreamers That will not after, That song and
laughter

Do nothing move. ”

The boy went out and Mr Henchy began to rub his hands cheerfully, saying:

“Ah, well, he’s not so bad after all.

“O, do go, Gabriel,” she cried. But all the same it was queer what Athy
said and the way he said it. When they were dead they lay on their sides. We
followed him with our eyes and saw that when he had gone on for perhaps fifty
paces he turned about and began to retrace his steps. When we landed we watched
the discharging of the graceful threemaster which we had observed from the
other quay. 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 brilliant career in after life. As the husband was
often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr Duffy had many
opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society.

Brother Michael was standing at the door of the infirmary and from the door of
the dark cabinet on his right came a smell like medicine.

--Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron. QUASI PALMA EXALTATA SUM IN GADES
ET QUASI PLANTATIO ROSAE IN JERICHO. QUASI ULIVA SPECIOSA IN CAMPIS ET QUASI
PLATANUS EXALTATA SUM JUXTA AQUAM IN PLATEIS. QUASI ULIVA SPECIOSA IN CAMPIS ET
QUASI PLATANUS EXALTATA SUM JUXTA AQUAM IN PLATEIS. SICUT CINNAMOMUM ET
BALSAMUM AROMATIZANS ODOREM DEDI ET QUASI MYRRHA ELECTA DEDI SUAVITATEM ODORIS.



His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the
refuge of sinners.

“The thin edge of the wedge,” said Mr Henchy. Why did he say he knew that
trick?

--Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that
struggled through the dusty windows. Certainly they were pretty and the face
itself was pretty. Lynch says all women do. Then he turned on his heel rudely.
A woman came running down the front steps and coughed.

--O. Temple, after a few moments, sidled across to Stephen and said:

--Excuse me, I wanted to ask you, do you believe that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was
a sincere man?

Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask from
the grass at his feet, turned swiftly and said sternly:

--Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you know, to
anybody on any subject, I'll kill you SUPER SPOTTUM. Some girls stood near the
entrance door. It was Gretta who had nursed her during all her last long
illness in their house at Monkstown. When he brought the blouse home Annie
kissed him and said it was very pretty and stylish; but when she heard the
price she threw the blouse on the table and said it was a regular swindle to
charge ten and elevenpence for it. Low-lived dogs! And they look it! By Christ,
they look it!

--They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their
priests. Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back.
After a while O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard came in and the story was repeated
to them. The congregation rose also and settled again on its benches. His soul
was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation he had
listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. The book which he used
for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori,
with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. So entire and unquestionable
was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he
could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should
continue to live. When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception,
artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a
new personal experience. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion.

--He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp
before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. I know how
it has changed you. My aunt was surprised and hoped it was not some Freemason
affair.



How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said
BURY ME IN THE OLD CHURCHYARD! A tremor passed over his body. My aunt said to
him energetically:

“Can’t you give him the money and let him go? You’ve kept him late enough
as it is.

Eastward the gradual dawn prevails Where softly-burning fires appear, Making to
tremble all those veils Of grey and golden gossamer. No.

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed,
turned again to meet Cranly's eyes.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. I
disremember if it was October or November. I used to spend money on them right
enough,” he added, in a convincing tone, as if he was conscious of being
disbelieved.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

--Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public
but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologized for him.
Then he smiled and said:

--O, well, it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know. 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. The conversation went no further. Dante gave him a cachou
every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

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. A troubled night of dreams. He could not see her face but
he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the
shadow made appear black and white. He looked at the contracted and quivering
face of the child and began to be alarmed. Mr Alleyne would never give him an
hour’s rest; his life would be a hell to him.

“No, no, not for me,” said old Cotter. He's taking pure mathematics and I'm
taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. ”

“And where are they?”

No one knew; a voice said:

“Give him air.

“He is dead,” she said at length.

Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I
had a great laugh over it. They reason thus because, blinded by the gross
illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable
to comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. But he said:

--Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first
holy communion.

He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a companion
in the spiritual life. A woman had waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by
at night and, offering him a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her bed; for
Davin had the mild eyes of one who could be secret. They embraced softly,
impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shield-like
witnessing lake, the swans. Someone gave the toast of the yacht _The Belle of
Newport_ and then someone proposed one great game for a finish.

“What are you doing in the dark?” asked a voice.

“Did you call on Grimes?”

“I did. ”

“O, don’t forget the candle, Tom,” said Mr M’Coy, “whatever you do.
Mrs Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one another on
the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to
regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert.

Little boys were sent out into the principal streets of Dublin early on Friday
morning with bundles of handbills.

--I do not, Stephen said. Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it! Poor
Mick Lacy! He had little turns for it, grace notes that he used to put in that
I haven't got.







XXIII

This heart that flutters near my heart My hope and all my riches is, Unhappy
when we draw apart And happy between kiss and kiss: My hope and all my
riches--yes!-- And all my happiness. 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. 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. A little troop of Neapolitan peasants 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 curtsying.

In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow.

“It’s bad for children,” said old Cotter, “because their minds are so
impressionable. Incline unto our aid, O God! O Lord make haste to help us!



There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. --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 American 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 seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to
give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with
a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the
Roman soldiery, stripped of his garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side
was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of our Lord water and blood
issued continually. One of his sentences, written two months after his last
interview with Mrs Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because
there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is
impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

Some of the boys had then asked the priest if Victor Hugo were not the greatest
French writer. And that's what I call limbo.

He sidled out of the alley, smiling slyly. His body ached to do something, to
rush out and revel in violence. But his figure fell into rotundity at the
waist, his hair was scant and grey and his face, when the waves of expression
had passed over it, had a ravaged look. “I heard something. . And when I ask
when my daughter is going to be paid I can’t get a civil answer.

MARCH 22. Father Arnall sat at a table to the left of the altar. 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. It only made you feel a little sickish on account of
the smell of the wine. ”

“Is that so?” asked Mr M’Coy.

“That’s a fact,” said Mr Cunningham.

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. “Father Purdon is giving it. It’s for business men, you
know. ”

“Very well,” said Little Chandler, “the next time you come we must have
an evening together. The subject of talk was the opera company which was then
at the Theatre Royal. For my esthetic.

--Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ.

A rogue in red and yellow dress Is knocking, knocking at the tree; And all
around our loneliness The wind is whistling merrily.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his body.
Mine, O Mine! No more be tears in moon or mist For thee, sweet sentimentalist.







XIII

Go seek her out all courteously, And say I come, Wind of spices whose song is
ever Epithalamium.

Little Chandler sustained for one moment the gaze of her eyes and his heart
closed together as he met the hatred in them.

“A chap. The piece ended with a trill of octaves in the treble and a final
deep octave in the bass. He was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. Little
Chandler was astonished.

“Who knows?” he said, as they lifted their glasses. His face was kind and
he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by the union of
their tips. Mr Power said again:

“All’s well that ends well. The preacher turned back each wide sleeve of
his surplice with an elaborate large gesture and slowly surveyed the array of
faces. No one knew who he was but one of the curates said he had served the
gentleman with a small rum.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. The piece
ended with a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the
bass. They talked volubly and with little reserve.

“What is the matter, Julia?” asked Aunt Kate anxiously. 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. 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. He seemed to be
rehearsing the piece in his mind. 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. It was with difficulty that he won
back his old consciousness of his state of grace by telling himself that he had
prayed to God at every temptation and that the grace which he had prayed for
must have been given to him inasmuch as God was obliged to give it.

But the phrase on the priest's lips was disingenuous for he knew that a priest
should not speak lightly on that theme. And to inquire what kind of beauty is
proper to each of the various arts. That was all to make him laugh. But they
were very holy peasants. And that was: to be straight and manly with God. I'd
see you damned first. He'd give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

That was not a nice expression. At the foot of the steps they halted and
Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it to his
companion. Gradually as the last glasses were being filled the conversation
ceased. A pause followed, broken only by the noise of the wine and by
unsettlings of chairs. I don't know the fellow's name.

The man continued his monologue.

--It is religion, Dante said again. Her interpretation of his words
disillusioned him. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father
was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive.





AFTER THE RACE

THE cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the
groove of the Naas Road. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the
freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a
living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the
flame in his blood.

The fellows all were silent.

“I am a little,” she answered.

“So we’re going to wash the pot together,” said Mr Cunningham.

--That remark was made before, Cranly said calmly. “Of course they are doing
their best, but really they are not good. ” Mahony asked why couldn’t boys
read them--a question which agitated and pained me because I was afraid the man
would think I was as stupid as Mahony. The arch of its fair trailing moustache
was repeated in the fair eyebrows looped above pleasantly astonished eyes. 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. There were holly and ivy round
the pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers.
An immense scarf of peacock-blue muslin was wound round her hat and knotted in
a great bow under her chin; and she wore bright yellow gloves, reaching to the
elbow. He bent down and asked her was there a chapel near.

“Hallo, Tommy, old hero, here you are! What is it to be? What will you have?
I’m taking whisky: better stuff than we get across the water.

--Where? Cranly asked.







XXI

He who hath glory lost, nor hath Found any soul to fellow his, Among his foes
in scorn and wrath Holding to ancient nobleness, That high unconsortable one--
His love is his companion. But his hands were bluish with cold. And on that day
may Erin well Pledge in the cup she lifts to Joy One grief--the memory of
Parnell.



Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. 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. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Soft
language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles
round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds,
dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow
circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language
issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite,
thrusting upwards their terrific faces. He longed to be at home and lay his
head on his mother's lap. Father Arnall's face looked very black, but he was
not in a wax: he was laughing. Father Dolan will be in tomorrow.

He poked one of the boys in the side with his pandybat, saying:

--You, boy! When will Father Dolan be in again?

--Tomorrow, sir, said Tom Furlong's voice.

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.
It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. It is remote
from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions. 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. Mr Casey tapped the gland of
his neck and smiled at Stephen with sleepy eyes: and Mr Dedalus said to him:

--Yes.

--No God for Ireland! he cried.

--I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Arnall said I am not to study
till they come. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You
apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts,
the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.

--Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence.

He crouched down between the sheets, glad of their tepid glow.

The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the classroom
when the voices paused and the silence was filled by the sound of softly
browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches tranquilly, lulled his
aching soul. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices.

--There's real poetry for you, he said.

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the
direction of the Tsar's image, saying:

--Keep your icon.

--Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the half chewed fig and
jerking it towards the squat student's mouth in sign that he should eat.
Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as
india-rubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved
hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. On the sideboard
were arrayed dishes and plates, and glasses and bundles of knives and forks and
spoons. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air.
talking and gesticulating. Routh won. The cabin shook with the young men’s
cheering and the cards were bundled together. The conductor talked with the
driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked window
the morning light was gathering. He told his fingers to hurry up. He had an odd
autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a
short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a
predicate in the past tense.

--Probably I shall go away, he said.

They had their way: they laid him low.

--I see. ”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling.

The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:

“Well, thank you, sir. Tell no more of enchanted days. Leave the basket
there. He's a level-headed 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.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice between two teeth.

--I wouldn't stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead.
In a moment Stephen was a prisoner. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a
handful of peas into the air. Damn you and damn everything. Damn him one way or
the other!

APRIL 14. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old country.
”

“O. . . . . . . . . . . But there’s a certain little nobleman with a
cock-eye--you know the patriot I’m alluding to?”

Mr O’Connor nodded.

“There’s nothing to touch a good slavey,” he affirmed. Then he read the
flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. Mahony
mentioned lightly that he had three totties. He chased a crowd of ragged girls,
brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of
chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them.

“I can see him so plainly,” she said after a moment.

--Simon! Simon! said uncle Charles.

--And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did
so little harm. 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. Two
men in outdoor dress had taken possession of the fireplace and were chatting
familiarly with Miss Healy and the baritone. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895 The Rev. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green
eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. He halted a few paces from
her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand
like a child. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge
Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness,
obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard
in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her
name. Boland, his friend, marched beside him, a large grin on his face, while
Nash came on a few steps behind, blowing from the pace and wagging his great
red head.

As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Road 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.



* * * * *



The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. ”

Eliza sighed again and bowed her head in assent. Neither Mr Henchy nor the old
man said anything but, just as the door was closing, Mr O’Connor, who had
been staring moodily into the fire, called out suddenly:

“‘Bye, Joe. ”

Mr Henchy waited a few moments and then nodded in the direction of the door.

“You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy,” said Ignatius Gallaher.
They are doing their duty in warning the people. 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. All I want is to have a look at her. Wells too would
be there but no fellow would look at him. Then he said secretly:

--You know the altar wine they keep in the press in the sacristy?

--Yes. ‘I don’t think that that’s a fair question to put to me,’ says
I. ”

Nosey Flynn was sitting up in his usual corner of Davy Byrne’s and, when he
heard the story, he stood Farrington a half-one, saying it was as smart a thing
as ever he heard. . . . Well, you better look sharp and get a copy of our
correspondence in the Delacour case for Mr Alleyne. His face was heavy, pale
and clean-shaven. Was that right? His father was a marshal now: higher than a
magistrate. The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud
on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow.
The firmament was as a scroll rolled away. Everyone roared laughing when he
showed the way in which Mr Alleyne shook his fist in Farrington’s face. 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. Temple is in grand form.

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes. Hell is the centre of evils and, as
you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest
points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften
in the least the pains of hell. The soul of the gallant venal city which his
elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from
the earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered the sombre college he
would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel
Whaley. 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. He knew his part. He
would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as
he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed
to plead with me that I should understand him. It was his habit to walk swiftly
in the street even by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at
night he hurried on his way apprehensively and excitedly. He left her crying on
the bed and moaning softly: _“O my God!”_

Going down the stairs his glasses became so dimmed with moisture that he had to
take them off and polish them.

The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the
girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale
sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of
quiet joy. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power
of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and
soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the
flame in his blood. One time I hear you talk against English literature. 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. He let it rebound twice or thrice to
his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley,
exclaiming in answer to its thud:

--Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. One human being had
seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced
her to ignominy, a death of shame. A movement of impatience escaped 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. But his hands were bluish with cold.
Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the
more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this
property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with
incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is
always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless,
shoreless and bottomless. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the
presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the secret cause.

--Repeat, said Lynch. Three days' silence in the refectory and sending us up
for six and eight every minute.

--I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly. He would be at one with
others and with God. He could hear them playing in the playgrounds.

At last Fleming said:

--And we are all to be punished for what other fellows did?

--I won't come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said. Then he took a coin
rapidly from his pocket.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial. Then he said:

--Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery.

--But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me. Thought this in bed last
night but was too lazy and free to add to it. Free, yes. The exhausted loins
are those of Elizabeth and Zacchary. The hollow rattle of the wooden dumbbells
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
laggards to make haste. With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he
blew from the arch-angelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three blasts
of the angel filled all the universe.

The two young men walked up the street without speaking, the mournful music
following them. As he did so the flame lit up a leaf of dark glossy ivy in the
lapel of his coat.

“I’m not done with you yet,” she said.

When all had taken their seats he laid his hand on the cover and then said
quickly, withdrawing it:

--Now, Stephen.

--That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. The first arts' men are
pretty sure. They had forgotten all about it. He was standing with her in the
cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring
furnace. He seemed to bear disappointments lightly.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced
him gaily and gravely. Our day will come yet, believe me. But the sulphurous
brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to
burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury.

When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for
fully half a minute. There would be cloudy grey light over the playgrounds. .
all right. Now time lay between: the oils of ordination would never anoint his
body.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two
images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she
had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. She had no longer any grace
of attitude but Gabriel’s eyes were still bright with happiness. I had riches
too great to count, could boast Of a high ancestral name, But I also dreamt,
which pleased me most, That you loved me still the same. Do I know?”

She did not answer at once.

--Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth.

As they crossed the hall a man of dwarfish stature came towards them.

While sweetly, gently, secretly, The flowery bells of morn are stirred And the
wise choirs of faery Begin (innumerous!) to be heard. He tried to count them
before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and
wondered were they odd or even in number.

The Priest was silent. Where?

--Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

--Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus. You wouldn't see the sign
of a christian house along the road or hear a sound.

Suck was a queer word. Though nobody spoke to him of the affair after class he
could feel about him a vague general malignant joy. In the dark of my room I
imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic.

--Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head. “But
it’s so sickening. ”

“O, I’d give anything to hear Caruso sing,” said Mary Jane. I was still
considering whether I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down
beside us again. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little
glass of wine. He watched her leave the room in the hope that she would look
back at him, but he was disappointed. What was the right answer to the
question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. It is a form: nothing else.
God was almighty. 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. I will set right my accounts. I am
sure you do. . ?” I said. Not now. Have read little and understood less. Then
she said I would come back to faith because I had a restless mind. On the very
moment John MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing against it, stood up and
shouted out with the voice of a lion: ‘_Credo!_’”

“_I believe!_” said Mr Fogarty. They saluted coldly; and the lover’s eyes
rested for a second or two on a thick bulldog face and a pair of thick short
arms. But he felt better now than before. She did not feel in the least hungry
and she had already overstayed her time.

“Well, I hope, Miss Morkan,” said Mr Browne, “that I’m brown enough for
you because, you know, I’m all brown. Stephen blushed under their eyes and
said:

--I do not. It was a raw spring morning and his eyes were still smarting and
weak. It is very difficult. First they were so cold to get into. Set that
before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. At
the words MY MOST GRIEVOUS FAULT he ceased, breathless. The soul of every human
being that has ever existed, the souls of all those who shall yet be born, all
the sons and daughters of Adam, all are assembled on that supreme day. They
proceeded towards it with linked arms, singing _Cadet Roussel_ in chorus,
stamping their feet at every:

_“Ho! Ho! Hohé, vraiment!”_

They got into a rowboat at the slip and made out for the American’s yacht.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably. Ask
Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

--Of prose do you mean?

--Yes.

The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in
thought and word and deed wilfully through his own body. ”

“Who did you get?” asked Mr Lyons.

“_Beannacht libh_,” cried Miss Ivors, with a laugh, as she ran down the
staircase. It is a terrible sin. But, he told his hearers, the text had seemed
to him specially adapted for the guidance of those whose lot it was to lead the
life of the world and who yet wished to lead that life not in the manner of
worldlings. I will set right my accounts. ”

“And his sixpence. Mr Holohan did not know what it meant. Mrs Kearney’s
anger began to flutter in her cheek and she had all she could do to keep from
asking:

“And who is the _Cometty_ pray?”

But she knew that it would not be ladylike to do that: so she was silent.

--Sit over, she said. They had a different father and mother.

In one of the benches near the pulpit sat Mr Cunningham and Mr Kernan.

“Why, what was wonderful about Johnny?” asked Mr Browne. There's plenty of
money to be made in a big commercial city.

--Depends on the practice.

--Yes, father?

--Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?

--Yes, father.

--Do you disbelieve then?

--I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it, Stephen answered. He went into
Capel Street and walked along towards the City Hall. But he could not: and so
he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed. It
was a quarter to nine. Perhaps she would not be sorry to see him fail in his
speech. But you could not have a green rose. But why was he then against the
priests? Because Dante must be right then. The mimic warfare of the evening
became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning
because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. Here was congenial ground
for all. Water? Say when. ”

Little Chandler allowed his whisky to be very much diluted. ”

The raisins and almonds and figs and apples and oranges and chocolates and
sweets were now passed about the table and Aunt Julia invited all the guests to
have either port or sherry. Mr M’Coy said:

“Father Tom Burke, that was the boy!”

“O, Father Tom Burke,” said Mr Cunningham, “that was a born orator. An
irregular musketry of applause escorted her also as far as the piano and then,
as Mary Jane seated herself on the stool, and Aunt Julia, no longer smiling,
half turned so as to pitch her voice fairly into the room, gradually ceased. He
would say, alluding to Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the
generation which is now on the wane among us may have had its faults but for my
part I think it had certain qualities of hospitality, of humour, of humanity,
which the new and very serious and hypereducated generation that is growing up
around us seems to me to lack. A thing like that had been done before by
somebody in history, by some great person whose head was in the books of
history. The boy that held the censer had swung it lifted by the middle chain
to keep the coals lighting. But it is too late: the just turn away from the
wretched damned souls which now appear before the eyes of all in their hideous
and evil character. It made him afraid to think of how it was. Both she and
Julia had always seemed a little proud of their serious and matronly sister.
Her photograph stood before the pierglass.

They both kissed Gabriel frankly. We can't speak here. Gabriel says everyone
wears them on the continent. She was standing right under the dusty fanlight
and the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of her hair, which he had seen
her drying at the fire a few days before. The first tenor and the contralto,
however, brought down the house.

When they came out into Grafton Street, Mr Power whistled for an outsider. 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, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart. The man listened
to the clicking of the machine for a few minutes and then set to work to finish
his copy. Corley was the son of an inspector of police and he had inherited his
father’s frame and gait. He walked with his hands by his sides, holding
himself erect and swaying his head from side to side. By Christ, I’ll go
myself and see what they’re like. “Give us that thing you wrote--do you
remember? Have you got it on you?”

“O, ay!” said Mr Henchy. Did you ever hear that, Crofton? Listen to this
now: splendid thing. By hell, I saw that at once. ’ And are we going to
insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn’t that
right, Crofton?”

Mr Crofton nodded his head. ”

Mr O’Connor shook his head in sympathy, and the old man fell silent, gazing
into the fire. I was still considering whether I would go away or not when the
man came back and sat down beside us again.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance.

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. You'd be afraid to open your lips.

--Afraid?

--Ay. No sound was to be heard; but he knew that all around him life was about
to awaken in common noises, hoarse voices, sleepy prayers.

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed,
turned again to meet Cranly's eyes. God and the Blessed Virgin were too far
from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy.
For him! For him!

He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat, clogging and
revolting his entrails. All day he had thought of nothing but their
leave-taking 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. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the
face of the earth.

It might be. Isn't that so, captain?

--What are you reading now, captain? Dixon asked. THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR?

--I love old Scott, the flexible lips said, I think he writes something lovely.





Polly sat for a little time on the side of the bed, crying. Miss Ivors promptly
took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly tone:

“Of course, I was only joking.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. At the foot
of the steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his
pocket and offered it to his companion.

Just as they were naming their poisons who should come in but Higgins! Of
course he had to join in with the others. He murmured:

--I. On Sunday nights there would often be a reunion in Mrs Mooney’s front
drawing-room. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there
was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny
eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct
in others but often disappointed. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the
world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of
incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. His
soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified
in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with
the element of the spirit. A petticoat string dangled to the floor.

--But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. He waited in fear, his
soul pining within him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow as
he passed over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness might not
be given power over him. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a
man could always pass muster. 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.

He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began
to speak with the voice of the hotel keeper. She brought them up to his
bedroom, the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them
chairs at the fire. Then, at her sister’s bidding, she filled out the sherry
into the glasses and passed them to us.

“You are a very generous person, Gabriel,” she said.

--You don't care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash. Don't talk to him
or look at him.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain.

“Ah,” he said, “you may say what you like. 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. Want to
get them off my chest.

A long curving gallery. He turned from the page and tried to hush it: but it
would not be hushed. Then gave me recipe for what he calls RISOTTO ALLA
BERGAMASCA. A small gold coin shone in the palm. For a full hour he had paced
up and down, waiting: but he could wait no longer.

--I don't care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of reach
of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen. ”

“He had a strong face,” said Mr Kernan. When he stood up he was tall and of
great bulk.

--Of course, said Lynch. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had
done and thought, sin after sin. At those moments the soft speeches of Claude
Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. The soul of every human being
that has ever existed, the souls of all those who shall yet be born, all the
sons and daughters of Adam, all are assembled on that supreme day. I looked
humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the
dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

“No, thank you. I think it’ll be all right. ”

At that moment the hall-door was opened and Mr Browne came in from the
doorstep, laughing as if his heart would break. ”

“Allow me,” said Mr Cunningham positively, “it was _Lux upon Lux_. Mrs
Kearney was now beginning to be alarmed. There was something she didn’t like
in the look of things and Mr Fitzpatrick’s vacant smile irritated her very
much. There were holly and ivy round the 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. The curate, who was standing beside the table,
nodded his red head towards the victor and said with stupid familiarity:

“Ah! that’s the knack!”

“What the hell do you know about it?” said Farrington fiercely, turning on
the man. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops
musty biscuits lay bleaching.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had
called up around them a thought-enchanted silence. “I think Christmas is
never really Christmas unless we have the snow on the ground. ”

“John of Tuam,” repeated Mr Cunningham, “was the man. “Must I have a
candle?”

“O yes,” said Mr Cunningham.

“No, damn it all,” said Mr Kernan sensibly, “I draw the line there.







XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night, Dear lady, a divining ear.

--I wouldn't, said Heron, damn me if I would. And to inquire what kind of
beauty is proper to each of the various arts.

He passed along the narrow dark corridor, passing little doors that were the
doors of the rooms of the community. “Five times in one day is a little bit.
. ”

“It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him,” said my aunt. ”

“O, Mr D’Arcy,” said Aunt Kate, “now that was a great fib to tell.

“O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope.

--Good day, sir, said Stephen.

A sudden swift hiss fell from the windows above him and he knew that the
electric lamps had been switched on in the reader's room. When their faces had
flushed with the struggle they drew apart, panting. He bawled upstairs:

“Ada! Ada!”

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was
sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk. Ever since the message of
summons had come for him from the director his mind had struggled to find the
meaning of the message; and, during the long restless time he had sat in the
college parlour waiting for the director to come in, his eyes had wandered from
one sober picture to another around the walls and his mind wandered from one
guess to another until the meaning of the summons had almost become clear.
Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent the
director from coming, he had heard the handle of the door turning and the swish
of a soutane.

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again.

“I am a little,” she answered. A certain pride mingled with his parents’
trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose for the names of
great foreign cities have at least this virtue.





THE BOARDING HOUSE

MRS MOONEY was a butcher’s daughter. He did not seem to have heard the
invitation. The tablecloth was damp and limp.

Fleming said:

--Are you not well?

He did not know; and Fleming said:

--Get back into bed.

--To wit? said Lynch. The old man was a nimble walker in spite of his corns and
often ten or twelve miles of the road were covered. His blood was in revolt.
When he reported these dialogues he aspirated the first letter of his name
after the manner of Florentines. My aunt said:

“I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord. We can
have a little music and----”

“Thanks awfully, old chap,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “I’m sorry we
didn’t meet earlier. And inquisitive! AND WHAT PART DOES STEPHEN TAKE, MR
DEDALUS? 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. 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.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness. A smiler. She looked a long time at a smiling
picture that was set in it and said musingly:

--The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly:

--What is she in, mud?

--In a pantomime, love. He was a shabby stooped little drunkard with a white
face and a white moustache and white eyebrows, pencilled above his little eyes,
which were pink-veined and raw; and all day long he sat in the bailiff’s
room, waiting to be put on a job. He was not without culture. One by one they
were all becoming shades. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built
houses in it--not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with
shining roofs. People would treat her with respect then. She shook hands a
moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I would do what I said. The
poison tongue of Satan had done its work. I took my seat in a third-class
carriage of a deserted train. Now, then! What age do you think I am? And I
remember seeing your grandfather in his red coat riding out to hounds.

The two men went along some tortuous passages and up a dark staircase and came
to a secluded room where one of the stewards was uncorking bottles for a few
gentlemen.

He got up on the car. I’ll follow,” called out Gabriel from the dark.
I’ll go over and talk to her and you can pass by. He’s the man. ”

We said nothing further to each other. .

A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:

--Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied
science. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and
clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from
all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. But Corley’s brow was
soon smooth again.

The prefect of the chapel prayed above his head and his memory knew the
responses:



O Lord open our lips And our mouths shall announce Thy praise. Coming round
too. The work is going ahead there too.

--Lynch is awake, said Cranly.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his body.
“I’d love to see Galway again. ”

“You can go if you like,” said Gabriel coldly.

“It keeps coming like from down in my throat; sickening thing.

--I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down questions
which are more amusing than yours were. A penitent emerged from the farther
side of the box. He let it rebound twice or thrice to his hand and struck it
strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its
thud:

--Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. He knew the inner side
of all affairs and was fond of delivering final judgments. As he was passing
out the chief clerk looked at him inquiringly. Freddy Malins also took a stalk
of celery and ate it with his pudding.

“O, Mr Conroy,” said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him,
“Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming.

Mary Jane gazed after her, a moody puzzled expression on her face, while Mrs
Conroy leaned over the banisters to listen for the hall-door.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the soul
crept over it like unseen vermin, over the shuffling feet and up the folds of
the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious of its
indignity.

--To wit? said Lynch. Mr Holohan began to pace up and down the room, in order
to cool himself for he felt his skin on fire. ”

Freddy Malins, who was nearing the climax of his story, waved the offer aside
impatiently but Mr Browne, having first called Freddy Malins’ attention to a
disarray in his dress, filled out and handed him a full glass of lemonade. Both
of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive and asked was
Gabriel with her. Her photograph stood before the pierglass.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door.

--Static therefore, said Stephen. At the foot of the steps they halted and
Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it to his
companion. There was a good deal of confused talk, and then Mr Browne got into
the cab. He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with
his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. Miss Healy stood in front
of him, talking and laughing.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Mr Tate, the
English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

--This fellow has heresy in his essay. The man answered that he knew nothing
about them, that he had made a faithful copy. A gentle kick from the tall boy
in the bench behind urged Stephen to ask a difficult question. To retrieve the
consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to earth, lived
and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the
cross.

The slide was shot back. He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her
body against his, to overmaster her.

He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. He has gone to complain. He
allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank
but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly--an
adventureless tale. His friends bowed to his opinions and considered that his
face was like Shakespeare’s. He had been a clerk in the Midland Railway, a
canvasser for advertisements for _The Irish Times_ and for _The Freeman’s
Journal_, a town traveller for a coal firm on commission, a private inquiry
agent, a clerk in the office of the Sub-Sheriff and he had recently become
secretary to the City Coroner. He went from country to country in the east,
from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptizing the people. White roses
and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. How simple and
beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him. The devil has led
you astray. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft of jesuits he had put
aside frankly as not borne out by his own experience. His masters, even when
they had not attracted him, had seemed to him always intelligent and serious
priests, athletic and high-spirited prefects. Flames burst forth from his skull
like a corolla, shrieking like voices:

--Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

Voices spoke near him:

--On hell.

--I suppose he rubbed it into you well. But Erin, list, his spirit may Rise,
like the Phœnix from the flames, When breaks the dawning of the day,

The day that brings us Freedom’s reign. ”

Mr Power stood up.

“Quite right, Gabriel, quite right,” she said.

The candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of
incense still floated down the dim nave.

--It's a pretty old air, said Mr Dedalus, twirling the points of his moustache.
" Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII. The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I
go. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a
white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. 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 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. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw
again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. In these sheets a sentence was
inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an
advertisement for _Bile Beans_ had been pasted on to the first sheet. Of course
she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. Mr Browne could go
back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to
Dublin--Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli, Giuglini,
Ravelli, Aramburo. The man answered that he knew nothing about them, that he
had made a faithful copy. . _ Go on! What day? _‘Hardly had the day
dawned’. . rrm. . . .

He felt his great body again aching for the comfort of the public-house.

--Byron, of course, answered Stephen.

“Really,” she said archly, “he is very attentive.

Mary Jane laughed at her tone. The leaves--they do not sigh at all When the
year takes them in the fall. The three men pushed past the whining
match-sellers at the door and formed a little party at the corner of the
counter. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words
of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for
weariness. The affair would be sure to be talked of and his employer would be
certain to hear of it. The cat escaped once more and Mahony began to throw
stones at the wall she had escaladed. He moved his head slowly to right and
left and from the manager to the person on the floor, as if he feared to be the
victim of some delusion. . do the other thing.

--Can you not think of the other way? he said. Still they were all different
places that had different names. A crocodile seized the child.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked. ”

“How do you mean, Mr Cotter?” asked my aunt.

“Yes,” said Mr Cunningham. He waited till all in the chapel had knelt and
every least noise was still. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to
die away. He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had arrived
only that morning from Rotterdam. That's the real Ally Daly. Did you know?

--Is it? Stephen said vaguely. I protest I did. And you will promise God now
that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin.
”

Mr Cunningham laughed. . . ”

I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger.
His deep raucous voice had thrilled them as it uttered the word of belief and
submission. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer
beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey
had braved death. They had five children. Do you twig?”

“Ah, poor Joe is a decent skin,” said Mr O’Connor.

--But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared
together?

--Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps.

“That so, John?”

“Yes.

--Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents, and you
will remember that they were created by God in order that the seats in heaven
left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be filled
again. He liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up at his dark fierce
face.

The Priest was silent.

Moynihan's voice called from behind in echo to a distant bell:

--Closing time, gents!

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. He had sinned. And above all
it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his
imagining. ”

“Neither did I,” said Mr Browne. Ignatius Gallaher watched him for a few
moments and then said:

“If ever it occurs, you may bet your bottom dollar there’ll be no mooning
and spooning about it. I mean to marry money. He did not believe me and said he
was sure I must have one. ”

Everyone laughed again: but Mr Kernan was somewhat indignant still.

“You don’t know what’s good for you, my boy,” said Ignatius Gallaher.
The fog had begun to chill him and he wondered could he touch Pat in
O’Neill’s. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and
angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart. His hands clenched
convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its
penetration. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the
gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. His heart swelled
with fury and, when he thought of the woman in the big hat who had brushed
against him and said _Pardon!_ his fury nearly choked him. He was well
informed.

The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the
girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale
sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of
quiet joy. 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. He
could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have
lived with her openly.

“Well, drive bang up against Trinity College gates,” said Mr Browne, “and
then we’ll tell you where to go.

He moved with a shambling gait round the group and spoke to Stephen. Stephen
felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost painlessly; and, bowing
submissively, as if to meet his companion's jesting mood, began to recite the
CONFITEOR. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. When he went in
by the side-door he found the kitchen empty and the kitchen fire nearly out.
And now she had nobody to protect her. That was the way a rat felt, slimy and
damp and cold.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. A full hour had passed since his
father had gone in with Dan Crosby, the tutor, to find out for him something
about the university. The faint murmur began again. His glossy black hair was
parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it
curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat. He said that when boys were
that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. He would love his
neighbour. To mortify the taste he practised strict habits at table, observed
to the letter all the fasts of the church and sought by distraction to divert
his mind from the savours of different foods.

They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went on by
the trees.



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. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness
seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation
and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or
left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous
sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and
his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps
of dead language.

Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still, leaning
on the desk with his arms folded. MAY THY HOLY ANGELS DWELL HEREIN TO PRESERVE
US IN PEACE AND MAY THY BLESSINGS BE ALWAYS UPON US THROUGH CHRIST OUR LORD. Mr
Dedalus took a bone from his plate and tore some meat from it with his teeth,
saying:

--Before he was killed, you mean. ”

“But Mr Shelley said, sir----”

“_Mr Shelley said, sir. ”

“Well, glue or starch,” said Gabriel, “the old gentleman had a horse by
the name of Johnny. ”

“Good-night, Mr D’Arcy.

“That’s what the woman we had in to wash him said.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash's line. O come among the laden trees:
The leaves lie thick upon the way Of memories.

--Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen. ”

“How dull you must find it,” said Little Chandler, “after all the other
places you’ve seen!”

“Well,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “it’s a relaxation to come over here,
you know. ”

“Hm,” said Mr Cunningham. “I remember hearing of old Parkinson but he’s
too far back for me. He’s a clever chap, too, with the pen. He’s fond of
his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good
sportsman. We’ll come here one of these nights and talk it over. ”

She saw him to the door.

“I am afraid you didn’t enjoy yourself at all,” said Mary Jane
hopelessly. The grave and cordial voice went on easily with its tale and in the
pauses Stephen felt bound to set it on again with respectful questions. That
was because he was thinking of his own father. Then she said suddenly:

“O, Mr Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer?
We’re going to stay there a whole month. That was he: and he read down the
page again.

He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God
cast him out of heaven into hell for ever. He told his fingers to hurry up.
Then he paused to judge. . . . . Poor James!”

“The Lord have mercy on his soul!” said my aunt.

Eliza took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with it. B. Patterson
Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the
accident. The company had always taken every precaution to prevent people
crossing the lines except by the bridges, both by placing notices in every
station and by the use of patent spring gates at level crossings. Cranly
turned, and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

--Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be
played in the Adelphi hotel. But was your father what is called well-to-do? I
mean, when you were growing up?

--Yes, Stephen said. He wondered whether the scullion's apron was damp too or
whether all white things were cold and damp. He would know obscure things,
hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath.

--Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length.

--Static therefore, said Stephen. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel keeper
through his father's face and voice, laughed.

--You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and
blinking his pale eyes. Leave dreams to the dreamers That will not after, That
song and laughter

Do nothing move. ”

The boy went out and Mr Henchy began to rub his hands cheerfully, saying:

“Ah, well, he’s not so bad after all.

“He is dead,” she said at length. Do you know that about the Forsters?

He paused for an answer.

--Neither my arse nor my elbow! Temple cried out scornfully. His father, who
had begun life as an advanced Nationalist, had modified his views early. Some
new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his
shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ and _The Gay
Science_. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one
that I trust will long be cultivated among us. It was not like the smell of the
old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. . ?”

“I’m awfully sorry, old man.

Gabriel coloured and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand,
when she said bluntly:

“O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for _The Daily Express_.
”

“I have been at him all the evening,” said Miss O’Callaghan, “and Mrs
Conroy too and he told us he had a dreadful cold and couldn’t sing.

“No,” continued Aunt Kate, “she wouldn’t be said or led by anyone,
slaving there in that choir night and day, night and day.

Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt. He felt with a smart of dejection that the
man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. His mother said:

--O, Stephen will apologize.

--CORPUS DOMINI NOSTRI. After a pause Stephen began:

--Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. Our Uncrowned King is dead. We
have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly
claim, our strenuous endeavours. 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. He watched the
visitors come down the steps from the house and pass into the theatre. In
Westmoreland Street the footpaths were crowded with young men and women
returning from business and ragged urchins ran here and there yelling out the
names of the evening editions. In a waking dream he went through the quiet
morning towards the college. 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.

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. As soon as he was
on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put
it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety stairs. ”

A hearty murmur of assent ran round the table.

“He is dead,” she said at length. The torment of fire is the greatest
torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. These
barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had
been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea.
When the gymnasium 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. And now she had nobody
to protect her.



Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows
wrote things for cod.

--They are the Lord's anointed, Dante said. Her head was leaned against the
window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She held
an open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine
who, dressed in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet. She has no priest to
flirt with, he thought with conscious bitterness, remembering how he had seen
her last. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. She will
help you, my child.

As Mr Holohan was a novice in such delicate matters as the wording of bills and
the disposing of items for a programme, Mrs Kearney helped him.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

--Our end is the acquisition of knowledge. He was unheeded, happy and near to
the wild heart of life. ”

“And what about Dowling?” asked Mr M’Coy.

“We both believe in----”

He hesitated for a moment.

--Hell, Temple said.

--You, John?

--I'm all right.

--You are quite welcome, sir. 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. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. And
this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without,
but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its
very vitals. 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. 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. I supple
and suave. But the grey face still followed me.

Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still, leaning
on the desk with his arms folded. No king or emperor on this earth has the
power of the priest of God. Let no worldly shame hold you back. God is still
the merciful Lord who wishes not the eternal death of the sinner but rather
that he be converted and live. Yes? What? Yes? His flesh shrank together as it
felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about
it the swirl of stifling air. He had died. He halted under a tree and allowed
the rhythm to die away. He couldn’t do anything. He said that if ever he
found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip
him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls.

“Good-evening, Freddy,” said Aunt Julia. In the little room downstairs we
found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state. Amen. So be it. ”

Mr Kernan’s expression changed. ”

Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at
her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his
patent-leather shoes.

When the Irish Revival began to be appreciable Mrs Kearney determined to take
advantage of her daughter’s name and brought an Irish teacher to the house.
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 spinning up and
crying:

--Hurroo!

And they gave three groans for Baldyhead Dolan and three cheers for Conmee and
they said he was the decentest rector that was ever in Clongowes.



* * * * *



He could wait no longer.

“That so, John?”

“Yes. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the angelic doctor, as
he is called, says that the worst damnation consists in this, that the
understanding of man is totally deprived of divine light and his affection
obstinately turned away from the goodness of God. These devils, who were once
beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful.
Maria had cut them herself. ”

But Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something
they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake. “There
used always to be crowds of Protestants in the chapel where Father Tom was
preaching. ”

The room was silent again.

