Chapter 2
Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse at the end of the garden.
-- Very good, Simon. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly. Anywhere you like. The outhouse will do me nicely: it will be more salubrious.
-- Damn me, said Mr Dedalus frankly, if I know how you can smoke such villainous awful tobacco. It's like gunpowder, by God.
-- It's very nice, Simon, replied the old man. Very cool and mollifying.
Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat. While he smoked the brim of his tall hat and the bowl of his pipe were just visible beyond the jambs of the outhouse door. His arbour, as he called the 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.
During the first part of the summer in Blackrock uncle Charles was Stephen's constant companion. Uncle Charles was a hale old man with a well tanned skin, rugged features and white side whiskers. On week days he did messages between the house in Carysfort Avenue and those shops in the main street of the town with which the family dealt. Stephen was glad to go with him on these errands for uncle Charles helped him very liberally to handfuls of whatever was exposed in open boxes and barrels outside 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. Do you hear me, sir? They're good for your bowels.
When the order list had been booked the two would go on to the park where an old friend of Stephen's father, Mike Flynn, would be found seated on a bench, waiting for them. Then would begin Stephen's run round the park. Mike Flynn would stand at the gate near the railway station, watch in hand, while Stephen ran round the track in the style Mike Flynn favoured, his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and his hands held straight down by his sides. When the morning practice was over the trainer would make his comments and sometimes illustrate them by shuffling along for a yard or so comically in an old pair of blue canvas shoes. A small ring of wonderstruck children and nursemaids would gather to watch him and linger even when he and uncle Charles had sat down again and were talking athletics and politics. Though he had heard his father say that Mike Flynn had put some of the best runners of modern times through his hands Stephen often glanced at his trainer's flabby stubble-covered face, as it bent over the long stained fingers through which he rolled his cigarette, and with pity at the mild lustreless blue eyes which would look up suddenly from the task and gaze vaguely into the blue distance while the long swollen fingers ceased their rolling and grains and fibres of tobacco fell back into the pouch.
On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel and, as the font was above Stephen's reach, the old man would dip his hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen's clothes and on the floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumb blackened prayer book wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page. Stephen knelt at his side respecting, though he did not share, his piety. He often wondered what his grand-uncle prayed for so seriously. Perhaps he prayed for the souls in purgatory or for the grace of a happy death or perhaps he prayed that God might send him back a part of the big fortune he had squandered in Cork.
On Sundays Stephen with his father and his grand-uncle took their constitutional. The old man was a nimble walker in spite of his corns and often ten or twelve miles of the road were covered. The little village of Stillorgan was the parting of the ways. Either they went to the left towards the Dublin mountains or along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum, coming home by Sandyford. Trudging along the road or standing in some grimy wayside public house his elders spoke constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear. Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about 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.
His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. 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. At night he built up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of Marseille, of sunny trellises, and of Mercedes.
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. 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. Aubrey carried a whistle dangling from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs. Stephen, who had read of Napoleon's plain style of dress, chose to remain unadorned and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with his 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.
Aubrey and Stephen had a common milkman and often they drove out in the milk-car to Carrickmines where the cows were at grass. While the men were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare round the field. But when autumn came the cows were driven home from the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen's heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded.
The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went round with the car which delivered the evening milk and these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman's coat. Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door. He thought it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at his trainer's flabby stubble-covered face as it bent heavily over his long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.
He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.
He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.
Two great yellow caravans had halted one morning before the door and men had come tramping into the house to dismantle it. The furniture had been hustled out through the front garden which was strewn with wisps of straw and rope ends and into the huge vans at the gate. When all had been safely stowed the vans had set off noisily down the avenue: and from the window of the railway carriage, in which he had sat with his red-eyed mother, Stephen had seen them lumbering along the Merrion Road.