“No,” continued Aunt Kate, “she wouldn’t be said or led by anyone,
slaving there in that choir night and day, night and day. Church Street chapel.

--Church?

She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him; and, as she held out
her reeking withered right hand under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower
towards her, saddened and soothed by her voice. Mr Browne still seemed not to
understand. He spoke volubly, but Mrs Kearney said curtly at intervals:

“She won’t go on.

“Good-evening, Freddy,” said Aunt Julia.

--You'd think butter wouldn't melt in your mouth said Heron.

Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I
had a great laugh over it. Then he said:

--Well now, the day kept up fine after all. There must be some left. He bowed
his head, overcome. 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. They
wouldn’t have dared to have treated her like that if she had been a man. The
ticket-collector saluted Jimmy; he was an old man:

“Fine night, sir!”

It was a serene summer night; the harbour lay like a darkened mirror at their
feet. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride
in himself and contempt of others, covetousness 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, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull
glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual
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.

“Bring me a plate of peas,” he said, “and a bottle of ginger beer. He
turned into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and passed
in through the clicking turnstile. It was no use making him take the pledge: he
was sure to break out again a few days after. ”

“O yes,” said Mr M’Coy, “_Tenebrae_. “He was no great trouble to us.
Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said. Every morning he came in from
Chapelizod by tram. Write away. You, boy, who are you?

Stephen's heart jumped suddenly. Nobody knew. He put it on his own plate,
saying:

--Well, you can't say but you were asked. ”

All his long years of service gone for nothing! All his industry and diligence
thrown away! As a young man he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had
boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions
in public-houses. Religion for her was a habit and she suspected that a man of
her husband’s age would not change greatly before death. She was tempted to
see a curious appropriateness in his accident and, but that she did not wish to
seem bloody-minded, she would have told the gentlemen that Mr Kernan’s tongue
would not suffer by being shortened. The poison tongue of Satan had done its
work. It was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life
without material cares. Farley clapped him on the back and laughed loudly. No
one knew very well what the talk was about. He had known neither the pleasure
of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial
piety. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Kathleen played a
selection of Irish airs which was generously applauded. The first part closed
with a stirring patriotic recitation delivered by a young lady who arranged
amateur theatricals. ”

“And did you not tell him to go back?” asked Gabriel.

She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing
at the curbstone, bidding the others good-night. They went on together, Cranly
repeating in strongly stressed rhythm the end of the refrain:

And when we are married, O, how happy we'll be For I love sweet Rosie O'Grady
And Rosie O'Grady loves me. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.
Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a
nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.

It was not thought nor vision though he knew vaguely that her figure was
passing homeward through the city. I fear more than that the chemical action
which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are
massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration. Damn you and damn
everything. Damn him one way or the other!

APRIL 14. I want a job of five hundred a year.

--Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. They used to kiss.

She got out of her tram at the Pillar and ferreted her way quickly among the
crowds. “My daughter has her contract. She will get four pounds eight into
her hand or a foot she won’t put on that platform. 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 well-read woman. But his face was
black-looking and his eyes were staring though his voice was so quiet.

--It might clear up, sir. Go home, blast you, for you're a hopeless bloody man.
”

The man walked heavily towards the door and, as he went out of the room, he
heard Mr Alleyne cry after him that if the contract was not copied by evening
Mr Crosbie would hear of the matter. He ordered the same again. His arms are
open to receive you even though you have sinned against Him.

A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred; and at the last
moment, glancing up swiftly, he saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a
capuchin.

“On that fire! You let the fire out! By God, I’ll teach you to do that
again!”

He took a step to the door and seized the walking-stick which was standing
behind it. Didn't I give him that name?

--You did. We're not deaf, said the tall consumptive. No, by the Lord Jesus
(God forgive me) not half dead. He longed to be master of her strange mood. He
seemed to bear disappointments lightly. He lifted up the counter and, passing
by the clients, went out of the office with a heavy step.





COUNTERPARTS

THE bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice
called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent:

“Send Farrington here!”

Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk:

“Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs. Very jolly it was.

Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before
he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on
his tall hat. Long talk with Cranly on the subject of my revolt.

He had his grand manner on. Evening had fallen. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

--Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.

--And was he annoyed, Simon?

--Annoyed? Not he! MANLY LITTLE CHAP! he said. 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. He rolled its
body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an
instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. Four
young men, who had come from the refreshment-room to stand in the doorway at
the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a few minutes.
The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her
hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of
a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to
turn the page. Everyone tried to quiet him. Mr Alleyne flushed to the hue of a
wild rose and his mouth twitched with a dwarf’s passion. A man of seventy had
bitten off a piece of his tongue during an epileptic fit and the tongue had
filled in again so that no one could see a trace of the bite.











He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the
crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool
of the jar. Where?

--Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the
shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along
the foreshore. Then he said:





_“For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool.
The porter halted on the stairs to settle his guttering candle. 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 Road. 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
brilliant career in after life. Mr Holohan came into the dressing-room every
few minutes with reports from the box-office. 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. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging
his cuffs and the bows of his tie. God was almighty. ”

“Is there any chance of a drink itself?” asked Mr O’Connor. “And I’m
sure now that he’s gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and all
your kindness to him. ”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza. A friend of hers had shown her his review of
Browning’s poems. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.

“_You--know--nothing_. 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. What’s the world
coming to when sons speaks that way to their father?”

“What age is he?” said Mr O’Connor.

“Nineteen,” said the old man. “I hope to God he’ll not leave us in the
lurch tonight. He’s a clever chap, too, with the pen. He’s fond of his
glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman.
He’s a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about
him. We’ll come here one of these nights and talk it over. ”

“Work it all right now,” said Lenehan in farewell. ”

“Good-night, Gabriel.

“He told me: ‘What do you think of a Lord Mayor of Dublin sending out for a
pound of chops for his dinner? How’s that for high living?’ says he. She
smiled and shook his hand. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the
white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up
the hand upon the railing. 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 Road. 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. Could he not escape from his little house?
Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to
London? There was the furniture still to be paid for. . . funnel.

--Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. He was sick then. The
barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot. He took no part
in the conversation for a long while but listened, with an air of calm enmity,
while his friends discussed the Jesuits.

“I’ll get you a match,” said the old man. Confess! Confess! It was not
enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a prayer. He had to kneel before
the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and
repentantly. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. So he
had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. Apply to the
jesuit theologian, Juan Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain to you in
what circumstances you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had better
hand him his poison in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or his
saddlebow. Ask me rather would I suffer others to rob me, or if they did, would
I call down upon them what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular
arm?

--And would you?

--I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed. Who
is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

--Of prose do you mean?

--Yes.

--Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. To please me, I mean.

The slide was shot back.

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. The
strife of their minds was quelled. An esthetic image is presented to us either
in space or in time. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on
their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. The
wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. At the end of the
walk he halted before turning and raised his eyes.

But Joe said it didn’t matter and made her sit down by the fire.

Mr Dedalus threw his knife and fork noisily on his plate.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. All the windows
of the boarding house were open and the lace curtains ballooned gently towards
the street beneath the raised sashes. Wells too would be there but no fellow
would look at him. So down with your breeches And out with your bum. When we
come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic
reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience. . The
sailors’ eyes were blue and grey and even black. But his head was not clear
and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of the public-house. Then he
asked Fleming and Fleming said that the word had no plural. The past is
consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth
the future. The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at
night from platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of
the case, he did not think the railway officials were to blame.

He could still hear his father's voice--

--When you kick out for yourself, Stephen--as I daresay you will one of these
days--remember, whatever you do, to mix with gentlemen.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

--Now, Mrs Riordan, sit over. A brief anger had often invested him but he had
never been able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself
passing out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease of some
outer skin or peel. She passed by with her daughter and a quick glance through
the open door of the hall showed her the cause of the stewards’ idleness. She
took out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words _A Present
from Belfast_. She stood on the curbstone, swinging a sunshade in one hand. Her
husband called out to her:

“And have you nothing for me, duckie?”

“O, you! The back of my hand to you!” said Mrs Kernan tartly. He did not
visit her for a week, then he wrote to her asking her to meet him.

He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt's kitchen. Make up your minds
for that. Every day Father Dolan. It never fell away.

--What is that exactly? asked Lynch.

The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of
the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music
or of a woman's hand. Did you ever see such a go-by-the-wall?

His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against
the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes.

He was watching Cranly's firm-featured suffering face, lit up now by a smile of
false patience. 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.

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with
good humour. It was known that the speaker had secret sources of information.
But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a
thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated
or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of
hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. It was that
windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light
and the moth flies forth silently. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people
pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it
was a special train for the bazaar.

“I was just telling my mother,” he said, “I never heard you sing so well,
never.

Lynch smote himself sonorously on the chest and said:

--Who has anything to say about my girth?

Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle.

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly's eyes back from a calm survey
of the walls of the hall.

--Damn your yellow insolence, answered Lynch. She felt him seize her hand:

“Come!”

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

Now I call that friendly, don't you?

Yes, I liked her today.

--Six months?

--Eight months, father. Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his
father's gaze.

Wells said:

--O, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to
bed.

Cranly smiled and said kindly:

--The captain has only one love: sir Walter Scott. His body ached to do
something, to rush out and revel in violence.

--We are assembled here today, my dear little brothers in Christ, for one brief
moment far away from the busy bustle of the outer world to celebrate and to
honour one of the greatest of saints, the apostle of the Indies, the patron
saint also of your college, saint Francis Xavier.

--Yes, father?

--Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?

--Yes, father. They cry unto the night their battle-name: I moan in sleep when
I hear afar their whirling laughter.

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
infirmary. . .

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Then he said:

--Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said. Very jolly it was.

Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before
he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on
his tall hat. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind,
in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the
physical torments which all who are in hell endure.

It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the
Pigeon House. Then would begin Stephen's run round the park. ”

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the
bed-rail, hid her face. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little
pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his
overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper
along the bare hallway to let in another guest. The man and I watched the
chase. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy,
he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. He would be thirty-one
in November.

Wells said:

--I didn't mean to, honour bright. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish
water and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the
course of Stephen's thought.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked.

“Me, pa.

Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid; and he would hold upon his
tongue the host and God would enter his purified body.

He began to speak in a quiet tone. And when I was only a week in the convent he
died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. Besides they
were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed.

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the
possession of money.

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. ”

Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. And the
children, Gretta, you’re not anxious about them?”

“O, for one night,” said Mrs Conroy.

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. “Isn’t that fine? What?”

Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.





A MOTHER

MR HOLOHAN, assistant secretary of the _Eire Abu_ Society, had been walking up
and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty
pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts. “Didn’t she tell
me herself?”

Lenehan made a tragic gesture. ”

“You’d better speak to Mr Fitzpatrick,” said Mr Holohan distantly. The
room was lively. On Friday confession will be heard all the afternoon after
beads. He crammed his cap back again into his pocket and re-entered the office,
assuming an air of absent-mindedness. The constable knelt down also to help.
The student's body shook all over and, to ease his mirth, he rubbed both his
hands delightedly over his groins. The glories of Mary held his soul captive:
spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing her royal lineage, her
emblems, the late-flowering plant and late-blossoming tree, symbolizing the
age-long gradual growth of her cultus among men. The vast cycle of starry life
bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant
music accompanying him outward and inward. Death, in his opinion, had been
probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action.

Mr H.

He came level with his friend and looked keenly in his face.

“O, what a pity!” she cried. Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise The chalice flowing to the brim.

Cranly, embarrassed for a moment, took another fig from his pocket and was
about to eat it when Stephen said:

--Don't, please. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their
presence and by their reproaches. Maria had cut them herself. The next-door
girls put some saucers on the table and then led the children up to the table,
blindfold.

He could still leave the chapel. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man
to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. The warmth, fragrance
and colour of her body appealed to his senses. He was surprised at their
manners and at their accents, and his brow grew thoughtful.

In a few minutes an apologetic “Pok!” was heard as the cork flew out of Mr
Lyons’ bottle. We have all his poetry at home in a book. And I say,” he
added, pointing to the candle, “you might remove that handsome article, like
a good man. We’ll have a family party. ”

“Faith, Mr Henchy,” said the old man, “you’d keep up better style than
some of them. “Wait till you see whether he will or not. I know him. But my
body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon
the wires.

--It might clear up, sir.

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen's arm, and said:

--The distillery is damn good. Tried to read three reviews. Told me once, in a
moment of thoughtlessness, his father was sixty-one when he was born. Got
threepence.

Then went to college.

--Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Leave dreams to the dreamers That
will not after, That song and laughter

Do nothing move.

--Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you're a good fellow but you have
yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human
individual. She started to her feet and ran to the banisters. The others spoke
only a few words, pointing out some building or street. He felt that they were
hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the
produce of a leisure not within their reach.

--Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length. The injured man said again
as well as he could:

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir. The first tenor bent his head and
began to count the links of the gold chain which was extended across his waist,
smiling and humming random notes to observe the effect on the frontal sinus.





Polly sat for a little time on the side of the bed, crying. In heart you are an
Irish man but your pride is too powerful.











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.

--Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. They are not as tall as men.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably.

--Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the
City of Cork in his day. He's the only man I see in this institution that has
an individual mind.

--Institution! Individual! cried Cranly.

This time Lenehan was inclined to disbelieve. Year after year, for much longer
than any of you, my dear little boys, can remember or than I can remember, the
boys of this college have met in this very chapel to make their annual retreat
before the feast day of their patron saint. Time has gone on and brought with
it its changes. Even in the last few years what changes can most of you not
remember? Many of the boys who sat in those front benches a few years ago are
perhaps now in distant lands, in the burning tropics, or immersed in
professional duties or in seminaries, or voyaging over the vast expanse of the
deep or, it may be, already called by the great God to another life and to the
rendering up of their stewardship. It may have been these constant showers of
snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the
red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week,
with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.
Her voice, strong and clear in tone, attacked with great spirit the runs which
embellish the air and though she sang very rapidly she did not miss even the
smallest of the grace notes.

Her husband called after her:

“Nothing for poor little hubby!”

He assumed such a comical face and voice that the distribution of the bottles
of stout took place amid general merriment. Go on.

--I'm an emotional man, said Temple. You are right to go your way. ”

He tossed his glass to his mouth, finished his drink and laughed loudly. Hardly
had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the
ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door
bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in
another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.
The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the
trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. Yes, and it was
not darkness that fell from the air.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders.

All the fellows were silent: and Athy said:

--And that's why. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty.
Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA,
CLARITAS. It baffled me for a long time. A dull resentment against his life
awoke within him. The bell and the bird ceased; and the dull white light spread
itself east and west, covering the world, covering the roselight in his heart.
He made the sign of the cross and prayed of the priest to bless him for he had
sinned.

They turned down Baggot Street and he followed them at once, taking the other
footpath. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching.

--With women, my child?

--Yes, father. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and
smiled nervously at the company. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my
experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern
nations. He remembered the summer evening he had been there to be dressed as
boatbearer, the evening of the Procession to the little altar in the wood. Mrs
Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante
turned round violently 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. The young man who had seen Mac in Westmoreland
Street asked was it true that Mac had won a bit over a billiard match. Cranly
turned, and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

--Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be
played in the Adelphi hotel.

--Look at him! he said. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The
party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with
Ségouin at Cambridge. The citizens of Dublin will benefit by it. This union
exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his
mental life.

--I will try to learn it, said Stephen. Now, Simon, that's quite enough now. So
timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that
all ages were as one to him. Well, I started to walk and on I went and it was
coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills, that's better than ten
miles from Kilmallock and there's a long lonely road after that.

--Underdone's?

--Yes.

--I bow to you, Dixon said, but I had the impression that limbo existed for
such cases. “And so much the better for us--a bob and a tanner instead of a
bob. But come on, Gabriel, into the drawing-room. Only at times, in the pauses
of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting him gave room to a softer
languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He
shivered and yawned. When the party had divided into three sections, each under
its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances.
Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth with a sharpened match,
listening to some companions.

--He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man. He named it with
humility and shame and repented of it once more. Then he drank a glass of
water, pushed his plate to one side, doubled the paper down before him between
his elbows and read the paragraph over and over again. They can wait. They took
the train at Westland Row and in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy, they
were walking out of Kingstown Station. They come shaking in triumph their long,
green hair: They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. It would be
lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf,
in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the
peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy.

Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey's face which stared across the table
over his joined hands. Then he said:

“Well!. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. Melancholy was the
dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered
by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give
expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

--By hell, that's a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that's
a fine expression.

“What age are you?” he asked. Only sometimes, they say, he didn’t preach
what was quite orthodox. He shivered and yawned. 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. Everybody had a solution for the
mystery and Mrs Donnelly said it was plain that Maria had left it behind her in
the tram. Never once had it fallen flat.

“I hope he’ll look smart about it if he means business,” said Mr
O’Connor. 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 remembered the man's voice when he had said:

--Take that one, sir. He is said to have baptized as many as ten thousand
idolaters in one month. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. He
heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost
conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed
to recede, to recede, to recede, and from each receding trail of nebulous music
there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of
silence. He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box. Nannie gave the
lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. The old woman pointed
upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt’s nodding, proceeded to toil up the
narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of
the banister-rail.

His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of THE COUNT
OF MONTE CRISTO. After an interval, he uncovered his face and rose. She was
half undressed as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair
hanging and I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes
that she must be carrying a child. It was she who had chosen the name of her
sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life. He was standing
at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled
forward over a face of bronze. What was it that stood in his way? His
unfortunate timidity! He wished to vindicate himself in some way, to assert his
manhood.

--I will ask you, therefore, my dear boys, to put away from your minds during
these few days all worldly thoughts, whether of study or pleasure or ambition,
and to give all your attention to the state of your souls. The telegraph poles
were passing, passing.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. As the two young men walked on
through the crowd Corley occasionally turned to smile at some of the passing
girls but Lenehan’s gaze was fixed on the large faint moon circled with a
double halo.

“It’s all right, Mr Shelley,” said the man, pointing with his finger to
indicate the objective of his journey. And therefore the air was silent save
for one soft hiss that fell. Everyone was so fond of Maria. Gabriel watched his
wife, who did not join in the conversation. It sounded so genuine that a little
colour struggled into Aunt Julia’s face as she bent to replace in the
music-stand the old leather-bound songbook that had her initials on the cover.
And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat
jump plop into the scum. Suddenly, as he was fingering his watch-chain, he
thought of Terry Kelly’s pawn-office in Fleet Street. That was the dart! Why
didn’t he think of it sooner?

He went through the narrow alley of Temple Bar quickly, muttering to himself
that they could all go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it.
I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Then he
asked us which of us had the most sweethearts.

Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel. He gazed calmly before him at the waning
sky, glad of the cool of the evening and of the faint yellow glow which hid the
tiny flame kindling upon his cheek. He had sent his son to England to be
educated in a big Catholic college and had afterwards sent him to Dublin
University to study law.





A PAINFUL CASE

MR JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible
from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other
suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. A troubled night of dreams. The
faint murmur began again. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some
liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the
gloomy yard of his prison. Amen.



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. Michael
Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he
presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not
this. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into
the world. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at
me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again. Upon my word
it was magnificent, the style of the oratory.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English
convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable may have turned
on the prodigal. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the
mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the
physical torments which all who are in hell endure. But we were all gentlemen,
Stephen--at least I hope we were--and bloody good honest Irishmen too. It was
lovely to be tired.

--The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and
towards pity, both of which are phases of it. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you,
gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to
him at that instant images of guilelessness, and he halted till the image had
vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish
face. The air was very silent and you could hear the cricket bats but more
slowly than before: pick, pock. O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the
word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin's chamber. She
was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. She
said she was all alone in the house and that her husband had gone that morning
to Queenstown with his sister to see her off.

“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?”

“Look lively, Miss Hill, please.





EVELINE

SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Amen.

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. Stephen stood among them, afraid
to speak, listening. Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare
phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms.

His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick back
into Stephen's hand.

--From me! said Stephen in astonishment.

--But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were all to come? Temple
said, his eyes searching Glynn's eyes.

--What do you know about it? shouted Stephen.

--Butter you up! said Brother Michael.







XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night, Dear lady, a divining ear. After about
thirty seconds Weathers brought his opponent’s hand slowly down on to the
table.

“Won’t you let us drink them first?” said Mr Henchy. He was in a dark
part of the hall gazing up the staircase. No memory of the past touched him,
for his mind was full of a present joy. He had known neither the pleasure of
companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety.
His friends talked very little.

He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street. One
humiliation had succeeded another--the false smiles of the market sellers, the
curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the
compliments and encouraging words of his father's friends. The other, who
walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the
road, owing to his companion’s rudeness, wore an amused listening face.

When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home.

“Every boy,” he said, “has a little sweetheart.

--Because the church is cruel like all old sinners, Temple said. In two minutes
he was surrounded by a ring of men. The man passed through the crowd, looking
on the spectacle generally with proud satisfaction and staring masterfully at
the office-girls.

Suddenly he saw them coming towards him.

--And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

--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. We saw him lying upon the catafalque. This evening
we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the spiritual torments of
hell. Besides Villona’s humming would confuse anybody; the noise of the car,
too.

--It's best of his play not to, Fleming said.

Gabriel, trembling with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her
phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely
touching it with his fingers. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because
Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect's false sleeves behind his back and the
prefect used to let on to be angry.

The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings.

--All are taking expulsion except Corrigan, Athy answered. All the windows of
the boarding house were open and the lace curtains ballooned gently towards the
street beneath the raised sashes.

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. The
wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads and myriads of other souls on
whom God's favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter and now
dimmer sustained and failing. He was pleasantly conscious that the bosom which
he saw rise and fall slowly beneath him rose and fell at that moment for him,
that the laughter and fragrance and wilful glances were his tribute. That was
called politics. One fine day the old gentleman thought he’d like to drive
out with the quality to a military review in the park. He was a suave, elderly
man who balanced his imposing body, when at rest, upon a large silk umbrella.
The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a
quagmire. I HOPE I AM NOT DETAINING YOU. ”

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. Freddy Malins’ left hand
accepted the glass mechanically, his right hand being engaged in the mechanical
readjustment of his dress.

“I could only get one cab,” he said.

--Admit. Mrs Dedalus was eating little and Dante sat with her hands in her lap.
She made Mary collect the crusts and pieces of broken bread to help to make
Tuesday’s bread-pudding. As she was naturally pale and unbending in manner
she made few friends at school. From the street door he walked on furtively on
the inner side of the path towards the corner and all at once dived into a
doorway.

The noise in the auditorium had risen to a clamour when Mr Fitzpatrick burst
into the room, followed by Mr Holohan, who was panting.

--Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the plain of
Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and colour, teeming with
luxuriant vegetation. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head
between his hands, counting the beats of his temples. ”

Gabriel was silent.

The horse was whipped up and the cab rattled off along the quay amid a chorus
of laughter and adieus.

“Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends,” she said, “when all is
said and done, no friends that a body can trust. The recollection brightened
his eyes. The noise of the hall became more audible.

“It’s very kind of you to bring him home,” she said. His father's jibes
at the Bantry gang leaped out of his memory. The duties of the priest towards
the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me
that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake
them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church
had written books as thick as the _Post Office Directory_ and as closely
printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate
questions.

The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent
back to Clongowes. The seats were being filled up rapidly and a pleasant noise
circulated in the auditorium. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least
some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in
the gloomy yard of his prison. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance
escaped--the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an
overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten. No sound of
footsteps came up or down the road. Let no worldly shame hold you back. Do you
love your mother?

Stephen shook his head slowly. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you. Old then. Then
said:

--Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world.

She was an active, practical woman of middle age.

--Is it Christy? he said.

The acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room
by many of the other guests and renewed time after time, Freddy Malins acting
as officer with his fork on high. First you must take your degree. He had a
notion that he was being had. He felt only an ache of soul and body, his whole
being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary. And when he had
tried to open Mr Casey's hand to see if the purse 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. Do you know that?

--Are you? asked Stephen.

--I don't know what your words mean, he said simply.

--PERNOBILIS ET PERVETUSTA FAMILIA, Temple said to Stephen. Who is this boy?
Why is he on his knees? What is your name, boy?

--Fleming, sir.

--Newman, I think. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had
gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this
channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry.
Whenever any job was vacant a friend was always ready to give him the hard
word. ”

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. I hope to goodness he didn’t
hear me. P. ”

“O, yes, positively,” said Little Chandler. ”

“I love the look of snow,” said Aunt Julia sadly.

“The German cardinal wouldn’t submit. That's a fine invention too. In a
bake, indeed! I think it's quite enough that you're taking a part in his bally
old play. 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 porters and the rumbling carts and the
ill-dressed bearded policeman. No help! No help! He--he himself--his body to
which he had yielded was dying. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river,
winding along towards Dublin. He told her the names of the ships he had been on
and the names of the different services. No touch of sin would linger upon the
hands with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would
linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to himself not
discerning the body of the Lord. He turned his olive face, equine in
expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to speak again. But then they got hot
and then he could sleep. It was a night for hot punches.

At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed in the
darkness and as he walked towards it he became aware of a faint aromatic odour.
”

Little Chandler ordered the drinks. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep.

“I have my own theory about it,” he said. They allowed a handful of
foreigners to subject them. Ségouin was in good humour because he had
unexpectedly received some orders in advance (he was about to start a motor
establishment in Paris) and Rivière was in good humour because he was to be
appointed manager of the establishment; these two young men (who were cousins)
were also in good humour because of the success of the French cars. Villona was
in good humour because he had had a very satisfactory luncheon; and besides he
was an optimist by nature. The fourth member of the party, however, was too
excited to be genuinely happy. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or
a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines
itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of
wings.

A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said:

--That's game ball. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against
another to hear. They must direct their flocks. Jimmy understood that the game
lay between Routh and Ségouin. Moreover Ségouin had the unmistakable air of
wealth. Jimmy set out to translate into days’ work that lordly car in which
he sat. But it was his own fault for he frequently mistook his cards and the
other men had to calculate his I.

The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the
corridors towards the refectory.

Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob.
It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian; and he thought of his
friend Davin, the peasant student. But now it sounded to me like the name of
some maleficent and sinful being. Masked memories passed quickly before him: he
recognized scenes and persons yet he was conscious that he had failed to
perceive some vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the
grounds watching the sports in Clongowes and eating slim jim out of his cricket
cap. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living, but his name was
vaguely associated with racing tissues. He would hold his secret knowledge and
secret power, being as sinless as the innocent, and he would be a priest for
ever according to the order of Melchisedec.

--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 went into Butler’s in
Moore Street--faith, I was genuinely moved, tell you the God’s truth--and I
remember well his very words.

At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out:

--Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!

--O, get out! said Heron.

--O, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus. “A wing or a slice
of the breast?”

“Just a small slice of the breast. ”. And Johnny used to work in the old
gentleman’s mill, walking round and round in order to drive the mill. I too
listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest
was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in
death, an idle chalice on his breast. Then, in that case, all the rest, all
that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now,
in fact.

The director had begun to speak of the dominican and franciscan orders and of
the friendship between saint Thomas and saint Bonaventure. 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.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically. Then, blushing
slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch's thick tweed sleeve. . . . Thank you,
indeed. ”

“Are you right now?”

“All right, thanks. ”

“He looks quite resigned,” said my aunt. I’ll talk to Martin. . . ?



He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment.

--Um, Cranly said as before. . It’s not exactly a sermon, you know. ”

“But look here, John,” said Mr O’Connor. The proposal conveyed very
little meaning to his mind but, understanding that some spiritual agencies were
about to concern themselves on his behalf, he thought he owed it to his dignity
to show a stiff neck. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men,
elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the
wreckage of the world. 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. But while they are
everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense,
unbearably extensive. A match of four was arranged, Cranly insisting, however,
that his ball should be used. The party was to dine together that evening in
Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying with
him, were to go home to dress. Mr Kernan came of Protestant stock and, though
he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his marriage, he had
not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years.

“Another time,” said the young man. He had sinned. He cursed his want of
money and cursed all the rounds he had stood, particularly all the whiskies and
Apollinaris which he had stood to Weathers. Then, almost at the instant of that
touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far
away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a
sudden ejaculation; and, seeing the silver line of the flood far away and
beginning again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and
satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had not yielded nor undone all. She
was a stout feeble old woman with white hair. She asked the stewards was any
member of the Committee in the hall and, after a great deal of trouble, a
steward brought out a little woman named Miss Beirne to whom Mrs Kearney
explained that she wanted to see one of the secretaries. . . But tell me
something about yourself. Their master had received his death-wound on the
battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He had always passed without
turning his head to look. He could not see.

Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. At the end were pictures
of big nobs. He stood still to listen. He would know obscure things, hidden
from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath. Now I
knew they were true.

The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step before the
tabernacle in the fallen gloom. But all the same it was queer what Athy said
and the way he said it. Mrs Kearney repeated:

“She won’t go on without her money. Her house had a floating population
made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally,
_artistes_ from the music-halls. To follow the voice, without looking at the
singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure
flight. Farther in front sat Mr Hendrick, the chief reporter of _The
Freeman’s Journal_, and poor O’Carroll, an old friend of Mr Kernan’s, who
had been at one time a considerable commercial figure. Gradually, as he
recognised familiar faces, Mr Kernan began to feel more at home. Life became a
divine gift for every moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of
a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank
the Giver. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer
existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and
universality. He knew that the tale was a prelude and his mind waited for the
sequel.

The Priest was silent. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel keeper through his
father's face and voice, laughed.

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. Tried to read three reviews. Useless. She is not out yet. To keep the
audience continually diverted she slipped the doubtful items in between the old
favourites. Gabriel applauded loudly with all the others at the close of the
song and loud applause was borne in from the invisible supper-table.

“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we’re in for a night of it. 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. Two penitents rose and entered the confessional at either
side.

--Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice.

“O, what a pity!” she cried.

--That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. ”

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control and then went on:

“Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’
Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window.

“Righto!” said Mr Cunningham promptly. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you,
gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to
him at that instant images of guilelessness, and he halted till the image had
vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish
face. The air was very silent and you could hear the cricket bats but more
slowly than before: pick, pock. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. After
supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk
from seventy-seven to seventy-six. As he walked on slowly, timing his pace to
theirs, he watched Corley’s head which turned at every moment towards the
young woman’s face like a big ball revolving on a pivot.

“I’m not done with you yet,” she said.

Freddy Malins bade the Misses Morkan good-evening in what seemed an offhand
fashion by reason of the habitual catch in his voice and then, seeing that Mr
Browne was grinning at him from the sideboard, crossed the room on rather shaky
legs and began to repeat in an undertone the story he had just told to Gabriel.
“There was some life in it then. ”

The room was silent again. ”

“There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf
under his oxter,” said Mr Kernan sententiously. Someone opened the door of
the room and called out:

“Hello! Is this a Freemasons’ meeting?”

“Who’s that?” said the old man.

“I wonder where did they dig her up,” said Kathleen to Miss Healy. The
chill and order of the life repelled him. . ”

“It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him,” said my aunt.

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. We were serious to the point
of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed.
Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell
his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we
came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the
Pigeon House.

We came then near the river. He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain
of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant before he let it fall from him
and wondered would it live or die. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and
when the meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table,
he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth with his
tongue and licking it from his lips. He stands and looks at the people while I
do the talking. Yes. His face was handsome and his body was strong and hard. He
was well informed. In the course of the evening, Mrs Kearney learned that the
Friday concert was to be abandoned and that the Committee was going to move
heaven and earth to secure a bumper house on Saturday night. At the very
instant of death the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at once
flies towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Rain was drizzling
down on the cold streets and, when they reached the Ballast Office, Farrington
suggested the Scotch House. The bar was full of men and loud with the noise of
tongues and glasses.

In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their things:
the party was over. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly. The granite
stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my
hands in time to an air in my head. I HOPE I AM NOT DETAINING YOU.

--No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. It's not right. Do you use a holder?

--I don't smoke, answered Stephen.

--But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared
together?

--Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps.

--Lynch puts out his chest, said Stephen, as a criticism of life.

--And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did
so little harm. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. He would save her. He
would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived
and born children of wrath.

When their turn to cross had come he was still perplexed and inattentive.

--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. On Saturday evenings when my aunt
went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels.

“_Credo!_” said Mr Cunningham. Useless. From without as from within the
waters had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle
fiercely above the crumbled mole. 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. Desisting from this, he
began to wander about the far end of the field, aimlessly.

After an interval the man spoke to me.

--Where? asked Stephen. Some died. I went to the stern and tried to decipher
the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign
sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion. .
peculiar cases. . the----”

“The body,” said Mr Cunningham.

“Yes, in the back near the door. He hardly knew where he was walking. He
shook the poker gravely and nodded his head at the fellow out of third of
grammar. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over
to the old country just for a holiday. Supreme Judge, from His sentence there
will be and can be no appeal. He calls the just to His side, bidding them enter
into the kingdom, the eternity of bliss prepared for them. And you, Stephen,
have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady's sodality.



* * * * *



He could wait no longer. The other boys bent over their theme-books and began
to write. The moon was blood-red. When we returned to the street light from the
kitchen windows had filled the areas. 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.

They drove down Dame Street. Soon they were all quite merry again and Mrs
Donnelly said Maria would enter a convent before the year was out because she
had got the prayer-book. Maria had never seen Joe so nice to her as he was that
night, so full of pleasant talk and reminiscences. ”

But Maria said she had brought something special for papa and mamma, something
they would be sure to like, and she began to look for her plumcake.

“That affected his mind,” she said. He had sinned. His friends asked him
had he seen Corley and what was the latest. But he played too fiercely for us
who were younger and more timid. What birds were they? He thought that they
must be swallows who had come back from the south. He began to mimic his
son’s flat accent, saying half to himself: _“At the chapel. He had money
enough to settle down on; it was not that.

--Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus. AMEN.

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel.

--Quite right! said the rector.

There was a silence while he ate.

--Give me a kiss, she said. Mr Holohan began to pace up and down the room, in
order to cool himself for he felt his skin on fire. Madam Glynn took her stand
in a corner of the room, holding a roll of music stiffly before her and from
time to time changing the direction of her startled gaze. The shadow took her
faded dress into shelter but fell revengefully into the little cup behind her
collar-bone. At once from every part of his being unrest began to irradiate. At
four o’clock he was set free.

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. If the lamp smokes
or smells I shall try to trim it.

--It is religion, Dante said. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. By
paying a small sum every week into a society, he ensured for both his daughters
a dowry of one hundred pounds each when they came to the age of twenty-four.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. AMEN.

The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone.

Stephen felt his heart filled by Fleming's words and did not answer. I
remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of
antique fashion.

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.

“Half-seven at M’Auley’s be it!”

There was a short silence. Then he smiled and said:

--O, well, it was a mistake; I am sure Father Dolan did not know. The cabbage
began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. Great applause greeted Mary
Jane as, blushing and rolling up her music nervously, she escaped from the
room. 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. It
was true. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. Nor can nature escape
from these intense and various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is
sustained and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater.
Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering, unceasing
variety of torture--this is what the divine majesty, so outraged by sinners,
demands; this is what the holiness of heaven, slighted and set aside for the
lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt flesh, requires; this is what the
blood of the innocent Lamb of God, shed for the redemption of sinners, trampled
upon by the vilest of the vile, insists upon.

--Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the
eternity of hell. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. She held an open book
on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed
in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet. There were worse husbands.

The first part of the concert was very successful except for Madam Glynn’s
item. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat-brush, and answered
me curtly:

“Yes, boy, I know. When he went in by the side-door he found the kitchen
empty and the kitchen fire nearly out. He hid under the table. He was not
without culture. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. That
was called politics.

He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God
cast him out of heaven into hell for ever. By God, I’ll say for you, Joe! No,
by God, you stuck to him like a man!”

“O, Joe,” said Mr O’Connor suddenly.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. Mr
Holohan began to pace up and down the room, in order to cool himself for he
felt his skin on fire. The others accepted under protest. Yes, the newspapers
were right: snow was general all over Ireland.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. But he turned again to Stephen and
said with a sudden eagerness:

--That word is a most interesting word. We were chatting, you know, and one
word borrowed another.

At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst out:

--Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!

--O, get out! said Heron. I want to go home. . ?” I said. “Do you know what
my private and candid opinion is about some of those little jokers? I believe
half of them are in the pay of the Castle. ”

“There’s no knowing,” said the old man. Safe home. ”

“Good-night. Gabriel waited again and then, fearing that diffidence was about
to conquer him, he said abruptly:

“By the way, Gretta!”

“What is it?”

“You know that poor fellow Malins?” he said quickly. She lived with her
married daughter in Glasgow and came to Dublin on a visit once a year. Her name
was Mrs Sinico. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and
lavish-limbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded him like water with
a liquid life; and like a cloud of vapour or like waters circumfluent in space
the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth
over his brain. One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel
cooked it for their dinner. At this Lenehan said that he had been with Mac the
night before in Egan’s.

--You are a great stranger now. Gabriel threw his overcoat and hat on a couch
and crossed the room towards the window.

“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we’re in for a night of it.

“.

He enunciated the word and then drank gravely. When their faces had flushed
with the struggle they drew apart, panting. The image, it is clear, must be set
between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of
others. That was because he was thinking of his own father. 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. They could understand how to jump.

He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he
would be transfigured.

“Ah,” he said, “you may say what you like. I tell you. Please come and
take me home. I am in the infirmary. I could not call my wandering thoughts
together. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. The instant flashed forth like a
point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form
was veiling softly its afterglow. The fellows said it was made of whalebone and
leather with lead inside: and he wondered what was the pain like. His very
brain was sick and powerless. While he did so he sang softly to himself with
quaint accent and phrasing:



'Tis youth and folly Makes young men marry, So here, my love, I'll No longer
stay. When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged
her to be a year or so younger than himself. ”

Mr O’Connor, a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many
blotches and pimples, had just brought the tobacco for a cigarette into a
shapely cylinder but when spoken to he undid his handiwork meditatively. Then
he mumbled good-night and went out. ”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Mr Cunningham, “Jack and I and M’Coy
here--we’re all going to wash the pot. He was a Castle official only during
office hours. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught
geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. The yellow
gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as
if before an altar. The wind of the last day blew through his mind, his sins,
the jewel-eyed harlots of his imagination, fled before the hurricane, squeaking
like mice in their terror and huddled under a mane of hair.

--I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.

After a pause Cranly asked:

--What age is your mother?

--Not old, Stephen said. And you invite me to be one of you. The letters of the
name of Dublin lay heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither
and thither with slow boorish insistence.

In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their things:
the party was over. It is a good evening. Thanks to her, Constantine was now
senior curate in Balbrigan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his
degree in the Royal University.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father
and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. For the first time in
his life he felt himself superior to the people he passed. By paying a small
sum every week into a society, he ensured for both his daughters a dowry of one
hundred pounds each when they came to the age of twenty-four. 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. Every year in the month
of July Mrs Kearney found occasion to say to some friend:

“My good man is packing us off to Skerries for a few weeks. No, no. He was
not foxing. Then, raising the umbrella in salute, he said to all:

--Good evening, sirs.

He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a slight
nervous movement. He could see nothing there. His conversation was mainly about
himself: what he had said to such a person and what such a person had said to
him and what he had said to settle the matter.

It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. The desire and loathing excited
by improper esthetic means are really not esthetic emotions not only because
they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical.
Everyone roared laughing when he showed the way in which Mr Alleyne shook his
fist in Farrington’s face. Mary Jane settled down quietly to her supper but
Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia were still toddling round the table, walking on each
other’s heels, getting in each other’s way and giving each other unheeded
orders. Freddy Malins, with his hat well back on his head and his shoulders
humped with cold, was puffing and steaming after his exertions. The explanation
was not very clear for Mr Browne grinned and said:

“I like that idea very much but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them
as well as a coffin?”

“The coffin,” said Mary Jane, “is to remind them of their last end.
O’Halloran stood a round and then Farrington stood another round, Weathers
protesting that the hospitality was too Irish. Weathers made them all have just
one little tincture at his expense and promised to meet them later on at
Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street.

When the Scotch House closed they went round to Mulligan’s. Stephen laughed
and said:

--He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine. 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. A silence filled the
classroom and Stephen, glancing timidly at Father Arnall's dark face, saw that
it was a little red from the wax he was in. Before a curtain, over which the
words _Café Chantant_ were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting
money on a salver. She told too of certain changes they had seen in her of late
and of her odd ways and sayings. She thought her plans over. Her long slender
bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of
seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her husband’s
great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. No, it was not the moment yet.