The parlour fire would not draw that evening and Mr Dedalus rested the poker against the bars of the grate to attract the flame. Uncle Charles dozed in a corner of the half furnished uncarpeted room and near him the family portraits leaned against the wall. The lamp on the table shed a weak light over the boarded floor, muddied by the feet of the van-men. Stephen sat on a footstool beside his father listening to a long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that some fight was going to take place. He felt, too, that he was being enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his shoulders. The sudden flight from the comfort and revery of Blackrock, the 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. He understood also why the servants had often whispered together in the hall and why his father had often stood on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, talking loudly to uncle Charles who urged him to sit down and eat his dinner.
-- There's a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with fierce energy. We're not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) not half dead.
Dublin was a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands and the disorder in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in Blackrock. In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down one of the side streets but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the 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. 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 sum-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 went once or twice with his mother to visit their relatives: and though they passed a jovial array of shops lit up and adorned for Christmas his mood of embittered silence did not leave him. The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.
He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt's kitchen. A lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees. She looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said musingly:
-- The beautiful Mabel Hunter!
A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly:
-- What is she in, mud?
-- In a pantomime, love.
The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother's sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if fascinated:
-- The beautiful Mabel Hunter!
As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured devotedly:
-- Isn't she an exquisite creature?
And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words. He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see.
He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old dark-windowed house. The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river. Before the fire an old woman was busy making tea and, as she bustled at the task, she told in a low voice of what the priest and the doctor had said. She told too of certain changes they had seen in her of late and of her odd ways and sayings. He sat listening to the words and following the ways of adventure that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults and winding galleries and jagged caverns.
Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared suspended in the gloom of the doorway. A feeble creature like a monkey was there, drawn thither by the sound of voices at the fire. A whining voice came from the door asking:
-- Is that Josephine?
The old bustling woman answered cheerily from the fireplace:
-- No, Ellen, it's Stephen.
-- O He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in
the doorway.
-- Do you want anything, Ellen? asked the old woman at the fire.
But she did not answer the question and said:
-- I thought it was Josephine. I thought you were Josephine, Stephen.
And, repeating this several times, she fell to laughing feebly.
He was sitting in the midst of a children's party at Harold's Cross.
His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in
the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers, danced and
romped noisily and, though he tried to share their merriment, he felt himself
a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and sunbonnets.
But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the
room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the
beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like
a soothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes
the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers
and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering,
taunting, searching, exciting his heart.
In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their
things: the party was over. She had thrown a shawl about her and, as they
went together towards the tram, sprays of her fresh warm breath flew gaily
above her cowled head and her shoes tapped blithely on the glassy road.
It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their
bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the driver,
both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of
the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came
up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the night save when the
lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.
They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She
came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their
phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the
upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced
upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said
to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether
in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her
vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that
he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above
the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which
he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he
and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters
running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering
to and fro on the sunny lawn and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out
into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path.
Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher
of the scene before him.
-- She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That's why she
came with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold Of her when she comes
up to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.
But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted tram,
he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the corrugated footboard.
The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours.
Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise.
From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the initial
letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared
the title of the verses he was trying to write: To E - C - . He knew it
was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems
of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line
underneath he fell into a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover
of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after
the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about
Parnell on the back of one of his father's second moiety notices. But his
brain had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had
covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates:
Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the
incident, he thought himself into confidence. 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. The verses told only of the
night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon. Some undefined
sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence
beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the
kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. After this the
letters L. D. S. were written at the foot of the page, and, having hidden
the book, he went into his mother's bedroom and gazed at his face for a
long time in the mirror of her dressing-table.
But his long spell of leisure and liberty was drawing to its end. One
evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy all
through dinner. Stephen had been awaiting his father's return for there
had been mutton hash that day and he knew that his father would make him
dip his bread in the gravy. But he did not relish the hash for the mention
of Clongowes had coated his palate with a scum of disgust.
-- I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth time, just
at the corner of the square.
-- Then I suppose, said Mrs Dedalus, he will be able to arrange it.
I mean about Belvedere.
-- Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. Don't I tell you he's provincial
of the order now?
-- I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers myself,
said Mrs Dedalus.
-- Christian brothers be damned! said Mr Dedalus. Is it with Paddy Stink
and Micky Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God's name since he
began with them. They'll be of service to him in after years. Those are
the fellows that can get you a position.
-- And they're a very rich order, aren't they, Simon?
-- Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes.
Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.
Mr Dedalus pushed his plate over to Stephen and bade him finish what
was on it.
-- Now then, Stephen, he said, you must put your shoulder to the wheel,
old chap. 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.
-- O, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus. Here, Maurice!
Come here, you thick-headed ruffian! Do you know I'm going to send you
to a college where they'll teach you to spell c.a.t. cat. And I'll buy
you a nice little penny handkerchief to keep your nose dry. Won't that
be grand fun?
Maurice grinned at his father and then at his brother.
Mr Dedalus screwed his glass into his eye and stared hard at both his
sons. Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his father's gaze.
-- By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector, or provincial
rather, was telling me that story about you and Father Dolan. You're an
impudent thief, he said.
-- O, he didn't, Simon!
-- Not he! said Mr Dedalus. But he gave me a great account of the whole
affair. We were chatting, you know, and one word borrowed another. And,
by the way, who do you think he told me will get that job in the corporation?
But I `Il tell you that after. Well, as I was saying, we were chatting
away quite friendly and he asked me did our friend here wear glasses still,
and then he told me the whole story.
-- And was he annoyed, Simon?
-- Annoyed? Not he! Manly little chap! he said.
Mr Dedalus imitated the mincing nasal tone of the provincial.
Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father
Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. You better mind yourself Father
Dolan, said I, or young Dedalus will send you up for twice nine.
We had a famous laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!
Mr Dedalus turned to his wife and interjected in his natural voice:
-- Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. 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. Ha! Ha! Ha!
The night of the Whitsuntide play had come and Stephen from the window
of the dressing-room looked out on the small grass-plot across which lines
of Chinese lanterns were stretched. He watched the visitors come down the
steps from the house and pass into the theatre. Stewards in evening dress,
old Belvedereans, loitered in groups about the entrance to the theatre
and ushered in the visitors with Ceremony. Under the sudden glow of a lantern
he could recognize the smiling face of a priest.
The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the tabernacle and the first
benches had been driven back so as to leave the dais of the altar and the
space before it free. Against the walls stood companies of barbells and
Indian clubs; the 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. The vestry and
chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The plump bald sergeant
major was testing with his foot the springboard of the vaulting horse.
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. 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. 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 a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the
altar a stout old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts. When she stood
up a pink-dressed figure, wearing a curly golden wig and an old-fashioned
straw sunbonnet, with black pencilled eyebrows and cheeks delicately rouged
and powdered, was discovered. A low murmur of curiosity ran round the chapel
at the discovery of this girlish figure. One of the prefects, smiling and
nodding his head, approached the dark corner and, having bowed to the stout
old lady, said pleasantly:
-- Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs
Tallon?
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. A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge
of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been
standing, walked out of the chapel.
He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked
the garden. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience
and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The light spread upwards
from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among
the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings.
A side door of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across
the grass plots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude
of a waltz: and when the side door closed again the listener could hear
the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their
languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had
been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of
a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on
the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of
lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.
It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the
stage.
At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed
in the darkness and as he walked towards it he became aware of a faint
aromatic odour. Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway, smoking,
and before he reached them he had recognised Heron by his voice.
-- Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice. 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.
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. 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.
Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector's
pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do it.
-- Go on, Dedalus, he urged, you can take him off rippingly. He that
will not hear the churcha let him be to theea as the heathena and the publicana.
The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis
in whose mouthpiece the cigarette had become too tightly wedged.
-- Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth
and smiling and frowning upon it tolerantly. It's always getting stuck
like that. Do you use a holder?
-- I don't smoke, answered Stephen.
-- No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn't smoke and he
doesn't go to bazaars and he doesn't flirt and he doesn't damn anything
or damn all.
Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival's flushed and mobile
face, beaked like a bird's. He had often thought it strange that Vincent
Heron had a bird's face as well as a bird's name. A shock of pale hair
lay on the forehead like a ruffled crest: the forehead was narrow and bony
and a thin hooked nose stood out between the close-set prominent eyes which
were light and inexpressive. The rivals were school friends. They sat together
in class, knelt together in the chapel, talked together after beads over
their lunches. As the fellows in number one were undistinguished dullards,
Stephen and Heron had been during the year the virtual heads of the school.
It was they who went up to the rector together to ask for a free day or
to get a fellow off.
-- O by the way, said Heron suddenly, I saw your governor going in.
The smile waned on Stephen's face. Any allusion made to his father by
a fellow or by a master put his calm to rout in a moment. He waited in
timorous silence to hear what Heron might say next. Heron, however, nudged
him expressively with his elbow and said:
-- You're a sly dog.
-- Why so? said Stephen.
-- You'd think butter wouldn't melt in your mouth said Heron. But I'm
afraid you're a sly dog.
-- Might I ask you what you are talking about? said Stephen urbanely.
-- Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn't we?
And deucedly pretty she is too. And inquisitive! And what part does
Stephen take, Mr 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. I wouldn't care
a bit, by Jove. She's ripping, isn't she, Wallis?
-- Not half bad, answered Wallis quietly as he placed his holder once
more in a corner of his mouth.
A shaft of momentary anger flew through Stephen's mind at these indelicate
allusions in the hearing of a stranger. For him there was nothing amusing
in a girl's interest and regard. All day he had thought of nothing but
their 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. All day he had imagined a new meeting with her for he
knew that she was to come to the play. The old restless moodiness had again
filled his breast as it had done on the night of the party, but had not
found an outlet in verse. The growth and knowledge of two years of boyhood
stood between then and now, forbidding such an outlet: and all day the
stream of gloomy tenderness within him had started forth and returned upon
itself in dark courses and eddies, wearying him in the end until the pleasantry
of the prefect and the painted little boy had drawn from him a movement
of impatience.
-- So you may as well admit, Heron went on, that we've fairly found
you out this time. You can't play the saint on me any more, that's one
sure five.
A soft peal of mirthless laughter escaped from his lips and, bending
down as before, he struck Stephen lightly across the calf of the leg with
his cane, as if in jesting reproof.
Stephen's moment of anger had already passed. He was neither flattered
nor confused, but simply wished the banter to end. He scarcely resented
what had seemed to him a silly indelicateness for he knew that the adventure
in his mind stood in no danger from these words: and his face mirrored
his rival's false smile.
-- Admit! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the
calf of the leg.
The stroke was playful but not so lightly given as the first one had
been. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost painlessly;
and, bowing 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.
It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was
in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes
of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted
and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two
years' spell of 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.
On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr
Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:
-- This fellow has heresy in his essay.
A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his
hand between his thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about
his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring morning
and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of failure
and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against
his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.
A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.
-- Perhaps you didn't know that, he said.
-- Where? asked Stephen.
Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.
-- Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrm 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 But the class was not so soon appeased. 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. 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. 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. Stephen
listened to them in some wonderment for Boland was the dunce and Nash the
idler of the class. In fact, after some talk about their favourite writers,
Nash declared for Captain Marryat who, he said, was the greatest writer.
-- Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus?
Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:
-- Of prose do you mean?
-- Yes.
-- Newman, I think.
-- Is it Cardinal Newman? asked Boland.
-- Yes, answered Stephen.
The grin broadened on Nash's freckled face as he turned to Stephen and
said:
-- And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?
-- 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.
-- And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland.
-- Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron.
-- O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home
in a book.
At this Stephen forgot the silent vows he had been making and burst
out:
-- Tennyson a poet! Why, he's only a rhymester!
-- O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest
poet.
-- And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging
his neighbour.
-- Byron, of course, answered Stephen.
Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.
-- What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.
-- You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated
people.
-- He must be a fine poet! said Boland.
-- You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, 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:
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.
-- Admit.
-- No. No.
At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His tormentors
set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, half
blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists madly and sobbing.