He began to feel that he had wronged her.

--Good day, sir, said Stephen.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze And you have had your will of him. Old
father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. Mulrennan spoke
Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. She would turn and look at
him. Amen.

The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. The frail gay sound smote
his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes,
he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs.
He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. A
great saint, saint Francis Xavier! A great soldier of God!

The rector paused and then, shaking his clasped hands before him, went on:

--He had the faith in him that moves mountains.

“Mr D’Arcy,” she said, “what is the name of that song you were
singing?”

“It’s called _The Lass of Aughrim_,” said Mr D’Arcy, “but I
couldn’t remember it properly. “God knows we done all we could, as poor as
we are--we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it. ”

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall
asleep. ”

“Allow me,” said Mr Cunningham positively, “it was _Lux upon Lux_.

“Yes,” said Mr Cunningham. He opened it cautiously with his left hand lest
he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book:



_Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom, Not e’en a Zephyr wanders
through the grove, Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb And scatter
flowers on the dust I love. Mrs Malins, who had been silent all through the
supper, said that her son was going down to Mount Melleray in a week or so. She
stood still for an instant like an angry stone image and, when the first notes
of the song struck her ear, she caught up her daughter’s cloak and said to
her husband:

“Get a cab!”

He went out at once.

It was the last tram.

Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the
playground.







XXVI

Thou leanest to the shell of night, Dear lady, a divining ear. Saint Thomas,
the greatest doctor of the church, the angelic doctor, as he is called, says
that the worst damnation consists in this, that the understanding of man is
totally deprived of divine light and his affection obstinately turned away from
the goodness of God. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become
as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. We can have no idea of how
horrible these devils are. Such booing and baaing, man, you never heard.
Villona was entertaining also--a brilliant pianist--but, unfortunately, very
poor. Then an impromptu square dance, the men devising original figures. They
can wait. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers. First of
all there was her disreputable father and then her mother’s boarding house
was beginning to get a certain fame. 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. But how so quickly? By seeing or
by thinking of seeing.

--He came. ”

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores. ”

“Can’t you see that I’m as hoarse as a crow?” said Mr D’Arcy roughly.
. _

It was useless. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them,
had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look
like a little perverse madonna. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head
towards me. As she was naturally pale and unbending in manner she made few
friends at school. Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and
neither was conscious of any incongruity. ”

Mr Henchy waited a few moments and then nodded in the direction of the door.
”

Mrs Conroy laughed. The blush which had risen to his face a few moments before
was establishing itself. In the middle of the vestry a young jesuit, who was
then on a visit to the college, stood rocking himself rhythmically from the
tips of his toes to his heels and back again, his hands thrust well forward
into his side-pockets. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do
her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she
elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of
provisions. He asked in a suspicious provincial accent:

“Who is the man? What’s his name and address?”

A young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders.
His confession would be long, long. He was laughing heartily in a high key at a
story which he had been telling Gabriel on the stairs and at the same time
rubbing the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye.
And you, Stephen, have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed
Lady's sodality. I wouldn't care a bit, by Jove. But the grey face still
followed me. Ireland first, Stevie.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly.
He was sick then. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the
third line all the fellows said. Nasty Roche had big hands. They said they
could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash. He would fail with them just as
he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He allowed himself to think that in
certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never
arose, his life rolled out evenly--an adventureless tale. No help! No help!
He--he himself--his body to which he had yielded was dying. He had known
neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male
health nor filial piety.

Mr Cunningham was the very man for such a case. 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. He said that
when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. He was
coming near the door. 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 they had stolen a monstrance to run away with and sell it somewhere.
But it was unfair and cruel.

The prefect cried:

--Quick march! Hayfoot! Strawfoot!

They went together down the staircase and along the corridor and past the bath.

--But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued.

We were grave lovers. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly.
Mr Holohan began to pace up and down the room, in order to cool himself for he
felt his skin on fire.

--I wish it would clear up. He waited till all in the chapel had knelt and
every least noise was still. Gallaher was only patronising him by his
friendliness just as he was patronising Ireland by his visit.

The barman brought their drinks.

“Tommy,” he said, “I see you haven’t changed an atom.

--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. There were five or six workingmen in
the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare. He
felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the
cocks. He knew the inner side of all affairs and was fond of delivering final
judgments. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but
it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple
joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would
listen.

--It is religion, Dante said. I pray to God, and do you pray with me, that we
may repent of our sins. Damn it now, what’s his name? Little chap with sandy
hair. I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old country.

“We’ll all renounce the devil,” he said, “together, not forgetting his
works and pomps. “And little thanks you get for it, only impudence. ”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza. It was Annie’s photograph.

“And why can’t you?” I asked. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet
curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. Hell is Roman, like the walls
of the Romans, strong and ugly. The straitness of this prison house is
expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws.
On the last flight of stairs he passed Jack Mooney who was coming up from the
pantry nursing two bottles of _Bass_. He was extremely nervous and extremely
jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient
friendliness. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the enormities
which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shameful
details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience
whatever image had attracted his eyes. You could die just the same on a sunny
day. You had the minister of God to preach to you, to call you back when you
had strayed, to forgive you your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if
only you had confessed and repented. That time is gone: gone for ever. Mary
Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the
household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. Freddy Malins, with his
hat well back on his head and his shoulders humped with cold, was puffing and
steaming after his exertions. At last she was settled comfortably and Freddy
Malins invited Mr Browne into the cab. She dealt with moral problems as a
cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. She looked
at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear. As soon as she
could she excused herself and went out after him. Pray to our mother Mary to
help you. She will help you, my child. Then she had her plants in the
conservatory and she liked looking after them.

--But I told him I broke them, sir, and he pandied me. An eternity of bliss in
the company of the dean of studies?

--Remember, Cranly said, that he would be glorified. The other houses of the
street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown
imperturbable faces.

“I’ll tell you my opinion,” said Ignatius Gallaher, emerging after some
time from the clouds of smoke in which he had taken refuge, “it’s a rum
world. But she would show them their mistake. If so, Cranly would not have
spoken as he did.

--It is religion, Dante said. “Did it come off?”

They had reached the corner of Ely Place. Then with a grave gesture he extended
a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his
disciple. She would turn and look at him. Her brother always teased her before
he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking at her.

They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was called Little Chandler because, though
he was but slightly under the average stature, he gave one the idea of being a
little man. ” Miss Ivors had praised the review.

Mary Jane brushed past the others and ran to the staircase, but before she
reached it the singing stopped and the piano was closed abruptly. I quite see
your point.

He also tapped the portfolio and coughed gently and smiled. Mr Tate, the
English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

--This fellow has heresy in his essay. She stuck her ugly old face up at me
when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. She looked at
herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear. All the lodgers in
the house knew something of the affair; details had been invented by some. It
was no use trying to say a word to him when he was with the chief clerk. He
turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the
middle of the maroon clouds. Then, raising his head, he repeated the act of
contrition, phrase by phrase, with fervour.

When he had eluded the flood of temptation many times in this way he grew
troubled and wondered whether the grace which he had refused to lose was not
being filched from him little by little. The priest's face was in total shadow,
but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and
the curves of the skull. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of
emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. There was nothing he liked, he
said, so much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her
beautiful soft hair.

--Now it is all about politics in the papers, he said.

The rain fell faster.

“Yes. 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. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors;
but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the
bazaar. It was pleasant after that honour to return to the profane world of
spectators amid nudges and significant looks. But now it sounded to me like the
name of some maleficent and sinful being. The working-man is not looking for
fat jobs for his sons and nephews and cousins. The master marked the sums and
cuts to be done for the next lesson and went out. She wore a short black jacket
with mother-of-pearl buttons and a ragged black boa. She felt a soft wet
substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her
bandage. In the purse were two half-crowns and some coppers. I drew the
blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. ”

“I’d like nothing better this minute,” said Mr Browne stoutly, “than a
rattling fine walk in the country or a fast drive with a good spanking goer
between the shafts. . . . . . . . . nearly. He still bought a copy of
_Reynolds’s Newspaper_ every week but he attended to his religious duties and
for nine-tenths of the year lived a regular life.

He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He felt quite at
ease now for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find
himself at the head of a well-laden table. That was mean of Wells to shoulder
him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuff box for
Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. And then when all
were vested he had stood holding out the boat to the rector and the rector had
put a spoonful of incense in it and it had hissed on the red coals.

He could hear the tolling.

--Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the
City of Cork in his day. “You saw the lady fall?”

_Witness_. Then they’ll make you Lord Mayor. She sang _I Dreamt that I
Dwelt_, and when she came to the second verse she sang again:



_I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side And of
all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride. She
pushed the decanter towards him, saying:

“Now, help yourself, Mr Holohan!”

And while he was helping himself she said:

“Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid of it!”

Everything went on smoothly. 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. I was too hairy to tell her that. He had studied
in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly.
She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. ” But what would grammar
matter if he really loved her? He could not make up his mind whether to like
her or despise her for what she had done. And Pius IX.

--Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He turned suddenly to
the invalid and said:

“D’ye know what, Tom, has just occurred to me? You night join in and we’d
have a four-handed reel.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates. Who is this boy? Why is he on his
knees? What is your name, boy?

--Fleming, sir.

The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in
thought and word and deed wilfully through his own body. Not like the other
tinker. ”

The three men left the bar and the crowd sifted through the doors into the
laneway. “Fire away, Joe. ”

Mr Hynes did not seem to remember at once the piece to which they were alluding
but, after reflecting a while, he said:

“O, that thing is it.

Mrs Kernan came to the door of the bedroom and announced:

“Here’s a visitor for you!”

“Who is it?”

“Mr Fogarty. 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. What’s the world coming to when sons speaks that way
to their father?”

“What age is he?” said Mr O’Connor.

“Nineteen,” said the old man.

“Sha, ‘s nothing,” said Mr Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the
collar of his filthy coat across his neck. “Such eyes as he had: big, dark
eyes! And such an expression in them--an expression!”

“O then, you were in love with him?” said Gabriel.

“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway. Of
course you know nothing,” said Mr Alleyne. She said she would do without any
tea but when it came near the time at which the shop at the corner closed she
decided to go out herself for a quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of
sugar. She stood on the curbstone, swinging a sunshade in one hand. His heart
danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. When Mrs Kernan came into
the room drying her hands she came into a solemn company.

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small
whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in this
house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. And that's what I call limbo.
Darkness was falling.

Darkness falls from the air. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and
he took little part in the games. His soul was swooning into some new world,
fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings.

When the plot had been disclosed to her, Mrs Kernan had said:

“I leave it all in your hands, Mr Cunningham.

--Certainly, said Dante.









When the shy star goes forth in heaven All maidenly, disconsolate, Hear you
amid the drowsy even One who is singing by your gate. He's very moist and
watery about the dewlaps, God bless him.

Mr Casey was still struggling through his fit of coughing and laughter.

--What? cried Mr Dedalus.

“You’ll put your head in the sack,” repeated Little Chandler stoutly,
“like everyone else if you can find the girl. That's all I can say, said Mr
Dedalus. Did you know?

--Is it? Stephen said vaguely.

--I did, Stephen answered. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the
retreat business and confession, and. All Dublin is raving about him. His mind
bred vermin.

Dante said:

--O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. She started to her
feet and ran to the banisters.

It was the last tram. That was his song. Then she said suddenly:

“O, Mr Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer?
We’re going to stay there a whole month. Hell is a strait and dark and
foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and
smoke. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in
the least the pains of hell. There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and
holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers.

We blessed ourselves and came away. She was a woman who was quite able to keep
things to herself: a determined woman. He sat listening to the words and
following the ways of adventure that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults
and winding galleries and jagged caverns.

“Hello, Crofton!” said Mr Henchy to the fat man. You often heard me speak
of the Groceries, didn't you, Stephen. I shall try to fly by those nets.

He paused. I will not let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here tonight.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro. The brimstone, too, which
burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable
stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential
odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to
infect the whole world. Stephen, his tongue cleaving to his palate, bowed his
head, praying with his heart.

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. In heart you are an
Irish man but your pride is too powerful.

This spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his
rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the soul
crept over it like unseen vermin, over the shuffling feet and up the folds of
the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious of its
indignity. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high
stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted
at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. But I must leave
tomorrow night.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice
was singing and gazing up at his wife.

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. His mother put on the oilsheet. His
soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. And
still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home
from the city after having dined moderately in George’s Street and read the
evening paper for dessert.

--Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He peered in front of
him and right and left through the gloom and thought that those must be
portraits. He did not like Wells's face. 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 small gold coin shone in the palm.
Moynihan murmured from behind in his natural voice:

--Isn't MacAlister a devil for his pound of flesh?

Stephen looked coldly on the oblong skull beneath him overgrown with tangled
twine-coloured hair. He can have me. 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
sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes.
That was because he was thinking of his own father. The clerk in Terry
Kelly’s said _A crown!_ but the consignor held out for six shillings; and in
the end the six shillings was allowed him literally.

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin who had
called it forth.

After a pause Cranly asked:

--What age is your mother?

--Not old, Stephen said. “It’s Bartell D’Arcy singing and he wouldn’t
sing all the night. O, I’ll get him to sing a song before he goes. ”

“O do, Mary Jane,” said Aunt Kate.

“Musha, God be with them times!” said the old man.

He uncovered the dish boldly and said:

--Now then, who's for more turkey?

Nobody answered. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first
luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it. It was a text for business men and
professional men. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding
it with their parts.

He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers.
“She’ll be there all right. I always let her wait a bit.

--Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. You know that well. There was a book in
the library about Holland. The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders
had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the
earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered the sombre college he would
be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel
Whaley. No! They wouldn’t have it!”

“Ha!” said Mr M’Coy.

“And they were a German cardinal by the name of Dolling. First you must take
your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you
will see your way. She was a stout feeble old woman with white hair. The first
tenor and the contralto, however, brought down the house. While his mind had
been pursuing 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. Seeing the spectacle, he called out:

“Hallo, Tom, old man! What’s the trouble?”

“Sha, ‘s nothing,” said the man.

The new-comer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the
constable, saying:

“It’s all right, constable.

--What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense of the
word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition. Down far in
the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. She forgot
nothing and, thanks to her, everything that was to be done was done. Their
conversation was evidently about Kathleen for they both glanced at her often as
she stood chatting to one of her Nationalist friends, Miss Healy, the
contralto. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: “Why is
it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no
word tender enough to be your name?”

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne
towards him from the past. Amen. So be it. Apply to the jesuit theologian, Juan
Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain to you in what circumstances you may
lawfully kill your king and whether you had better hand him his poison in a
goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or his saddlebow. Ask me rather would
I suffer others to rob me, or if they did, would I call down upon them what I
believe is called the chastisement of the secular arm?

--And would you?

--I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed. Who
is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

--Of prose do you mean?

--Yes.

--Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. As soon as he was on the landing the man
pulled a shepherd’s plaid cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran
quickly down the rickety stairs. He halted a few paces from her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand
like a child. 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. Moreover, our
earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it
is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it
preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity,
it rages for ever.

--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is
always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless,
shoreless and bottomless. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a
dairy to see the time. He listened to Father Arnall's low and gentle voice as
he corrected the themes. Supreme Judge, from His sentence there will be and can
be no appeal. He calls the just to His side, bidding them enter into the
kingdom, the eternity of bliss prepared for them. It was his wife. His arms
trembled with anger and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted:

“Stop!”

The child stopped for an instant, had a spasm of fright and began to scream.
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. Perhaps
that made her severe against Parnell. S. Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks
of the billiard sharp who is condemned to play:



On a cloth untrue With a twisted cue And elliptical billiard balls.











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.

--Did they hurt you much? Nasty Roche asked. 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.

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets.

--Look at that basket, he said. Church Street chapel.

--Church?

She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him; and, as she held out
her reeking withered right hand under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower
towards her, saddened and soothed by her voice. Any lazy idle loafers that want
flogging in this class?

He came to the middle of the class and saw Fleming on his knees. He waited in
timorous silence to hear what Heron might say next. So he had sunk to the state
of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. 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. 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.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of
the weariness of school-life for one day at least. I tell you. She set these on
the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Gabriel asked her
whether she had had a good crossing. Everyone protested loudly so that he
compromised by taking a long draught of stout for he had found the carving hot
work. Gabriel watched his wife, who did not join in the conversation. It was
that of an old song of Aunt Julia’s--_Arrayed for the Bridal_. As the waters
of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment
torture the spirit with the flesh. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled
together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot,
stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night
bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. They must direct their flocks.
Farley and Jimmy were the heaviest losers. No one knew very well what the talk
was about. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards
Dublin. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they
were saying. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos. She
mounted the stairs behind the porter, her head bowed in the ascent, her frail
shoulders curved as with a burden, her skirt girt tightly about her.

It was a bright Sunday morning of early summer, promising heat, but with a
fresh breeze blowing. I'm old enough to be his grandfather.

Brother Michael repeated:

--You'll get your walking papers. Everyone gave him advice and said it was a
great pity and urged him to be very careful of his throat in the night air.
Then he imitated Farrington, saying, _“And here was my nabs, as cool as you
please,”_ while Farrington looked at the company out of his heavy dirty eyes,
smiling and at times drawing forth stray drops of liquor from his moustache
with the aid of his lower lip. All the fellows would be at the mass, dressed in
black, all with sad faces. 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. In a whisper Mr
Cunningham drew Mr Kernan’s attention to Mr Harford, the moneylender, who sat
some distance off, and to Mr Fanning, the registration agent and mayor maker of
the city, who was sitting immediately under the pulpit beside one of the newly
elected councillors of the ward. A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a
box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone in the warm glare.
A soft whispering noise floated in vaporous cloudlets out of the box. Tea was
nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms
of the small glass jars and jampots which did service for teacups. Discarded
crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been
poured over them, lay scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and
there on the board, and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through
the pith of a ravaged turnover. Of course she was in a bad humour and gave him
short answers. But what else could she do? She appealed to the second tenor who
said he thought she had not been well treated. ”

She had worked herself into a passion and would have continued in defence of
her sister for it was a sore subject with her but Mary Jane, seeing that all
the dancers had come back, intervened pacifically:

“Now, Aunt Kate, you’re giving scandal to Mr Browne who is of the other
persuasion. “No bones broken. What? Can you walk?”

The young man in the cycling-suit took the man by the other arm and the crowd
divided.

--I didn't think he had that much in him, said Mr Casey.

--O well then, said the rector, Father Dolan did not understand. But I am
curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of
yourself?

He turned towards his friend's face and saw there a raw smile which some force
of will strove to make finely significant. ”

Lenehan laughed again, noiselessly.

“O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack,” said Mr Henchy. 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.

--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. It is not the first time that we have been the
recipients--or perhaps, I had better say, the victims--of the hospitality of
certain good ladies. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow
had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum. And every single fellow had a
different way of walking. Perhaps they could be happy together. He was a poet
himself. Then a short laugh broke from his lips as he thought of that solitary
farmhand in the kitchen gardens behind their house whom they had nicknamed the
man with the hat. There must be some left. Gabriel began to carve second
helpings as soon as he had finished the first round without serving himself.

“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we’re in for a night of it.

He wished the details of the incident to remain vague. By the time they had
crossed the quadrangle his restlessness had risen to fever.

Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his
station in life, circled about its own centre of spiritual energy.

--Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of
honour. “It’s Bartell D’Arcy singing and he wouldn’t sing all the
night. You ask Hogan, my boy. Leave me to go mine.

--Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you're a good fellow but you have
yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human
individual. We want to hear about that. God loves with a divine love every
human soul, and every human soul lives in that love.

Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a
crash. His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word, and
deed, every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in
heaven; and at times his sense of such immediate repercussion was so lively
that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard
of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth
immediately in heaven, not as a number but as a frail column of incense or as a
slender flower. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. Ten thousand
souls won for God in a single month! That is a true conqueror, true to the
motto of our order: AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM! A saint who has great power in
heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief; power to obtain
whatever we pray for if it be for the good of our souls; power above all to
obtain for us the grace to repent if we be in sin. He fancied to himself the
English lecture and felt, even at that distance, restless and helpless. He
waited still at the threshold as at the entrance to some dark cave. Mr Bell,
the second tenor, was a fair-haired little man who competed every year for
prizes at the Feis Ceoil. He had failed in business in a licensed house in the
city because his financial condition had constrained him to tie himself to
second-class distillers and brewers. Then he turned into Dame Street. The
cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. Angry with himself
he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down sideways into the
shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection therein
of their top-heavy silk hats and humble tape-like collars and loosely-hanging
clerical clothes.

--Brother Hickey. His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk, stood often in
shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music of
the lutenists or the frank laughter of waist-coateers until a laugh too low, a
phrase, tarnished by time, of chambering and false honour stung his monkish
pride and drove him on from his lurking-place. His eyes, which were of bluish
slate-colour, relieved his unhealthy pallor and shone out plainly above the
vivid orange tie he wore. He replied that he had spent the day with Corley. The
shop was very quiet. That was called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the
fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour smell. Mary Jane, who
was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the
household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. Mr Browne begged of them
to sit down and eat their suppers and so did Gabriel but they said they were
time enough so that, at last, Freddy Malins stood up and, capturing Aunt Kate,
plumped her down on her chair amid general laughter. All I can say is I never
heard her sing half so well as long as I am coming here. And he remembered that
Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil, GIVING
UTTERANCE, LIKE THE VOICE OF NATURE HERSELF, TO THAT PAIN AND WEARINESS YET
HOPE OF BETTER THINGS WHICH HAS BEEN THE EXPERIENCE OF HER CHILDREN IN EVERY
TIME. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up
screwed.

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the
possession of money. ‘Wisha! wisha,’ says I. ‘A pound of chops,’ says
he, ‘coming into the Mansion House. ’ ‘Wisha!’ says I, ‘what kind of
people is going at all now?’”

At this point there was a knock at the door, and a boy put in his head. ”

“Why so?”

“He asked me who the nominators were; and I told him. ”

“And when we are thirsty we are also quarrelsome,” added Mr Browne. He
ordered the same again. Besides Gleeson won't flog him hard. They would not
wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane’s pupils should see him under the
influence; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to manage him.
He remembered well her eyes, the touch of her hand and his delirium. Faces were
there; eyes: they waited and watched.

--We knew perfectly well of course that though it was bound to come to the
light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce
himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary and so
we knew of course perfectly well--

Murmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark shell of
the cave. Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves. The end
he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen
path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be
opened to him. He saw her approach him in a lull of the talk and beg him to
sing one of his curious songs. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan
and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. On the staircase he paused
and gazing absently at Dixon repeated:

--Pawn to king's bloody fourth. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous
of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient
friendliness. He longed to ascend through the roof and fly away to another
country where he would never hear again of his trouble, and yet a force pushed
him downstairs step by step. He apologised to his guests for the disorder of
the room, but at the same time looked at them a little proudly, with a
veteran’s pride.

--Admit! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the calf of
the leg. The face of an old priest was at the grating, averted from him,
leaning upon a hand. At once from every part of his being unrest began to
irradiate.

Hm!.

--Do you mean women?

--I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. The arc of his
social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr Kernan’s
decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known
him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. People,
perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the
lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. Aunt
Kate drew Gabriel aside hurriedly and whispered into his ear:

“Slip down, Gabriel, like a good fellow and see if he’s all right, and
don’t let him up if he’s screwed. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her
ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face.

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a young star,
shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxytone and more faintly as the
cadence died. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste
of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was
flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few
last figures in distant pools. Again a wave. His brain began to glow. I have
not made or accepted its words. Here we are gathered together for a brief
moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine. We are met here as
friends, in the spirit of good-fellowship, as colleagues, also to a certain
extent, in the true spirit of _camaraderie_, and as the guests of--what shall I
call them?--the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world. And inquisitive! AND
WHAT PART DOES STEPHEN TAKE, MR DEDALUS? 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. Do you know that?

--Are you? asked Stephen. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

“O, I am thinking about that song, _The Lass of Aughrim_. They had cried to
him from the car, waving their hands:

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

--Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and
muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. A little boy came running down
the stairs. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being
the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him. The light was
lowered quietly. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but
when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two
evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to
work for Mr Tierney. It was his humour to have people know what an ordeal a
concert was to him. Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet
only with a disinterred sweetness like the figseeds Cranly rooted out of his
gleaming teeth. .
I didn’t do anything. Mrs Kearney looked searchingly at the oldish face which
was screwed into an expression of trustfulness and enthusiasm and answered:

“No, thank you!”

The little woman hoped they would have a good house. But the kettle would be on
the hob to make punch. He sat a long time over it. But still it was a strange
and a great sin even to touch it. Of course it is idealistic, German,
ultra-profound.

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely.

--Indeed you might, answered Heron.

--Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of
honour. Farrington pulled up his sleeve accordingly and showed his biceps
muscle to the company. Why, Johnny Cashman, you must be nearing the century.

--Well, I'll tell you the truth, said the little old man.

“O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack,” said Mr Henchy.

Mr Hynes sat on the side of the table near Mr Lyons but said nothing. ”

In another corner of the room were Mrs Kearney and her husband, Mr Bell, Miss
Healy and the young lady who had to recite the patriotic piece. Mrs Kearney
said that the Committee had treated her scandalously. She had spared neither
trouble nor expense and this was how she was repaid.

They thought they had only a girl to deal with and that, therefore, they could
ride roughshod over her. She spoke also of the beautiful house her daughter
kept in Glasgow, and of all the friends they had there. He looked at it and saw
that Wells was 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. All seemed weary of life even before entering
upon 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.

He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers.
Shrinking from that life he turned towards the wall, making a cowl of the
blanket and staring at the great overblown scarlet flowers of the tattered
wallpaper. He tried to warm his perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining
a roseway from where he lay upwards to heaven all strewn with scarlet 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.

My book was closed, I read no more, Watching the fire dance On the floor. One
boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its
side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.

Little Chandler quickened his pace. For the first time in his life he felt
himself superior to the people he passed.

He sat again in the front bench of the chapel. Four boys left the room; and he
heard others passing down the corridor. Mrs Kearney asked him when was her
daughter going to be paid. Mr Holohan said that Mr Fitzpatrick had charge of
that. By hell, I saw that at once. Mrs Kearney wrapped the cloak round her
daughter and followed him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy
silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the
call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A
wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy
from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy
the gates of all the ways of error and glory. A sin, an instant of folly and
weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death and suffering into
the world.

APRIL 10. Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which
has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses
move, the sound of hoofs upon the road.

It was the last 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.

Hm!. . . Do you hear me now?”

“Yes, sir.

--Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly.
“Give us that thing you wrote--do you remember? Have you got it on you?”

“O, ay!” said Mr Henchy. “He hasn’t got those little pigs’ eyes for
nothing. He felt completely out-generalled. But a pleased expression flickered
across his face.

Little Chandler sustained for one moment the gaze of her eyes and his heart
closed together as he met the hatred in them. ”

“To be sure,” said Aunt Kate again.

They drove in a jingle across Cork while it was still early morning and Stephen
finished his sleep in a bedroom of the Victoria Hotel. Stephen walked on alone
and out into the quiet of Kildare Street opposite Maple's hotel he stood to
wait, patient again.

The man continued his 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. The boy that held the censer had swung it 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. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of
the chapel at Sunday mass. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the
square ditch, they were saying. . . . ’ ‘That’ll be all right, Mr H. B.
Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret
at the accident. Mr Cunningham said that he had once known a similar case. He
was an elder colleague of Mr Power.

“Sha, ‘s nothing,” said Mr Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the
collar of his filthy coat across his neck. He wore a round hat of hard black
felt. His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow
cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones. He opened his very
long mouth suddenly to express disappointment and at the same time opened wide
his very bright blue eyes to express pleasure and surprise.

“O Father Keon!” said Mr Henchy, jumping up from his chair. She declined
it, saying she was ironing downstairs, and, after having exchanged a nod with
Mr Cunningham behind Mr Power’s back, prepared to leave the room. One of them
was a very fat man whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling
from his sloping 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?

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' murmurs of admiration behind him as they passed
forward to see the little boy who had to dance the sunbonnet dance by himself.

--O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that
language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning
I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel
today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall
command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear
ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED,
INTO EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS!

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his
head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up
the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and
waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and
shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul
had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging
headlong through space.

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening
one of his books at random and poring over it. YOU BETTER MIND YOURSELF FATHER
DOLAN, said I, OR YOUNG DEDALUS WILL SEND YOU UP FOR TWICE NINE. A keen east
wind hit them, blowing from the mouth of the river. We pleased ourselves with
the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce--the barges signalled from far away by
their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big
white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony
said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and
even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had
been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes.
He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a
feeling must be love. How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw,
every thought of our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God's
inexhaustible goodness.

The slide was shot to suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added:

--I mean, have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join
the order? Think.

--I have sometimes thought of it, said 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 O'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 bystreet a German
band of five players in faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was
playing to an audience of street arabs and leisurely messenger 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 footballers the greasy
leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. She had taken off
her hat and cloak and was standing before a large swinging mirror, unhooking
her waist. Gabriel paused for a few moments, watching her, and then said:

“Gretta!”

She turned away from the mirror slowly and walked along the shaft of light
towards him. ”

In fact right behind her Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across
the landing. The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size
and build, with very round shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along
under the sheets and lay down beside his wife.

“God!” he exclaimed, resuming his natural face, “I never saw such an eye
in a man’s head.

Lenehan observed them for a few minutes. ”

He set to his supper and took no part in the conversation with which the table
covered Lily’s removal of the plates. ”

He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.

“At dinner, you know.

And the fellow who had spoken first said:

--Yes, that's what I heard too from the fellow in the higher line. When we come
to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic
reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience.

--Of course, said Lynch.

--This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's
hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled
and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the
dray had passed. He was neither flattered nor confused, but simply wished the
banter to end. One evening his father came home full of news which kept his
tongue busy all through dinner. I was quite bad. I was awake a long time that
night. Mrs Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items followed one
another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer and fewer,
she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such a concert.
There was something she didn’t like in the look of things and Mr
Fitzpatrick’s vacant smile irritated her very much. However, she said nothing
and waited to see how it would 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.

Lynch smote himself sonorously on the chest and said:

--Who has anything to say about my girth?

Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle. When their faces had
flushed with the struggle they drew apart, panting.

The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one
against another to hear. ”

“Who?” said I. I answered that I had none. Once a priest always a priest,
remember. “I remember now there was a 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 sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in
search of Mercedes. And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied
himself in another Marseille but that he missed the bright sky and the
sun-warmed trellises 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 started with delight and, keeping close to his
lamp-post, tried to read the result in their walk. They were walking quickly,
the young woman taking quick short steps, while Corley kept beside her with his
long stride. They did not seem to be speaking.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said.

Now I call that friendly, don't you?

Yes, I liked her today. ”

“Who did you get?” asked Mr Lyons.

--Who caught them?

--Mr Gleeson and the minister. And if the minister did it he would go to the
rector: and the rector to the provincial: and the provincial to the general of
the jesuits. It was hard to think what because 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. They closed for an instant and then opened.
He saw.

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the
tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid
excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the ordure through
the bristling grey-green weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless
lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither
and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling
canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose,
to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails
besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces.

The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room.
Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste
room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. I tell you. Let
no worldly shame hold you back. And one night she brought me two bloody fine
cigars--O, the real cheese, you know, that the old fellow used to smoke. . Here
you are, Tommy. ”

Little Chandler said nothing until the barman returned with two glasses: then
he touched his friend’s glass lightly and reciprocated the former toast. He
was beginning to feel somewhat disillusioned. Gallaher’s accent and way of
expressing himself did not please him.

“I was just telling my mother,” he said, “I never heard you sing so well,
never. O, what a dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless
bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of
cessation, of agony limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of
torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish
that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity,
every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible
punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an almighty and a just
God. He would love his neighbour.

--Byron, of course, answered Stephen. Next business. But. . .

--Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing, pure stewing.

--Don't mind him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping
upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards
a major third, like triple-branching flames leaping fitfully, flame after
flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless;
and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to
hear from under the boughs and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet
pattering like rain upon the leaves. Their feet passed in pattering tumult over
his mind, the feet of hares and rabbits, the feet of harts and hinds and
antelopes, until he heard them no more and remembered only a proud cadence from
Newman:

--Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms. When
he reached the foot of the staircase he glanced up and saw Jack regarding him
from the door of the return-room.

Suddenly he remembered the night when one of the music-hall _artistes_, a
little blond Londoner, had made a rather free allusion to Polly. Things were as
she had suspected: she had been frank in her questions and Polly had been frank
in her answers.

Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. 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. 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 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. Cranly turned, and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

--Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be
played in the Adelphi hotel. Stephen walked on alone and out into the quiet of
Kildare Street opposite Maple's hotel he stood to wait, patient again. By the
time they had crossed the quadrangle his restlessness had risen to fever. At
the first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door. A
voice asked who was there and I answered I was over at the match in Buttevant
and was walking back and that I'd be thankful for a glass of water.

--He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp
before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. He began to
mimic his son’s flat accent, saying half to himself: _“At the chapel. The
corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark
and sleeping.

She had passed through the dusk. It was Heron who had called out and, as he
marched forward between his two attendants, he cleft the air before him with a
thin cane in time to their steps. Get it out in bits!

Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures 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. The feelings excited by
improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go
to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. Gabriel was
surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. He could not
see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her
skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It will go 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.

Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle
of the refectory, Paddy Rath 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 tables of the third line.

The fellows all were silent.

“Tell us,” said Mahony pertly to the man, “how many have you yourself?”

The man smiled as before and said that when he was our age he had lots of
sweethearts. Mahony mentioned lightly that he had three totties. The man asked
me how many had I. P. ”

“O, yes, positively,” said Little Chandler.

He sipped a little of his drink while Ignatius Gallaher finished his 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.

--I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely that's not
the strange thing that happened you?

--Well, I suppose that doesn't interest you, but leastways there was such noise
after the match that I missed the train home and I couldn't get any kind of a
yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it, there was a mass meeting
that same day over in Castletownroche and all the cars in the country were
there.

--I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

--You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us. He
was passing by the house.

As soon as the first part was ended Mr Fitzpatrick and Mr Holohan went over to
Mrs Kearney and told her that the other four guineas would be paid after the
Committee meeting on the following Tuesday and that, in case her daughter did
not play for the second part, the Committee would consider the contract broken
and would pay nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is
insulted and spit on by renegade 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 famous spit?

--You did not, John, said Mr Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland.

--Were they, faith? said Mr Casey.

He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger
after another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatever your name is, give us the same
again here. I always feel easier in my mind when he’s here. And that’s the
honest truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

--Somewhat, Stephen said.

I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically:

“Can’t you give him the money and let him go? You’ve kept him late enough
as it is.

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a
magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. Whenever he
showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual
word:

“He is in Melbourne now. Still, I know he’s gone and all to that. That was
called 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. He was happy and free; but he would not be anyway proud with
Father Dolan. You're an impudent thief, he said.

--Damn your yellow insolence, answered Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

He could hear the tolling. He said over to himself the song that Brigid had
taught him. And when he had tried to open Mr Casey's hand to see if the purse
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. Names.

The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. The yellow gas-flames 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. At length he said:

“Well. . all right. ”

“_François_, the same again. The lumps of knotted flock under his head
reminded him of the lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on
which he used to sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come,
displeased with her and with himself, confounded by the print of the Sacred
Heart above the untenanted sideboard. He saw her approach him in a lull of the
talk and beg him to sing one of his curious songs. Mrs Donnelly said _“Do,
please, Maria!”_ and so Maria had to get up and stand beside the piano. A
picture of the balcony scene in _Romeo and Juliet_ hung there and beside it was
a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower which Aunt Julia had worked
in red, blue and brown wools when she was a girl. ”

He had slightly emphasised his tone and he was aware that he had betrayed
himself; but, though the colour had heightened in his cheek, he did not flinch
from his friend’s gaze. The shadow took her faded dress into shelter but fell
revengefully into the little cup behind her collar-bone. The noise of the hall
became more audible. The first tenor and the baritone arrived together. ”

Mr Kernan was silent. The proposal conveyed very little meaning to his mind
but, understanding that some spiritual agencies were about to concern
themselves on his behalf, he thought he owed it to his dignity to show a stiff
neck. A grey woollen cloak was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her
waist and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose red-brown hair
and tender shapely strong freckled hands.

The professor had gone to the glass cases on the side wall, from a shelf of
which he took down a set of coils, blew away the dust from many points and,
bearing it carefully to the table, held a finger on it while he proceeded with
his lecture. He explained that the wires in modern coils were of a compound
called platinoid lately discovered by F. W. Martino.

He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan whispered
from behind:

--Good old Fresh Water Martin!

--Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a subject for
electrocution. He can have me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at
the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one
side.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door.

“O no, sir!” cried the girl, following him. Then, turning to Cranly, he
said:

--Good evening, particularly to you.

--You are quite welcome, sir.

--Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly.
“Give us that thing you wrote--do you remember? Have you got it on you?”

“O, ay!” said Mr Henchy. “But won’t you come in and sit down a
minute?”

“No, no, thank you. Come away. Sorry because he was afraid. Afraid that it
was some disease. Canker was a disease of plants and cancer one of animals: or
another different. I HOPE I AM NOT DETAINING YOU.

A race of clodhoppers!

MARCH 25, MORNING. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words,
and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. Yes, it was her
body he smelt, a wild and languid smell, the tepid limbs over which his music
had flowed desirously and the secret soft linen upon which her flesh distilled
odour and a dew.

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger
deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it. That’s human nature. He felt
acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend’s and it seemed to
him unjust. Gallaher was his inferior in birth and education. He was sure that
he could do something better than his friend had ever done, or could ever do,
something higher than mere tawdry journalism if he only got the chance. What
was it that stood in his way? His unfortunate timidity! He wished to vindicate
himself in some way, to assert his manhood. The question of honour here raised
was, like all such questions, trivial to him. O, what shame, what misery! The
Ruler of the universe entreated you, a creature of clay, to love Him Who made
you and to keep His law. No. You would not. I'm a democrat and I'll work and
act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United
States of the Europe of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak
to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused
adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like
fingers running upon the wires.

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died.

The singing ceased. They went on together, Cranly repeating in strongly
stressed rhythm the end of the refrain:

And when we are married, O, how happy we'll be For I love sweet Rosie O'Grady
And Rosie O'Grady loves me.

Fleming asked:

--But why did they run away, tell us?

--I know why, Cecil Thunder said.

--O, he didn't, Simon!

--Not he! said Mr Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland.

--Were they, faith? said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when
she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. I bent down to her and
PHTH! says I to her like that. I wouldn’t like to face your journey home at
this hour. And when two constabulary men had come into sight round a bend in
the gloomy road he had broken off his prayer to whistle loudly an air from the
last pantomime.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar.
Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he could wait.

--All, God! All, all!

A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard in the
chapel.

He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the
garden. Now that the play was over his nerves cried for some further adventure.

An old man was dozing in a great hooded chair in the hall. From this humble
state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate _artiste_. He had
appeared in grand opera. One night, when an operatic _artiste_ had fallen ill,
he had undertaken the part of the king in the opera of _Maritana_ at the
Queen’s Theatre. She was sitting there among the others perhaps waiting for
him to appear. He tried to recall her appearance but 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 the word had no plural. Father Arnall
suddenly shut the book and shouted at him:

--Kneel out there in the middle of the class.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend's face, flattered by his
confidence and won over to sympathy by the speaker's simple accent. He watched
her leave the room in the hope that she would look back at him, but he was
disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own
acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led
him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself
containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He
never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. At the
corner of George’s Street he met two friends of his and stopped to converse
with them. The gentleman began to chat with her about Hallow Eve and the rainy
weather. He supposed the bag was full of good things for the little ones and
said it was only right that the youngsters should enjoy themselves while they
were young. Maria agreed with him and favoured him with demure nods and hems.
He was very nice with her, and when she was getting out at the Canal Bridge she
thanked him and bowed, and he bowed to her and raised his hat and smiled
agreeably, and while she was going up along the terrace, bending her tiny head
under the rain, she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he
has a drop taken. What’s the world coming to when sons speaks that way to
their father?”

“What age is he?” said Mr O’Connor.

“Well, I couldn’t go over while he was talking to Alderman Cowley. ”

“Why didn’t you remind him?” said Mr O’Connor.

“He’s not a bad sort,” said Mr Henchy, “only Fanning has such a loan of
him. Yes? What? Yes? His flesh shrank together as it felt the approach of the
ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about it the swirl of stifling
air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to 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.

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and
strange. He tried to think how it could be.

I would be ever in that heart (O soft I knock and soft entreat her!) Where only
peace might be my part.

--Probably I shall go away, he said.

--Where? Cranly asked.

--From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight
if I am lucky.

--These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like
looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the
depths and never come up. Introduction. All I want is to have a look at her. Of
course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business.

“Why isn’t it your business?” asked Mrs Kearney.

Her face was inundated with an angry colour and she looked as if she would
attack someone with her hands. He liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up
at his dark fierce face. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly
on the side of his head and that his accent was flat. For years and years it
had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since
Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in
Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the
dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented
from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. One boot stood upright,
its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. Every sinful
act is a thorn piercing His head. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded
to, is a keen lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart.



--O my God!-- --O my God!-- --I am heartily sorry-- --I am heartily sorry--
--for having offended Thee-- --for having offended Thee-- --and I detest my
sins-- --and I detest my sins-- --above every other evil-- --above every other
evil-- --because they displease Thee, my God-- --because they displease Thee,
my God-- --Who art so deserving-- --Who art so deserving-- --of all my love--
--of all my love-- --and I firmly purpose-- --and I firmly purpose-- --by Thy
holy grace-- --by Thy holy grace-- --never more to offend Thee-- --never more
to offend Thee-- --and to amend my life-- --and to amend my life--



* * * * *



He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul, and at
every step his soul seemed to sigh; at every step his soul mounted with his
feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.

He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the porcelain knob,
opened the door quickly. I'll be home after you. And that’s the wish of a
sincere friend, an old friend.

“You think so?” he said.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

--Now, Mrs Riordan, sit over. Told me then how he broke Pennyfeather's heart.







VII

My love is in a light attire Among the apple-trees, Where the gay winds do most
desire To run in companies.

There, where the gay winds stay to woo The young leaves as they pass, My love
goes slowly, bending to Her shadow on the grass;

And where the sky's a pale blue cup Over the laughing land, My love goes
lightly, holding up Her dress with dainty hand.

“Hallo, Corley!” he cried again. Night prayers and then bed: he shivered
and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. The only persons who
seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the
key-board or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in
momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn 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.

--I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Arnall said I am not to study
till they come. Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own
filth but the blasts of the angel's trumpet had driven him forth from the
darkness of sin into the light. She had taken off her hat and cloak and was
standing before a large swinging mirror, unhooking her waist. Gabriel paused
for a few moments, watching her, and then said:

“Gretta!”

She turned away from the mirror slowly and walked along the shaft of light
towards him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised. ”

“And everything. . . Am I right, Jack?”

“That’s my principle, too,” said my uncle. “Let him learn to box his
corner. ”

Mr Power stood up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the bike with some
fellows out by Malahide. He had lifted up his arms and spoken in ecstasy to the
sombre nave of the trees, knowing that he stood on holy ground and in a holy
hour. ”

“I’d like nothing better this minute,” said Mr Browne stoutly, “than a
rattling fine walk in the country or a fast drive with a good spanking goer
between the shafts. ”

“We used to have a very good horse and trap at home,” said Aunt Julia
sadly. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with
Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. They stopped just
before the end of it to drink for luck. Jimmy understood that the game lay
between Routh and Ségouin. They were not much more than acquaintances as yet
but Jimmy found great pleasure in the society of one who had seen so much of
the world and was reputed to own some of the biggest hotels in France. Such a
person (as his father agreed) was well worth knowing, even if he had not been
the charming companion he was. Now, then! There's a memory for you!

--That's three generations--four generations, said another of the company.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably. She
wanted to be on good terms with them but, while she strove to be polite, her
eyes followed Mr Holohan in his limping and devious courses. As soon as she
could she excused herself and went out after him. Often, as he sat in Davin's
rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend's well-made boots that
flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend's simple ear the
verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and
dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it
and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or
by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude
bodily skill--for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the
Gael--repelling swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a
bluntness of feeling or by a dull stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of
soul of a starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly 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. ”

“Who?” said I. P. ”

“O, yes, positively,” said Little Chandler.

“Any youngsters?” said Ignatius Gallaher.

Little Chandler blushed again. ”

“Good-night, all. ”

She went on to the window and stood there, looking out. Gabriel shot the lock
to.

But one unto him Will softly move And softly woo him In ways of love. The tears
gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he
saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree.

--Alas, my dear little boys, they too fell.

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them.
He was glad that he could rest from all his walking. His friends asked him had
he seen Corley and what was the latest. He replied that he had spent the day
with Corley. “I know the way to get around her, man. ”

He drank and the other gentlemen followed his lead. Then he resumed:

“There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from
all the ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last
the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church _ex
cathedra_. On the very moment John MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing
against it, stood up and shouted out with the voice of a lion:
‘_Credo!_’”

“_I believe!_” said Mr Fogarty. ”

“O, come in! come in!”

A pale oval face came forward into the 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. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranly's despair of soul:
the child of exhausted loins.

MARCH 21, MORNING. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words,
and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On
Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the
parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and
bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of
shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal
chanting of street-singers, who sang a _come-all-you_ about O’Donovan Rossa,
or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a
single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely
through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange
prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. Freddy Malins explained
to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins
committed by all the sinners in the outside world. Yet eternity had no end. He
was in mortal sin. It is a terrible sin. Yes, the preacher was right. I’m
only a stupid old woman and I wouldn’t presume to do such a thing. Ah,
there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement. He had been seen
by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals. At the
control Ségouin had presented him to one of the French competitors and, in
answer to his confused murmur of compliment, the swarthy face of the driver had
disclosed a line of shining white teeth.

“I hope you’ll spend an evening with us,” he said, “before you go back.
Much to Farrington’s relief he drank a glass of bitter this time. The three
blasts of the angel filled all the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there:
himself, his name and where 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’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir,” said the injured man.

--I'm an emotional man, said Temple.

--But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like me.

He knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave; and his
prayers ascended to heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming
upwards from a heart of white rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you
could. --If you want a good smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An
American 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. We’ll be coming back.

“Bravo,” he said, “I wouldn’t doubt you, Tommy. ”

Little Chandler said nothing until the barman returned with two glasses: then
he touched his friend’s glass lightly and reciprocated the former toast.

“I met some of the old gang today,” said Ignatius Gallaher. “I didn’t
know your address or I’d have done so at the time.

“But only for ten minutes, Molly,” said Mrs Conroy. “That’s the latest.
He replied that he had spent the day with Corley. His friends talked very
little. . . . . . ”





CLAY

THE matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over
and Maria looked forward to her evening out. All the work we had, she and me,
getting in the woman to wash him and then laying him out and then the coffin
and then arranging about the Mass in the chapel. The corridors were darkly lit
and the chapel was darkly lit. The man went up by the houses until he reached
the door of the office, wondering whether he could finish his copy in time. The
three blasts of the angel filled all the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there:
himself, his name and where he was. And how cold and slimy the water had been!
And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum. Mother was
sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. How
simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him. He had
been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had
withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support
to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr Tierney. ”

“O, he’s as tricky as they make ‘em,” said Mr Henchy. “But won’t
you come in and sit down a minute?”

“No, no, thank you.

O bend no more in revery When he at eventide is calling. He had never been seen
in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace
of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He
carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he
evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him
only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind
of which was written the name of his firm with the address--London, E. C. On
the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters
was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls
which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan
tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and
then spat it forth into the grate.

“I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “to have too much to say
to a man like that.

--Did they hurt you much? Nasty Roche asked.

--Do you mean women?

--I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. Stephen's mind
halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the
priest's face which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false
focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the
dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the
gloom of God?

--I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

A hush fell on the class. You are one of the idlest boys I ever met. Copy out
your themes again the rest of you. We can have a little music and----”

“Thanks awfully, old chap,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “I’m sorry we
didn’t meet earlier. But I must leave tomorrow night. Free. Soul free and
fancy free. Let the dead bury the dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the
Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go
away like the others, to leave her home. Stephen listened to them in some
wonderment for Boland was the dunce and Nash the idler of 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. Stephen did not look up.

--Because there is a thigh in it, he said. “Only for him----”

“O, only for him,” said Mr Power, “it might have been a case of seven
days, without the option of a fine. The conversation went no further. The first
tenor bent his head and began to count the links of the gold chain which was
extended across his waist, smiling and humming random notes to observe the
effect on the frontal sinus. From time to time everyone glanced at Mrs Kearney.
“I have my contract, and I intend to see that it is carried out. The upper
part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by
vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. Tiresome old red-nosed
imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding
to me as a child, I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished
sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey
face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of
Christmas. ”

She laughed herself this time good-humouredly and then added quickly:

“But tell him to come in, Mary Jane, and close the door. His arbour, as he
called the reeking outhouse which he shared with the cat and the garden tools,
served him also as a sounding-box: and every morning he hummed contentedly one
of his favourite songs: O, TWINE ME A BOWER 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.

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. And the day was
going on in the college just as if he were there. His fingers found a pencil
and then a cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the packet, placed
the last cigarette on the window ledge and began to write out the stanzas of
the villanelle in small neat letters on the rough cardboard surface.

Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them again.
His thoughts were running another way. I used to spend money on them right
enough,” he added, in a convincing tone, as if he was conscious of being
disbelieved.

But Lenehan could well believe it; he nodded gravely.

“True bill,” said Mr Kernan, equally gravely.

“What is it?” asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner.

“Who is G. , respectfully solicits the favour of your vote and influence at
the coming election in the Royal Exchange Ward. To the right sat old Michael
Grimes, the owner of three pawnbroker’s shops, and Dan Hogan’s nephew, who
was up for the job in the Town Clerk’s office. At the end of the walk he
halted before turning and raised his eyes. School and home seemed to recede
from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in
the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. Then she thought what
else would she buy: she wanted to buy something really nice. They would be sure
to have plenty of apples and nuts. It was hard to know what to buy and all she
could think of was cake. She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes’s
plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in
Henry Street. We’ll be coming back. My wife will be delighted to meet you.
Come away.

Cranly looked at him for a few moments and asked:

--Now?

--Yes, now, Stephen said.

“I am a little,” she answered. I give them monthly examinations to see that
they are profiting by my tuition.

He also tapped the portfolio and coughed gently and smiled. Then, just as the
chain was about to start again, she stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear:

“West Briton!”

When the lancers were over Gabriel went away to a remote corner of the room
where Freddy Malins’ mother was sitting. She was a stout feeble old woman
with white hair. The moon was blood-red. The firmament was as a scroll rolled
away. You could do nothing in Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of
revery to find himself 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 in the company of
subversive writers whose jibes 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.

--I'll tell him tomorrow, said Boland.

--Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out. You're a born sneerer,
Stevie. They were only talking and laughing. 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. Every day there was something in the
paper about it. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit
could express itself in unfettered freedom. The voice of the director urging
upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the
priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. He longed to recall to her
those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together
and remember only their moments of ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his
soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate
life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth
and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in
an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. A sin, an
instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death
and suffering into the world. He had simply taken advantage of Polly’s youth
and inexperience: that was evident. The question was: What reparation would he
make?

There must be reparation made in such cases.

--Don't argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. Don't talk to him or look
at him.

In a dream he fell asleep. In a dream he rose and saw that it was morning. A
troubled night of dreams. Want to get them off my chest.

A long curving gallery. From the floor ascend pillars of dark vapours. It is
peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their hands are folded
upon their knees in token of weariness and their eyes are darkened for the
errors of men go up before them for ever as dark vapours.

Strange figures advance as from a cave. They are not as tall as men. However,
he said that Mrs Kearney might have taken the _artistes_ into consideration.
The stewards and the secretaries debated hotly as to what should be done when
the interval 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. “Is he coming down,
Gretta?”

Gabriel heard his wife answer yes and saw her come down towards them. He longed
to ascend through the roof and fly away to another country where he would never
hear again of his trouble, and yet a force pushed him downstairs step by step.

He went heavily upstairs until he came to the second landing, where a door bore
a brass plate with the inscription _Mr Alleyne_. Here he halted, puffing with
labour and vexation, and knocked. The shrill voice cried:

“Come in!”

The man entered Mr Alleyne’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.

--We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our
Maker and not to hear election addresses.

--It is religion, Dante said again. The cabbage began to deposit a cold white
grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to ask was his dinner not
properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls of it with
difficulty. Then he paid his bill and went out.

He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick
striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff _Mail_ peeping out of a
side-pocket of his tight reefer overcoat. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables
she had given his surname and glanced at her. Then I looked back at him
again--taking my time, you know. Now, won’t you have a little something
before you go?”

“I don’t mind,” said Mr Hendrick.

The two men went along some tortuous passages and up a dark staircase and came
to a secluded room where one of the stewards was uncorking bottles for a few
gentlemen. I suppose we’d better open the ball. We can scut the whole hour.
And when two constabulary men had come into sight round a bend in the gloomy
road he had broken off his prayer to whistle loudly an air from the last
pantomime.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar.
Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he could wait.

--All, God! All, all!

A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard in the
chapel. The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. The man
went up by the houses until he reached the door of the office, wondering
whether he could finish his copy in time. You can't play the saint on me any
more, that's one sure five. The dark damp night was coming and he longed to
spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and the
clatter of glasses. Why did he say he knew that trick?

--Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies.

--Try Leopardstown! said a voice from the bench behind. Patience.

A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred; and at the last
moment, glancing up swiftly, he saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a
capuchin. The priest entered the box and was hidden. He ate his dinner with
surly appetite and when the meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay
abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum
from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips.

“Listen to me,” said Mr Henchy. “Many’s the good man before now drank
out of the bottle. ”

“Anyway, it’s better than nothing,” said Mr O’Connor.

“He told me: ‘What do you think of a Lord Mayor of Dublin sending out for a
pound of chops for his dinner? How’s that for high living?’ says he. Some
weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he got the card for
first.

--All are taking expulsion except Corrigan, Athy answered. Some died. Yes. His
face was handsome and his body was strong and hard. He had spoken of a mother's
love.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

--A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently
and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was
still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically. The blackest
protestant in the land would not speak the language I have heard this 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 cowyard
and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman's
coat. The old man watched him attentively and then, taking up the piece of
cardboard again, began to fan the fire slowly while his companion smoked.

“Ah, yes,” he said, continuing, “it’s hard to know what way to bring up
children. She would give him neither money nor food nor house-room; and so he
was obliged to enlist himself as a sheriff’s man. You see I’m over here
with another fellow, clever young chap he is too, and we arranged to go to a
little card-party. Only for that. . . But the astonishing thing is this. Not at
all. Jimmy, under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake
to life within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. Lynch was right. . . .
and they’re nothing else. Mr Alleyne would never give him an hour’s rest;
his life would be a hell to him. He had a brave manner of coming up to a party
of them in a bar and of holding himself nimbly at the borders of the company
until he was included in a round. They were all beginning to feel mellow.
Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back. My wife
will be delighted to meet you. We can have a little music and----”

“Thanks awfully, old chap,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “I’m sorry we
didn’t meet earlier. But I must leave tomorrow night. He looked down the
slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some
human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. I
am and I know I am.

--Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you
drop out of the league class after the first lesson?

--You know one reason why, answered Stephen.

--O certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but for the
street I really think it would be better to do away with it, don't you?

--It must be troublesome, I imagine.

--Of course it is, of course. She had been made awkward by her not wishing to
receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived and
Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always
made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her
wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother’s tolerance.

Mrs Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as
soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George’s
Church had stopped ringing. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would
have lots of time to have the matter out with Mr Doran and then catch short
twelve at Marlborough Street. The crowd brought us together. They were both
well dressed, stout and complacent and they brought a breath of opulence among
the company.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably.

--A bloody ape, Cranly repeated with emphasis, and a blasphemous bloody ape!

Temple stood up and, pushing past Cranly, addressed Glynn:

--That phrase you said now, he said, is from the new testament about suffer the
children to come to me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as
wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real
adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen
to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad. Why, by God, they
wouldn't be seen dead in a ten-acre field with them. It was his own name that
he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. First of all it had been
an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. She
glanced at him once or twice and, when the party was leaving the room, she
brushed against his chair and said _“O, pardon!”_ in a London accent. He
watched her leave the room in the hope that she would look back at him, but he
was disappointed. He cursed his want of money and cursed all the rounds he had
stood, particularly all the whiskies and Apollinaris which he had stood to
Weathers. If there was one thing that he hated it was a sponge. He was so angry
that he lost count of the conversation of his friends.

When Paddy Leonard called him he found that they were talking about feats of
strength. Weathers was showing his biceps muscle to the company and boasting so
much that the other two had called on Farrington to uphold the national honour.

--I wouldn't, said Heron, damn me if I would.





Polly sat for a little time on the side of the bed, crying. Then she dried her
eyes and went over to the looking-glass. She dipped the end of the towel in the
water-jug and refreshed her eyes with the cool water.

Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety,
quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle
and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. At last, when he could clap no
more, he stood up suddenly and hurried across the room to Aunt Julia whose hand
he seized and held in both his hands, shaking it when words failed him or the
catch in his voice proved too much for him. She brought them up to his bedroom,
the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour, and gave them chairs at
the fire.

“That’s a nice lady!” he said.

--Butter you up! said Brother Michael.

He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice
of sorrow over the waters:

--He is dead. Ay. And let the dead marry the dead. Orchestra played O WILLIE,
WE HAVE MISSED YOU. ”

“Good-night, Mr D’Arcy. I won’t have him annoyed. ”

Seeing that all were ready to start she shepherded them to the door, where
good-night was said:

“Well, good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks for the pleasant evening. Yes. I
think I know him. ”

“Lovely voice, lovely voice!” said Aunt Kate.

As the piano had twice begun the prelude to the first figure Mary Jane led her
recruits quickly from the room. How melancholy it was! Could he, too, write
like that, express the melancholy of his soul in verse? There were so many
things he wanted to describe: his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan
Bridge, for example. Mr Kernan seemed to be weighing something in his mind.
After a rather long pause he announced:



THE DEATH OF PARNELL _6th October_ 1891

He cleared his throat once or twice and then began to recite:



He is dead. Orchestra played O WILLIE, WE HAVE MISSED YOU.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his
head.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced
him gaily and gravely.

“I know that game,” he said, “and it’s a mug’s game. He answered the
question, therefore, as if Mr Kernan had asked it. ”

“You’d better speak to Mr Fitzpatrick,” said Mr Holohan distantly.

“I don’t know anything about Mr Fitzpatrick,” repeated Mrs Kearney.

The noise in the auditorium had risen to a clamour when Mr Fitzpatrick burst
into the room, followed by Mr Holohan, who was panting. The clapping and
stamping in the hall were punctuated by whistling. Mr Fitzpatrick held a few
banknotes in his hand.

“Good-night, Dan,” he said gaily.

When the cab drew up before the hotel, Gabriel jumped out and, in spite of Mr
Bartell D’Arcy’s protest, paid the driver. He gave the man a shilling over
his fare. His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or
roaming about the outskirts of the city. Now, at the name of the fabulous
artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form
flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.

During the first part of the summer in Blackrock uncle Charles was Stephen's
constant companion.

--I know you are poor, he said.

While he was sitting helplessly on the side of the bed in shirt and trousers
she tapped lightly at his door and entered.

The light and noise of the bar held him at the doorways for a few moments.

“Tell me, John,” said Mr O’Connor, lighting his cigarette with another
pasteboard card.

“Hm?”

“What he is exactly?”

“Ask me an easier one,” said Mr Henchy.

Mr Hynes sat on the side of the table near Mr Lyons but said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she continued, “that I’ve nothing in the house to
offer you.

Fleming moved heavily out of his place and knelt between the two last benches.
”

He took the remark as an invitation to talk. I understand it so. The world, it
seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my esthetic. It leads
you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand
on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand on the new testament, tells you
that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear
you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she
would give good milk to her children and yours.

--Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

--There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing. She _was_ a little
vulgar; sometimes she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known. ” But
what would grammar matter if he really loved her? He could not make up his mind
whether to like her or despise her for what she had done. He could not have
carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her
openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she
was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after
night alone in that room. The middle of the room was occupied by two square
tables placed end to end, and on these Aunt Julia and the caretaker were
straightening and smoothing a large cloth. On the sideboard were arrayed dishes
and plates, and glasses and bundles of knives and forks and spoons. The top of
the closed square piano served also as a sideboard for viands and 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. The unjust He casts from
Him, crying in His offended majesty: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED, INTO
EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS. O, what agony
then for the miserable sinners! Friend is torn apart from friend, children are
torn from their parents, husbands from their wives. The poor sinner holds out
his arms to those who were dear to him in this earthly world, to those whose
simple piety perhaps he made a mock of, to those who counselled him and tried
to lead him on the right path, to a kind brother, to a loving sister, to the
mother and father who loved him so dearly. But it is too late: the just turn
away from the wretched damned souls which now appear before the eyes of all in
their hideous and evil character. O you hypocrites, O, you whited sepulchres, O
you who present a smooth smiling face to the world while your soul within is a
foul swamp of sin, how will it fare with you in that terrible day?

And this day will come, shall come, must come: the day of death and the day of
judgement. Death is certain. .

But delirium passes. He echoed her phrase, applying it to himself: _“What am
I to do?”_ The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. My wife will
be delighted to meet you. ”

“To take a pick itself,” said Mary Jane, “after all your dancing. ”

“I really couldn’t,” said Miss Ivors. She was a frank-mannered talkative
young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes.

--Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth. As he passed
Lenehan took off his cap and, after about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute
to the air.

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought.

--But you have not answered my question, said Lynch.

--But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued.

“Pope Leo, you know, was a great scholar and a poet.

--And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland.

--Will you? said Stephen.

--And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend,
more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. . Ah! WITHOUT A
POSSIBILITY OF EVER APPROACHING NEARER. 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. . . . . . . ”





CLAY

THE matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over
and Maria looked forward to her evening out.

He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick
striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff _Mail_ peeping out of a
side-pocket of his tight reefer overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When
he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the
bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I
heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The
kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big
copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were
four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer
you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready
to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself.

Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a
very long chin. Then Ginger Mooney lifted up her mug of tea and proposed
Maria’s health while all the other women clattered with their mugs on the
table, and said she was sorry she hadn’t a sup of porter to drink it in. And
Maria laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin and
till her minute body nearly shook itself asunder because she knew that Mooney
meant well though, of course, she had the notions of a common woman. She had
married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring
Gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when
he thought of life) he became sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to
try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said,
also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she 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.
Education is all very fine and large. . . . _ Kindly attend to what I say and
not to what _Mr Shelley says, sir_. You have always some excuse or another for
shirking work.

--Broke? What is this I hear? What is this? Your name is! said 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. It was too much for him. I’d take the stick to his back and beat
him while I could stand over him--as I done many a time before. It would be
nice getting better slowly.

Gabriel knitted his brows and said, as if he were slightly angered:

“It’s nothing very wonderful but Gretta thinks it very funny because she
says the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels. ”

“But tell me, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate, with brisk tact. She knew what
_artistes_ should go into capitals and what _artistes_ should go into small
type. She knew that the first tenor would not like to come on after Mr
Meade’s comic turn. To keep the audience continually diverted she slipped the
doubtful items in between the old favourites. Mr Holohan called to see her
every day to have her advice on some point. She was invariably friendly and
advising--homely, in fact. . . . ”

He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. You
would not write your name in pencil across the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle.

--No, said Lynch, give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.

--Static therefore, said Stephen.

--You know, he said, you can ask that riddle another way. If he might use the
metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and
every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life,
and see if they tallied accurately with conscience. Just as in dead bodies
worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises
a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the
worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting. The first sting
inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past pleasures. O what a
dreadful memory will that be! In the lake of all-devouring flame the proud king
will remember the pomps of his court, the wise but wicked man his libraries and
instruments of research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles and
pictures and other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the
table his gorgeous feasts, his dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice
wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber his ill-gotten
wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood
and violence in which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable
and filthy pleasures in which they delighted. They will remember all this and
loathe themselves and their sins. His confession would be long, long. Everybody
in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Stephen felt the skin
tingle and glow slightly and almost painlessly; and, bowing submissively, 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 familiar stroke of the cane against his calf and
had heard the familiar word of admonition:

--Admit.

--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.

“Teddy will have all the cabs in Dublin out,” he said.

“That’s forfeit,” said Mahony. The man, however, only smiled.

--Tuition! said Cranly rudely.

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm
flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life
together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined
his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was
caressing it with his hand. He bent down and asked her was there a chapel 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, detaching himself from
it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.

He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt's kitchen. A group of his
brothers and sisters was sitting round 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. Gretta caught a dreadful cold. His mother put on the
oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. No, I treat you as your
grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. You've had a fine long holiday.

--O, I'm sure he'll work very hard now, said Mrs Dedalus, especially when he
has Maurice with him. She glanced at him once or twice and, when the party was
leaving the room, she brushed against his chair and said _“O, pardon!”_ in
a London accent. Few fellows had talents like his and fewer still could remain
unspoiled by such success. Gallaher’s heart was in the right place and he had
deserved to win. To begin with she had all the weight of social opinion on her
side: she was an outraged mother. ”

After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in the _Dublin by
Lamplight_ laundry, and she liked it. He leaned against the lamp-post and kept
his gaze fixed on the

His mind became active again. .

Help!

He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. He wore a round
hat of hard black felt. His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of
damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones. He
opened his very long mouth suddenly to express disappointment and at the same
time opened wide his very bright blue eyes to express pleasure and surprise.

“O Father Keon!” said Mr Henchy, jumping up from his chair. “Is that you?
Come in!”

“O, no, no, no!” said Father Keon quickly, pursing his lips as if he were
addressing a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice. ”

“It takes Teddy to find out the really good things,” said Mr Browne
familiarly to the table. The mechanic and the two work-girls examined him point
by point before resuming their conversation in a subdued voice. He thought that
in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the
fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the
strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the
soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our
own. But the memory of Corley’s slowly revolving head calmed him somewhat: he
was sure Corley would pull it off all right. Here, Stephen, show me your plate,
old chap. You've had a fine long holiday. I feel a ton better since I landed
again in dear dirty Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out
of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the
darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still
he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the
syllables of her name. He was not straight-laced, but he could not forget that
Mr M’Coy had recently made a crusade in search of valises and portmanteaus to
enable Mrs M’Coy to fulfil imaginary engagements in the country.

The rain fell 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 was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.

She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly,
open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and
to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her.

Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his
hands with a sob 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.

--Kneel down, 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.

Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous titter
in his voice and moving his umbrella at every word:

--And, as you remark, if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this
thusness.

--Because the church is cruel like all old sinners, Temple said. He's taking
pure mathematics and I'm taking constitutional history. Royal persons,
favourites, intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of
names. All had died: all had been judged. What did it profit a man to gain the
whole world if he lost his soul? At last he had understood: and human life lay
around him, a plain of peace whereon ant-like men laboured in brotherhood,
their dead sleeping under quiet mounds. The elbow of his companion touched him
and his heart was touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of his master
he heard his own voice full of the quietude of humility and contrition.

His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to
suffer the pain of dread, and sending forth, as he sank, a faint prayer. Ah
yes, he would still be spared; he would repent in his heart and be forgiven;
and then those above, those in heaven, would see what he would do to make up
for the past: a whole life, every hour of life. ”

“I often heard he was one of the most intellectual men in Europe,” said Mr
Power.

“‘Course he is,” said Mr Kernan, “and a damned decent Orangeman too.
Experience had embittered his heart against the world. A figure that had seemed
to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding
darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes
bright with brutish joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were
aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. But he would not go to
hell when he died; and the shaking would stop. A voice bade the boys in the
dormitory good night. Mrs Kearney said nothing, but, as the mediocre items
followed one another on the platform and the few people in the hall grew fewer
and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to any expense for such
a concert. There was something she didn’t like in the look of things and Mr
Fitzpatrick’s vacant smile irritated her very much. Not true. God was
almighty. God could call him now, call him as he sat at his desk, before he had
time to be conscious of the summons. God had called him. He had a beautiful
death, God be praised. ”

“And everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.
Only God could do that. I wouldn’t like to face your journey home at this
hour.

The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step before the
tabernacle in the fallen gloom. He waited till all in the chapel had knelt and
every least noise was still. He talked of writing a letter to the papers.

“These yahoos coming up here,” he said, “think they can boss the people.

--We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our
Maker and not to hear election addresses.

--It is religion, Dante said again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the
morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with
him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his
rebellious angels into hell.

Nor was that all. He’s as good as his word, anyhow. ”

“There’s no tumblers,” said the old man.

The car drove off towards Westmoreland Street. She was sure she would win. He
was a serious young man, not rakish or loud-voiced like the others. If it had
been Mr Sheridan or Mr Meade or Bantam Lyons her task would have been much
harder. She did not think he would face publicity. All the lodgers in the house
knew something of the affair; details had been invented by some. Besides, he
had been employed for thirteen years in a great Catholic wine-merchant’s
office and publicity would mean for him, perhaps, the loss of his 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
mahogany.

Dante broke in angrily:

--If we are a priest-ridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple
of God's eye. . . . . . . . ?”

“Some of these hillsiders and fenians are a bit too clever if you ask me,”
said Mr Henchy. “Isn’t that fine? What?”

Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.





A MOTHER

MR HOLOHAN, assistant secretary of the _Eire Abu_ Society, had been walking up
and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty
pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts.

As Mr Holohan was a novice in such delicate matters as the wording of bills and
the disposing of items for a programme, Mrs Kearney helped 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. Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim. Tell no more
of enchanted days.



* * * * *



What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at them,
leaning wearily on his ashplant. They flew round and round the jutting shoulder
of a house in Molesworth Street. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist
stood in the roadway, playing to a little ring of listeners. He plucked at the
wires heedlessly, glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each
new-comer and from time to time, wearily also, at the sky. But an unresting
doubt flew hither and thither before his mind.

His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the parlour
when he became aware that the priest was addressing him in a different voice.

--Thank you.

--Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of his
fingers in adieu.

The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it slowly,
choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad nun screeching in
the nuns' madhouse beyond the wall. It was like waves. Or the waves were
talking among themselves as they rose and fell. And therefore the tongues about
him had ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.

Darkness falls from the air. Strange that it should come that very night to
remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together
as long as she could.

The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the
corridors towards the refectory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on
his plate but could not eat the damp bread. The tablecloth 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.
The baritone was asked what did he think of Mrs Kearney’s conduct. He did not
like to say anything. . ”





AN ENCOUNTER

IT was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. We won't let it 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 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. Don't forget the turnips
for me and my mate.

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face resembled a
devil's mask:

--To think that that yellow pancake-eating excrement can get a good job, he
said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes!

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in
silence. As they neared the alley Stephen could hear the thuds of the players'
hands and the wet smacks of the ball and Davin's voice crying out excitedly at
each stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time)
and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it
lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would
see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles
must be set at the head of a corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders
of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the ground, into
the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured by
scuttling plump-bellied rats.

And while the friends were still standing in tears by the bedside the soul of
the sinner was judged. A wave of fire swept through his body: the first. His
white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and heard
Father Arnall's voice.

--I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very
important subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her
shoulder. The right side of the head had been injured in the fall. He had not
yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. The reporter called it a
tragic death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he
had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he
had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. Why? Do you know it?”

“_The Lass of Aughrim_,” she repeated. “I couldn’t think of the 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 between the close-set
prominent eyes which were light and inexpressive. The rivals were school
friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair
young man.

--Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Mr Alleyne flushed to the hue of a
wild rose and his mouth twitched with a dwarf’s passion. He shook his fist in
the man’s face till it seemed to vibrate like the knob of some electric
machine:

“You impertinent ruffian! You impertinent ruffian! I’ll make short work of
you! Wait till you see! You’ll apologise to me for your impertinence or
you’ll quit the office instanter! You’ll quit this, I’m telling you, or
you’ll apologise to me!”





He stood in a doorway opposite the office watching to see if the cashier would
come out alone. He was happy and free; but he would not be anyway proud with
Father Dolan. Write away. There was a pause of a few seconds: and then the
piano was heard.

Eileen had long white hands. One hand played in the bass the melody of _Silent,
O Moyle_, while the other hand careered in the treble after each group of
notes. The notes of the air sounded deep and full.

The two young men walked up the street without speaking, the mournful music
following them. We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and
always will be till the end of the chapter.

Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:

--A bad business! A bad business!

Mr Dedalus repeated:

--A priest-ridden Godforsaken race!

He pointed to the portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right. O, we
had a good walk, hadn't we, John? Yes. The exhausted loins are those of
Elizabeth and Zacchary. Then he is the precursor. Item: he eats chiefly belly
bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey. Also, when thinking of him,
saw always a stern severed head or death mask as if outlined on a grey curtain
or veronica. Decollation they call it in the gold. Puzzled for the moment by
saint John at the Latin gate. His song is softer than the dew And he is come to
visit you.

O bend no more in revery When he at eventide is calling. She started to her
feet and ran to the banisters.

“Polly! Polly!”

“Yes, mamma?”

“Come down, dear. Mr Doran wants to speak to you. Never fear,” he said.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

--Now, Mrs Riordan, sit over. Now it was God's turn: and He was not to be
hoodwinked or deceived. Every sin would then come forth from its lurking place,
the most rebellious against the divine will and the most degrading to our poor
corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection and the most heinous atrocity. What
did it avail then to have been a great emperor, a great general, a marvellous
inventor, the most learned of the learned? All were as one before the judgement
seat of God.

It made him very tired to think that way. ”

The boy came back with the corkscrew. The old man opened three bottles and was
handing back the corkscrew when Mr Henchy said to the boy:

“Would you like a drink, boy?”

“If you please, sir,” said the boy.

The old man opened another bottle grudgingly, and handed it to the boy.

--Yes, yes, said Mr 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.

--You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turning on him boldly.

“Who knows?” he said, as they lifted their glasses. The three men pushed
past the whining match-sellers at the door and formed a little party at the
corner of the counter. He would seize a handful of grapes and sawdust or three
or four American apples and thrust them generously into his grandnephew's hand
while the shopman smiled uneasily; and, on Stephen's feigning reluctance to
take them, he would frown and say:

--Take them, sir. That's the real Ally Daly.

Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandybat 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. But he got there. She said she was all alone in the house
and that her husband had gone that morning to Queenstown with his sister to see
her off. And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my
face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. When I handed her
back the mug at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and
said: 'COME IN AND STAY THE NIGHT HERE. By God, I don't feel more than eighteen
myself. Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk
about Wicklow bacon. He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of Latin
verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese 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. Let the dead bury the 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 customhouse. 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 porters and
the rumbling carts and the ill-dressed bearded policeman.

His collar was unfastened and his necktie undone. He opened his eyes for an
instant, sighed and closed them again.

He could still leave the chapel. Four boys left the room; and he heard others
passing down the corridor. A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger
than a little wind, and yet, listening and suffering silently, he seemed to
have laid an ear against the muscle of his own heart, feeling it close and
quail, listening to the flutter of its ventricles.

No escape. I see, however, two ways out. Gabriel waited again and then, fearing
that diffidence was about to conquer him, he said abruptly:

“By the way, Gretta!”

“What is it?”

“You know that poor fellow Malins?” he said 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 telegraph-poles held the galloping
notes of the music between punctual bars. This furious music allayed his dread
and, leaning against the windowledge, he let his eyelids close again.

MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar's rescript, of Stead, of
general disarmament arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the
signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would
make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the
greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. Twelve, thirteen:
for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low
but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from
left to right, circling about a temple of air. Their cry was shrill and clear
and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches
murmured insistently and the dark frail quivering bodies wheeling and
fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the tenuous sky soothed his
eyes which still saw the image of his mother's face. As I did so I met the gaze
of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I
turned my eyes away again. The two best out of three. The bell and the bird
ceased; and the dull white light spread itself east and west, covering the
world, covering the roselight in his heart.

He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart be meek and humble that he
might be like those who knelt beside him and his prayer as acceptable as
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 lieutenant before giving orders. The gang made forays into the
gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on the
shaggy weed-grown 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. Her voice had a catch in it like her
son’s and she stuttered slightly. She had been told that Freddy had come and
that he was nearly all right. I’m only a stupid old woman and I wouldn’t
presume to do such a thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic
QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple,
divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their
sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

--Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you
win the cigar.

--The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. He wished his
friends to think there had been some mistake, that Mr Harford and he had missed
each other. His friends, who knew quite well Mr Harford’s manners in
drinking, were silent. Then he asked:

--How old are you, my child?

--Sixteen, father.

--Were they married women, my child?

He did not know. . and thought how strange it was that the last three words
began with the same letter. The chief clerk began to hurry Miss Parker, saying
she would never have the letters typed in time for post. The man listened to
the clicking of the machine for a few minutes and then set to work to finish
his copy. The tirade continued: it was so bitter and violent that the man could
hardly restrain his fist from descending upon the head of the manikin before
him:

“I know nothing about any other two letters,” he said stupidly.

“_You--know--nothing_. Of course you know nothing,” said Mr Alleyne.
“Tell me,” he added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him,
“do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?”

The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back
again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous
moment:

“I don’t think, sir,” he said, “that that’s a fair question to put to
me.

--Did you tell him that you had written home for a new pair? the rector asked.

--Where I can, Stephen said.

--And if you got nothing, would you rob?

--You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are
provisional, and that in certain circumstances it is not unlawful to rob.
Everyone would act in that belief. So I will not make you that answer. Apply to
the jesuit theologian, Juan Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain to you
in what circumstances you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had
better hand him his poison in a goblet or smear it for him upon his robe or his
saddlebow. Ask me rather would I suffer others to rob me, or if they did, would
I call down upon them what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular
arm?

--And would you?

--I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be robbed.

--I see, Cranly said. Now that supper was coming near he began to think again
about his speech and about the quotation. When he saw Freddy Malins coming
across the room to visit his mother Gabriel left the chair free for him and
retired into the embrasure of the window. I left the house in bad humour and
walked slowly towards the school. When she came to the age of marriage she was
sent out to many houses where her playing and ivory manners were much admired.
She sat amid the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor
to brave it and offer her a brilliant life. Sometimes he caught himself
listening to the sound of his own voice. She sang _I Dreamt that I Dwelt_, and
when she came to the second verse she sang again:



_I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side And of
all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride.

He was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot which his friends, Mr
Cunningham, Mr M’Coy and Mr Power had disclosed to Mrs Kernan in the parlour.
The idea had been Mr Power’s but its development was entrusted to Mr
Cunningham.

“O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope. ”

“So he was,” said Mr Cunningham, “if not _the_ most so. Then I should
have to like it also.

Their minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have been drawn closer, one
to the other. You ask Hogan, my boy.

The old man opened another bottle grudgingly, and handed it to the boy. ” He
asked me where I was going and, when I had told him a second time he asked me
did I know _The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed_. When I left the kitchen he was
about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.

I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards
the station. The ticket-collector saluted Jimmy; he was an old man:

“Fine night, sir!”

It was a serene summer night; the harbour lay like a darkened mirror at their
feet. They proceeded towards it with linked arms, singing _Cadet Roussel_ in
chorus, stamping their feet at every:

_“Ho! Ho! Hohé, vraiment!”_

They got into a rowboat at the slip and made out for the American’s yacht.
There was to be supper, music, cards.

“I’ll get you a match,” said the old man. He’s a clever chap, too, with
the 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.

It was queer that they had not given him any medicine. That came from the
bottles on the shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled
him. You are His. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now
attacking his nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an
emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens,
or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an
ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last
dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. He also? Was there not a slight flush
on Cranly's cheek? Or had it come forth at Temple's words? The light had waned.
He could not see. He struck a match and, sheltering it in the shell of his
hands, peered again into the mouth which Mr Kernan opened obediently. The
swaying movement of the car brought the match to and from the opened 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
leave-taking 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. That’s human nature. He felt acutely the contrast between his own life
and his friend’s and it seemed to him unjust. Gallaher was his inferior in
birth and education. None of your modern trumpery. . . . over your boots,
Gretta, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Conroy. ”

While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and
spiced beef Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes
wrapped in a white napkin. This was Mary Jane’s idea and she had also
suggested apple sauce for the goose but Aunt Kate had said that plain roast
goose without any apple sauce had always been good enough for her and she hoped
she might never eat worse. Mary Jane waited on her pupils and saw that they got
the best slices and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia opened and carried across from the
piano bottles of stout and ale for the gentlemen and bottles of minerals for
the ladies. ”

He made a circle in the air with his arm and paused. Then Mr Cunningham turned
towards Mr Power and said casually:

“On Thursday night, you said, Jack. ”

“Thursday, yes,” said Mr Power. “The four of us together. That’s agreed
now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s agreed,” said Ignatius Gallaher. ”

Ignatius Gallaher in the act of drinking closed one eye expressively over the
rim of his glass.

“Well, you know,” said Mr M’Coy, “isn’t the photograph wonderful when
you come to think of it?”

“O, of course,” said Mr Power, “great minds can see things. Perhaps he
ought not to have answered her like that. And you know what that word means?
Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend. People
used to say that Ignatius Gallaher was wild. Of course, he did mix with a
rakish set of fellows at that time, drank freely and borrowed money on all
sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory:
the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair and a hoyden's face
who had called herself his own girl and begged his handsel, the kitchen-girl in
the next house who sang over the clatter of her plates, with the drawl of a
country singer, the first bars of BY KILLARNEY'S LAKES AND FELLS, a girl who
had laughed gaily to see him stumble when the iron grating in the footpath near
Cork Hill had caught the broken sole of his shoe, a girl he had glanced at,
attracted by her small ripe mouth, as she passed out of Jacob's biscuit
factory, who had cried to him over her shoulder:

--Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was
also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain that was not wholly
sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes
upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly
as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her
country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and
secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild
lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear
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 dumbbells were piled in one corner: 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 waiting 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 gymnasium, 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. Then you can ask him questions on the catechism,
Dedalus. I meant about the. . . nearly. He still bought a copy of _Reynolds’s
Newspaper_ every week but he attended to his religious duties and for
nine-tenths of the year lived a regular life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual
life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and
escorting them to the cemetery when they died. May God have mercy on him!

He closed his eyes wearily and paused. Then Mr Cunningham turned towards Mr
Power and said casually:

“On Thursday night, you said, Jack. ”

“Thursday, yes,” said Mr Power. “There used always to be crowds of
Protestants in the chapel where Father Tom was preaching. ”

“There’s not much difference between us,” said Mr M’Coy.

Mr M’Coy had been at one time a tenor of some reputation. His wife, who had
been a soprano, still taught young children to play the piano at low terms. His
line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for
short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. A lean student with olive
skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing from one to
the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his
open moist mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but
there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their
tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming
instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from
his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd
autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a
short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a
predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly,
carrying a stout hazel.

He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Their
cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the
cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. He was called
Little Chandler because, though he was but slightly under the average stature,
he gave one the idea of being a little man.

--I don't know, I'm sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.

--Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the
City of Cork in his day. We were down there at a meeting and after the meeting
was over we had to make our way to the railway station through the crowd. Like
illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the
living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into
the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. The eyes were
melancholy as those of a monkey.

--Good evening, gentlemen, said the stubble-grown monkeyish 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. He had coarse features, a
blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips.

“Listen to me,” said Mr Henchy.

He nodded curtly to Mr Hynes and sat down on the chair which the old man
vacated.

“Did you serve Aungier Street?” he asked Mr O’Connor.

“I’m dry too,” said the old man.

The new-comer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the
constable, saying:

“It’s all right, constable. I’ll see him home. Please come and take me
home. He took her to see _The Bohemian Girl_ and she felt elated as she sat in
an unaccustomed little.





ARABY

NORTH RICHMOND STREET, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when
the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. Against the walls stood
companies of barbells and Indian clubs; the dumbbells were piled in one corner:
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 waiting 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 gymnasium, 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 to the chapel. At the chapel, if you
please!”_ When the lamp was lit he banged his fist on the table and shouted:

“What’s for my dinner?”

“I’m going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her
sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her
hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.
The walls of the room were bare except for a copy of an election address. The
confusion grew greater and the cabman was directed differently by Freddy Malins
and Mr Browne, each of whom had his head out through a window of the cab.
Freddy Malins clambered in after her and spent a long time settling her on the
seat, Mr Browne helping him with advice. The battered silk hat was placed on
the man’s head. I'm old enough to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather,
said the little old man to Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

A hush fell on the class. He crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left
which led to the physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not
unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had
heard that in Buck Whaley's time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the
jesuit house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of
Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening
one of his books at random and poring over it. I asked him why he had brought
it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony
used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a
quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at
last, jumped down and said:

“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it. It is a form: nothing else. Mr Alleyne
would never give him an hour’s rest; his life would be a hell to him. I think
he has a grand voice.

“Can’t you tell us?” he said.

--Do you disbelieve then?

--I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it, Stephen answered.

--Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome them or
put them aside, Cranly said.

--And if you got nothing, would you rob?

--You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are
provisional, and that in certain circumstances it is not unlawful to rob.
Everyone would act in that belief. So I will not make you that answer. Was it
right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to
kiss? You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put
her face down. That was to 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 seventy-six.

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. He kept
his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. Square feet. A squad of
christian brothers was on its way back from the Bull and had begun to pass, two
by two, across the bridge. Soon the whole bridge was trembling and resounding.
The uncouth faces passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the
sea, and, as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint
stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Then, resting
his forehead against his hand, he leaned towards the grating and, with eyes
still averted, spoke slowly.

--Hold out! 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.

“Ah, poor James!” she said.

While he was sitting helplessly on the side of the bed in shirt and trousers
she tapped lightly at his door and entered.

The light and noise of the bar held him at the doorways for a few moments. He
looked about him, but his sight was confused by the shining of many red and
green wine-glasses The bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that
the people were observing him curiously. He glanced quickly to right and left
(frowning slightly to make his errand appear serious), but when his sight
cleared a little he saw that nobody had turned to look at him: and there, sure
enough, was Ignatius Gallaher leaning with his back against the counter and his
feet planted far apart.

“Hallo, Tommy, old hero, here you are! What is it to be? What will you have?
I’m taking whisky: better stuff than we get across the water.

--He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp
before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp.

--That? said Stephen. He's the only man I see in this institution that has an
individual mind. He had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist
freemason. O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient
consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting
long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight,
radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther
and more impalpable.

--So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps some of
you gentlemen may be familiar with the works of Mr W. Martino.

He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan whispered
from behind:

--Good old Fresh Water Martin!

--Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a subject for
electrocution. He can have me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

“The youngster and he were great friends. His inexplicable debts were a
byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man. “Did the cow calve?”

“O, of course, Lyons spots the drink first thing!” said Mr O’Connor,
laughing.

“Well, isn’t Freddy terrible?” said Mary Jane.

“I wish we had an institution like that in our Church,” said Mr Browne
candidly.

He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the
morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for. If he could
only write a book and get it published, that might open the way for him. He
could remember the way in which Mr Alleyne had hounded little Peake out of the
office in order to make room for his own nephew. He felt savage and thirsty and
revengeful, annoyed with himself and with everyone else. And you will set her
mind at 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. His own head was unbent for
his thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class of
students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the green an odour
assailed him of cheerless cellar-damp and decay. Another head than his, right
before him in the first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fellows
like the head of a priest appealing without humility to the tabernacle for the
humble worshippers about him. . peculiar cases. It is all very well for the
man: he can go his ways as if nothing had happened, having had his moment of
pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt. Some mothers would be content to
patch up such an affair for a sum of money; she had known cases of it. It’s
for business men, you know. . ”

Little Chandler finished his whisky and, after some trouble, succeeded in
catching the barman’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. Some jesuits were walking round the cycle-track in
the company of ladies. The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes
sounded in remote caves of his mind. He was impressed. He had a high opinion of
Mr Cunningham as a judge of character and as a reader of faces. The mere sight
of that medley of wet nakedness chilled him to the bone. Their bodies,
corpse-white or suffused with a pallid golden light or rawly tanned by the sun,
gleamed with the wet of the sea. This progress you will see easily in that old
English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the first person and ends in the
third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed
and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he
or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. Stephen passed out on to
the wide platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild
evening air. People began to look at us. I can see it every day. But Saturday
and Sunday being free days some boys might be inclined to think that Monday is
a free day also.

Their minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have been drawn closer, one
to the other. His friends, who knew quite well Mr Harford’s manners in
drinking, 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.

--They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. I'm an Irish nationalist,
first and foremost. But that's you all out. The cold air met him on the
threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat.

His household returned to its usual way of 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.

Addressing it as it lay, he said:

--Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!

Taking Stephen's arm, he went on again and said:

--Do you not fear that those words may be spoken to you on the day of
Judgement?

--What is offered me on the other hand? Stephen asked.

--Do you mean women?

--I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. On that point
Ireland is united.

He struck the ferrule of his umbrella on the stone floor of the colonnade.

--Hell, Temple said. “I was married last May twelve months. ”

“I hope it’s not too late in the day to offer my best wishes,” said
Ignatius Gallaher. “Next year if I come, _parole d’honneur_. ”

“And to clinch the bargain,” said Little Chandler, “we’ll just have one
more now. Only at times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was
wasting him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the
background of his memory. He felt only an ache of soul and body, his whole
being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary.

That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and over-cloud his
conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and sin-corrupted flesh:
and, praying God timidly to forgive him his weakness, he crawled up on to the
bed and, wrapping the blankets closely about him, covered his face again with
his hands. His hands were cold and damp and his limbs ached with chill. Bodily
unrest and chill and weariness beset him, routing his thoughts. Why was he
kneeling there like a child saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his
soul, to examine his conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their
times and manners and circumstances, to weep over them. 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. An esthetic image is presented to us either in
space or in time. O Mary, refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O Virgin
Undefiled, save him from the gulf of death!

The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. 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.

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. 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. Mr Holohan became very red
and excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

“Till tomorrow, mates!”

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was first-comer to the bridge as I
lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of
the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. Though he
had never embraced more than the Jewish ethical code his fellow-Catholics,
whenever they had smarted in person or by proxy under his exactions, spoke of
him bitterly as an Irish Jew and an illiterate and saw divine disapproval of
usury made manifest through the person of his idiot 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. Mr Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness
of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the
music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by
Nietzsche: _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ and _The Gay Science_. He wrote seldom in
the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. He had not 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 suit. ”

Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie reassuringly while Aunt Kate
nearly doubled herself, so heartily did she enjoy the joke.

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. ”

“Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” said Gabriel, almost trotting to the
stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation.

The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:

“Well, thank you, sir. There was two gentlemen with him. The imagery of the
psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride. I had riches too great to count,
could boast Of a high ancestral name, But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you loved me still the same. A frightful hole he said it was.

--That was a good answer our friend made to the canon. What? said Mr Dedalus.
And just finish what you have there and we'll have another.

--Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price
after his death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. Mr Cunningham said:

“It is supposed--they say, you know--to take place in the depot where they
get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The
sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates.
”

He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.

“At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on
the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on
the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch
it on their plates: 65, _catch your cabbage_. ”

Everyone laughed again: but Mr Kernan was somewhat indignant still. . Here you
are, Tommy. ”

Little Chandler said nothing until the barman returned with two glasses: then
he touched his friend’s glass lightly and reciprocated the former toast.

--Ah, do! he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do.
She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the
saucers. She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that
nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and
then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about
the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the
next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Ideas!
Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. What
day of the week was it? He stopped at a newsagent's to read the headline of a
placard. Thursday. Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to
one, physics. He fancied to himself the English lecture and felt, even at that
distance, restless and helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs
down which he had fallen. They succeeded in turning him over.

The night of the grand concert came. Mrs Kearney, with her husband and
daughter, arrived at the Antient Concert Rooms three-quarters of an hour before
the time at which the concert was to begin. By ill luck it was a rainy evening.

--With your people? Cranly asked.

His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening,
excited Stephen's brain, over which its fumes seemed to brood.

--Look here, Cranly, he 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 pierglass 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 withdrew 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 fingers. Great parcels of
groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Vaguely first
and then more sharply he smelt her body.

--Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud
sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy.
So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood,
that all ages were as one to him. I remember Crofton saying to me when we came
out----”

“But he’s an Orangeman, Crofton, isn’t he?” said Mr Power.

“‘Course he is,” said Mr Kernan, “and a damned decent Orangeman too. We
must make sure of the newcomers.

Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the doorway, and
said in a swift whisper:

--Do you know that he is a married man? he was a married man before they
converted him. I mentioned Father Burke’s name. He knew that people went
there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard
that the waiters there spoke French and German. Walking swiftly by at night he
had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies, escorted by
cavaliers, alight and enter quickly.

The concert on Thursday night was better attended, but Mrs Kearney saw at once
that the house was filled with paper.

“Did Mr Tierney say when he’d be back?” he asked in a husky falsetto.

“He didn’t say. ”

Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

--Hoho! he cried. “Where on earth is Gabriel? There’s everyone waiting in
there, stage to let, and nobody to carve the goose!”

“Here I am, Aunt Kate!” cried Gabriel, with sudden animation, “ready to
carve a flock of geese, if necessary. But Corley’s brow was soon smooth
again. They are 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. It was at
Cambridge that he had met Ségouin. What excitement! Jimmy was excited too; he
would lose, of course. I can see it in your eye. TOUCH THEM NOT, says Christ,
FOR THEY ARE THE APPLE OF MY 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. They walked forward in silence.

--To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying
relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of
artistic apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep
away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a
stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the
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. For, remember, the fire of hell
gives forth no light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it.

--But that was stealing. How could they have done that?

--A fat lot you know about it, Thunder! Wells said. “Weren’t some of the
popes--of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old
popes--not exactly. . ”

“Where did the boose come from?” asked the young man.

The new-comer surveyed the deplorable figure before him and then turned to the
constable, saying:

“It’s all right, constable. I’ll see him home. He took her to see _The
Bohemian Girl_ and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed little.

--Then do so, Cranly said.

“I’m up to all their little tricks,” Corley confessed. It was quite
simple.

The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the dark
streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling
and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, 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. The faint sour stink
of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising
ground above the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets
flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and
often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It
was noon when we reached the quays and, as all the labourers seemed to be
eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them
on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle
of Dublin’s commerce--the barges signalled from far away by their curls of
woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white
sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.

He was much older than she. I'M BLINDED! I'M BLINDED AND DROWNDED!

He stopped in a fit of coughing and laughter, repeating:

--I'M BLINDED ENTIRELY.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly and lay back in his chair while uncle Charles swayed
his head to and fro.







XXXVI

I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam
about their knees: Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the
reins, with fluttering ships, the charioteers. They cry unto the night their
battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter. They
drove by the crowd, blended now into soft colours, to a music of merry bells.
They took the train at Westland Row and in a few seconds, as it seemed to
Jimmy, they were walking out of Kingstown Station. The sight of the streets
thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my
journey.

The chief clerk glanced at the hat-rack but, seeing the row complete, offered
no remark. As soon as he was on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid
cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety
stairs. They followed him in silence, their feet falling in soft thuds on the
thickly carpeted stairs. From the street door he walked on furtively on the
inner side of the path towards the corner and all at once dived into a doorway.
A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. His black clothes were
tightly buttoned on his short body and it was impossible to say whether he wore
a clergyman’s collar or a layman’s, because the collar of his shabby
frock-coat, the uncovered buttons of which reflected the candlelight, was
turned up about his neck.

Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the
dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat
of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of
clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition
of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by
legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to
allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind of which was
written the name of his firm with the address--London, E. C. On the mantelpiece
of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and
on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were
usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. How
simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him.

His tram let him down at Shelbourne Road and he steered his great body along in
the shadow of the wall of the barracks. He loathed returning to his home. And
when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard
where his people came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar
objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.

“How did you get yourself into this mess?” asked Mr Power. “There used
always to be crowds of Protestants in the chapel where Father Tom was
preaching. ”

“There’s not much difference between us,” said Mr M’Coy.

“It keeps coming like from down in my throat; sickening thing.

And the air in the corridor chilled him too. His instinct urged him to remain
free, not to marry. Once you are married you are done for, it said. “He’s
really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and
making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor
child! And she simply hates the sight of it!. .
. He began to cry. He’s the man.

--O certainly, said the director. IVORY, IVOIRE, AVORIO, EBUR. One of the first
examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: INDIA MITTIT EBUR; and he
recalled the shrewd northern face of the rector who had taught him to construe
the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly English, made whimsical by the mention
of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. And how cold and slimy the water
had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.

--Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his friend. I
have. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to
fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him
good-day.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival's flushed and mobile face,
beaked like a bird's. He walked towards us very slowly, always tapping the
ground with his stick, so slowly that I thought he was looking for something in
the grass. He asked in a suspicious provincial accent:

“Who is the man? What’s his name and address?”

A young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders.
He could not touch him for more than a bob--and a bob was no use.

Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and
repeated:

--Easy, easy, easy!

Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin
foam:

--Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached
the freedom of thought was Collins. Two penitents rose and entered the
confessional at either side.

P. “Did you never hear that? And the men used to go in on Sunday morning
before the houses were open to buy a waistcoat or a trousers--moya! But Tricky
Dicky’s little old father always had a tricky little black bottle up in a
corner. God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and
stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy.

--And here's the wiseacre, said Temple.

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from its
listless despair. I'll stand you a pint after. ”

“Faith, Mr Henchy,” said the old man, “you’d keep up better style than
some of them. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon
Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies
of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest.

Went to library. That's no way to send for one of the senior boys. Villona was
entertaining also--a brilliant pianist--but, unfortunately, very poor. Once or
twice I stopped by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew
was thick I'd have stretched out there and slept. I tried to make him someway
decent. 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. A
game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with
their green-white slime. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and
almost painlessly; and, bowing submissively, as if to meet his companion's
jesting mood, began to recite the CONFITEOR. Royal persons, favourites,
intriguers, bishops, passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. That
has the true scholastic stink. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and
responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the
nervous system. Second arts, too. You know I'm a member of the field club.
Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the angelic doctor, as he is
called, says that the worst damnation consists in this, that the understanding
of man is totally deprived of divine light and his affection obstinately turned
away from the goodness of God. ”

“Why didn’t you remind him?” said Mr O’Connor. HE THAT WILL NOT HEAR
THE CHURCHA LET HIM BE TO THEEA AS THE HEATHENA AND THE PUBLICANA. ”

As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table
during which Mrs Malins could be heard saying to her neighbour in an indistinct
undertone:

“They are very good men, the monks, very pious men.

All this time the dressing-room was a hive of excitement. It was a mild sunny
morning in the first week of June. _

He paused.

They had to go visiting together and, as he had not answered her, Miss

“Of course, you’ve no answer. . But the astonishing thing is this.

The porter led them along a corridor and opened a door. The fellows said it was
made of whalebone and leather with lead inside: and he wondered what was the
pain like. Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the
evening. He cursed his want of money and cursed all the rounds he had stood,
particularly all the whiskies and Apollinaris which he had stood to Weathers.
Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside. Air,
musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room
behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Then all his eagerness
passed away and he felt his face quite cool. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter
the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. They
cry unto the night their battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their
whirling laughter. He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for
God but he died of fever on the island of Sancian. He rolled its body, tender
yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant before
he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. Then he asked
Fleming and Fleming said that the word had no plural. He knew that he would
have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat
were too dry for such a task. The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight
years, of finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and
noise, of listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space
Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive
nature.

--And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of
this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it
has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul
and body alike. Come, my beloved, where I may Speak to your heart. ”

“O do, Mary Jane,” said Aunt Kate. One time I hear you talk against English
literature.

APRIL 15. They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness. ”

“O, now, Mrs Kernan,” said Mr Power, “we’ll make him turn over a new
leaf. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. One
evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy all
through dinner. 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.

He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominoes and
once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. He
spoke without listening to the speech of his companions. You are McGlade's
suck. ”

“To take a pick itself,” said Mary Jane, “after all your dancing. ”

“Allow me,” said Mr Cunningham positively, “it was _Lux upon Lux_. He
wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly.
She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at
him with her rabbit’s eyes. The ends of her tulle collarette had been
carefully disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her bosom,
stems upwards. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light
and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. He could not see
her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt
which the shadow made appear black and white. He scarcely resented what had
seemed to him a silly indelicateness for he knew that the adventure in his mind
stood in no danger from these words: and his face mirrored his rival's false
smile. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft whispering vapour,
whispering and vanishing. The conversation of the others in the dressing-room
had become strained.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar.

He beat his breast with his fist humbly, secretly under cover of the wooden
armrest. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud
address an echo of his own proud musings. You, the leader of the class!

Then he asked the next boy and the next and the next.

--So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. They allowed a
handful of foreigners to subject them. If he sent her the verses? They would be
read out at breakfast amid the tapping of egg-shells. He was a suave, elderly
man who balanced his imposing body, when at rest, upon a large silk umbrella.
And on the wall of another closet there was written in backhand in beautiful
writing:



Julius Caesar wrote The Calico Belly. But not peevish. ”

Mr Holohan admitted that the _artistes_ were no good but the Committee, he
said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and
reserve all the talent for Saturday night. ”

“But I’ve a nice partner for you, Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor. Then
Ginger Mooney lifted up her mug of tea and proposed Maria’s health while all
the other women clattered with their mugs on the table, and said she was sorry
she hadn’t a sup of porter to drink it in.

He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the porcelain knob,
opened the door quickly. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the
ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. Their sympathy, however, was for
the blue cars--the cars of their friends, the French. 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. ”

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control and then went on:

“Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’
Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window.

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a
magistrate too like Saurin's father and Nasty Roche's father. The first step in
the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the
imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. O, how
terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in
the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing
and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes
flaming like molten balls.

Lightly, lightly--ever so: Clouds that wrap the vales below At the hour of
evenstar Lowliest attendants are; Love and laughter song-confessed When the
heart is heaviest. But you could not have a green rose. His whole speech was a
mistake from first to last, an utter failure. She was invariably friendly and
advising--homely, in fact. You have no fear of that. “I thought it was some
Italian or American. ”

Mr Holohan seemed to be in a hurry; he advised her to speak to Mr Fitzpatrick.

Aunt Kate and Gabriel laughed too. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was
beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles.

Mr Hynes leaned against the mantelpiece and asked:

“Has he paid you yet?”

“Not yet,” said Mr O’Connor. The board on which he knelt was narrow and
worn and those who knelt near him were humble followers of Jesus. Nannie
received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at
her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. “Of course they are doing their
best, but really they are not good.

--Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

--I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost
self-respect.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness.

--Of course, said Lynch. . . ”

“O, the room is all right,” replied Gabriel. For the first time his soul
revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel Street. 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 Clongowes. It was folly. Canker was a disease
of plants and cancer one of animals: or another different. He was not without
culture. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically. They tried to keep up with
him, smiling also at his eagerness.

APRIL 13.

--I remember that, he said, PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT. She was on her way
to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. When they came out of
the Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble
so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye
quickly and left her. He liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up at his
dark fierce face.

1 Pair Buskins.

Gabriel’s brows were dark but he raised them quickly and answered:

“O, no, hardly noticeable. They lived in Clane, a fellow said: there were
little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing at the half-door of a
cottage with a child in her arms as the cars had come past from Sallins.

--Now don't be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus.

--I was told not to, Wells said.

--Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome them or
put them aside, Cranly said.

They passed back through the garden and out through the hall where the
doddering porter was pinning up a hall notice in the frame. He asked in a
suspicious provincial accent:

“Who is the man? What’s his name and address?”

A young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders.
There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys had grown
up and she knew that he would walk to the end of Thomas Street and back again
to book even a small order. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his
look from his humbled eyes. The big student turned on him, frowning.

“Tell me, Martin,” he said. ”

His attitude on this point struck me as strangely liberal in a man of his age.
His face was heated. From the hall came sounds of encouragement, clapping and
stamping of feet.

A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was
embayed.

--Certainly, said Dante.

--Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of
honour.

Stephen heard his father's voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob.

--No.

“Damn it!” said Lenehan boldly, “I don’t want an introduction.

--We want no budding buddhists.

He went into the pantry hastily and put on his overcoat. Then as to money--he
really had a great sum under his control. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits,
thinking that his daughter’s hand was in question. ”

“No, no,” said Mr Fogarty eagerly. “I admire the man personally. Miss
Kathleen Kearney’s musical career was ended in Dublin after that, he said.
His soul was foul with sin and he dared not ask forgiveness with the simple
trust of those whom Jesus, in the mysterious ways of God, had called first to
His side, the carpenters, the fishermen, poor and simple people following a
lowly trade, handling and shaping the wood of trees, mending their nets with
patience. He waited for some minutes listening. He stood up in terror and
walked blindly into the box. The young men eyed him respectfully while he took
a trial sip. It was a holy place. The party was increased by a young Englishman
named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The night was cold
and gloomy. He waited for some minutes listening.

“Who’s not playing fair?” said the other. All the filth of the world, all
the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast
reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the
world.

The heavy scowl faded from Cranly's face as MacCann marched briskly towards
them from the other side of the hall. “Take that, you little whelp!”

The boy uttered a squeal of pain as the stick cut his thigh. I remarked their
English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. Moments of their
secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. He inquired politely for
Mr Kernan, placed his gift on the table and sat down with the company on equal
terms.



* * * * *



--REMEMBER ONLY THY LAST THINGS AND THOU SHALT NOT SIN FOR EVER--words taken,
my dear little brothers in Christ, from the book of Ecclesiastes, seventh
chapter, fortieth verse. Her son-in-law brought them every year to the lakes
and they used to go fishing. They looked at him and saw their master's face and
cloak and knew that he had received his death-wound. 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.
SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the founder would have had him, like
a staff in an old man's hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in
stress of weather, to lie with a lady's nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised
in menace. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used
to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey’s on
Bachelor’s Walk, to Webb’s or Massey’s on Aston’s Quay, or to
O’Clohissey’s in the by-street. At the last moment of consciousness the
whole earthly life passed before the vision of the soul and, ere it had time to
reflect, the body had died and the soul stood terrified before the judgement
seat. Play fair,” he said. She listened to all. Mrs Kearney had to stand
aside to allow the baritone and his accompanist to pass up to the platform.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice
was singing and gazing up at his wife. Come, my beloved, where I may Speak to
your heart. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. 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. ”

“Yes. Only he doesn't know it. He felt the death chill touch the extremities
and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the
bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat
oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech
thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more
faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless
human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat.

--Are you as bad as that? asked Moynihan with a broad grin.

--Out here, Dedalus. I think I had better eat it myself because I'm not well in
my health lately.

--I did, Stephen answered. He did not wish her to think that he was interested
in this delicate boy.

My love she's handsome, My love she's bony: She's like good whisky When it is
new; But when 'tis old And growing cold It fades and dies like The mountain
dew.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

“Ecod! Corley, you know how to take them,” he said. All the images it had
awakened were false.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. We're not out for the half mile,
are we?

For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through Stephen's
fingers.

--Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes? answered
Heron.

“O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope. She set these on the table
and invited us to take a little glass of wine. But an unresting doubt flew
hither and thither before his mind. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was
no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. ”

Before leaving the room with Gabriel she signalled to Mr Browne by frowning and
shaking her forefinger in warning to and fro. The veins stood out on
Farrington’s forehead, and the pallor of Weathers’ complexion changed to
peony. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an
acquired speech. But that's you all out.

--He's coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he
wants to.

A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said:

--That's game ball. The ends of her tulle collarette had been carefully
disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her bosom, stems
upwards. What have you there? he asked, tapping the portfolio under Glynn's
arm. The master marked the sums and cuts to be done for the next lesson and
went out.

The parlour fire would not draw that evening and Mr Dedalus rested the poker
against the bars of the grate to attract the flame.

“Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown tonight,
Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate. . . . Till what? Till he yield to me? No.
Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back. Her face,
healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled
red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost
its ripe nut colour.

--Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his friend. . a
bit of all right,” he said regretfully.

The priest did not turn his head. The only persons who seemed to follow the
music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted
from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and
Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page. Why, by God, they wouldn't be
seen dead in a ten-acre field with them. Perhaps it would be better to insert
his mother’s name before the surname: Thomas Malone Chandler, or better
still: T. While her tongue rambled on Gabriel tried to banish from his mind all
memory of the unpleasant incident with Miss Ivors. On the very moment John
MacHale, who had been arguing and arguing against it, stood up and shouted out
with the voice of a lion: ‘_Credo!_’”

“_I believe!_” said Mr Fogarty.

The fellows at his table stood up. ”

“What?” cried Mr Kernan. “When you come next year I may have the pleasure
of wishing long life and happiness to Mr and Mrs Ignatius Gallaher. O! In the
virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.

“Tell me, Lily,” he said in a friendly tone, “do you still go to
school?”

“O no, sir,” she answered. After early nightfall the yellow lamps would
light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. Neither Mr
Henchy nor the old man said anything but, just as the door was closing, Mr
O’Connor, who had been staring moodily into the fire, called out suddenly:

“‘Bye, Joe.

He could still leave the chapel. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the
plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or
hurtful to them. Then late one night as he was undressing for bed she had
tapped at his door, timidly. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at
the foot of the bed. They walked northward with a curious feeling of
disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light
above them in a haze of summer evening.

He listened without sympathy to his father's evocation 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.

--And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend,
more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. For a full hour he
had paced up and down, waiting: but he could wait no longer. She told me she
used to go with a dairyman.

The concerts were to be on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Hardly had
she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the
ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door
bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in
another guest. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud
address an echo of his own proud musings.

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. O, 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
HAD A HEARTY LAUGH TOGETHER OVER IT. ”

“But poor Mr D’Arcy doesn’t like the snow,” said Aunt Kate, smiling. .
There now, love! There now!. . . . . And when I ask when my daughter is going
to be paid I can’t get a civil answer. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in
the copious easy-chair beside the bed. Some things he could not vouch for (his
friends had told him), but of others he had had personal experience. . . Look
out!

--Oh, Cripes, I'm drownded!

--One! Two! Three and away!

--The next! The next!

--One!. 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 had walked the streets long
enough with friends and with girls. Then he imitated Farrington, saying,
_“And here was my nabs, as cool as you please,”_ while Farrington looked at
the company out of his heavy dirty eyes, smiling and at times drawing forth
stray drops of liquor from his moustache with the aid of his lower lip. He
hardly knew where he was walking. Not long before, when she had been laid up
for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the
fire. He ran towards her and shouted, but, before he could reach her, she was
caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground. The horse galloped
along wearily under the murky morning sky, dragging his old rattling box after
his heels, and Gabriel was again in a cab with her, galloping to catch the
boat, galloping to their honeymoon. She forgot nothing and, thanks to her,
everything that was to be done was done. Little Chandler had come home late for
tea and, moreover, he had forgotten to bring Annie home the parcel of coffee
from Bewley’s. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a
tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time
the planks fell:

“All right! All right!”

When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. He lit a
candle in the office and went before them to the stairs. His father, therefore,
was unusually friendly with Villona and his manner expressed a real respect for
foreign accomplishments; but this subtlety of his host was probably lost upon
the Hungarian, who was beginning to have a sharp desire for his dinner.
advancing into the light of the fire. But we are living in a sceptical and, if
I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this
new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities
of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.
All I can say is I never heard her sing half so well as long as I am coming
here. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam
and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to
beginners on the old square piano in the back room. The train went on and on.

Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of
a peace-offering, saying:

--PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM. Mrs Kearney, with her husband and
daughter, arrived at the Antient Concert Rooms three-quarters of an hour before
the time at which the concert was to begin.

He heard the sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened his eyes
with a nervous impulse.

--Didn't I tell you he was a smiler? said Temple, turning right and left. His
lungs dilated and sank as if he were inhaling a warm moist unsustaining air and
he smelt again the moist warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes above the
sluggish turf-coloured water. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. Decollation they call it in the
gold.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

“Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world. Weakness and timidity and
inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.

“You’re not to put the weight of your body behind it.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

“Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world. At the first bend of the road I
looked back and she was standing at the door. His mind bred vermin.

--By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector, or provincial rather, was
telling me that story about you and Father Dolan. His anger against her found
vent in coarse railing at her paramour, whose name and voice and features
offended his baffled pride: a priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in
Dublin and a brother a potboy in Moycullen. He wondered how he would pass the
first night in the novitiate and with what dismay he would wake the first
morning in the dormitory. Mrs Donnelly bade the children be quiet and listen to
Maria’s song. His face was heavy, pale and clean-shaven.

A bell clanged upon her heart. What is art? What is the beauty it expresses?

--That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepy-headed wretch, said
Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself.

“It’s all right, Mr Shelley,” said the man, pointing with his finger to
indicate the objective of his journey. When it had ceased all the auditors
drank from their bottles in silence. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when
she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. How characterless they
looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet
belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the
flapless side-pockets! It was a pain to see them, and a sword-like pain to see
the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. His
hands were white and small, his frame was fragile, his voice was quiet and his
manners were refined. The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude
gusts round the hall from his scattered fellow students. I asked him why he had
brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. He
lit a candle in the office and went before them to the stairs.

One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his
mouth his hand stopped. And all the priests used to be dining there. “I bar
the magic-lantern business. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow
actors aiding it with their parts. As soon as she could she excused herself and
went out after him. All day he had thought of nothing but their leave-taking 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.

He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the porcelain knob,
opened the door quickly. If any boys have special confessors perhaps it will be
better for them not to change. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice
when she cried. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and
knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale
before. But there’s such a thing as common everyday politeness and gratitude.
Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song
about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place.

“Well, Mat,” he said to Mr O’Connor, “how goes it?”

Mr O’Connor shook his head.

“Every place is immoral,” he said.

--Here I am! said Stephen.

--Who is?

--Tell McGlade.

Freddy Malins bade the Misses Morkan good-evening in what seemed an offhand
fashion by reason of the habitual catch in his voice and then, seeing that Mr
Browne was grinning at him from the sideboard, crossed the room on rather shaky
legs and began to repeat in an undertone the story he had just told to Gabriel.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy
silence of his ecstasy.

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. But when this brief pride of silence
upheld him no longer he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common
lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city
fearlessly and with a light heart.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain.

Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother’s persistent
silence could not be misunderstood.



* * * * *



The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light,
leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly
dangling and looping the cord of the other blind, Stephen stood before him,
following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight
above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. He rolled
its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for
an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. He
had felt a subtle, dark, and murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire
him with a brief iniquitous lust: it, too, had slipped beyond his grasp leaving
his mind lucid and indifferent. ”

“I don’t mind,” said Mr Kernan, smiling a little nervously. No, I never
heard your voice so good as it is tonight. It is dishonourable and unmanly. He
gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by
heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly
circling round and round in the same orbit. She dipped the end of the towel in
the water-jug and refreshed her eyes with the cool water.

--Do you believe in the eucharist? Cranly asked. 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. He wondered had Corley managed it
successfully. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were
unfolding some elaborate mystery. He asked himself what else could he have
done. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's
ill-humour had had its vent.

--Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before Stephen.

--Where I can, Stephen said. ”

“‘ant we have a little.

“Why?” repeated Miss Ivors.

The child, hearing its mother’s voice, broke out into a paroxysm of sobbing.
He clasped his hands together in the air and his voice shook with fright.

“Now, you’ll let the fire out the next time!” said the man striking at
him vigorously with the stick. All the filth of the world, all the offal and
scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when
the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The students
saluted, Temple fumbling as before at the peak of his cap. It was not even the
way in which he thought of her. And he remembered an evening when he had
dismounted from a borrowed creaking bicycle to pray to God in a wood near
Malahide. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door,
pretended that he had never heard the story. When he smiled he used to uncover
his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip--a habit
which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I
knew him well. C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden
battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood
four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. Mr
Cunningham continued. ,’ he said. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of
thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms
of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its
fine arts to impresarios?

He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their
evenings alone. After supper in the study hall he would change the number
pasted up inside his desk from seventy-seven to seventy-six. A dull anger began
to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to
glow angrily in his veins.

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. His face was kind and
he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by the union of
their tips. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.

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.

“I’ve been to the Moulin Rouge,” Ignatius Gallaher continued when the
barman had removed their glasses, “and I’ve been to all the Bohemian
cafés. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will
feel the pain of fire. 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 MUTANTUR NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR ET
NOS MUTAMUR IN ILLIS. Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his
surname and glanced at her. He sang his music with great feeling and volume and
was warmly welcomed by the gallery; but, unfortunately, he marred the good
impression by wiping his nose in his gloved hand once or twice out of
thoughtlessness.

He stood still in deference to their calls and parried their banter with easy
words. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up
screwed. Did you ever hear that, Crofton? Listen to this now: splendid thing.
She called Mr Fitzpatrick away from his screen and told him that her daughter
had signed for four concerts and that, of course, according to the terms of the
contract, she should receive the sum originally stipulated for, whether the
society gave the four concerts or not. If it does not give light enough I shall
sell it and buy another. ”

“What?” said Mr Henchy and Mr O’Connor. My aunt fingered the stem of her
wine-glass before sipping a little. He cursed his want of money and cursed all
the rounds he had stood, particularly all the whiskies and Apollinaris which he
had stood to Weathers. Lynch says all women do. ”

“_François_, the same again. His silent watchful manner had grown upon him
and he took little part in the games.

He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a gang of
adventurers in the avenue. In hell all laws are overturned--there is no thought
of family or country, of ties, of relationships. Mrs Mooney had first sent her
daughter to be a typist in a corn-factor’s office but, as a disreputable
sheriff’s man used to come every other day to the office, asking to be
allowed to say a word to his daughter, she had taken her daughter home again
and set her to do housework. She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had
not the moral courage to resist her. The frail gay sound smote his heart more
strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned
aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. She put
the sleeping child deftly in his arms and said:

“Here.

--From me! said Stephen in astonishment. Met her today point blank in Grafton
Street. Away with God!

--Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting
in his face. Then he paid his bill and went out.

Wells said:

--O, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to
bed. I'm old enough to be his grandfather. Shrinking from that life he turned
towards the wall, making a cowl of the blanket and staring at the great
overblown scarlet flowers of the tattered wallpaper. After waiting for a little
time he saw them coming towards him and, when they turned to the right, he
followed them, stepping lightly in his white shoes, down one side of Merrion
Square. They drank the health of the Queen of Hearts and of the Queen of
Diamonds. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord--in tending
the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon
worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden--and yet had remained ungraced by
aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. The room was lively. Gabriel’s wife
served out spoonfuls of the pudding and passed the plates down the table.

“André.

--Six months?

--Eight months, father.

“So that we had better go to supper,” said Mary Jane, “and finish the
discussion afterwards.

--Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandy-bat over his
shoulder and he's not allowed to do that. Freddy Malins, who had listened with
his head perched sideways to hear her better, was still applauding when
everyone else had ceased and talking animatedly to his mother who nodded her
head gravely and slowly in acquiescence.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

--You made me confess the fears that I have. That is the language of the Holy
Ghost. They must have gone home by another way. Better pass boldly into that
other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally
with age. He wore a round hat of hard black felt. By thinking of things you
could understand them. I think he has a grand voice. She noticed that he wore
his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his head and that his accent was
flat.

Symbol of departure or of loneliness? The verses crooned in the ear of his
memory composed slowly before his remembering eyes the scene of the hall on the
night of the opening of the national theatre. She moved her hand about here and
there in the air and descended on one of the saucers. The priests were always
the true friends of Ireland. And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy
patron saint, the first martyr, who is very powerful with God, that God may
enlighten your mind. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. They lived in Clane, a
fellow said: there were little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing
at the half-door of a cottage with a child in her arms as the cars had come
past from Sallins. Folly indeed! Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the
page from each other with their strong hard fingers. ”

Mrs Kearney had to go back to the dressing-room. Then, turning to Cranly, he
said:

--Good evening, particularly to you. “Must I have a candle?”

“O yes,” said Mr Cunningham.

Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. A dark medal of
blood had formed itself near the man’s head on the tessellated floor. Do you
remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk about Wicklow
bacon. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out.
One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds.

APRIL 27. ”

Their neighbours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. A little tact
was necessary.

“How could they be anything else, Tom?” he said. To please me, I mean. He
was sorry. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. Then, with
a snort of disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps. He said they were
to leave the report for him at the _Freeman_ office and he would see that it
went in. “But won’t you come in and sit down a minute?”

“No, no, thank you. All day he had thought of nothing but their leave-taking
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. ”

“That’s right.

“And I own up,” said Mr M’Coy.

“God, yes,” said Mr Henchy. It came from the comic Irishman in the bench
behind. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The other, who walked on the verge
of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his
companion’s rudeness, wore an amused listening face. --Of course I tried to
carry it off as best I could. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to
force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. But his
figure fell into rotundity at the waist, his hair was scant and grey and his
face, when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a ravaged look.

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of her
praise. 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. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud
address an echo of his own proud musings. The squalid scene composed itself
around him; the common accents, the burning gas-jets in the shops, odours of
fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. Stephen's heart began
slowly to fold and fade with fear like a withering flower. God and religion
before the world. But Corley had not a subtle mind.

--Might I ask you what you are talking about? said Stephen urbanely. .
manufacturing that champagne for those fellows.

He struck the ferrule of his umbrella on the stone floor of the colonnade. He
might have tried Higgins for the money, but sure Higgins never had anything for
himself.

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.
And when he had tried to open Mr Casey's hand to see if the purse 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. The priests were always the true friends
of Ireland.

“Where is Gabriel?” she cried. “That’ll be the most convenient place.
As these had not been well received he had desisted. He revealed many of the
secrets of religious houses on the Continent and described some of the
practices which were fashionable in high society and ended by telling, with
details, a story about an English duchess--a story which he knew to be true.

“Only I’m an old man now I’d change his tune for him.

--CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA
MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS.

“Sha, ‘s nothing,” said Mr Kernan, closing his mouth and pulling the
collar of his filthy coat across his neck.

He fell as fall the mighty ones, Nobly undaunted to the last, And death has now
united him With Erin’s heroes of the past. They would be for the breakfast in
the morning after the communion in the college chapel.

“The working-man,” said Mr Hynes, “gets all kicks and no halfpence.
Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the temptress of his
villanelle. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience
and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band.

“Tell me,” he said across the fire, “what brings our friend in here? What
does he want?”

“‘Usha, poor Joe!” said Mr O’Connor, throwing the end of his cigarette
into the fire, “he’s hard up, like the rest of us.

When the cook told her everything was ready she went into the women’s room
and began to pull the big bell. The audience behaved indecorously, as if the
concert were an informal dress rehearsal. Mrs Kearney was somewhat reassured,
but she thought well to tell her husband part of her suspicions. “Isn’t
that fine? What?”

Mr Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing.

--Try Leopardstown! said a voice from the bench behind. He would know then what
was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for which
there was no forgiveness. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was
a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. It began to sob piteously, losing its
breath for four or five seconds, and then bursting out anew.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in
the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. And the time of
dreaming Dreams is over-- As lover to lover,

Sweetheart, I come. Mr Holohan said that she was Madam Glynn from London. She
wore a loose open combing-jacket of printed flannel.

Neither of the others spoke. He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others,
sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily. Madness. Who
could think such a thought? And, cowering in darkness and abject, he prayed
mutely to his guardian angel to drive away with his sword the demon that was
whispering to his brain.

“It’s well for you,” she said. 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. Desisting from this, he began to wander about the far end
of the field, aimlessly.

--Then be one of us, said Davin. No one knew how he achieved the stern task of
living, but his name was vaguely associated with racing tissues. Near the Bank
Ségouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. I sat up on the coping of
the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed
overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people
up the hill. That was the aim of his life.

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. The attitude
of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes
as of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer,
humiliated and faint before her Creator. Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers
tapped the cold pane of the window. One by one they were all becoming shades.
It was the noise of the waves. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin English. 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 towards others, restless and sickened of
himself when they had swept over him. Are you not weary of ardent ways?

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat. 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. The bass and
the second tenor had already come. As he approached Hume Street corner he found
the air heavily scented and his eyes made a swift anxious scrutiny of the young
woman’s appearance. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no
head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about
the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night.
At the very instant of death the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the
soul at once flies towards God as towards the centre of her existence. ”

“But, of course,” said Mr Cunningham quietly and effectively, “our
religion is _the_ religion, the old, original faith. ”

“And did you not tell him to go back?” asked Gabriel. You have asked me
what I would do and what I would not do.

And the fellow who had spoken first said:

--Yes, that's what I heard too from the fellow in the higher line. She ate the
apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her. He
shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin.

“Who’s not playing fair?” said the other. He had simply taken advantage
of Polly’s youth and inexperience: that was evident.

Stephen pointed to the Tsar's photograph and said:

--He has the face of a besotted Christ. A side door of the theatre opened
suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grass plots. Man, in this earthly
life, though he be capable of many evils, is not capable of them all at once,
inasmuch as one evil corrects and counteracts another just as one poison
frequently corrects another. But his figure fell into rotundity at the waist,
his hair was scant and grey and his face, when the waves of expression had
passed over it, had a ravaged look. The lovely smell there was in the wintry
air: the smell of Clane: rain and wintry air and turf smouldering and corduroy.
His face was kind and he joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a
frail cage by the union of their tips. Then in an instant it happens. Why is he
on his knees, Father Arnall?

--He wrote a bad Latin theme, Father Arnall said, and he missed all the
questions in grammar. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours
to think of. ”_ She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their
tubs and always succeeded in making peace.

A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. “I’m sorry you were
not in voice tonight. Away with God!

--Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting
in his face. His father, who had begun life as an advanced Nationalist, had
modified his views early. Was that right? His father was a marshal now: higher
than a magistrate. I said he was terribly burned.

The Priest was silent. A gentle kick from the tall boy in the bench behind
urged Stephen to ask a difficult question. He was often to be seen walking with
policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly. At the corner of a street the
shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star.

--Are you quite orthodox on that point, Temple? Dixon said suavely. Mr Alleyne
and Miss Delacour were standing outside the counter and all the clerks had turn
round in anticipation of something. He was drawing her into them: he would
drown her. All the lodgers in the house knew something of the affair; details
had been invented by some. However, when she drew near the limit and her
friends began to loosen their tongues about her, she silenced them by marrying
Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay. Some distant lamp or lighted
window gleamed below me. . . with others. Everyone of us could do something.
You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you
ate pieces of dried cowdung. And you know what that word means? Not only to be
separate from all others but to have not even one friend.

--Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters
and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. She would be there before
eight.

He began to feel that he had wronged her.

--Mr Casey! Simon! said Mrs Dedalus, let it end now.

“Where?” asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy.

--How are you off, sir?

--Right as the mail, Simon. Rody Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. Was
she sincere? Had she really any life of her own behind all her propagandism?
There had never been any ill-feeling between them until that night.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him descending along his
spine from his closely cowled head. The recollection brightened his eyes. . . a
bit of all right,” he said regretfully. I am sure you do.

--Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name
because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect's false sleeves behind his back
and the prefect used to let on to be angry. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted
tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat
it forth into the grate. Perhaps they could be happy together.

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
infirmary. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a
white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. One by one the
others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing. They halted
too on the steps below him. God's turn had come.

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names
of places in America. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the
shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow
currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving. I never heard
the word in my life. Grafton Street, along which he walked, prolonged that
moment of discouraged poverty. I am sure you do. Every night as I gazed up at
the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.

Athy, who had been silent, said quietly:

--You are all wrong. “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. A
world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and
unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession
to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose,
leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with
its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other. First you must take your
degree. That is INTEGRITAS. That’s where he first saw the light.

But no.

“The German cardinal wouldn’t submit.

“Amen,” said Gabriel. He felt against his shirt the agitation of her bosom.
He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and
riddles. Little Chandler remembered (and the remembrance brought a slight flush
of pride to his cheek) one of Ignatius Gallaher’s sayings when he was in a
tight corner:

“Half time now, boys,” he used to say light-heartedly. When they reached
Stephen’s Green they crossed the road. It was cold autumn weather but in
spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly
three hours.

After that they lived apart. But Erin, list, his spirit may Rise, like the
Phœnix from the flames, When breaks the dawning of the day,

The day that brings us Freedom’s reign.

--Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story. The injured man said
again as well as he could:

“I’ ‘ery ‘uch o’liged to you, sir. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. Farley was an American.

Brightness falls from the air. The student's body shook all over and, to ease
his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly over his groins. When Mrs
Kernan came into the room drying her hands she came into a solemn company.

O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. The noise in hall died
away.

He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on
the stage and in the pulpit, had found them set forth solemnly in books and had
wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to force his
lips to utter their names with conviction. To keep the audience continually
diverted she slipped the doubtful items in between the old favourites.

Moynihan leaned down towards Stephen's ear and murmured:

--What price ellipsoidal balls! chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!

His fellow student's rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister of
Stephen's mind, shaking into gay life limp priestly vestments that hung upon
the walls, setting them to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule.

“The working-man,” said Mr Hynes, “gets all kicks and no halfpence. In
spite of all he had done it.

“How can I?” said the old man, “when there’s no corkscrew?”

“Wait now, wait now!” said Mr Henchy, getting up quickly. His days and
works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of
sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.

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.

Yes, his mother was hostile to the idea, as he had read from her listless
silence. After a rather long pause he announced:



THE DEATH OF PARNELL _6th October_ 1891

He cleared his throat once or twice and then began to recite:



He is dead. They entered the grounds of the college and were led by the
garrulous porter across the quadrangle. Not this.

MARCH 30. ”

“Well? How does he stand?”

“He wouldn’t promise.

“For me,” said Aunt Kate, who had been picking a bone, “there was only
one tenor.

“There was others at her before me,” said Corley philosophically. O Mary,
refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O Virgin Undefiled, save him from the
gulf of death!

The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. At first Mr Bartell
D’Arcy refused to take either but one of his neighbours nudged him and
whispered something to him upon which he allowed his glass to be filled.

He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt's kitchen. No memory of the
past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy. Or if Mangan’s
sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched
her from our shadow peer up and down the street. He longed to cry to her from
his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her.

In the dressing-room behind the stage she was introduced to the secretary of
the Society, Mr Fitzpatrick. When the strain of the silence had become somewhat
painful Miss Healy said to the baritone:

“Have you seen Mrs Pat Campbell this week?”

The baritone had not seen her but he had been told that she was very fine. The
decisive expression of her great florid face satisfied her and she thought of
some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands. The
room had already cleared and from the back room came the clatter of plates and
knives.

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly's eyes back from a calm survey
of the walls of the hall. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. She had been made awkward by her not
wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have
connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that
kind always made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought
that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother’s
tolerance. . . It’s not exactly a sermon, you know. Yet he must get money
somewhere or other: he had spent his last penny for the g. Air, musty from
having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the
kitchen was littered with old useless papers. ”

“You’d better speak to Mr Fitzpatrick,” said Mr Holohan distantly. “And
I’m sure now that he’s gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and
all your kindness to him. It was lovely to be tired. He wanted to sin with
another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with
her in sin. To him she would unveil her soul's shy nakedness, to one who was
but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest
of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the
radiant body of everliving life. He was fond of using soldiers’ obscenities:
usually he came home in the small hours. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an
ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious
practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did
you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit,
that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor?
Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third
or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God
who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time
for repentance has gone by. . Thanks. ”

Mr Henchy returned with the candlestick and put it on the table. 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. He tried to soothe it but it sobbed more convulsively. She
had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him
with her rabbit’s eyes. He was thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, so
that youth could not be pleaded as his excuse; nor could ignorance be his
excuse since he was a man who had seen something of the world. He told too of
how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of
how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to _Let me like a Soldier
fall_, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would
sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great
_prima donna_ and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. They
took the train at Westland Row and in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy,
they were walking out of Kingstown Station. A dim antagonism gathered force
within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty and when it
passed, cloud-like, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he
was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their
lives. All the resident young men spoke of her as _The Madam_. No one knew who
he was but one of the curates said he had served the gentleman with a small
rum. You ought to come. He wanted to say that literature was above politics.

She was about to explore another life with Frank.

“This lad,” said Mr Henchy.

“Of course I’m right,” said Mr Cunningham. I meant about the. Then,
turning to Cranly, he said:

--Good evening, particularly to you. Even if he sent her the verses she would
not show them to others.

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the
direction of the Tsar's image, saying:

--Keep your icon. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said:

--We all know why you speak. 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. It must have been
a good speech. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the
hall was in darkness. There was no noise on the playgrounds. The man passed
through the crowd, looking on the spectacle generally with proud satisfaction
and staring masterfully at the office-girls.

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and
strange. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. He took them as
a warning and, glancing back towards the house which the young woman had
entered to see that he was not observed, he ran eagerly across the road.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty. The glories of Mary
held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing her
royal lineage, her emblems, the late-flowering plant and late-blossoming tree,
symbolizing the age-long gradual growth of her cultus among men. He found
something mean in the pretty furniture which he had bought for his house on the
hire system. Now time lay between: the oils of ordination would never anoint
his body.

--What funnel? asked Stephen. Let us have the story anyhow. The penitent came
out. Joe was a good fellow. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater
part of the hall was in darkness.

APRIL 27.

“That affected his mind,” she said. He felt completely out-generalled. All
the lodgers in the house knew something of the affair; details had been
invented by some. Then, as if he had been unaware of the man’s presence till
that moment, he shot up his head again, saying:

“Eh? Are you going to stand there all day? Upon my word, Farrington, you take
things easy!”

“I was waiting to see.

--Hell, Temple said. . spiritual matter. ”

“O,” said Mr Kernan. ”

Ignatius Gallaher slapped his friend sonorously on the back. “O’Hara seems
to be in a bad way. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she
cried. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen lance
transfixing that sacred and loving heart. Then next Sunday, man, I met her by
appointment. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious
bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. They were not to eat of the
fruit of the forbidden tree. Yes. He was judged. He described to me how he
would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. At the
corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in
the shape of a star. Sorry because he was afraid. He could not strive against
another. He would tell all his sins. Did he bring his crocodile? Is he the
shining light now? Well, I discovered him.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke
was humble and indifferent. As he passed Lenehan took off his cap and, after
about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute to the air. And Stephen smiled too
for he knew now that it was not true that Mr Casey had a purse of silver in his
throat. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. ”

Mr Henchy began to snuffle and to rub his hands over the fire at a terrific
speed.

“I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “to have too much to say
to a man like that. I ask you if you ever felt love towards anyone or anything?

Stephen walked on beside his friend, staring gloomily at the footpath. In other
words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud
address an echo of his own proud musings. Devotion had gone by the board. He
might die before his mother came. He often wondered what his grand-uncle prayed
for so seriously. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his
intellectual life with her. Would he never get a good job? Would he never have
a home of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to
sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. Bravo Lancaster! The red rose wins. In
the silence of the soft grey air he heard the cricket bats from here and from
there: pock.

The stroke was playful but not so lightly given as the first one had been. It
was like waves. Madam Glynn took her stand in a corner of the room, holding a
roll of music stiffly before her and from time to time changing the direction
of her startled gaze. In this case the monosyllable had a moral intention. He
would know then what was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the
Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness.

A second shrill whistle, prolonged angrily, brought one of the girls to the
foot of the staircase.

--And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend,
more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. He was excited and
breathless. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry. He asked
himself what else could he have done. But she wanted to live. But the family
would look down on her.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically. “Leave it to me,
can’t you?”

Lenehan said no more.

“The Isle of Man!” he said. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he
to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have
been, sitting night after night alone in that room. Why, when I was a nipper
every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer. The moist blue
eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once
or twice mechanically when it closed. A graceful image of his, he thought, and
a just one. He laughed almost slyly and pressed Stephen's arm with an elder's
affection. The fourth member of the party, however, was too excited to be
genuinely happy. But the faint smell of the rector's breath had made him feel a
sick feeling on the morning of his first communion. A doorway, a room, the same
room, same window. The bell rang.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin. He walked onward,
dismayed, wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. He
began to rock it to and fro in his arms but its wailing cry grew keener. She
was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door.
A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and
like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat
slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold,
fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds. Their trim
boots prattled as they stood on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and
gaily, glancing at the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles
against the few last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts
demurely. Joe was a good fellow. ”

“Well; and then?” asked Gabriel. It humiliated and shamed him to think that
he would never be freed from it wholly, however holily he might live or
whatever virtues or perfections he might attain. At the first bend of the road
I looked back and she was standing at the door.

--Well, they drank that and it was found out who did it by the smell. 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. He told
himself that it was simply his room with the door open. Her head was leaned
against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty
cretonne.

He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice
was singing and gazing up at his wife.

In the vestry a plump fresh-faced jesuit and an elderly man, in shabby blue
clothes, were dabbling in a case of paints and chalks. Villona returned quietly
to his piano and played voluntaries for them. But as soon as his father-in-law
was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil.

He turned to the right towards Capel Street. But him no woman's eyes had wooed.
Yes? What? Yes? His flesh shrank together as it felt the approach of the
ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about it the swirl of stifling
air. Either they went to the left towards the Dublin mountains or along the
Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum, coming home by Sandyford. Lily, the
caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for them. The firmament was as a
scroll rolled away. He was not foxing. He had a high opinion of Mr Cunningham
as a judge of character and as a reader of faces. He had often thought it
strange that Vincent Heron had a bird's face as well as a bird's name. ”

“And everything. “That’ll be the most convenient place. ”

“Indeed, that’s true,” said my aunt. After early nightfall the yellow
lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. Time
is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge
in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of
your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the
beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to
guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. Time is, time was, but time
shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and
pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature,
to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field,
for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was,
but time shall be no more. In a quiet bystreet a German band of five players in
faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience
of street arabs and leisurely messenger boys. Then an impromptu square dance,
the men devising original figures. The space of sky above us was the colour of
ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble
lanterns.

“Who’s playing up there?” asked Gabriel.

The child, hearing its mother’s voice, broke out into a paroxysm of sobbing.
White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea. He pointed down the
snow-covered quay from where the sound of shrill prolonged whistling was borne
in. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if
they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as
this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in
our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world
will not willingly let die. The whole conclave except these two was unanimous.
We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone
walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at
for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts.

The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and yet the
shaft came back to its bowstring; for he saw in a moment the student's
whey-pale face. Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some
clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair
on his chest. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names
of the different services.

His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned
from its sleep to hear its doom. We have had too much God In Ireland.

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.

--Do you know what limbo is? he cried. I want to go home.

Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life.
Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. She has no priest to flirt with,
he thought with conscious bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last.

--He had, faith, Temple said. A voice spoke softly to Stephen's lonely heart,
bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to an end. ”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza.

“Father Purdon? Father Purdon?” said the invalid. Of course the girl or
woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all
things. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his handiwork. ”

“There’s no tumblers,” said the old man. It is before you must weigh
well, not after.

--Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of his
fingers in adieu. The porter halted on the stairs to settle his guttering
candle. What with your name and your ideas--Are you Irish at all?

--Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my
family, said Stephen. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle
and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. She answered
placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and that the captain had been
most attentive to her. Useless. She is not out yet. Am I alarmed? About what?
That she will never be out again. I understand it so. The world, it seems, is
drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. What, then, had become of that
deep-rooted shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a
strange roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made
him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. Then he smelt it with both nostrils, bit a
tiny piece, spat it out and threw the fig rudely into the gutter.

--And which are they taking? asked the fellow who had spoken first. When he
brought the blouse home Annie kissed him and said it was very pretty and
stylish; but when she heard the price she threw the blouse on the table and
said it was a regular swindle to charge ten and elevenpence for it. He had not
intended to stay a moment because concerts and _artistes_ bored him
considerably but he remained leaning against the mantelpiece. You remember the
pigs and forget that. As he walked on slowly, timing his pace to theirs, he
watched Corley’s head which turned at every moment towards the young
woman’s face like a big ball revolving on a pivot. The cabin door opened and
he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of grey light:

“Daybreak, gentlemen!”





TWO GALLANTS

THE grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm
air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. Then, turning to Cranly, he
said:

--Good evening, particularly to you. “He hasn’t got those little pigs’
eyes for nothing. . . over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Conroy. He goes in to represent the labour classes. People
used to say that Ignatius Gallaher was wild. The song seemed to be in the old
Irish tonality and the singer seemed uncertain both of his words and of his
voice.

--No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean--

--Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: DETAIN. Mr
Cunningham said:

“It is supposed--they say, you know--to take place in the depot where they
get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill.

Dublin was a new and complex sensation. She cried and threw her arms round his
neck, saying:

“O Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?”

She would put an end to herself, she said. Asked Davin if he might offer him
some refreshment. Then he resumed:

--Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that
abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into
existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. He came to the woman, the
weaker vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence into her ear, promising
her--O, the blasphemy of that promise!--that if she and Adam ate of the
forbidden fruit they would become as gods, nay as God Himself.

Lynch nodded. Brother Quaid. Brother Keogh. Brother MacArdle. Brother MacArdle.
--

Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their clothes,
and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and contrite hearts,
it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a
gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. God would look down
on him and on them and would love them all. In hell, on the contrary, one
torment, instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and,
moreover, as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses,
so are they more capable of suffering. He sang his music with great feeling and
volume and was warmly welcomed by the gallery; but, unfortunately, he marred
the good impression by wiping his nose in his gloved hand once or twice out of
thoughtlessness.

--But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were all to come? Temple
said, his eyes searching Glynn's eyes. Thought this in bed last night but was
too lazy and free to add to it.

--Next business? said MacCann.

“‘Course he is,” said Mr Kernan, “and a damned decent Orangeman too.

“Righto!” said Mr Cunningham promptly. “Next year I may take a little
skip over here now that I’ve broken the ice. Then he took up the corkscrew
and went out of the door sideways, muttering some form of salutation. It was a
holy place. ‘He has extensive house property in the city and three places of
business and isn’t it to his own advantage to keep down the rates? He’s a
prominent and respected citizen,’ said I, ‘and a Poor Law Guardian, and he
doesn’t belong to any party, good, bad, or indifferent. Was that not desire?

--I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. Her name sprang to my lips at
moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.

--Broke? What is this I hear? What is this? Your name is! said the prefect of
studies. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got
broken. This furious music allayed his dread and, leaning against the
windowledge, he let his eyelids close again. Was she sincere? Had she really
any life of her own behind all her propagandism? There had never been any
ill-feeling between them until that night.

But Lenehan could well believe it; he nodded gravely. He can have me. Did he
bring his crocodile? Is he the shining light now? Well, I discovered him. Dante
covered her plate with her hands and said:

--No, thanks. How simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all
before him. He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he
had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his
mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. . . . I’ve spent
a lot of money’? Mean little shoeboy of hell! I suppose he forgets the time
his little old father kept the hand-me-down shop in Mary’s Lane.

They shook hands. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas
will carry me all along the line. I remember Crofton saying to me when we came
out----”

“But he’s an Orangeman, Crofton, isn’t he?” said Mr Power. “You can
never know women. ”

“She’s all right,” said Corley.

“I was told to ask for the bottles.

“Sit down, Joe,” said Mr O’Connor, “we’re just talking about the
Chief. Her name was Mrs Sinico. Gretta caught a dreadful cold. ’ But, sure,
it’s worse whenever he gets a job; he drinks it all. He had felt proud and
happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. Are
you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim. He is said
to have baptized as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month.

--We are assembled here today, my dear little brothers in Christ, for one brief
moment far away from the busy bustle of the outer world to celebrate and to
honour one of the greatest of saints, the apostle of the Indies, the patron
saint also of your college, saint Francis Xavier. The reporter called it a
tragic death.

He was a tall, slender young man with a light brown moustache. She was
preparing to go away with her companions. But one thing only, he said, he would
ask of his hearers. That's why she came with me to the tram.

Of course, the investment was a good one and Ségouin had managed to give the
impression that it was by a favour of friendship the mite of Irish money was to
be included in the capital of the concern.

But his voice was no longer angry and Stephen wondered was he thinking of her
greeting to him under the porch. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated,
reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were. My heart is quite calm
now. O, Erin, mourn with grief and woe For he lies dead whom the fell gang Of
modern hypocrites laid low. Then the two next-door girls handed round the nuts.

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. No one wanted him; he
was outcast from life’s feast. They said you got stinking stuff to drink when
you were in the infirmary.

Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in the
field, hither and thither. And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy
patron saint, the first martyr, who is very powerful with God, that God may
enlighten your mind. The best helpers the language has. She held an open book
on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed
in a man-o’-war suit, lay at her feet.

He leaned back weakly in his desk.

--CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA
MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS.

My aunt brought the dish from the safe and put it on the table.

--And was he annoyed, Simon?

--Annoyed? Not he! MANLY LITTLE CHAP! he said. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the
straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin. They sat together in
class, knelt together in the chapel, talked together after beads over their
lunches. Maria superintended the distribution of the barmbrack and saw that
every woman got her four slices.

He produced four candle-butts from the side-pockets of his soutane and placed
them deftly among the coals and twisted papers. . . naughty girl. You needn’t
sham: You know I am. Then I should have to like it also.

--He had, faith, Temple said. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no
light.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced
him gaily and gravely. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look,
they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul,
poignant and self-embittered.

“Miss Furlong, what shall I send you?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mr Cunningham.

Dr Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that
the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions
of the right shoulder.

Dixon smiled and turned his ring. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until
we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the
Pigeon House. They began to exchange stories. His father, remonstrative, but
covertly proud of the excess, had paid his bills and brought him home. The
granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with
my hands in time to an air in my head. It was something to have a friend like
that. Farrington was just standing another round when Weathers came back. And
there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell's Spelling Book.

“O, do go, Gabriel,” she cried. The pandybat came down on it with a loud
smacking sound: one, two, three, four, five, six. ”

The porter took up his candle again, but slowly for he was surprised by such a
novel idea. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms
are often confused. There was a pause of a few seconds: and then the piano was
heard. He was sick then. Why?

He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to the thin
wooden bridge he felt the planks shaking with the tramp of heavily shod feet.
We never can say what is in us. Cork is a city. He had spoken of himself, of
his own loneliness which he feared. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated
me when I was a young chap. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending
to the child’s face he shouted:

“Stop!”

The child stopped for an instant, had a spasm of fright and began to scream.
Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own
name. The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot. Term,
vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to
bed to sleep. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world;
and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost
affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him. He stood
up to put on his coat and waistcoat, more helpless than ever. The adventure of
meeting Gallaher after eight years, of finding himself with Gallaher in
Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of listening to Gallaher’s
stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s vagrant and triumphant
life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. 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.
Farrington’s eyes wandered at every moment in the direction of one of the
young women.

“It’s such a relief,” said Aunt Kate to Mrs Conroy, “that Gabriel is
here. I give them monthly examinations to see that they are profiting by my
tuition. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for
him. He was sorry. 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. J.

His name in that new life leaped into characters before his eyes and to it
there followed a mental sensation of an undefined face or colour of a face.

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
travelling slowly, a tall overcoated figure and a hard hat. ”

His wizened face broke into a broader smile, and the three young ladies laughed
in musical echo to his pleasantry, swaying their bodies to and fro, with
nervous jerks of their shoulders. . . Or was it that----?”

Mr Fogarty interrupted.

It was the signal for their onset. He would fall.

The Priest was silent.

He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said:

--What's up? Have you a pain or what's up with you?

--I don't know, Stephen said. ”

“I often told Julia,” said Aunt Kate emphatically, “that she was simply
thrown away in that choir. Let me ask you a question. Yes, it was her body he
smelt, a wild and languid smell, the tepid limbs over which his music had
flowed desirously and the secret soft linen upon which her flesh distilled
odour and a dew. O how could they laugh about it that way?

He looked at Athy's rolled-up sleeves and knuckly inky hands. It may be uphill
pedalling at first. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that
bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. As long as you commit that sin, my poor
child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. ”

“Of course, the working-classes should be represented,” said the old man.

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. He suffered its agony. Even he was sensible of the
decorous atmosphere and even he began to respond to the religious stimulus.
While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable
mare round the field. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and
curse them. She answered placidly that she had had a beautiful crossing and
that the captain had been most attentive to her. In her home anyway she had
shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her.

“Is it to be the last?” he said. The corridors were darkly lit and the
chapel was darkly lit. Miss Delacour was a middle-aged woman of Jewish
appearance. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite,
whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. He asked what they did
it for.

“Well?” he said.

--O, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus.

The grin broadened on Nash's freckled face as he turned to Stephen and said:

--And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?

--O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the other two
in explanation, of course he's not a poet. As for Freddy Malins he was
speechless with laughter. But perhaps it was only the result of living in
London amid the bustle and competition of the Press. A dull yellow light
brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending. And
the time of dreaming Dreams is over-- As lover to lover,

Sweetheart, I come. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin.
All the lodgers in the house knew something of the affair; details had been
invented by some.

--And was he annoyed, Simon?

--Annoyed? Not he! MANLY LITTLE CHAP! he said. Are your doubts on that point
too strong?

--I do not wish to overcome them, Stephen answered.

--God and religion before everything! Dante cried. He laughed almost slyly and
pressed Stephen's arm with an elder's affection.







XXII

Of that so sweet imprisonment My soul, dearest, is fain-- Soft arms that woo me
to relent And woo me to detain.

“Good-night, Dan,” he said gaily. And when I was only a week in the convent
he died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. The boys
answered him phrase by phrase. He made light of his accident. Marx is only a
bloody cod. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket
money.

“You know you can’t kid me, Corley,” he said.

“God!” he exclaimed, resuming his natural face, “I never saw such an eye
in a man’s head.

--Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Did you ever see such a
go-by-the-wall?

His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against
the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The voice, made plaintive by
distance and by the singer’s hoarseness, faintly illuminated the cadence of
the air with words expressing grief:



O, the rain falls on my heavy locks And the dew wets my skin, My babe lies
cold. 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.

--I see.

Stephen smiled at this side-thrust. . . . . . . . What?”

His bright, small eyes searched his companion’s face for reassurance.
“Tricky Dicky Tierney. ”

“O, he’s as tricky as they make ‘em,” said Mr Henchy. “That showed
the faith he had. 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. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her
five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip.
How characterless they looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis
without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Connolly without his Norfolk
coat with the flapless side-pockets! It was a pain to see them, and a
sword-like pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their
pitiable nakedness. One hand played in the bass the melody of _Silent, O
Moyle_, while the other hand careered in the treble after each group of notes.
She died on the instant. You know that well. By hell, I saw that at once. If
they didn’t pay her to the last farthing she would make Dublin ring. She set
these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Soft language
issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and
round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their
long tails amid the rattling canisters. He held her hand and she knew that he
was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. I
remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. They
were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.
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. God
spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear.

He stood, holding her head between his hands. Still it was early. Jimmy, under
generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life within
him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last.

Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the
playground. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from
his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I
don't think that it has a meaning, but the true and the beautiful are akin.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke
was humble and indifferent. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. It would be
splendid for Gretta too if she’d come. ”

A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin, who
was passing out with his partner said:

“And may we have some refreshment, too, Miss Morkan?”

“Julia,” said Aunt Kate summarily, “and here’s Mr Browne and Miss
Furlong. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a
flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. Perhaps you are
the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself. This union exalted
him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life.
“O’Hara seems to be in a bad way. Into the grave with it. No. You would
not. ”

“Have you seen Paris?”

“I should think I have! I’ve knocked about there a little. ”

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores. The sergeant makes them
stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates.



* * * * *



He could wait no longer.

--The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all
admire a different type of female beauty. Amen.

The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. And Ginger Mooney was
always saying what she wouldn’t do to the dummy who had charge of the irons
if it wasn’t for Maria. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation,
because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete,
Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin
beyond forgiveness, the eternal mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the
priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of
fire. Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway, smoking, and before
he reached them he had recognised Heron by his voice. He was fond of using
soldiers’ obscenities: usually he came home in the small hours. He began to
talk of the weather, saying that it would be a very hot summer and adding that
the seasons had changed greatly since he was a boy--a long time ago. The
injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal person. A dull
yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be
descending. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. Ideas! Why,
that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas.

Blinded by his tears and by the light of God's mercifulness he bent his head
and heard the grave words of absolution spoken and saw the priest's hand raised
above him in token of forgiveness. The car steered out slowly for Grafton
Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers. 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. The class must be doing
the themes or perhaps Father Arnall was reading out of the book. Only they
don’t believe in the Pope and in the mother of God. I need hardly remind you
that during the days of the retreat all boys are expected to preserve a quiet
and pious demeanour and to shun all loud unseemly pleasure. . . to cook it,
pa,” said the little boy.

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:

IMPLETA SUNT QUAE CONCINIT DAVID FIDELI CARMINE DICENDO NATIONIBUS REGNAVIT A
LIGNO DEUS. But I don't believe they will be flogged. Perhaps they will be sent
up for twice nine.

--I don't care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of reach
of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen.

Mrs Kearney brought her daughter over to them, and talked to them amiably.
Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. Mother asked
it back.

When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and the old
washing glove flung on the side of it he allowed his mother to scrub his neck
and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of
his nose. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning
mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as
if I had been freed from something by his death. Confess! He had to confess
every sin.



MY EXCELLENT FRIEND BOMBADOS. . . . . . . . ”

“Very good, you needn’t wait to see. I supple and suave.

“O, Mr D’Arcy,” cried Mary Jane, “it’s downright mean of you to break
off like that when we were all in raptures listening to you. ”

“Yes, yes, Miss Morkan is right,” said Mr Browne. It was as much as to say:
_I have you properly taped, my lad_. He could remember only that she had worn a
shawl about her head like a cowl and that her dark eyes had invited and
unnerved him. It is a good odour to breathe. He yawned again. ”

“Ah!. Saw her drinking tea and eating cakes in Johnston's, Mooney and
O'Brien's. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England.
”

“On the photograph!” exclaimed Mr Kernan. Simultaneously Mr Alleyne, a
little man wearing gold-rimmed glasses on a clean-shaven face, shot his head up
over a pile of documents. . I couldn’t. Here we are gathered together for a
brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine. She stuck her
ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco
juice.

It was easy to be good. QUASI PALMA EXALTATA SUM IN GADES ET QUASI PLANTATIO
ROSAE IN JERICHO. She doesn’t know my name. She took out her purse with the
silver clasps and read again the words _A Present from Belfast_. His face was
very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by
a scanty white fur. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. As the
husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr Duffy had
many opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. The first tenor and the
baritone and Miss Healy stood together, waiting tranquilly, but Mr Bell’s
nerves were greatly agitated because he was afraid the audience would think
that he had come late. Father Arnall sat at a table to the left of the altar.

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. All at once the idea
struck him that perhaps Corley had seen her home by another way and given him
the slip. She had her Sunday finery on. A little boy came running down the
stairs. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle-lamps.

Gabriel took his seat boldly at the head of the table and, having looked to the
edge of the carver, plunged his fork firmly into the goose. Some things he
could not vouch for (his friends had told him), but of others he had had
personal experience. “I couldn’t think of the name. Old servants in old
dress were in the ironing-room above the staircase. That's the real Ally Daly.
The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with
a gaily coloured crowd.

Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of
enchanted days. I used to take them out, man, on the tram somewhere and pay the
tram or take them to a band or a play at the theatre or buy them chocolate and
sweets or something that way. All the leisure which his school life left him
was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of
speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his
crude writings. The moon was blood-red. It was seventeen minutes past eleven:
she would have lots of time to have the matter out with Mr Doran and then catch
short twelve at Marlborough Street. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a
convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. What can't be cured, sure,
Must be injured, sure, So I'll go to Amerikay.

--I sir? Why, sir?

A little wave of quiet mirth broke forth over the class of boys from the
rector's grim smile. 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. The gang made
forays into the gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a
battle on the shaggy weed-grown 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.

At the moment Aunt Kate came toddling out of the supper-room, almost wringing
her hands in despair. It was not even the way in which he thought of her.
It’s capital we want. Come away.

They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking.

No escape. Tom. ”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s out at the chapel. A doorway, a room, the same room, same window. It
was pleasant after that honour to return to the profane world of spectators
amid nudges and significant looks.

--That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. B. Patterson Finlay, on
behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the accident. They
were all friends of the Kearneys--musical friends or Nationalist friends; and,
when they had played every little counter of gossip, they shook hands with one
another all together, laughing at the crossing of so many hands, and said
good-bye to one another in Irish. All that had been denied them had been freely
given to him, the eldest; but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their
faces no sign of rancour.











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. The
clatter of forks and spoons began again. Like a scene on some vague arras, old
as man's weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to
him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of
subjection than in the days of the thingmote.

--O. The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the language I have
heard this evening. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those
whom she had known all her life about her. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a
cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide field. His bed was very hot
and his face and body were very hot. 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. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had
met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. The verses passed from his
lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from
his brain to force a passage. He approached the young woman and, without
saluting, began at once to converse with her. He stood up from his desk and,
lifting the counter as before, passed out of the office. They sat well back and
gazed formally at the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the
high altar. Tell no more of enchanted days. . . . . He’s a queer old
josser!”

“In case he asks us for our names,” I said, “let you be Murphy and I’ll
be Smith. MacCann stood his ground and said with hostile humour:

--Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of
universal peace. That was all to make him laugh. An idea came into his mind and
gave him courage. Gabriel went on more boldly:

“I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no
tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously
as that of its hospitality. Now, then! There's a memory for you!

--That's three generations--four generations, said another of the company.

--What funnel? asked Stephen. Tell the rector, all said. It was well for her
she had not to attend to the ladies also. The frail gay sound smote his heart
more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned
aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. In a few
minutes the women began to come in by twos and threes, wiping their steaming
hands in their petticoats and pulling down the sleeves of their blouses over
their red steaming arms. Nasty Roche had big hands. There had been no mass for
the dead in the chapel and no procession. ” Very good: that was one for Miss
Ivors.

“Well, I hope, Miss Morkan,” said Mr Browne, “that I’m brown enough for
you because, you know, I’m all brown. Old father, old artificer, stand me now
and ever in good stead. All the resident young men spoke of her as _The Madam_.
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.

He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he
would be transfigured.

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with
good humour. Cheers for the rector!

Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!

The cars drove past the chapel and all caps were raised. The shock which had
first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves.

--CORPUS DOMINI NOSTRI.

“Browne is everywhere,” said Aunt Kate, lowering her voice. . . .

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession.
This is the last and deepest and most cruel sting of the worm of conscience.

“Well, isn’t Freddy terrible?” said Mary Jane. “Is he coming down,
Gretta?”

Gabriel heard his wife answer yes and saw her come down towards them. The
peasant women stood at the half-doors, the men stood here and there. ”

“Why didn’t you remind him?” said Mr O’Connor.

“I am afraid you didn’t enjoy yourself at all,” said Mary Jane
hopelessly.

--What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense of the
word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition. But his dark
eyes were never fierce and his slow voice was good to listen to. He thought of
them as men who washed their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold
linen. But I don't believe they will be flogged. Every night as I gazed up at
the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.

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 allowed, because a priest
would know what a sin was and would not do it. Place your finger for a moment
in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. At other times
they remembered his good points. He kept his hands in the side pockets of his
belted grey suit. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to
it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost. Great parcels
of groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. It would
rain for ever, noiselessly.

--O yes, Stephen said. “She’ll be there all right. I always let her wait a
bit. 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. Do you know what Giraldus Cambrensis
says about your family?

--Is he descended from Baldwin too? asked a tall consumptive student with dark
eyes. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he
observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. Everybody had a solution for
the mystery and Mrs Donnelly said it was plain that Maria had left it behind
her in the tram. He was glad of its rattling noise as it saved him from
conversation. He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live
happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little
of the ready. I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. But then they got hot
and then he could sleep.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his
head. No, I never heard your voice so good as it is tonight. The world, it
seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. Mr Holohan called to see her
every day to have her advice on some point. She seemed to be somewhat
disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down
behind her sister. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden
music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them
painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sand-built turrets of
children. At the door Dante turned round violently 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. They had hardly gone when Aunt Julia wandered
slowly into the room, looking behind her at something. The pages of his
time-worn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were
cold; they were human pages and fifty years before they had been turned by the
human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm
Inverarity. As he walked on slowly, timing his pace to theirs, he watched
Corley’s head which turned at every moment towards the young woman’s face
like a big ball revolving on a pivot. Farrington’s dark wine-coloured face
flushed darker still with anger and humiliation at having been defeated by such
a stripling. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. It’s just kind of a friendly talk,
you know, in a common-sense way. It was true that he wrote a literary column
every Wednesday in _The Daily Express_, for which he was paid fifteen
shillings. Lynch's idea. Dislike it. ”

“Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” said Gabriel, almost trotting to the
stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation. Why was it that when he
thought of Cranly he could never raise before his mind the entire image of his
body but only the image of the head and face? Even now against the grey curtain
of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a
severed head or death-mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright
hair as by an iron crown. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his
whole being. Gabriel paused for a few moments, watching her, and then said:

“Gretta!”

She turned away from the mirror slowly and walked along the shaft of light
towards him. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. Malone Chandler. He would
speak to Gallaher about it. He wanted to say that literature was above
politics. Shrinking from that life he turned towards the wall, making a cowl of
the blanket and staring at the great overblown scarlet flowers of the tattered
wallpaper.







XXI

He who hath glory lost, nor hath Found any soul to fellow his, Among his foes
in scorn and wrath Holding to ancient nobleness, That high unconsortable one--
His love is his companion. The figure of his old master, so strangely
re-arisen, brought back to Stephen's mind his life at Clongowes: the wide
playgrounds, swarming with boys; the square ditch; the little cemetery off the
main avenue of limes where he had dreamed of being buried; the firelight on the
wall of the infirmary where he lay sick; the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.
Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example
he shows to others. The bar was full of men and loud with the noise of tongues
and glasses. ”

Aunt Kate turned to Mr Browne, who was grinning at this allusion to his
religion, and said hastily:

“O, I don’t question the pope’s being right. The man saluted and said:

“A prosperous New Year to you, sir.

--Good? Yes. God's yoke was sweet and light. He’s fond of his glass of grog
and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. . . I say,
Tommy, don’t make punch of that whisky: liquor up. Sometimes talks to girls
after nightfall. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. 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.

“Now, I ask you,” she said almost testily, “where is Julia going? Julia!
Julia! Where are you going?”

Julia, who had gone half way down one flight, came back and announced blandly:

“Here’s Freddy.

“Well, I’m ashamed of you,” said Miss Ivors frankly. His mind seemed
older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets
like a moon upon a younger earth.

--What is it for?

--QUOD?

--What is it for?

Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said blandly and bitterly:

--PER PAX UNIVERSALIS. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but
the cat escaped into a wide field. This was not altogether pleasant for him, as
he had nearly always to make a deft guess at the meaning and shout back a
suitable answer in the face of a high wind. On the dresser was a plate of
sausages and white pudding and on the shelf there were eggs. It awakens, or
ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal
pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last
dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

“What is the matter, Julia?” asked Aunt Kate anxiously. 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. Like Ignatius
he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius's enthusiasm. A long
thin cane would have a high whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain
like.







XXII

Of that so sweet imprisonment My soul, dearest, is fain-- Soft arms that woo me
to relent And woo me to detain. It is a good odour to breathe. Soon they would
be going home for the holidays. Let us drink to their health, wealth, long
life, happiness and prosperity and may they long continue to hold the proud and
self-won position which they hold in their profession and the position of
honour and affection which they hold in our hearts. I saw that he had great
gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Then he resumed:

--Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that
abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into
existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. No, no; she could not. I was
too hairy to tell her that. Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked
her. ”

Mr Holohan seemed to be in a hurry; he advised her to speak to Mr Fitzpatrick.
He told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs. Mr Alleyne was said to be
sweet on her or on her money. ”

“O. “I forget the subject of his discourse now. She leaned lightly on his
arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few hours before. Why did you
tell me those things?

--Thanks, said Stephen. I was still considering whether I would go away or not
when the man came back and sat down beside us again. Whenever I’d bring in
his soup to him there I’d find him with his breviary fallen to the floor,
lying back in the chair and his mouth open. His blood was in revolt. He
returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate. But what is limbo?

--Put him back into the perambulator, Cranly, O'Keeffe called out.

At the moment Aunt Kate came toddling out of the supper-room, almost wringing
her hands in despair.

--If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no
such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own
laws. “Now, Joe!”

Mr Hynes hesitated a little longer. He shoved it back and in the shadow of the
trees Stephen saw his pale face, framed by the dark, and his large dark eyes.
You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. It was an elfin
prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames
leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs and grasses wild
creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves. What
excitement! Jimmy was excited too; he would lose, of course. ”

Mr Cunningham gave a qualified assent. ”

“They say,” said Mary Jane, “we haven’t had snow like it for thirty
years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all
over Ireland. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a
clock that it was ten minutes to ten. She sang _I Dreamt that I Dwelt_, and
when she came to the second verse she sang again:



_I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side And of
all who assembled within those walls That I was the hope and the pride. As he
walked on he preconsidered the terms in which he would narrate the incident to
the boys:

“So, I just looked at him--coolly, you know, and looked at her. You know what
they are, I suppose?”

“I’ve heard of them,” said Little Chandler. Weathers was showing his
biceps muscle to the company and boasting so much that the other two had called
on Farrington to uphold the national honour. The tone of her voice was not
encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty.

The slide was shot back.

His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of THE COUNT
OF MONTE CRISTO. A frightful hole he said it was.

“How could they be anything else, Tom?” he said. But I must leave tomorrow
night. ”





THE DEAD

LILY, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. He moved his
head slowly to right and left and from the manager to the person on the floor,
as if he feared to be the victim of some delusion. _

He paused. ”

He was in such a fever of rage and desire that he did not hear her come from
the window. ”

“That’s true,” said Mr O’Connor.

“But tell me,” said Lenehan again, “are you sure you can bring it off all
right? You know it’s a ticklish job. He's going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson.
But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know. That time is gone: gone for
ever. If they didn’t pay her to the last farthing she would make Dublin ring.
He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion at
the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the back of
one of his father's second moiety notices. But we are living in a sceptical
and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear
that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those
qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an
older day.

--A thimbleful, John, he said, just to whet your appetite. His sins trickled
from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering
and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. Then an impromptu square
dance, the men devising original figures. She died on the instant.

His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. ”

“He looks quite resigned,” said my aunt. “Weren’t some of the popes--of
course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes--not
exactly. A few of the faithful still lingered praying before one of the
side-altars or kneeling in the benches near the confessionals.

--We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our
Maker and not to hear election addresses. Mr Fitzpatrick, who did not catch the
point at issue very quickly, seemed unable to resolve the difficulty and said
that he would bring the matter before the Committee. No.

At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. He loved you as only
a God can love. Weathers said he would take a small Irish and Apollinaris. So
long and cruel they were, though the white fattish hands were not cruel but
gentle.

He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly:

--Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?

Cranly pointed his long forefinger.

The prefect's shoes went away. 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.

A voice said:

--Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement than in it. . . God
forgive me,” he added, “I thought he was the dozen of stout. 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. The lady who sat
next him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:

“What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It’s so hard on people to
have to sing to empty benches. The cars were rolling on the gravel. Consider
then what must be the foulness of the air of hell.

--Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege?
For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

--I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. The air of wealth and repose
diffused about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Temple turned back to
Stephen and asked:

--Do you believe in the law of heredity?

--Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked Cranly,
facing round on him with an expression of wonder. If ever he had seen himself
celebrant it was as in the pictures of the mass in his child's massbook, in a
church without worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare
altar, and served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. He was
excited and breathless. They called us all the names in the world. The five
young men had various tastes and their tongues had been loosened. What was
after the universe?

Nothing. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of
wine. The veins stood out on Farrington’s forehead, and the pallor of
Weathers’ complexion changed to peony.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his body.

Mr Dedalus turned to uncle Charles.

Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob.
He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a
tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. ”

“I often told Julia,” said Aunt Kate emphatically, “that she was simply
thrown away in that choir.

--Do you mean women?

--I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. A feverish
quickening of his pulses followed, and a din of meaningless words drove his
reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly.

“I could only get one cab,” he said.

--Give me a kiss, she said. A certain pride mingled with his parents’
trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play fast and loose for the names of
great foreign cities have at least this virtue. Dixon turned towards him,
saying in a soft voice:

--Did an angel speak?

Cranly turned also and said vehemently but without anger:

--Goggins, you're the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know. I know
how it has changed you. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your
spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom. He took up his pen and
dipped it in the ink but he continued to stare stupidly at the last words he
had written: _In no case shall the said Bernard Bodley be. Instinctively he
turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon
his forehead. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost
painlessly; and, bowing submissively, as if to meet his companion's jesting
mood, began to recite the CONFITEOR.







XII

What counsel has the hooded moon Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet, Of Love in
ancient plenilune, Glory and stars beneath his feet-- A sage that is but kith
and kin With the comedian Capuchin?

Believe me rather that am wise In disregard of the divine, A glory kindles in
those eyes Trembles to starlight.

Mr Kernan sent a letter to his office next day and remained in bed. It means
certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. But there’s such a thing as common
everyday politeness and gratitude. I bent down to her and PHTH! says I to her
like that.

Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of MacCann's flushed
blunt-featured face. People used to say that Ignatius Gallaher was wild. As he
did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their
ruined confessional they met in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. The
sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates.

--If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no
such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own
laws. ”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling. A dull yellow
light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be
descending. It was something to have a friend like that. .

A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:

--Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied
science. They passed the farmhouse of the Jolly Farmer. Such a person (as his
father agreed) was well worth knowing, even if he had not been the charming
companion he was. The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from
cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its
afterglow. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study till the new
glasses came. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours.

“The youngster and he were great friends. She was red in the face. It was
falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling
softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the
dark mutinous Shannon waves. God could see that he was sorry. After a silence
of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

“I say! Look what he’s doing!”

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

“I say. Decollation they call it in the gold. The sea was cold day and night:
but it was colder at night. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he
heard voices. And the bell would toll slowly.

“O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack,” said Mr Henchy. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the
straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin. As he proceeded I noticed
that his accent was good. 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. He
told himself calmly that those words had absolutely no sense which had seemed
to rise murmurously from the dark. ”

Mr Hynes laughed and, shoving himself away from the mantelpiece with the aid of
his shoulders, made ready to leave. A cut ham was exposed on a great blue dish
while near it on a plate lay a segment of very light plum-pudding. But she
would not do so. I was too hairy to tell her that. Soon they would be going
home for the holidays.

“It’s such a relief,” said Aunt Kate to Mrs Conroy, “that Gabriel is
here. 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. The attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted
hands, the parted lips and eyes as of one about to swoon, became for him an
image of the soul in prayer, humiliated and faint before her Creator. O come
among the laden trees: The leaves lie thick upon the way Of memories. One human
being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had
sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame.

--Do you remember, he said, when we knew each other first? The first morning we
met you asked me to show you the way to the matriculation class, putting a very
strong stress on the first syllable.

He banged his pandybat down on the desk and cried:

--Up, Fleming! Up, my boy!

Fleming stood up slowly. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his slow voice
was good to listen to. He wondered had he been in her thoughts as she had been
in his. Soon he would sleep. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the
field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep _nix_
and call out when he saw her father coming.

--You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and
blinking his pale eyes. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the
door.

O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. ”

“Some day you will,” said Little Chandler calmly. Then Mr Power said, point
blank:

“To tell you the truth, Tom, we’re going to make a retreat. ”

“There was many a good man went to the penny-a-week school with a sod of turf
under his oxter,” said Mr Kernan sententiously. He would fall. He had sinned
so deeply against heaven and before God that he was not worthy to be called
God's child. Now I knew they were true. I think it’ll be all right. ”

“Tonight, perhaps. Where?

--Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. “Press life. Always hurry and scurry, looking for
copy and sometimes not finding it: and then, always to have something new in
your stuff.

“Therefore, I will not linger on the past. Then, with a snort of disgust, he
shoved him violently down the steps. His soul’s companion! He thought of the
hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by
the barman. They walked forward in silence. ”

The room was silent again. He was undecided about the lines from Robert
Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. It is the
whole mass of those born into it. The bird call from SIEGFRIED whistled softly
followed them from the steps of the porch. That was all to make him laugh. His
life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a
memory--if anyone remembered him. The King’s coming here will mean an influx
of money into this country. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing
like a stone through a quagmire. He stood still, gazing fixedly at the head
upon the pile of papers. It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes
and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently. His
line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points and for
short periods he had been driven to live by his wits. Lucifer, we are told, was
a son of the morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and
there fell with him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled
with his rebellious angels into hell. ”

“And what about Dowling?” asked Mr M’Coy. The sea had fallen below the
line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was
running out fast along the foreshore. They walked forward in silence. But how
so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. ”

At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the halldoor.

--What funnel? asked Stephen. QUASI PALMA EXALTATA SUM IN GADES ET QUASI
PLANTATIO ROSAE IN JERICHO.

--Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall? cried the prefect of studies. The
Laocoon interested me very much when I read it.

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he
felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above
the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over
the flowing waters.

Mr Kernan seemed to be troubled in mind.

“I bar the candles,” said Mr Kernan, conscious of having created an effect
on his audience and continuing to shake his head to and fro.

--Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice. Find these and you
find the qualities of universal beauty. At last she turned towards them and
Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining.
”





A very sullen-faced man stood at the corner of O’Connell Bridge waiting for
the little Sandymount tram to take him home.

--Haven't I? he cried. Then he said:

--Well now, the day kept up fine after all. His cheeks were aflame; his body
was aglow; his limbs were trembling. After the first year of married life, Mrs
Kearney perceived that such a man would wear better than a romantic person, but
she never put her own romantic ideas away. He sat propped up in the bed by
pillows and the little colour in his puffy cheeks made them resemble warm
cinders.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything
else was idle and alien. As a boy he had imagined the reins by which horses are
driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to feel at Stradbrooke the
greasy leather of harness. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of
water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl. He thought of how she
who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her
lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

APRIL 3. Do you know what we call a notion like that in Roscommon?

--Hoosh! Blast you! Cranly cried, clapping his hands.

--Saint Augustine says that about unbaptized children going to hell, Temple
answered, because he was a cruel old sinner too.

“I’m so sorry,” she continued, “that I’ve nothing in the house to
offer you. 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.

Stephen followed also with his ears the accents and intervals of the priest's
voice as he spoke gravely and cordially of indifferent themes, the vacation
which had just ended, the colleges of the order abroad, the transference of
masters. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff that day
minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time
and shouting like mad. 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. He kept the pair in view until he had seen them climbing
the stairs of the Donnybrook tram; then he turned about and went back the way
he had come. In a quiet bystreet a German band of five players in faded
uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of
street arabs and leisurely messenger boys.

--Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. Every sin would then come forth from its
lurking place, the most rebellious against the divine will and the most
degrading to our poor corrupt nature, the tiniest imperfection and the most
heinous atrocity.



VISIT, WE BESEECH THEE, O LORD, THIS HABITATION AND DRIVE AWAY FROM IT ALL THE
SNARES OF THE ENEMY. She looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin
above her ear. ”

“I’m very much obliged to you, old man,” said the invalid. 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. He had told me stories about the
catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning
of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by
the priest. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its
verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and
inward. How they will rage and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of
heaven for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for
bodily comforts, for a tingling of the nerves.

The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is the pain
of conscience. 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.
Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song
about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place.

He fell as fall the mighty ones, Nobly undaunted to the last, And death has now
united him With Erin’s heroes of the past. On Friday confession will be heard
all the afternoon after beads.

No escape.

“We were waiting for him to come home with the money. Evening had fallen. A
rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop
embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low
whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

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. I hope we’ll ‘eet
again. ”

“Why so?”

“He asked me who the nominators were; and I told him. Only at times, in the
pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting him gave room to a
softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory.
When he had drunk he smacked his lips decisively, set down his glass and said:

“No blooming fear of that, my boy. He knew that the prostrate creatures down
by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. Hell is Roman, like the
walls of the Romans, strong and ugly. Neither he nor she had had any such
adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. This, it seemed,
was the only love and that the only hate his soul would harbour. He read it not
aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he reads the prayers
_Secreto_.

I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards
the station. Only louder.

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then
hot.

Lynch nodded. .
. O, 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 Christopher manufacturing. . “The
Celtic note. ”_ It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking. Perhaps it
would be better to insert his mother’s name before the surname: Thomas Malone
Chandler, or better still: T. Malone Chandler. He would speak to Gallaher about
it.

He pursued his revery so ardently that he passed his street and had to turn
back. As he came near Corless’s his former agitation began to overmaster him
and he halted before the door in indecision. Finally he opened the door and
entered.

The light and noise of the bar held him at the doorways for a few moments. He
looked about him, but his sight was confused by the shining of many red and
green wine-glasses The bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that
the people were observing him curiously. He glanced quickly to right and left
(frowning slightly to make his errand appear serious), but when his sight
cleared a little he saw that nobody had turned to look at him: and there, sure
enough, was Ignatius Gallaher leaning with his back against the counter and his
feet planted far apart.

“Hallo, Tommy, old hero, here you are! What is it to be? What will you have?
I’m taking whisky: better stuff than we get across the water. Soda? Lithia?
No mineral? I’m the same. Spoils the flavour. . Is he a good preacher?”

“Munno. . you know. When you told me that night in Harcourt Street those
things about your private life, honest to God, Stevie, I was not able to eat my
dinner. I was quite bad. I was awake a long time that night. Why did you tell
me those things?

--Thanks, said Stephen. You mean I am a monster.

--No, said Davin. But I wish you had not told me. Is it what you told me the
night we were standing outside Harcourt Street station?

--Yes, Stephen said, smiling in spite of himself at Cranly's way of remembering
thoughts in connexion with places. The night you spent half an hour wrangling
with Doherty about the shortest way from Sallygap to Larras.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. What does he know about the way from
Sallygap to Larras? Or what does he know about anything for that matter? And
the big slobbering washing-pot head of him!

He broke into a loud long laugh.

--Well? Stephen said. Do you remember the rest?

--What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it.

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.

--Too bad! Too bad! said uncle Charles. But a man's country comes first.
Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.

--Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the
old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly.
But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and
the two players who had finished their game. A match of four was arranged,
Cranly insisting, however, that his ball should be used. He let it rebound
twice or thrice to his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly towards the base
of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its thud:

--Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. Then he plucked him by
the sleeve to come away. Lynch obeyed, saying:

--Let us eke go, as Cranly has it.

Stephen smiled at this side-thrust.

They passed back through the garden and out through the hall where the
doddering porter was pinning up a hall notice in the frame. At the foot of the
steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and
offered it to his companion. Lynch took the last one that remained, saying
simply:

--Proceed!

--Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which
pleases.

Lynch nodded.

--I remember that, he said, PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT.

--He uses the word VISA, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all
kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of
apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good
and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not
a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the mind. You would
not write your name in pencil across the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle.

--No, said Lynch, give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.

--Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the
splendour of truth. I don't think that it has a meaning, but the true and the
beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the
most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the
imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible.
The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope
of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection.
Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and
that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the
same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same
subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame
and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic
apprehension. Is that clear?

--But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another definition.
Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas can do?

--Let us take woman, said Stephen.

--Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

--The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all
admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which
we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that
every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the
manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so.
The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my
esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where
MacCann, with one hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand on the new
testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you
felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts
because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours.

--Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

--There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.

--To wit? said Lynch.

--This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's
hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled
and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the
dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and
waited for a few moments till his companion's ill-humour had had its vent.

--This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the
same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a
beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with
the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the
sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be
therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old
friend saint Thomas for another pennyworth of wisdom.

Lynch laughed. His mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a
listless peace.

He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two friends who
had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of getting places on
ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.

--That's all a bubble. An Irish country practice is better.

--Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful hole he
said it was. Nothing but midwifery cases.

--Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country than in a
rich city like that? I know a fellow. . . . . out-and-out ruffian, not one of
them ever preached _ex cathedra_ a word of false doctrine. Now isn’t that an
astonishing thing?”

“That is,” said Mr Kernan.

“Yes, because when the Pope speaks _ex cathedra_,” Mr Fogarty explained,
“he is infallible. ”

“Yes,” said Mr Cunningham. “I was married last May twelve months. ”

“I hope it’s not too late in the day to offer my best wishes,” said
Ignatius Gallaher. “I didn’t know your address or I’d have done so at the
time. ”

He extended his hand, which Little Chandler took.

“Well, Tommy,” he said, “I wish you and yours every joy in life, old
chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. And that’s
the wish of a sincere friend, an old friend. You know that?”

“I know that,” said Little Chandler. “I won’t be bringing him in his
cup of beef-tea any more, nor you, ma’am, sending him his snuff. Ah, poor
James!”

She stopped, as if she were communing with the past and then said shrewdly:

“Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly.
Whenever I’d bring in his soup to him there I’d find him with his breviary
fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open. ”

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned: then she continued:

“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d
go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were
all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only
get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father
O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day
cheap--he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three
of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that. . . . . Look
out!

--Oh, Cripes, I'm drownded!

--One! Two! Three and away!

--The next! The next!

--One!. . . .

The door was burst open and a young woman ran in, panting.

“What is it? What is it?” she cried.

“From the _Black Eagle_,” said the boy, walking in sideways and depositing
a basket on the floor with a noise of shaken bottles.

The old man helped the boy to transfer the bottles from the basket to the table
and counted the full tally. After the transfer the boy put his basket on his
arm and asked:

“Any bottles?”

“What bottles?” said the old man.

“Won’t you let us drink them first?” said Mr Henchy.

“I was told to ask for the bottles. ”

“Come back tomorrow,” said the old man.

“Here, boy!” said Mr Henchy, “will you run over to O’Farrell’s and
ask him to lend us a corkscrew--for Mr Henchy, say. Tell him we won’t keep it
a minute. Leave the basket there. ”

The boy went out and Mr Henchy began to rub his hands cheerfully, saying:

“Ah, well, he’s not so bad after all. He’s as good as his word, anyhow.
”

“There’s no tumblers,” said the old man.

“O, don’t let that trouble you, Jack,” said Mr Henchy. “Many’s the
good man before now drank out of the bottle. ”

“Anyway, it’s better than nothing,” said Mr O’Connor.

“He’s not a bad sort,” said Mr Henchy, “only Fanning has such a loan of
him. He means well, you know, in his own tinpot way. ”

The boy came back with the corkscrew. The old man opened three bottles and was
handing back the corkscrew when Mr Henchy said to the boy:

“Would you like a drink, boy?”

“If you please, sir,” said the boy.

The old man opened another bottle grudgingly, and handed it to the boy.

“What age are you?” he asked.

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She
could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her
convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was
alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me.
The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck,
lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the
railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a
petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

“It’s well for you,” she said.

Kathleen followed her mother meekly. 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 Newcombe's coffee-house, where Mr
Dedalus's 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 barmaids 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 MUTANTUR NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR 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 him 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 something 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.











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. Will that do now?

Stephen felt the tears wetting his eyes and murmured:

--O 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.

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.



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 remembered 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 pandybat 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.

--How are you off, sir?

--Right as the mail, Simon.

--You, John?

--I'm all right. 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, turning 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. In a moment Stephen was a
prisoner.

--Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy in your
essay.

--I'll 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. No. You would not. And now, though you were to flood all hell with your
tears if you could still weep, all that sea of repentance would not gain for
you what a single tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would
have gained for you. You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to
repent: in vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.

--Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very
heart's core of the wretches in hell, so that filled with hellish fury they
curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil companions who have brought
them to such ruin and curse the devils who tempted them in life and now mock
them in eternity and even revile and curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and
patience they scorned and slighted but Whose justice and power they cannot
evade.

--The next spiritual pain to which the damned are subjected is the pain of
extension. Man, in this earthly life, though he be capable of many evils, is
not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one evil corrects and counteracts
another just as one poison frequently corrects another. In hell, on the
contrary, one torment, instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater
force: and, moreover, as the internal faculties are more perfect than the
external senses, so are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is
afflicted with a fitting torment, so is every spiritual faculty; the fancy with
horrible images, the sensitive faculty with alternate longing and rage, the
mind and understanding with an interior darkness more terrible even than the
exterior darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The malice, impotent
though it be, which possesses these demon souls is an evil of boundless
extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state of wickedness which we can
scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God
bears to it.

--Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have the pain
of intensity. Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more
intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries
or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell.
Nay, things which are good in themselves become evil in hell. Company,
elsewhere a source of comfort to the afflicted, will be there a continual
torment: knowledge, so much longed for as the chief good of the intellect, will
there be hated worse than ignorance: light, so much coveted by all creatures
from the lord of creation down to the humblest plant in the forest, will be
loathed intensely. In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not
very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to
them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome
by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of
continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and
re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame. Nor can
nature escape from these intense and various tortures by succumbing to them for
the soul is sustained and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the
greater. Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering,
unceasing variety of torture--this is what the divine majesty, so outraged by
sinners, demands; this is what the holiness of heaven, slighted and set aside
for the lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt flesh, requires; this is what
the blood of the innocent Lamb of God, shed for the redemption of sinners,
trampled upon by the vilest of the vile, insists upon.

--Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the
eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man
can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the
pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite,
as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are
at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To
bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment.
What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For
ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to
imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the
seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little
grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now
imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth
to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest
space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of
countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the
forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish,
hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the
end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away
in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of
centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of
that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all?
Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity
could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of
years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after
it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all
away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there
are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on
the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the
end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast
mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even
then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of
which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

--A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a
vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the midst of a great hall,
dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock. The ticking went on
unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the
ceaseless repetition of the words--ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in
hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God,
never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by
vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to
have the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with
darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the foul demons
who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the
shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to
God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony, never
to receive, even for an instant, God's pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy;
ever to be damned, never to be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O, what a
dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and
spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of
agony limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that
sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that
everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity,
every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible
punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an almighty and a just
God.

--Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that God should
mete out an everlasting and infinite punishment in the fires of hell for a
single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by the gross illusion of
the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to
comprehend the hideous malice of mortal sin. They reason thus because they are
unable to comprehend that even venial sin is of such a foul and hideous nature
that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the
world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the
murders, on condition that he allowed a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a
single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of wilful sloth, He, the
great omnipotent God could not do so because sin, be it in thought or deed, is
a transgression of His law and God would not be God if He did not punish the
transgressor.

--A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer and a
third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory. A sin, an instant of
folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death and
suffering into the world. To retrieve the consequences of that sin the Only
Begotten Son of God came down to earth, lived and suffered and died a most
painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross.

--O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that good
Redeemer and provoke His anger? Will we trample again upon that torn and
mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow and love? Will we
too, like the cruel jews and the brutal soldiers, mock that gentle and
compassionate Saviour Who trod alone for our sake the awful wine-press of
sorrow? Every word of sin is a wound in His tender side. Every sinful act is a
thorn piercing His head. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a
keen lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart. No, no.

“You looked tired,” he said.

“I am a little,” she answered.

“You don’t feel ill or weak?”

“No, tired: that’s all. ”

She went on to the window and stood there, looking out. 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.

O 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 carriage-lamps.
They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who had received
their death-wound on battlefields far away over the sea. What did they wish to
say that their faces were so strange?



VISIT, WE BESEECH THEE, O LORD, THIS HABITATION AND DRIVE AWAY FROM IT ALL. . .

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. 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 anyhow.

--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.

--Respect! he said. Is it for Billy with the lip or for the tub of guts up in
Armagh? Respect!

--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. O Johnny!

He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping
noise with his lips.

--Really, Simon, you should not speak that way before 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. Low-lived 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 renegade 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 famous spit?

--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 language I have heard this evening.

Mr Dedalus began to sway his head to and fro, crooning like a country singer.

--I am no protestant, I tell you again, said Mr Casey, flushing.

Mr Dedalus, still crooning and swaying 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. And her thoughtfulness! If the night was anyway
cold or wet or windy there was sure to be a little tumbler of punch ready for
him. Perhaps they could be happy together. . . . . O, good evening, Stephen.

He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in the
doorway.

They turned to the left and walked on as before. When they had gone on so for
some time Stephen said:

--Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening.

--With your people? Cranly asked.

--With my mother.

--Were they married women, my child?

He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in
shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid
stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more
to tell.

He bent down to rake the fire. Mr Hynes took off his hat, shook it and then
turned down the collar of his coat, displaying, as he did so, an ivy leaf in
the lapel.

“If this man was alive,” he said, pointing to the leaf, “we’d have no
talk of an address of welcome. ”

“That’s true,” said Mr O’Connor.

“Musha, God be with them times!” said the old man. “There was some life
in it then. ”

The room was silent again. 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 surplices lay quietly folded. It was not the chapel but
still you had to speak under your breath. It was a holy place. The boy that
held the censer had swung it 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 put a
spoonful of incense in it and it had hissed on the red coals.

The fellows were talking together in little groups here and there on the
playground.

At last Fleming said:

--And we are all to be punished for what other fellows did?

--I won't come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said. Perhaps they had stolen a
monstrance to run away with 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. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps
a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the
wild rose blossoms on the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

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 played on the piano the
sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. 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. His gaiety seemed to forsake him and, as he
came by the railings of the Duke’s Lawn, he allowed his hand to run along
them. The air which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His
softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of
variations idly along the railings after each group of notes.

He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street.
Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed
they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did
not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have
to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were
too dry for such a task. The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met
Corley again troubled him a little. He could think of no way of passing them
but to keep on walking. ”

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had
not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

“The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great
deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him. ”

“God have mercy on his soul,” said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while.

“The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great
deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him. ”

“God have mercy on his soul,” said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes
were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate. He
returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

“I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “to have too much to say
to a man like that. ”

“How do you mean, Mr Cotter?” asked my aunt.

“What I mean is,” said old Cotter, “it’s bad for children. My idea is:
let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be. .
. . . But tell me something about yourself. Hogan told me you had. . . . . . .
. Well, you better look sharp and get a copy of our correspondence in the
Delacour case for Mr Alleyne. ”

This address in the presence of the public, his run upstairs and the porter he
had gulped down so hastily confused the man and, as he sat down at his desk to
get what was required, he realised how hopeless was the task of finishing his
copy of the contract before half past five. The dark damp night was coming and
he longed to spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of
gas and the clatter of glasses. He got out the Delacour correspondence and
passed out of the office. He hoped Mr Alleyne would not discover that the last
two letters were missing.

The moist pungent perfume lay all the way up to Mr Alleyne’s room. Miss
Delacour was a middle-aged woman of Jewish appearance. Mr Alleyne was said to
be sweet on her or on her money. She came to the office often and stayed a long
time when she came. She was sitting beside his desk now in an aroma of
perfumes, smoothing the handle of her umbrella and nodding the great black
feather in her hat. Mr Alleyne had swivelled his chair round to face her and
thrown his right foot jauntily upon his left knee. The man put the
correspondence on the desk and bowed respectfully but neither Mr Alleyne nor
Miss Delacour took any notice of his bow. Mr Alleyne tapped a finger on the
correspondence and then flicked it towards him as if to say: _“That’s all
right: you can go. ”_

The man returned to the lower office and sat down again at his desk. He stared
intently at the incomplete phrase: _In no case shall the said Bernard Bodley
be_. . you know. Is it Tricky Dicky Tierney?”

“By God! perhaps you’re right, Joe,” said Mr O’Connor. “Anyway, I
wish he’d turn up with the spondulics. ”

The three men fell 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 surplices 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 boatbearer, 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 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 put a spoonful of incense in it 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 fellow's machine lightly on the cinder path
and his spectacles 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 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. 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.

The prefect cried:

--Quick march! Hayfoot! Strawfoot!

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 infirmary and from the door of
the dark cabinet on his right came a smell like medicine. That came from the
bottles on the shelves. He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an
evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take
one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had
always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times
he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

When his hour had struck he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his
fellow-clerks punctiliously. He emerged from under the feudal arch of the
King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street.
The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp. A horde of grimy
children populated the street. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up
the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds.
Little Chandler gave them no thought. He picked his way deftly through all that
minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in
which the old nobility of Dublin had roystered. No memory of the past touched
him, for his mind was full of a present joy.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. He knew
that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and
he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German. Walking swiftly by
at night he had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies,
escorted by cavaliers, alight and enter quickly. They wore noisy dresses and
many wraps. Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when
they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas. He had always passed without
turning his head to look. It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even
by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on
his way apprehensively and excitedly. Sometimes, however, he courted the causes
of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked
boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him,
the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive
laughter made him tremble like a leaf.

He turned to the right towards Capel Street. Then he turned into Dame Street.
The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and
the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Ségouin drew up and Jimmy
and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to
pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening
in Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying
with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton
Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers.
They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise,
while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer
evening.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride
mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play
fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue.
Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall
giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt
even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often
unpurchaseable. His father, therefore, was unusually friendly with Villona and
his manner expressed a real respect for foreign accomplishments; but this
subtlety of his host was probably lost upon the Hungarian, who was beginning to
have a sharp desire for his dinner.

The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very
refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom
Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room
lit by electric candle-lamps. They talked volubly and with little reserve.
Jimmy, whose imagination was kindling, conceived the lively youth of the
Frenchmen twined elegantly upon the firm framework of the Englishman’s
manner. A graceful image of his, he thought, and a just one. He admired the
dexterity with which their host directed the conversation. The five young men
had various tastes and their tongues had been loosened. Villona, with immense
respect, began to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of
the English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not
wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the French
mechanicians. The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in
ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Ségouin
shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy,
under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life
within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. The room grew doubly hot and
Ségouin’s task grew harder each moment: there was even danger of personal
spite. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when
the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly.

That night the city wore the mask of a capital. The five young men strolled
along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They talked loudly
and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders. The people made way
for them. At the corner of Grafton Street a short fat man was putting two
handsome ladies on a car in charge of another fat man. He had spoken of a
mother's love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their
bodies and souls: and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow
his mind to them.

Away then: it is time to go. He listened to Father Arnall's low and gentle
voice as he corrected the themes. Perhaps he was sorry now and wanted to be
decent. He wanted to cry. . And when I ask when my daughter is going to be paid
I can’t get a civil answer. ”

She tossed her head and assumed a haughty voice:

“You must speak to the secretary. It’s not my business. I’m a great
fellow fol-the-diddle-I-do. ”

“I thought you were a lady,” said Mr Holohan, walking away from her
abruptly.

After that Mrs Kearney’s conduct was condemned on all hands: everyone
approved of what the Committee had done. She stood at the door, haggard with
rage, arguing with her husband and daughter, gesticulating with them. She
waited until it was time for the second part to begin in the hope that the
secretaries would approach her. But Miss Healy had kindly consented to play one
or two accompaniments. Mrs Kearney had to stand aside to allow the baritone and
his accompanist to pass up to the platform. She stood still for an instant like
an angry stone image and, when the first notes of the song struck her ear, she
caught up her daughter’s cloak and said to her husband:

“Get a cab!”

He went out at once. Mrs Kearney wrapped the cloak round her daughter and
followed him. As she passed through the doorway she stopped and glared into Mr
Holohan’s face.

“I’m not done with you yet,” she said.

“But I’m done with you,” said Mr Holohan.

Kathleen followed her mother meekly. 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 Newcombe's coffee-house, where Mr
Dedalus's 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 barmaids 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 MUTANTUR NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR 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 him alone.







OLD JACK raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them
judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered
his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his
crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into
light. It was an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes
blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or
twice mechanically when it closed. When the cinders had caught he laid the
piece of cardboard against the wall, sighed and said:

“That’s better now, Mr O’Connor. ”

Mr O’Connor, a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many
blotches and pimples, had just brought the tobacco for a cigarette into a
shapely cylinder but when spoken to he undid his handiwork meditatively. Then
he began to roll the tobacco again meditatively and after a moment’s thought
decided to lick the paper.

“Did Mr Tierney say when he’d be back?” he asked in a husky falsetto.

“He didn’t say. . . . . . . . ”

“Let bygones be bygones,” said Mr Henchy. “I admire the man personally.
He’s just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He’s fond of his glass of
grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. Damn it,
can’t we Irish play fair?”

“That’s all very fine,” said Mr Lyons. “But look at the case of Parnell
now. ”

“In the name of God,” said Mr Henchy, “where’s the analogy between the
two cases?”

“What I mean,” said Mr Lyons, “is we have our ideals. Why, now, would we
welcome a man like that? Do you think now after what he did Parnell was a fit
man to lead us? And why, then, would we do it for Edward the Seventh?”

“This is Parnell’s anniversary,” said Mr O’Connor, “and don’t let
us stir up any bad blood. We all respect him now that he’s dead and
gone--even the Conservatives,” he added, turning to Mr Crofton.

Pok! The tardy cork flew out of Mr Crofton’s bottle. Mr Crofton got up from
his box and went to the fire. . . . .

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession.
But not there in the chapel of the college. Other wrangle with little round
head rogue's eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and
ended in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was
terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for
what he calls RISOTTO ALLA BERGAMASCA. When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes
his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel. Has he? And could he repent?
Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue's tears, one from each eye.

Crossing Stephen's, that is, my green, remembered that his countrymen and not
mine had invented what Cranly the other night called our religion. A quartet of
them, soldiers of the ninety-seventh infantry regiment, sat at the foot of the
cross and tossed up dice for the overcoat of the crucified.

Went to library. Tried to read three reviews. Useless. Soon they would be going
home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the
number pasted up inside his desk from seventy-seven to seventy-six.

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
window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha 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. He wondered from
which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha 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. He wondered from
which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha 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
something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. Wolsey 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. 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. 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. They could 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
infirmary. 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. He felt his
whole body hot and confused in a moment. Turned off that valve at once and
opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in
all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the
midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must
have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. In his
imagination he beheld the pair of lovers walking along some dark road; he heard
Corley’s voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer of the
young woman’s mouth. This vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of
purse and spirit. He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the
tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in November. Would he
never get a good job? Would he never have a home of his own? He thought how
pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit
down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He
knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too. Experience had
embittered his heart against the world. But all hope had not left him. He felt
better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less
vanquished in spirit. He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner
and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with
a little of the ready.

He paid twopence halfpenny to the slatternly girl and went out of the shop to
begin his wandering again. He went into Capel Street and walked along towards
the City Hall. Ignatius Gallaher on the London Press! Who would have thought it
possible eight years before? Still, now that he reviewed the past, Little
Chandler could remember many signs of future greatness in his friend. People
used to say that Ignatius Gallaher was wild. Of course, he did mix with a
rakish set of fellows at that time, drank freely and borrowed money on all
sides. In the end he had got mixed up in some shady affair, some money
transaction: at least, that was one version of his flight. But nobody denied
him talent. There was always a certain. The time and manner are uncertain,
whether from long disease or from some unexpected accident: the Son of God
cometh at an hour when you little expect Him. Be therefore ready every moment,
seeing that you may die at any moment. ”

While she was threading her way back across the room Mrs Malins, without
adverting to the interruption, went on to tell Gabriel what beautiful places
there were in Scotland and beautiful scenery. Her son-in-law brought them every
year to the lakes and they used to go fishing. Her son-in-law was a splendid
fisher. One day he caught a beautiful big fish and the man in the hotel cooked
it for their dinner.

Gabriel hardly heard what she said. Now that supper was coming near he began to
think again about his speech and about the quotation. When he saw Freddy Malins
coming across the room to visit his mother Gabriel left the chair free for him
and retired into the embrasure of the window. The room had already cleared and
from the back room came the clatter of plates and knives. Those who still
remained in the drawing-room seemed tired of dancing and were conversing
quietly in little groups. Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold
pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to
walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow
would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top
of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at
the supper-table!

He ran over the headings of his speech: Irish hospitality, sad memories, the
Three Graces, Paris, the quotation from Browning. He repeated to himself a
phrase he had written in his review: “One feels that one is listening to a
thought-tormented music. ” Miss Ivors had praised the review. ”

“And everything. . . here’s a little. . . . Poor O’Hara! Boose, I
suppose?”

“Other things, too,” said Little Chandler shortly.

Ignatius Gallaher laughed. You could tell that at once by his travelled air,
his well-cut tweed suit, and fearless accent. Few fellows had talents like his
and fewer still could remain unspoiled by such success. Gallaher’s heart was
in the right place and he had deserved to win. It was something to have a
friend like that.

Little Chandler’s thoughts ever since lunch-time had been of his meeting with
Gallaher, of Gallaher’s invitation and of the great city London where
Gallaher lived. He was called Little Chandler because, though he was but
slightly under the average stature, he gave one the idea of being a little man.
His hands were white and small, his frame was fragile, his voice was quiet and
his manners were refined. He took the greatest care of his fair silken hair and
moustache and used perfume discreetly on his handkerchief. The half-moons of
his nails were perfect and when he smiled you caught a glimpse of a row of
childish white teeth.

As he sat at his desk in the King’s Inns he thought what changes those eight
years had brought. The friend whom he had known under a shabby and necessitous
guise had become a brilliant figure on the London Press. He turned often from
his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window. The glow of a late
autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly
golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the
benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures--on the children who ran
screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the
gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when
he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him.
He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden
of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.

He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He had bought them
in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the
hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out
something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books
had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this
consoled him.

When his hour had struck he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his
fellow-clerks punctiliously. He emerged from under the feudal arch of the
King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street.
The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp. A horde of grimy
children populated the street. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up
the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds.
Little Chandler gave them no thought. He picked his way deftly through all that
minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in
which the old nobility of Dublin had roystered. No memory of the past touched
him, for his mind was full of a present joy.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name. He knew
that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and
he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German. Walking swiftly by
at night he had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies,
escorted by cavaliers, alight and enter quickly. They wore noisy dresses and
many wraps. Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when
they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas. He had always passed without
turning his head to look. It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even
by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on
his way apprehensively and excitedly. Sometimes, however, he courted the causes
of his fear. He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked
boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him,
the wandering silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive
laughter made him tremble like a leaf.

He turned to the right towards Capel Street. Then he turned into Dame Street.
The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud with the horns of motorists and
the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the Bank Ségouin drew up and Jimmy
and his friend alighted. A little knot of people collected on the footpath to
pay homage to the snorting motor. The party was to dine together that evening
in Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy and his friend, who was staying
with him, were to go home to dress. The car steered out slowly for Grafton
Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers.
They walked northward with a curious feeling of disappointment in the exercise,
while the city hung its pale globes of light above them in a haze of summer
evening.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride
mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play
fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue.
Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall
giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt
even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often
unpurchaseable. His father, therefore, was unusually friendly with Villona and
his manner expressed a real respect for foreign accomplishments; but this
subtlety of his host was probably lost upon the Hungarian, who was beginning to
have a sharp desire for his dinner.

The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very
refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom
Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room
lit by electric candle-lamps. They talked volubly and with little reserve.
Jimmy, whose imagination was kindling, conceived the lively youth of the
Frenchmen twined elegantly upon the firm framework of the Englishman’s
manner. A graceful image of his, he thought, and a just one. He admired the
dexterity with which their host directed the conversation. The five young men
had various tastes and their tongues had been loosened. Villona, with immense
respect, began to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of
the English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not
wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the French
mechanicians. The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in
ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Ségouin
shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy,
under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life
within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. The room grew doubly hot and
Ségouin’s task grew harder each moment: there was even danger of personal
spite. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when
the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly.

That night the city wore the mask of a capital. The five young men strolled
along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They talked loudly
and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders. The people made way
for them. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his
footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the
cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there
in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a
man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it--not like their little
brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the
avenue used to play together in that field--the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however,
never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of
the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep
_nix_ and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have
been rather happy then. . . . Ah! EVER REACHING. That's another story. His eyes
moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat
string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen
down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions
of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from
his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying
good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow.
Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick
Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a
moment when she was singing _Arrayed for the Bridal_. Soon, perhaps, he would
be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his
knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside
him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would
cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find
only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously
along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. A woman came running down
the front steps and coughed. Corley turned and went towards her. He sauntered
across the road swaying his head from side to side. His bulk, his easy pace,
and the solid sound of his boots had something of the conqueror in them. He
approached the young woman and, without saluting, began at once to converse
with her. She swung her umbrella more quickly and executed half turns on her
heels. Once or twice when he spoke to her at close quarters she laughed and
bent her head.

Lenehan observed them for a few minutes. Then he walked rapidly along beside
the chains at some distance and crossed the road obliquely. As he approached
Hume Street corner he found the air heavily scented and his eyes made a swift
anxious scrutiny of the young woman’s appearance. She had her Sunday finery
on. Her blue serge skirt was held at the waist by a belt of black leather. He
had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in expression, staring blue
eyes and a grizzled moustache. The other man, who was much younger and frailer,
had a thin, clean-shaven face. He wore a very high double collar and a
wide-brimmed bowler hat.

“Hello, Crofton!” said Mr Henchy to the fat man. “Talk of the devil. .
there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion. . I’ll say
a _Hail Mary_. . What?”

His bright, small eyes searched his companion’s face for reassurance. Corley
swung his head to and fro as if to toss aside an insistent insect, and his
brows gathered.

“I’ll pull it off,” he said. “Leave it to me, can’t you?”

Lenehan said no more. He did not wish to ruffle his friend’s temper, to be
sent to the devil and told that his advice was not wanted. A little tact was
necessary. But Corley’s brow was soon smooth again. His thoughts were running
another way.

“She’s a fine decent tart,” he said, with appreciation; “that’s what
she is. ”

They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare Street. Not far
from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway, playing to a little
ring of listeners. His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers
swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes.

He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street.
Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed
they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did
not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have
to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were
too dry for such a task. The problem of how he could pass the hours till he met
Corley again troubled him a little. He could think of no way of passing them
but to keep on walking. He turned to the left when he came to the corner of
Rutland Square and felt more at ease in the dark quiet street, the sombre look
of which suited his mood. One of them was just bringing a long monologue to a
close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged
to step on to the road, owing to his companion’s rudeness, wore an amused
listening face. He was squat and ruddy. A yachting cap was shoved far back from
his forehead and the narrative to which he listened made constant waves of
expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and
mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his
convulsed body. His eyes, twinkling with cunning enjoyment, glanced at every
moment towards his companion’s face. Once or twice he rearranged the light
waterproof which he had slung over one shoulder in toreador fashion. His
breeches, his white rubber shoes and his jauntily slung waterproof expressed
youth. But his figure fell into rotundity at the waist, his hair was scant and
grey and his face, when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a
ravaged look.

When he was quite sure that the narrative had ended he laughed noiselessly for
fully half a minute. Then he said:

“Well!. . I was afraid, man, she’d get in the family way. But she’s up to
the dodge. ”

“Maybe she thinks you’ll marry her,” said Lenehan.

“I told her I was out of a job,” said Corley. “I told her I was in
Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she
thinks I’m a bit of class, you know. ”

Lenehan laughed again, noiselessly.

“Of all the good ones ever I heard,” he said, “that emphatically takes
the biscuit. ”

Corley’s stride acknowledged the compliment. They did not seem to be
speaking. An intimation of the result pricked him like the point of a sharp
instrument. He knew Corley would fail; he knew it was no go.

They turned down Baggot Street and he followed them at once, taking the other
footpath. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were
five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s
estate in County Kildare. They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers
and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over
their spits with their heavy boots. Mr Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at
them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called
for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The
proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the _Herald_ and yawning. Now and
again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two
images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she
had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at
ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried
on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He
had done what seemed to him best. ”

The trial began again. The veins stood out on Farrington’s forehead, and the
pallor of Weathers’ complexion changed to peony. Their hands and arms
trembled under the stress. After a long struggle Weathers again brought his
opponent’s hand slowly on to the table. There was a murmur of applause from
the spectators. Then as to money--he really had a great sum under his control.
Ségouin, perhaps, would not think it a great sum but Jimmy who, in spite of
temporary errors, was at heart the inheritor of solid instincts knew well with
what difficulty it had been got together. This knowledge had previously kept
his bills within the limits of reasonable recklessness, and, if he had been so
conscious of the labour latent in money when there had been question merely of
some freak of the higher intelligence, how much more so now when he was about
to stake the greater part of his substance! It was a serious thing for him.

Of course, the investment was a good one and Ségouin had managed to give the
impression that it was by a favour of friendship the mite of Irish money was to
be included in the capital of the concern. Jimmy had a respect for his
father’s shrewdness in business matters and in this case it had been his
father who had first suggested the investment; money to be made in the motor
business, pots of money. Moreover Ségouin had the unmistakable air of wealth.
Jimmy set out to translate into days’ work that lordly car in which he sat.
How smoothly it ran. In what style they had come careering along the country
roads! The journey laid a magical finger on the genuine pulse of life and
gallantly the machinery of human nerves strove to answer the bounding courses
of the swift blue animal.

They drove down Dame Street. The street was busy with unusual traffic, loud
with the horns of motorists and the gongs of impatient tram-drivers. Near the
Bank Ségouin drew up and Jimmy and his friend alighted. A little knot of
people collected on the footpath to pay homage to the snorting motor. The party
was to dine together that evening in Ségouin’s hotel and, meanwhile, Jimmy
and his friend, who was staying with him, were to go home to dress. The car
steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way
through the knot of gazers. They walked northward with a curious feeling of
disappointment in the exercise, while the city hung its pale globes of light
above them in a haze of summer evening.

In Jimmy’s house this dinner had been pronounced an occasion. A certain pride
mingled with his parents’ trepidation, a certain eagerness, also, to play
fast and loose for the names of great foreign cities have at least this virtue.
Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall
giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt
even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often
unpurchaseable. His father, therefore, was unusually friendly with Villona and
his manner expressed a real respect for foreign accomplishments; but this
subtlety of his host was probably lost upon the Hungarian, who was beginning to
have a sharp desire for his dinner.

The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very
refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom
Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room
lit by electric candle-lamps. They talked volubly and with little reserve.
Jimmy, whose imagination was kindling, conceived the lively youth of the
Frenchmen twined elegantly upon the firm framework of the Englishman’s
manner. A graceful image of his, he thought, and a just one. He admired the
dexterity with which their host directed the conversation. The five young men
had various tastes and their tongues had been loosened. Villona, with immense
respect, began to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of
the English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not
wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the French
mechanicians. The resonant voice of the Hungarian was about to prevail in
ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Ségouin
shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy,
under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life
within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. The room grew doubly hot and
Ségouin’s task grew harder each moment: there was even danger of personal
spite. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when
the toast had been drunk, he threw open a window significantly.

That night the city wore the mask of a capital. The five young men strolled
along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They talked loudly
and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders. The people made way
for them. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his
footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the
cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there
in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a
man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it--not like their little
brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the
avenue used to play together in that field--the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however,
never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of
the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep
_nix_ and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have
been rather happy then.

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell
on the wall. It was like 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:

--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 walking proudly and silently past the people who
knelt by the water's edge.



* * * * *



A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the They had
come home a little 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 pierglass 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 withdrew 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 fingers. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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 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. You're a born sneerer, Stevie.

--When you make the next rebellion with hurleysticks, said Stephen, and want
the indispensable informer, tell me. I can find you a few in this college. ”

But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the truth, to
be frank and say like a man:

“Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But,
with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.
”





THE DEAD

LILY, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had
she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the
ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door
bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in
another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.
But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom
upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there,
gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the
stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who
had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who
knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the
members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough,
and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For
years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could
remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had
left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live
with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which
they had rented from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a
good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in
short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in
Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils’ concert
every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils
belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as
they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey,
was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble
to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in
the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for
them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of
everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled
stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so that she got on well
with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing
they would not stand was back answers. She said she would do without any tea
but when it came near the time at which the shop at the corner closed she
decided to go out herself for a quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of
sugar. She put the sleeping child deftly in his arms and said:

“Here. Don’t waken him. ”

A little lamp with a white china shade stood upon the table and its light fell
over a photograph which was enclosed in a frame of crumpled horn. It was
Annie’s photograph. Little Chandler looked at it, pausing at the thin tight
lips. She wore the pale blue summer blouse which he had brought her home as a
present one Saturday. It had cost him ten and elevenpence; but what an agony of
nervousness it had cost him! How he had suffered that day, waiting at the shop
door until the shop was empty, standing at the counter and trying to appear at
his ease while the girl piled ladies’ blouses before him, paying at the desk
and forgetting to take up the odd penny of his change, being called back by the
cashier, and finally, striving to hide his blushes as he left the shop by
examining the parcel to see if it was securely tied. When he brought the blouse
home Annie kissed him and said it was very pretty and stylish; but when she
heard the price she threw the blouse on the table and said it was a regular
swindle to charge ten and elevenpence for it. At first she wanted to take it
back but when she tried it on she was delighted with it, especially with the
make of the sleeves, and kissed him and said he was very good to think of her.

Hm!. . all that business.

His smiling eyes were fixed on a silver-wrapped tablet of milk chocolate which
peeped out of the propagandist's breast-pocket. A little ring of listeners
closed round to hear the war of wits. A lean student with olive skin and lank
black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing from one to the other at
each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his open moist
mouth. Cranly took a small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine
it closely, turning it over and over.

--Next business? said MacCann. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the
straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.

--The next business is to sign the testimonial.

--Will you pay me anything if I sign? asked Stephen.

--I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann.

The gipsy-like student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in an
indistinct bleating voice.

--By hell, that's a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a mercenary
notion.

His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned his
olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to speak again.

MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar's rescript, of Stead, of
general disarmament arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the
signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would
make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the
greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.

The gipsy student responded to the close of the period by crying:

--Three cheers for universal brotherhood!

--Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. I'll stand you a pint
after.

--I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out
of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.

Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and
repeated:

--Easy, easy, easy!

Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin
foam:

--Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached
the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced
priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for John Anthony
Collins!

A thin voice from the verge of the ring replied:

--Pip! pip!

Moynihan murmured beside Stephen's ear:

--And what about John Anthony's poor little sister:

Lottie Collins lost her drawers; Won't you kindly lend her yours?

Stephen laughed and Moynihan, pleased with the result, murmured again:

--We'll have five bob each way on John Anthony Collins.

--I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly.

--The affair doesn't interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You know
that well. Why do you make a scene about it?

--Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You are a reactionary, then?

--Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden
sword?

--Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts.

Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his ground and said with
hostile humour:

--Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of
universal peace.

Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of
a peace-offering, saying:

--PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM.

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the
direction of the Tsar's image, saying:

--Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.

--By hell, that's a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that's
a fine expression. I like that expression immensely.

He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase
and, fumbling at the peak of his tweed cap, turned to Stephen, saying:

--Excuse me, sir, what do you mean by that expression you uttered just now?

Feeling himself jostled by the students near him, he said to them:

--I am curious to know now what he meant by that expression.

He turned again to Stephen and said in a whisper:

--Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man. Of course, I don't know if you
believe in man. . He. . UK!

--Stephaneforos!

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on
high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of
life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair,
not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An
instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips
withheld cleft his brain.

--Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death--the fear he had
walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame
that had abased him within and without--cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes!
Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as
the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and
beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the
flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with
song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the
ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above
the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show
him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of
seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running
out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and
dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the
shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow
currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his
canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a
pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down
the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course,
he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and
olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the
rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The
clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting
below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in
his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her
destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of
squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that
withered at the touch? Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was
alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and
brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey
sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices
childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She
seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and
beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and
pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon
the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the
hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white
down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed
behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the
breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and
girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly
withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring
the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently
moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the
bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame
trembled on her cheek.

--Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were
aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on
he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet
the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy
silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the
call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A
wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy
from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy
the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. Evening would deepen
above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and
show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of
seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running
out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and
dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the
shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow
currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his
canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a
pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down
the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course,
he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and
olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the
rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The
clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting
below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in
his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her
destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of
squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that
withered at the touch? Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was
alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and
brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey
sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices
childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She
seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and
beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and
pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon
the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the
hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white
down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed
behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the
breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and
girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly
withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring
the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently
moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the
bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame
trembled on her cheek.

--Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were
aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on
he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet
the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy
silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the
call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A
wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy
from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy
the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. Evening would deepen
above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and
show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of
seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running
out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and
dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the
shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow
currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his
canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a
pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down
the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course,
he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and
olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the
rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The
clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting
below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in
his veins.

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her
destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of
squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that
withered at the touch? Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was
alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and
brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey
sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices
childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She
seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and
beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and
pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon
the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the
hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white
down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed
behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the
breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and
girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly
withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring
the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently
moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the
bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame
trembled on her cheek.

--Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were
aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on
he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet
the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy
silence of his ecstasy. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the
body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made
radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight
made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant
his windswept limbs.

--One! Two!. . Well, and how have you been pulling along since I saw you last?
Dear God, how old we’re getting! Do you see any signs of aging in me--eh,
what? A little grey and thin on the top--what?”

Ignatius Gallaher took off his hat and displayed a large closely cropped head.
His face was heavy, pale and clean-shaven. His eyes, which were of bluish
slate-colour, relieved his unhealthy pallor and shone out plainly above the
vivid orange tie he wore. Between these rival features the lips appeared very
long and shapeless and colourless. He bent his head and felt with two
sympathetic fingers the thin hair at the crown. Little Chandler shook his head
as a denial. Ignatius Galaher put on his hat again.

“It pulls you down,” he said. “Press life. Always hurry and scurry,
looking for copy and sometimes not finding it: and then, always to have
something new in your stuff. Damn proofs and printers, I say, for a few days.
I’m deuced glad, I can tell you, to get back to the old country. Does a
fellow good, a bit of a holiday. I feel a ton better since I landed again in
dear dirty Dublin. . with others. He would love his neighbour. He would love
God who had made and loved him. He would kneel and pray with others and be
happy. God would look down on him and on them and would love them all. 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. . manufacturing that
champagne for those fellows.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly.

--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 coughing 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 arranged.

--Sit over, she said.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

--Now, Mrs Riordan, 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. 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 Stephen.

--Bedad I am, said the little old man. And, more than that, I can remember even
your great-grandfather, 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 twenty-seven
years of age.

--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 whatever 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 five-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.

--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. ”

Mr Henchy returned with the candlestick and put it on the table. He sat down
again at the fire. There was silence for a few moments.

“Tell me, John,” said Mr O’Connor, lighting his cigarette with another
pasteboard card. “Why should we welcome the King of England? Didn’t Parnell
himself. . He. . No, damn it, I think he’s a stroke above that. . Thank you,
indeed. ”

“Are you right now?”

“All right, thanks. . . . ?”

“Father O’Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared
him and all. ”

“He knew then?”

“He was quite resigned. ”

“He looks quite resigned,” said my aunt.

“That’s what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked
as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think
he’d make such a beautiful corpse. ”

“Yes, indeed,” said my aunt.

She sipped a little more from her glass and said:

“Well, Miss Flynn, at any rate it must be a great comfort for you to know
that you did all you could for him. You were both very kind to him, I must say.
”

Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

“Ah, poor James!” she said. “God knows we done all we could, as poor as
we are--we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it. ”

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall
asleep.

“There’s poor Nannie,” said Eliza, looking at her, “she’s wore out.
All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then
laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the Mass in the
chapel. Only for Father O’Rourke I don’t know what we’d have done at all.
It was him brought us all them flowers and them two candlesticks out of the
chapel and wrote out the notice for the _Freeman’s General_ and took charge
of all the papers for the cemetery and poor James’s insurance. ”

“Wasn’t that good of him?” said my aunt.

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends,” she said, “when all is
said and done, no friends that a body can trust. ”

“Indeed, that’s true,” said my aunt. “And I’m sure now that he’s
gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and all your kindness to him.
”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza. “God knows we done all we could, as poor as
we are--we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it. ”

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall
asleep.

“There’s poor Nannie,” said Eliza, looking at her, “she’s wore out.
All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then
laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the Mass in the
chapel. Only for Father O’Rourke I don’t know what we’d have done at all.
”

Mrs Kearney rewarded his very flat final syllable with a quick stare of
contempt, and then said to her daughter encouragingly:

“Are you ready, dear?”

When she had an opportunity, she called Mr Holohan aside and asked him to tell
her what it meant. Mr Holohan did not know what it meant. He said that the
Committee had made a mistake in arranging for four concerts: four was too many.

“And the _artistes_!” said Mrs Kearney. “Of course they are doing their
best, but really they are not good. ”

Mr Holohan admitted that the _artistes_ were no good but the Committee, he
said, had decided to let the first three concerts go as they pleased and
reserve all the talent for Saturday night. Mrs Kearney said nothing, but, as
the mediocre items followed one another on the platform and the few people in
the hall grew fewer and fewer, she began to regret that she had put herself to
any expense for such a concert. There was something she didn’t like in the
look of things and Mr Fitzpatrick’s vacant smile irritated her very much.
However, she said nothing and waited to see how it would end. I saw that he had
great gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Then he asked us which of us
had the most sweethearts. Mahony mentioned lightly that he had three totties.
The man asked me how many had I. I answered that I had none. He did not believe
me and said he was sure I must have one. ”

“They’re the grandest order in the Church, Tom,” said Mr Cunningham, with
enthusiasm. “The General of the Jesuits stands next to the Pope. Education is
all very fine and large. . _ The evening was falling and in a few minutes they
would be lighting the gas: then he could write. He felt that he must slake the
thirst in his throat. He stood up from his desk and, lifting the counter as
before, passed out of the office. As he was passing out the chief clerk looked
at him inquiringly.

“It’s all right, Mr Shelley,” said the man, pointing with his finger to
indicate the objective of his journey.

The chief clerk glanced at the hat-rack but, seeing the row complete, offered
no remark. As soon as he was on the landing the man pulled a shepherd’s plaid
cap out of his pocket, put it on his head and ran quickly down the rickety
stairs. From the street door he walked on furtively on the inner side of the
path towards the corner and all at once dived into a doorway. He was now safe
in the dark snug of O’Neill’s shop, and filling up the little window that
looked into the bar with his inflamed face, the colour of dark wine or dark
meat, he called out:

“Here, Pat, give us a g. p. ”

“O, yes, positively,” said Little Chandler.

“Very well, then,” said Ignatius Gallaher, “let us have another one as a
_deoc an doruis_--that’s good vernacular for a small whisky, I believe. ”

Little Chandler ordered the drinks. The blush which had risen to his face a few
moments before was establishing itself. A trifle made him blush at any time:
and now he felt warm and excited. Three small whiskies had gone to his head and
Gallaher’s strong cigar had confused his mind, for he was a delicate and
abstinent person. The adventure of meeting Gallaher after eight years, of
finding himself with Gallaher in Corless’s surrounded by lights and noise, of
listening to Gallaher’s stories and of sharing for a brief space Gallaher’s
vagrant and triumphant life, upset the equipoise of his sensitive nature. He
felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend’s and it seemed
to him unjust. Gallaher was his inferior in birth and education. He was sure
that he could do something better than his friend had ever done, or could ever
do, something higher than mere tawdry journalism if he only got the chance.
What was it that stood in his way? His unfortunate timidity! He wished to
vindicate himself in some way, to assert his manhood. He saw behind
Gallaher’s refusal of his invitation. Gallaher was only patronising him by
his friendliness just as he was patronising Ireland by his visit.

The barman brought their drinks. Little Chandler pushed one glass towards his
friend and took up the other boldly.

“Who knows?” he said, as they lifted their glasses. “When you come next
year I may have the pleasure of wishing long life and happiness to Mr and Mrs
Ignatius Gallaher. ”

Ignatius Gallaher in the act of drinking closed one eye expressively over the
rim of his glass. When he had drunk he smacked his lips decisively, set down
his glass and said:

“No blooming fear of that, my boy. I’m going to have my fling first and see
a bit of life and the world before I put my head in the sack--if I ever do. ”

“Some day you will,” said Little Chandler calmly.

Ignatius Gallaher turned his orange tie and slate-blue eyes full upon his
friend.

“You think so?” he said.

“O, of course, nothing wrong, you know. Only sometimes, they say, he didn’t
preach what was quite orthodox. ”

“Ah!. . manufacturing that champagne for those fellows.

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly.

--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 coughing 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 arranged.

--Sit over, she said.

Mr Dedalus went to the end of the table and said:

--Now, Mrs Riordan, 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. 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 Stephen.

--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
born. I don't know what you wish to do in life. Is it what you told me the
night we were standing outside Harcourt Street station?

--Yes, Stephen said, smiling in spite of himself at Cranly's way of remembering
thoughts in connexion with places. The night you spent half an hour wrangling
with Doherty about the shortest way from Sallygap to Larras.

--Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. What does he know about the way from
Sallygap to Larras? Or what does he know about anything for that matter? And
the big slobbering washing-pot head of him!

He broke into a loud long laugh.

--Well? Stephen said. Do you remember the rest?

--What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it.

“But, of course, that doesn’t alter the contract,” she said. “The
contract was for four concerts. ”

Mr Holohan seemed to be in a hurry; he advised her to speak to Mr Fitzpatrick.
Mrs Kearney was now beginning to be alarmed. She called Mr Fitzpatrick away
from his screen and told him that her daughter had signed for four concerts and
that, of course, according to the terms of the contract, she should receive the
sum originally stipulated for, whether the society gave the four concerts or
not. Mr Fitzpatrick, who did not catch the point at issue very quickly, seemed
unable to resolve the difficulty and said that he would bring the matter before
the Committee. Mrs Kearney’s anger began to flutter in her cheek and she had
all she could do to keep from asking:

“And who is the _Cometty_ pray?”

But she knew that it would not be ladylike to do that: so she was silent.

Little boys were sent out into the principal streets of Dublin early on Friday
morning with bundles of handbills. Special puffs appeared in all the evening
papers, reminding the music-loving public of the treat which was in store for
it on the following evening. Mrs Kearney was somewhat reassured, but she
thought well to tell her husband part of her suspicions. He listened carefully
and said that perhaps it would be better if he went with her on Saturday night.
She agreed. She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the
General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew
the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
She was glad that he had suggested coming with her. So then they got the keys
and opened the chapel and the clerk and Father O’Rourke and another priest
that was there brought in a light for to look for him. . I couldn’t. The
wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He
was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending to
the child’s face he shouted:

“Stop!”

The child stopped for an instant, had a spasm of fright and began to scream. He
jumped up from his chair and walked hastily up and down the room with the child
in his arms. The others, taken aback by his rude speech, could find nothing to
say. Aunt Kate wrinkled her brows and made signs to the others to drop the
subject. Mr D’Arcy stood swathing his neck carefully and frowning.

“It’s the weather,” said Aunt Julia, after a pause.

“Yes, everybody has colds,” said Aunt Kate readily, “everybody. ”

“They say,” said Mary Jane, “we haven’t had snow like it for thirty
years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all
over Ireland. ”

“I love the look of snow,” said Aunt Julia sadly.

“So do I,” said Miss O’Callaghan. “I think Christmas is never really
Christmas unless we have the snow on the ground. ”

“But poor Mr D’Arcy doesn’t like the snow,” said Aunt Kate, smiling.

Mr D’Arcy came from the pantry, fully swathed and buttoned, and in a
repentant tone told them the history of his cold. Everyone gave him advice and
said it was a great pity and urged him to be very careful of his throat in the
night air. She was invariably friendly and advising--homely, in fact. She
pushed the decanter towards him, saying:

“Now, help yourself, Mr Holohan!”

And while he was helping himself she said:

“Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid of it!”

Everything went on smoothly. Mrs Kearney bought some lovely blush-pink
charmeuse in Brown Thomas’s to let into the front of Kathleen’s dress. It
cost a pretty penny; but there are occasions when a little expense is
justifiable. She took a dozen of two-shilling tickets for the final concert and
sent them to those friends who could not be trusted to come otherwise. She
forgot nothing and, thanks to her, everything that was to be done was done. It
would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.

“And why can’t you?” I asked.

“Seventeen,” said the boy.

As the old man said nothing further, the boy took the bottle and said:
“Here’s my best respects, sir,” to Mr Henchy, drank the contents, put the
bottle back on the table and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Then he took up
the corkscrew and went out of the door sideways, muttering some form of
salutation.

“That’s the way it begins,” said the old man.

“The thin edge of the wedge,” said Mr Henchy.

The old man distributed the three bottles which he had opened and the men drank
from them simultaneously. After having drunk each placed his bottle on the
mantelpiece within hand’s reach and drew in a long breath of satisfaction.

“Well, I did a good day’s work today,” said Mr Henchy, after a pause.

“That so, John?”

“Yes. I got him one or two sure things in Dawson Street, Crofton and myself.
Between ourselves, you know, Crofton (he’s a decent chap, of course), but
he’s not worth a damn as a canvasser. He hasn’t a word to throw to a dog.
He stands and looks at the people while I do the talking. ”

“There’s no mistake about it,” said Mr M’Coy, “if you want a thing
well done and no flies about it you go to a Jesuit. They’re the boyos have
influence. I’ll tell you a case in point. . . . there was something uncanny
about him. I’ll tell you my opinion. . . . I’ll say a _Hail Mary_ for you.
. . . . . and thought how strange it was that the last three words began with
the same letter. The chief clerk began to hurry Miss Parker, saying she would
never have the letters typed in time for post. The man listened to the clicking
of the machine for a few minutes and then set to work to finish his copy. But
his head was not clear and his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of
the public-house. It was a night for hot punches. He struggled on with his
copy, but when the clock struck five he had still fourteen pages to write.
Blast it! He couldn’t finish it in time. He longed to execrate aloud, to
bring his fist down on something violently. He was so enraged that he wrote
_Bernard Bernard_ instead of _Bernard Bodley_ and had to begin again on a clean
sheet.

He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office singlehanded. His body
ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the indignities
of his life enraged him. . Ah! EVER REACHING. 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. . . . . . . . Am I right, Jack?”

“That’s my principle, too,” said my uncle. “Let him learn to box his
corner. That’s what I’m always saying to that Rosicrucian there: take
exercise. Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath,
winter and summer. And that’s what stands to me now. Education is all very
fine and large. . Ao!

--Good man, Towser! Duck him!

--Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!

--Duck him! Guzzle him now, Towser!

--Help! Help!. . ”

“The Jesuits are a fine body of men,” said Mr Power.

“It’s a curious thing,” said Mr Cunningham, “about the Jesuit Order.
Every other order of the Church had to be reformed at some time or other but
the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.

--And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man
to account: and Michael, prince of the heavenly host, with a sword of flame in
his hand, appeared before the guilty pair and drove them forth from Eden into
the world, the world of sickness and striving, of cruelty and disappointment,
of labour and hardship, to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. But
even then how merciful was God! He took pity on our poor degraded parents and
promised that in the fullness of time He would send down from heaven One who
would redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the kingdom
of heaven: and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be God's only
begotten Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Eternal Word.

--He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He was born in
a poor cowhouse in Judea and lived as a humble carpenter for thirty years until
the hour of His mission had come. And then, filled with love for men, He went
forth and called to men to hear the new gospel.

--Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized and
bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a
public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned with a crown of
thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the Roman
soldiery, stripped of his garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was
pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of our Lord water and blood
issued continually.

--Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, Our Merciful Redeemer had pity
for mankind. Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, He founded the holy
catholic church against which, it is promised, the gates of hell shall not
prevail. He founded it upon the rock of ages, and endowed it with His grace,
with sacraments and sacrifice, and promised that if men would obey the word of
His church they would still enter into eternal life; but if, after all that had
been done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness, there remained
for them an eternity of torment: hell.

The preacher's voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted
them. Then he resumed:

--Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that
abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into
existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and
foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and
smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to
punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor
captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four
walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There,
by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together
in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles
thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed
saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able
to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

--They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no
light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its
heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while
retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never
ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid
which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of
all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague
alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to
the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all
eternity?

--The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench.
All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told,
shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of
the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in
such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the
bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint
Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world.
The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable
when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the
air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and
decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such
a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving
off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine
this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from
the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking
darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have
some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

--But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment
to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment
to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger
for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But
our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him
the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell
is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the
unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly
according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that
human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check
or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a
substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with
unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it
burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire
of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though
it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is
always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless,
shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked
the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole
mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up in an
instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies
of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself,
the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of
those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are
boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels
a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

--And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of
this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it
has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul
and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God,
working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As
the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of
punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is
tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable
utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and
execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless
suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues
of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is
tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing
fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and
fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of
the God-head.

--Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the
company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the
plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or
hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned--there is no thought of family
or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one
another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured
and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of
the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths
of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their
fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices
in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who
had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the
depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a
serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems
cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and
hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the
fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the
damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided
and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil
thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led
them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of
virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But
they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

--Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters
and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the
damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no
idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a
devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant
on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life
along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have
become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at
the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who
are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an
ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious
practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did
you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit,
that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor?
Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third
or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God
who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time
for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time
was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the
unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the
beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at
least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time
shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear.
You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not
restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy
church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked
companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the
language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of
hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when
they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical
natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils
must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those
unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the
Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

--O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that
language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning
I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel
today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall
command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear
ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED,
INTO EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS!

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his
head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up
the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and
waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and
shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul
had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging
headlong through space.

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening
one of his books at random and poring over it. Every word for him. Upon my word
I must. Upon my word I must. It was true. Told him the shortest way to Tara was
VIA Holyhead. Just then my father came up. He might have answered rudely.

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart and went coursing in warm
flood along his arteries. Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life
together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined
his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the
years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of
ecstasy. For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their
children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’
tender fire. In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: “Why
is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is
no word tender enough to be your name?”

Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne
towards him from the past. He longed to be alone with her. When the others had
gone away, when he and she were in their room in the hotel, then they would be
alone together. He would call her softly:

“Gretta!”

Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in
his voice would strike her. He turned suddenly to the invalid and said:

“D’ye know what, Tom, has just occurred to me? You night join in and we’d
have a four-handed reel. ”

“Good idea,” said Mr Power. “The four of us together. ”

Mr Kernan was silent. The old man began to rake more cinders together. 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.

Your fond son, Stephen



How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered
if he would die. 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 bell! 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 CHURCHYARD! 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! O farewell!

The cold sunlight was weaker and Brother Michael was standing at his bedside
with a bowl of beef-tea. He was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. He could
hear them playing in the playgrounds. 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. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous desire
that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she had
fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.

He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly
about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:

“Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?”

She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

“Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?”

She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

“O, I am thinking about that song, _The Lass of Aughrim_. ”

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the
bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment
and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught
sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face
whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his
glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand
like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked. A few steps behind her were Mr Bartell D’Arcy
and Miss O’Callaghan. ”

“Good-night, Miss Morkan. ”

“Good-night, again. ”

“Good-night, all. ”





Mrs Kernan’s puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight. What do I
see? A decollated percursor trying to pick the lock.

MARCH 21, NIGHT. Free.

--O by the way, said Heron suddenly, I saw your governor going in.

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.

--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 that 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
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,
depressed 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 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 towards 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
O'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 bystreet a German
band of five players in faded uniforms 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 limestone 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 position 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 these
days--remember, whatever you do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was a young
fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. 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 right kidney. I'm talking
to you as a friend, Stephen. I don't believe a son should be afraid of his
father.

--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. 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 the
descriptions 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 remember only that she had worn a shawl
about her head like a cowl and that her dark eyes had invited and unnerved him.
He wondered had he been in her thoughts as 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.

--O, Dedalus, he cried, Doyle is in a great bake about you.

--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.

--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 turbulence 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 pursuing 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. 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.

In the vestry a plump fresh-faced 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
rhythmically 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 likeness between his father's mind and that of this smiling
well-dressed priest: and he was aware of some desecration of the priest's
office or of the vestry itself whose silence was now routed by loud talk and
joking and its air pungent with the smells of the gas-jets 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 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 transformed his moody
mistrustfulness. For one rare moment he seemed to be clothed in the real
apparel of boyhood: 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
able-bodied 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 mummery 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 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.

“What is the matter, Julia?” asked Aunt Kate anxiously. “Who is it?”

Julia, who was carrying in a column of table-napkins, turned to her sister and
said, simply, as if the question had surprised her:

“It’s only Freddy, Kate, and Gabriel with him. ”

In fact right behind her Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across
the landing. The latter, a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size
and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched
with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings
of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow,
tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty
hair made him look sleepy. He was laughing heartily in a high key at a story
which he had been telling Gabriel on the stairs and at the same time rubbing
the knuckles of his left fist backwards and forwards into his left eye.

“Good-evening, Freddy,” said Aunt Julia.

Freddy Malins bade the Misses Morkan good-evening in what seemed an offhand
fashion by reason of the habitual catch in his voice and then, seeing that Mr
Browne was grinning at him from the sideboard, crossed the room on rather shaky
legs and began to repeat in an undertone the story he had just told to Gabriel.

“He’s not so bad, is he?” said Aunt Kate to Gabriel.

Gabriel’s brows were dark but he raised them quickly and answered:

“O, no, hardly noticeable. ”

“Now, isn’t he a terrible fellow!” she said. “And his poor mother made
him take the pledge on New Year’s Eve. But come on, Gabriel, into the
drawing-room. ”

Before leaving the room with Gabriel she signalled to Mr Browne by frowning and
shaking her forefinger in warning to and fro. Mr Browne nodded in answer and,
when she had gone, said to Freddy Malins:

“Now, then, Teddy, I’m going to fill you out a good glass of lemonade just
to buck you up. ”

Freddy Malins, who was nearing the climax of his story, waved the offer aside
impatiently but Mr Browne, having first called Freddy Malins’ attention to a
disarray in his dress, filled out and handed him a full glass of lemonade.
Freddy Malins’ left hand accepted the glass mechanically, his right hand
being engaged in the mechanical readjustment of his dress. Mr Browne, whose
face was once more wrinkling with mirth, poured out for himself a glass of
whisky while Freddy Malins exploded, before he had well reached the climax of
his story, in a kink of high-pitched bronchitic laughter and, setting down his
untasted and overflowing glass, began to rub the knuckles of his left fist
backwards and forwards into his left eye, repeating words of his last phrase as
well as his fit of laughter would allow him.





Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of
runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He liked music but the
piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any
melody for the other listeners, though they had begged Mary Jane to play
something. Four young men, who had come from the refreshment-room to stand in
the doorway at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a
few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane
herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at the pauses
like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at
her elbow to turn the page.

Gabriel’s eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under
the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano. A picture of the
balcony scene in _Romeo and Juliet_ hung there and beside it was a picture of
the two murdered princes in the Tower which Aunt Julia had worked in red, blue
and brown wools when she was a girl. Probably in the school they had gone to as
girls that kind of work had been taught for one year. His mother had worked for
him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes’
heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons. It was
strange that his mother had had no musical talent though Aunt Kate used to call
her the brains carrier of the Morkan family. Both she and Julia had always
seemed a little proud of their serious and matronly sister. Her photograph
stood before the pierglass. She held an open book on her knees and was pointing
out something in it to Constantine who, dressed in a man-o’-war suit, lay at
her feet. It was she who had chosen the name of her sons for she was very
sensible of the dignity of family life. Thanks to her, Constantine was now
senior curate in Balbrigan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his
degree in the Royal University. A shadow passed over his face as he remembered
her sullen opposition to his marriage. Some slighting phrases she had used
still rankled in his memory; she had once spoken of Gretta as being country
cute and that was not true of Gretta at all. It was Gretta who had nursed her
during all her last long illness in their house at Monkstown.

He knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing
again the opening melody with runs of scales after every bar and while he
waited for the end the resentment died down in his heart. The piece ended with
a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the bass. Great
applause greeted Mary Jane as, blushing and rolling up her music nervously, she
escaped from the room. The most vigorous clapping came from the four young men
in the doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of
the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.

Lancers were arranged. Gabriel found himself partnered with Miss Ivors. She was
a frank-mannered talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown
eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice and the large brooch which was fixed in
the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device and motto.

When they had taken their places she said abruptly:

“I have a crow to pluck with you. ”

“With me?” said Gabriel.

She nodded her head gravely.

“What is it?” asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner.

“Who is G. C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden
battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood
four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From
these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his
palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.
”

The gentlemen drank again, one following another’s example. Mr Kernan seemed
to be weighing something in his mind. He was impressed. Even when he was out at
elbows and at his wits’ end for money he kept up a bold face. Little Chandler
remembered (and the remembrance brought a slight flush of pride to his cheek)
one of Ignatius Gallaher’s sayings when he was in a tight corner:

“Half time now, boys,” he used to say light-heartedly. “Where’s my
considering cap?”

That was Ignatius Gallaher all out; and, damn it, you couldn’t but admire him
for it.

Little Chandler quickened his pace. For the first time in his life he felt
himself superior to the people he passed. For the first time his soul revolted
against the dull inelegance of Capel Street. There was no doubt about it: if
you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin. As he
crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and
pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled
together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot,
stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night
bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. He wondered whether he could write
a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some
London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what
idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him
took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

Every step brought him nearer to London, farther from his own sober inartistic
life. A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind. He was not so
old--thirty-two. His temperament might be said to be just at the point of
maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to
express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if
it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he
thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and
resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of
poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He
could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred
minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic
school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would
put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notice
which his book would get. _“Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful
verse. ”. .