While he was still repeating the Confiteor amid the indulgent
laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode
were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why
he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten
a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth
no anger from him. All 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. You're
to go in at once and get dressed for the play. Hurry up, you better.
-- He's coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl,
when he wants to.
The boy turned to Heron and repeated:
-- But Doyle is in an awful bake.
-- Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes?
answered Heron.
-- Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points
of honour.
-- 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. 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. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly
voice would bid him raise up his father's fallen state by his labours and,
meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow,
to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get
free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding
voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave
them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them,
beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.
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. 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 streamed upwards before his anguished
eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last
the air was clear and cold again.
A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin
to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought
his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of the
morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He saw the
word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank
heavy air.
That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour
to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go
back.
Stephen was once again seated beside his father in the corner of a railway
carriage at Kingsbridge. He was travelling with his father by the night
mail to Cork. As the train steamed out of the station he recalled his childish
wonder of years before and every event of his first day at Clongowes. But
he felt no wonder now. He saw the darkening lands slipping away past him,
the silent 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.
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. Stephen
heard but could feel no pity. The images of the dead were all strangers
to him save that of uncle Charles, an image which had lately been fading
out of memory. He knew, however, that his father's property was going to
be sold by auction, and in the manner of his own dispossession he felt
the world give the lie rudely to his phantasy.
At Maryborough he fell asleep. When he awoke the train had passed out
of Mallow and his father was stretched asleep on the other seat. The cold
light of the dawn lay over the country, over the unpeopled fields and the
closed cottages. The terror of sleep fascinated his mind as he watched
the silent country or heard from time to time his father's deep breath
or sudden sleepy movement. The neighbourhood of unseen sleepers filled
him with strange dread, as though they could harm him, and he prayed that
the day might come quickly. His prayer, addressed neither to God nor saint,
began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze crept through the chink
of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in a trail of foolish words
which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of the train; and silently, at
intervals of four seconds, the 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.
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. The
bright warm sunlight was streaming through the window and he could hear
the din of traffic. His father was standing before the dressing-table,
examining his hair and face and moustache with great care, craning his
neck across the water-jug and drawing it back sideways to see the better.
While he did so he sang softly to himself with quaint accent and phrasing:
`My love she's handsome,
The consciousness of the warm sunny city outside his window and the tender
tremors with which his father's voice festooned the strange sad happy air,
drove off all the mists of the night's ill humour from Stephen's brain.
He got up quickly to dress and, when the song had ended, said:
-- That's much prettier than any of your other come-all-yous.
-- Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus.
-- I like it, said Stephen.
-- It's a pretty old air, said Mr Dedalus, twirling the points of his
moustache. Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it! Poor Mick Lacy!
He had little turns for it, grace notes 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. I mixed with fine decent
fellows. Everyone of us could lo something. One fellow had a good voice,
another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic song,
another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell
a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves
and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. But we were
all gentlemen, Stephen - at least I hope we were - and bloody good honest
Irishmen too. That's the kind of fellows I want you to associate with,
fellows of the right kidney. I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I
don't believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as
your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like
brothers than father and son. I `Il never forget the first day he caught
me smoking. I was standing at the end of the South Terrace one day with
some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because
we had pipes stuck in the corners of our mouths. Suddenly the governor
passed. He didn't say a word, or stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we
were out for a walk together and when we were coming home he took out his
cigar case and said: - By the by, Simon, I didn't know you smoked, or something
like that. - Of course I tried to carry it off as best I could. - If you
want a good smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An 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.
He heard the sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened
his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking-suddenly on his
sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses
with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless.
He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops.
By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits
of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless
he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond
to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer
and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice.
He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to
himself:
-- I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is
Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is
in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen
and Victoria. Names.
The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth
some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante,
Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an
old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away
from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten slim
jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and dancing
on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead,
of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being
buried then in the little graveyard of the community off the main avenue
of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no
mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but
he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered
out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him
passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out
in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe! It
was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy
in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his side-pockets and his trousers
were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.
On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed
his father meekly about the city from bar to bar. To the sellers in the
market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for
a lob Mr Dedalus told the same tale - that he was an old Corkonian, that
he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up in
Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that
he was only a Dublin jackeen.
They had set out early in the morning from 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'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.
-- 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. Do you know that?
Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which
they had drifted.
-- Now don't be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus Leave him
to his Maker.
-- Yerra, sure I wouldn't put any ideas into his head. I'm old enough
to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old man
to Stephen. Do you know that?
-- Are you? asked 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.
-- Ay, or thought of, said Mr Dedalus.
-- Bedad I did, repeated the little old man. And, more than that, I
can remember even your great-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. That's all I can
say, said Mr Dedalus.
-- If he is, he'll do, said the little old man.
-- And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long
and did so little harm.
-- But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks
be to God we lived so long and did so much good.
Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his
father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss
of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older
than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets
like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it
had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship
with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing
stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood
was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was
drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.
He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation
of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled
him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.
Stephen's mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the
corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps
and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When they
had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen drew forth
his orders on the 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.
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 impatient
of their voices and could not keep his feet at rest. But the teller still
deferred the serving of others to say he was living in changed times and
that there was nothing like giving a boy the best education that money
could buy. Mr Dedalus lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the
roof and telling Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing
in the house of commons of the old Irish parliament.
-- God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times,
Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal
Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at home
and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn't be seen dead in a ten-acre field
with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I'm sorry to say that they are only as
I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet July.
A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures standing
at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery eyes. Stephen
looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a few days before
he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the windows of Barnardo's.
-- Well that's done, said Mr Dedalus.
-- We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where?
-- Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what?
-- Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.
-- Underdone's?
-- Yes. Some quiet place.
-- Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn't matter about the dearness.
He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried
to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness.
-- Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We're hot
out for the half mile, are we?
For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through
Stephen's fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried
fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the
family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see
Ingomar or The Lady of Lyons. In his coat pockets he carried
squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers' pocket bulged
with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for everyone,
overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his books up and
down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a form
of commonwealth for the household by which every member of it held some
office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed loans on willing
borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out receipts and
reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove
up and down the city in trams. Then the season of pleasure came to an end.
The pot of pink enamel paint gave out and the wainscot of his bedroom remained
with its unfinished and ill-plastered coat.
His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no further
occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He too returned to his
old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell to pieces. The commonwealth
fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and its books on a sensible loss,
the rules of life which he had drawn about himself fell into desuetude.
How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a break-water of
order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam
up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the
powerful recurrence of the tides within him. 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.
He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step
nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame
and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He
felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather
in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.
He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything
else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that
his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. 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. 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.
Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot,
its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him
from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet
avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly
lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at times,
in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting him gave
room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the background
of his memory. 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. At those moments
the soft speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest.
A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward
to and, in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of
then and now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness
and timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.
Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The
verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken
brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood
was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into
the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned
to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another
of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her
in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the
darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly
with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude
in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively
and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration.
He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning
form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled
for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like
a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious
entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the
echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.
He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul
laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling
of drunken singers. He walked onward, 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. They were leisurely and
perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes 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. She said gaily:
-- Good night, Willie dear!
Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart
in the copious easy-chair beside the bed. 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.
As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and
embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her and
he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the warm
calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical weeping.
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.
-- Give me a kiss, she said.
His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in
her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that
he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his
lips would not bend to kiss her.
With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his
and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It
was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her,
body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure
of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips
as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he
felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer
than sound or odour.
Òà·²¹«ÒæͼÊé¹Ý(shuku.net)Roderick Kickham
John Lawton
Anthony MacSwiney
Simon Moonan
As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem
He fell and hurt his Alec Kafoozelum.`'Tis youth and folly
Makes young men marry,
So here, my love, I'll
No longer stay.
What can't be cured, sure,
Must be injured, sure,
So I'll go to
Amerikay.
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.'Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless