Chapter Five

Chapter V

Read Chapter IV here.

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.
The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole,
and the pool under it brought back to his memory the
dark turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes. The
box of pawn tickets at his elbow had just been rifled and
he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the
blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased
and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or Mac-
Evoy.

1 Pair Buskins.
1 D. 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.

—An hour and twenty five minutes, she said. The

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right time now is twenty past ten. The dear knows you
might try to be in time for your lectures.

—Fill out the place for me to wash, said Stephen.

—Katey, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

—Booty, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

— I can’t, I’m going for blue. Fill it out, you, Maggie.

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.

—Well, it’s a poor case, she said, when a university
student is so dirty that his mother has to wash him.

—But it gives you pleasure, said Stephen calmly.

An ear splitting whistle was heard from upstairs and
his mother thrust a damp overall into his hands, saying:

— Dry yourself and hurry out for the love of goodness.

A second shrill whistle, prolonged angrily, brought one
of the girls to the foot of the staircase.

—Yes, father.

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

—Yes, father.

— Sure?

— Hm!

The girl came back, making signs to him to be quick
and go out quietly by the back. Stephen laughed and
said:

—He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch
is masculine.

—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. I know how it has changed you.

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— 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
nun’s madhouse beyond the wall.

—Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss
of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the
mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache
of loathing and bitterness. His father’s whistle, his
mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac
were to him now so many voices offending and threatening
to humble the pride of his youth. He drove their
echoes even out of his heart with an execration: but, as
he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning
light falling about him through the dripping trees and
smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and bark,
his soul was loosed of her miseries.

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. 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 silverveined 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 stone cutting 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

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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.

His mind when wearied of its search for the essence
of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas
turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the
Elizabethans. 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 waistcoateers 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.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding
upon so that it had rapt him from the companionship
of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from
Aristotle’s Poetics and Psychology and a Synopsis
Philosophiae Scholasticae ad mentem divi Thomae. His
thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at
moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings
of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world
perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed:
and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the
eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that
the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle
and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with
nobility. 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.

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Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive
man with the doll’s face and the brimless hat coming
towards him down the slope of the bridge with little
steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and
holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him
like a divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and
peered into a dairy to see the time. The clock in the
dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as
he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him,
but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision.
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 anti-social being, wrapped up
in yourself. I’m 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.

Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture 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
saw the heads of his classmates meekly bent as they
wrote in their notebooks the points they were bidden to
note, nominal definitions, essential definitions and examples
or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable
and an unfavourable criticism side by 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

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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.

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. It was a
priestlike face, priestlike in its pallor, in the wide winged
nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the
jaws, priestlike 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.

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.
But the night shade 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

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up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among
heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language
was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the
very words themselves which set to band and disband
themselves in wayward rhythms:

The ivy whines upon the wall,
And whines and twines upon the wall,
The yellow ivy upon the wall,
Ivy, ivy up the wall.

Did any one ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty!
Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy:
that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what about
ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter
than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants.
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 potshreds and chines of bacon. He
had learnt what little he knew of the laws of Latin verse
from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history
were handed on to him in the trite words in tanto
discrimine and he had tried to peer into the social life
of the city of cities through the words implere ollam
denariorum which the rector had rendered sonorously

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as the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his
timeworn 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. Yes, those were noble
names on the dusky flyleaf and, even for so poor a
Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as fragrant as
though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender
and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think
that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of
the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in
terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic
philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in
than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in
the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous
ring, pulled his mind downward; and while he was striving
this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of
the reformed conscience he came upon the droll statue of
the national poet of Ireland.

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. It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of
a Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the peasant
student. It was a jesting name between them, but
the young peasant bore with it lightly:

— Go on, Stevie, I have a hard head, you tell me.
Call me what you will.

The homely version of his christian name on the lips

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of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first
heard for he was as formal in speech with others as
they were with 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.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess
of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant
worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland. 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. His nurse had taught him
Irish and shaped his rude imaginaation by the broken
lights of Irish myth. He stood towards the myth upon
which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of
beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves
as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as
towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a
dull witted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or of feeling
came to him from England or by way of English
culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to
a password: and of the world that lay beyond England

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he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he
spoke of serving.

Coupling this ambition with the young man’s humour
Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese:
and there was even a point of irritation in the name
pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed
in his friend which seemed so often to stand between
Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden
ways of Irish life.

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the
violent or luxurious language in which Stephen escaped
from the cold silence of intellectual revolt, had called
up before Stephen’s mind a strange vision. The two
were walking slowly towards Davin’s rooms through the
dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

— A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn,
coming on winter, and I never told it to a living soul
and you are the first person now I ever told it to. I
disremember if it was October or November. It was
October because it was before I came up here to join the
matriculation 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.

— I was away all that day from my own place over
in Buttevant— 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. 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. I never will forget that day. One of the
Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his

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caman and I declare to God he was within an aim’s
ace of getting it at the side of his temple. 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. So there
was nothing for it only to stay the night or to foot it
out. 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. You wouldn’t see the sign
of a christian house along the road or hear a sound.
It was pitch dark almost. 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. I went up and knocked 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.
After a while a young woman opened the door and
brought me out a big mug of milk. 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. She kept me in talk a long

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while at the door and I thought it strange because her
breast and her shoulders were bare. She asked me was
I tired and would I like to stop the night 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. You’ve no call to be frightened.
There’s no one in but ourselves….’ I didn’t go in,
Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in
a fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and
she was standing at the door.

The last words of Davin’s story sang in his memory
and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth,
reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom
he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the
college cars drove by, as a type of her race and of his
own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself
in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the
eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile,
calling the stranger to her bed.

A hand was laid on his arm and a young voice cried:

—Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir! The first handsel
today, gentleman. 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.

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—Do, gentleman! Don’t forget your own girl, sir!

— I have no money, said Stephen.

—Buy them lovely ones, will you, sir? Only a penny.

—Did you hear what I said? asked Stephen, bending
towards her. I told you I had no money. I tell you
again now.

—Well, sure, you will some day, sir, please God, the
girl answered after an instant.

—Possibly, said Stephen, but I don’t think it likely.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might
turn to gibing and wishing to be out of the way before
she offered her ware to another, a tourist from England
or a student of Trinity. Grafton Street, along which
he walked, prolonged that moment of discouraged poverty.
In the roadway at the head of the street a slab
was set to the memory of Wolfe Tone and he remembered
having been present with his father at its laying.
He remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry
tribute. 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 rainsodden earth gave forth its mortal
odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould
from many hearts. 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.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. He
crossed the hall and took the corridor to the left which

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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 opened the door of the theatre and halted in the
chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows.
A figure was crouching before the large grate
and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was
the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the
door quietly and approached the fireplace.

— Good morning, sir! Can I help you? —

The priest looked up quickly and said:

— One moment now, Mr Dedalus, and you will see.
There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal
arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the
useful arts.—

—I will try to learn it—said Stephen.

—Not too much coal—said the dean —working
briskly at his task—that is one of the secrets.—

He produced four candle butts from the side pockets
of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals
and twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence.
Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and
busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and
candle butts he seemed more than ever a humble server
making ready the place of sacrifice in an empty temple,
a levite of the Lord. Like a levite’s robe of plain linen
the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure of
one whom the canonicals or the bellybordered ephod
would irk and trouble. His very body had waxed old

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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. Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service
without growing towards light and beauty or spreading
abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity— a mortified
will no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than
was to the thrill of love or combat his ageing body, spare
and sinewy, greyed with a silver-pointed down.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the
sticks catch. Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

— I am sure I could not light a fire.—

—You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? —said
the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes.— The
object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What
the beautiful is is another question.—

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

— Can you solve that question now? —he asked.

— Aquinas— answered Stephen—says pulcra sunt
quae visa placent.—

— This fire before us—said the dean —will be pleasing
to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful? —

— In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which
I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be
beautiful. But Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod
tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal
craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell, however, it is
an evil.—

— Quite so — said the dean —you have certainly hit
the nail on the head.—

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

—A draught is said to be a help in these matters.—

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but
with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit
look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius
he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’
enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the
company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled
books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul
with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used
the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden
to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy
in their handling or hatred of that in them which was
evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience,
back upon themselves: and for all this silent service it
seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little,
if at all, the ends he served. 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.

—When may we expect to have something from you
on the esthetic question? —he 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. Only the trained diver can

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go down into those depths and explore them and come
to the surface again.—

—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.—

—Ha! —

—For my purpose I can work on at present by the
light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.—

—I see. I quite see your point.—

—I need them only for my own use and guidance
until I have done something for myself by their light.
If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If
it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy
another.—

—Epictetus also had a lamp —said the dean —which
was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the
lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You
know Epictetus? —

—An old gentleman—said Stephen coarsely— who
said that the soul is very like a bucketful 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. What did the
philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character
of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen
lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.—

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean’s
candle butts and fused itself in Stephen’s consciousness
with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp
and bucket. The priest’s voice, too, had a hard jingling
tone. Stephen’s mind halted by instinct, checked by
the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest’s

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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.

— Undoubtedly—said the dean.

—-One difficulty—said Stephen—in esthetic discussion
is to know whether words are being used according
to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of
the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s,
in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained
in the full company of the saints. The use of
the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope
I am not detaining you.—

— Not in the least—said the dean politely.

— No, no —said Stephen, smiling— I mean… —

—Yes, yes: I see — said the dean quickly— I quite
catch the point: detain.—

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry
short cough.

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

—What funnel? — asked Stephen.

— The funnel through which you pour the oil into
your lamp.—

— That? —said Stephen.— Is that called a funnel?
Is it not a tundish? —

—What is a tundish? —

— That. The… the funnel.—

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— Is that called a tundish in Ireland? — asked the
dean.— I never heard the word in my life.
—
— It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra— said
Stephen, laughing — where they speak the best English.—

— A tundish—said the dean reflectively.— That is
a most interesting word. I must look that word up.
Upon my word I must.—

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. 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. From what had he set out?
Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters,
seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhoring the
vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need
of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and
the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principal men,
peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian
dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden
in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some
finespun line of reasoning upon insufflation on the imposition
of hands or the procession of the Holy Ghost?
Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow,
like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as
he sat by the door of some zinc roofed chapel, yawning
and telling over his church pence?

The dean repeated the word yet again.

— Tundish! Well now, that is interesting! —

[220]

— The question you asked me a moment ago seems to
me more interesting. What is that beauty which the
artist struggles to express from lumps of earth —said
Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point
of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant
foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man
to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben
Jonson. He thought:

— The language in which we are speaking is his before
it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ,
ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak
or write these words without unrest of spirit. His
language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for
me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted
its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets
in the shadow of his language.—

— And to distinguish between the beautiful and the
sublime —the dean added —to distinguish between
moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire
what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various
arts. These are some interesting points we might take
up.—

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean’s firm
dry tone, was silent: and through the silence a distant
noise of many boots and confused voices came up the
staircase.

— In pursuing these speculations—said the dean
conclusively—there is, however, the danger of perishing
of inanition. First you must take your degree. 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. It may be uphill pedalling

[221]

at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a long time before
he got to the top. But he got 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. I most certainly should
not be despondent. Per aspera ad astra.—

He left the hearth quickly and went towards the
landing to oversee the arrival of the first arts’ class.

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet
briskly and impartially every student of the class and
could almost see the frank smiles of the coarser students.
A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his easily
embittered heart for this faithful servingman 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 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. The calling
of the roll began, and the responses to the names
were given out in all tones until the name of Peter Byrne
was reached.

— Here! —

A deep base note in response came from the upper
tier, followed by coughs of protest along the other
benches.

[222]

The professor paused in his reading and called the
next name:

— Cranly! —

No answer.

—Mr Cranly! —

A smile flew across Stephen’s face as he thought of his
friend’s studies.

— Try Leopardstown! — said a voice from the bench
behind.

Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan’s snoutish
face, outlined on the grey light, was impassive. A
formula was given out. Amid the rustling of the notebooks
Stephen turned back again and said:

— Give me some paper for God’s sake.—

— Are you as bad as that? —asked Moynihan with a
broad grin.

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

— In case of necessity any layman or woman can do
it.—

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet
of paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the
professor, the spectrelike symbols of force and velocity
fascinated and jaded Stephen’s mind. He had heard
some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason.
Oh, 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

[223]

familiar with the works of Mr W. 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.

— He means a ball having the form of the ellipsoid
of the principal axes of which I spoke a moment ago.—

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 forms of the community emerged from
the gust blown vestments, the dean of studies, the portly
florid bursar with his cap of grey hair, the president,
the little priest with feathery hair who wrote devout
verses, the squat peasant form of the professor of economics,
the tall form of the young professor of mental
science discussing on the landing a case of conscience
with his class like a giraffe cropping high leafage among
a herd of antelopes, the grave troubled prefect of the
sodality, the plump round headed professor of Italian
with his rogue’s eyes. They came ambling and stumbling,
tumbling and capering, kilting their gowns for leap
frog, holding one another back, shaken with deep false
laughter, smacking one another behind and laughing
at their rude malice, calling to one another by
familiar nicknames, protesting with sudden dignity at

[224]

some rough usage, whispering two and two behind their
hands.

The professor had gone to the glass cases on the sidewall,
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.—

Moynihan, seeing the professor bend over the coils,
rose in his bench and, clacking noiselessly the fingers
of his right hand, began to call with the voice of a
slobbering urchin: — Please, teacher! This boy is after
saying a bad word, teacher.—

— Platinoid—the professor said solemnly— is preferred
to German silver because it has a lower coefficient
of resistance by changes of temperature. The platinoid
wire is insulated and the covering of silk that insulates
it is wound on the ebonite bobbins just where my
finger is. If it were wound single an extra current would
be induced in the coils. The bobbins are saturated in
hot paraffin-wax…—

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

[225]

pure science and applied science. A heavybuilt student,
wearing gold spectacles, stared with some wonder at the
questioner. Moynihan murmured from behind in his
natural voice:

—Isn’t MacAlister a devil for his pound of flesh? —

Stephen looked down coldly on the oblong skull beneath
him overgrown with tangled twinecoloured hair.
The voice, the accent, the mind of the questioner offended
him and he allowed the offence to carry him towards wilful
unkindness, bidding his mind think that the student’s
father would have done better had he sent his son to
Belfast to study and have saved something on the train
fare by so doing.

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.

— That thought is not mine—he said to himself
quickly.— It came from the comic Irishman in the bench
behind. 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.—

The droning voice of the professor continued to wind
itself slowly round and round the coils it spoke of,
doubling, trebling, quadrupling its somnolent energy as
the coil multiplied its ohms of resistance.

Moynihan’s voice called from behind in echo to a distant
bell:

— Closing time, gents! —

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk.

[226]

On a table near the door were two photographs in frames
and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular
tail of signatures. 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.

Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted
irresolutely. From under the wide falling leaf of a soft
hat Cranly’s dark eyes were watching him.

— Have you signed? — Stephen asked.

Cranly closed his long thinlipped mouth, communed
with himself an instant and answered:

—Ego habeo.—

—What is it for?—

— Quod?—

—What is it for? —

Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said
blandly and bitterly:

—Per pax universalis.—

Stephen pointed to the Tsar’s photograph and said:

— He has the face of a besotted Christ.—

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly’s
eyes back from a calm survey of the walls of the hall.

—Are you annoyed? —he asked.

—No—answered Stephen.

—Are you in bad humour? —

—No.—

— Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis—said
Cranly—quia facies vostra monstrat ut vos in damno
malo humore estis.—

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

[227]

—MacCann is in tiptop form. Ready to shed the last
drop. Brand new world. No stimulants and votes for
the bitches.—

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and,
when Moynihan had passed, turned again to meet
Cranly’s eyes.

— Perhaps you can tell me—he said—why he pours
his soul so freely into my ear. Can you? —

A dull scowl appeared on Cranly’s forehead. He
stared at the table where Moynihan had bent to write
his name on the roll; and then said flatly:

—A sugar! —

— Quis est in malo humore—said Stephen— ego aut
vos?—

Cranly did not take up the taunt. He brooded sourly
on his judgment and repeated with the same flat force:

—A flaming bloody sugar, that’s what he is! —

It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen
wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same
tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank
slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire.
Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling
its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly’s speech, unlike
that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan
English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish
idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin
given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an
echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly
by a Wicklow pulpit.

The heavy scowl faded from Cranly’s face as MacCann
marched briskly towards them from the other side of
the hall.

—Here you are! — said MacCann cheerily.

[228]

— Here I am! —said Stephen.

— Late as usual. Can you not combine the progressive
tendency with a respect for punctuality? —

— That question is out of order— said Stephen.—
Next 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 strawcoloured 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 gipsylike 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

[229]

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.—

[230]

— 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 peaceoffering, 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 you 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:

[231]

— 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. I admire
you, sir. I admire the mind of man independent of all
religions. Is that your opinion about the mind of
Jesus? —

— Go on, Temple — said the stout ruddy student, returning,
as was his wont, to his first idea—that pint is
waiting for you.—

— He thinks I’m an imbecile — Temple explained to
Stephen — because I’m a believer in the power of
mind.—

Cranly linked his arms into those of Stephen and his
admirer and said:

— Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus.—

Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of
MacCann’s flushed bluntfeatured face.

—My signature is of no account —he said politely.
You are right to go your way. 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.—

A voice said:

— Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement
than in it.—

Stephen, recognizing the harsh tone of MacAlister’s
voice, did not turn in the direction of the voice. Cranly
pushed solemnly through the throng of students, linking
Stephen and Temple like a celebrant attended by his
ministers on his way to the altar.

[232]

Temple bent eagerly across Cranly’s breast and said:

— Did you hear MacAlister what he said? That youth
is jealous of you. Did you see that? I bet Cranly
didn’t see that. By hell, I saw that at once.—

As they crossed the inner hall the dean of studies was
in the act of escaping from the student with whom he
had been conversing. 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. As he spoke he wrinkled a little his
freckled brow, and bit, between his phrases, at a tiny
bone pencil.

— I hope the matric men will all come. The first arts
men are pretty sure. Second arts, 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. He has a
wife and children somewhere. By hell, I think that’s the
queerest notion I ever heard! Eh? —

His whisper trailed off into sly cackling laughter.
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

[233]

content, while Cranly repeated flatly at every rude
shake:

—A flaming flaring bloody idiot! —

They crossed the weedy garden together. The president,
wrapped in a heavy loose cloak, was coming towards
them along one of the walks, reading his office.
At the end of the walk he halted before turning and
raised his eyes. The students saluted, Temple fumbling
as before at the peak of his cap. They walked forward
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.

The three students halted round the box on which
Davin sat to follow the game. 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.—

—Blast him, curse him! — said Cranly broadly.—
Don’t talk to him at all. Sure, you might as well be
talking, do you know, to a flaming chamberpot as talking
to Temple. Go home, Temple. For God’s sake, go
home.—

—I don’t care a damn about you, Cranly — answered
Temple, moving out of reach of the uplifted stave and

[234]

pointing at Stephen.— He’s the only man I see in this
institution that has an individual mind.—

— Institution! Individual! — cried Cranly.— Go
home, blast you, for you’re a hopeless bloody man.—

—I’m an emotional man—said Temple.— That’s
quite rightly expressed. And I’m proud that I’m an
emotionalist.—

He sidled out of the alley, smiling slyly. Cranly
watched him with a blank expressionless face.

—Look at him! — he said.— 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 laugh, pitched in a high key
and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the
whinny of an elephant. The student’s body shook all
over and, to ease his mirth, he rubbed both his hands
delightedly, over his groins.

— Lynch is awake — said Cranly.

Lynch, for answer, straightened himself and thrust
forward his chest.

—Lynch puts out his chest—said Stephen—as a
criticism 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. Stephen bent down towards
Davin who, intent on the game, had paid no heed to
the talk of the others.

— And how is my little tame goose? —he asked—
Did he sign, too? —

Davin nodded and said: — And you, Stevie? —

[235]

Stephen shook his head.

—You’re a terrible man, Stevie
— said Davin, taking the short pipe from his
mouth — always alone.—

—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.—

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.— I’m an
Irish nationalist, first and foremost. But that’s you all
out. 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.—

— I can ‘t understand you — said Davin.— One time I
hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk
against the Irish informers. 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.

— Then be one of us—said 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.

Davin tossed his head and laughed.

— Oh, come now — he said.— Is it on account of that
certain young lady and Father Moran? But that’s all
in your own mind, Stevie. They were only talking and
laughing.—

Stephen paused and laid a friendly hand upon Davin ‘s
shoulder.

— Do you remember—he said — when we knew each

[236]

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. You remember?
Then you used to address the jesuits as father,
you remember? I ask myself about you: Is he as
innocent as his speech? —

— I’m a simple person —said Davin.—You know that.
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.—

A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of
Stephen’s friendliness.

— This race and this country and this life produced
me — he said.— I shall express myself as I am.—

— Try to be one of us — repeated Davin.— In your
heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.—

—My ancestors threw off their language and took
another— Stephen said.— They allowed a handful of
foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going
to pay in my own life and person debts they made?
What for? —

— For our freedom —said Davin.

—No honourable and sincere man—said Stephen—
has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections
from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you
sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled

[237]

him and left him for another. And you invite me to
be one of you. I’d see you damned first.—

— They died for their ideals, Stevie —said Davin.—
Our day will come yet, believe me.—

Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an
instant.

— The soul is born—he said vaguely—first in those
moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth,
more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the
soul of a man is born in this country there are nets
flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me
of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by
those nets.—

Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.

— Too deep for me, Stevie —he said.— But a man’s
country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be
a poet or 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.—

[238]

Stephen smiled at this sidethrust.

They passed back through the garden and out
through the hall where the doddering porter was pinning
up a 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.

— I know you are poor—he said.

—Damn your yellow insolence —answered Lynch.

This second proof of Lynch’s culture made Stephen
smile again.

— It was a great day for European culture—he said
—when you made up your mind to swear in yellow.—

They lit their cigarettes and turned to the right.
After a pause Stephen began:

—Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have.
I say…—

Lynch halted and said bluntly:

— Stop! I won’t listen! I am sick. I was out last
night on a yellow drunk with Horan and Goggins.—

Stephen went on:

—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the
presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. 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.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago—he went
on—in London. She was on her way to meet her
mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the
corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the
window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long

[239]

fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She
died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic
death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity
according to the terms of my definitions.

— The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two
ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which
are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean
that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic
emotion 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. The arts which excite them, pornographical
or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The
esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore
static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire
and loathing.

— You say that art must not excite desire—said
Lynch — I told you that one day I wrote my name in
pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the
Museum. Was that not desire? —

— I speak of normal natures —said Stephen.—You
also told me that when you were a boy in that charming
Carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.—

Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and
again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without
taking them from his pockets.

— O, I did! I did! —he cried.

Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at
him for a moment boldly in the eyes. 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

[240]

image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptilelike
in glint and gaze. 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 selfembittered.

—As for that— Stephen said in polite parenthesis—
we are all animals. I also am an animal.—

— You are —said Lynch.

—But we are just now in a mental world — Stephen
continued.— 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. 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. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the
fly is about to enter our eye.—

—Not always—said Lynch critically.

— In the same way—said Stephen —your flesh responded
to the stimulus of a naked statue but it was, I
say, simply a reflex action of the 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.—

—What is that exactly? —asked Lynch.

—Rhythm—said Stephen—is the first formal
esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole
or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any
part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.—

[241]

— If that is rhythm — said Lynch —let me hear what
you call beauty: and, please remember, though I did eat
a cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty.—

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing
slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch’s thick tweed
sleeve.

—We are right—he said —and the others are wrong.
To speak of these things and to try to understand their
nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and
humbly and constantly to express, to press out again,
from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound
and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our
soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—
that is art.—

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

—But you have not answered my question —said
Lynch—What is art? What is the beauty it expresses? —

— That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepyheaded
wretch— said Stephen—when I began to try to
think out the matter for myself. Do you remember the
night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk about
Wicklow bacon.—

— I remember — said Lynch.— He told us about them
flaming fat devils of pigs.—

—Art — said Stephen — is the human disposition of
sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You
remember the pigs and forgot that. You are a distressing
pair, you and Cranly.

[242]

Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and
said:

— If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me
at least another cigarette. I don’t care about it. I
don’t even care about women. Damn you and damn
everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You
can’t get me one.—

Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. 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
hypothenuse of a rightangled triangle.—

—No,— said Lynch—give me the hypothenuse 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.

[243]

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 part
I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than
to 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.—

[244]

— Then MacCann is a sulphuryellow 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.

— It amuses me vastly —he said —to hear you quoting
him time after time like a jolly round friar. Are
you laughing in your sleeve? —

—MacAlister—answered Stephen—would call my
esthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of
esthetic philosophy extends Aquinas will carry me all
along the line. When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic repro-

[245]

duction, I require a new terminology and a new personal
experience.—

— Of course —said Lynch.—After all Aquinas, in
spite of his intellect, was exactly a good round friar.
But you will tell me about the new personal experience
and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and
finish the first part.—

—Who knows? —said Stephen, smiling.— Perhaps
Aquinas would understand me better than you. He was
a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday.
It begins with the words Pange lingua gloriosi. They
say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate
and soothing hymn. 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.—

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep
bass voice:

Inpleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine
Dicendo nationibus
Regnavit a lingo Deus.

— That’s great! — he said, well pleased.— Great
music! —

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps
from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth,
saluted them and stopped.—Did you hear the
results of the exams.? —he asked.— Griffin was plucked.
Halpin and O’Flynn are through the home civil.
Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O’Shaughnessy
got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clark’s gave them a
feed last night. They all ate curry.—

[246]

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice
and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success,
his small fat encircled eyes vanished out of sight and his
weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephen’s his eyes and his
voice came forth again from their lurking places.

— Yes, MacCullagh and I—he said.—He’s taking
pure mathematics and I’m taking constitutional history.
There are twenty subjects. I’m taking botany too.
You know I’m a member of the field club.—

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion
and placed a plump woollen gloved hand on his breast,
from which muttered wheezing laughter at once broke
forth.

—Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you
go out—said Stephen drily—to make a stew.—

The fat student laughed indulgently and said:

—We are all highly respectable people in the field
club. Last Saturday we went out to Glenmalure, seven
of us.—

—With women, Donovan? — said Lynch.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

— Our end is the acquisition of knowledge.—

Then he said quickly:

— I hear you are writing some essay about esthetics.—

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

— Goethe and Lessing—said Donovan—have written
a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic
school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very
much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic, German,
ultra profound.—

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of
them urbanely.

[247]

— I must go — he said softly and benevolently—I
have a strong suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction,
that my sister intended to make pancakes today for
the dinner of the Donovan family.—

— Goodbye— Stephen said in his 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 on for a little 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. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pul-
critudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia,
claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for
beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these
correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you
following? —

— Of course, I am—said Lynch.— If you think I
have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan
and ask him to listen to you.—

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

—Look at that basket —he said.

— I see it —said Lynch.

— 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. The first

[248]

phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the
object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented
to us either in space or in time. What is audible
is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space.
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. You apprehended it as one thing.
You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness.
That is integritas.—

—Bull’s eye! —said Lynch, laughing— Go on.—

— Then—said Stephen—you pass from point to
point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as
balanced part against part within its limits; you feel
the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis
of immediate perception is followed by the analysis
of apprehension. 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.
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. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be
inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead
you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism,
the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some
other world, the idea of which the matter was but the
shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol.
I thought he might mean that claritas was the artistic
discovery and representation of the divine purpose in
anything or a force of generalization which would make

[249]

the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine
its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand
it so. 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 see that it is that thing which it is and no other
thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic
quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality
is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived
in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious
instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The
instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the
clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended
luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its
wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous
silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very
like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist
Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful
as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.—

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

—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. In the market
place it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in
the second sense of the term our judgment is influenced
in the first place by the art itself and by the form of that
art. The image, it is clear, must be set between the
mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or
senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see
that art necessarily divides itself into three forms pro-

[250]

gressing from one to the next. These forms are: the
lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his
image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form,
the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation
to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the
form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation
to others.—

— That you told me a few nights ago —said Lynch—
and we began the famous discussion.—

—I have a book at home—said Stephen—in which I
have written down questions which are more amusing
than yours were. In finding the answers to them I found
the theory of the esthetic which I am trying to explain.
Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely
made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good
if I desire to see it? Is the lust of Sir Philip Crampton
lyrical, epical or dramatic? If not, why not?—

—Why not, indeed? —said Lynch, laughing.

—If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood—
Stephen continued—make there an image of a cow, is
that image a work of art? If not, why not?—

— That’s a lovely one —said Lynch, laughing again.—
That has the true scholastic stink.—

—Lessing—said Stephen—should not have taken a
group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior,
does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished
clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest
and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused.
The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of
an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago
cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged
stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of
the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.

[251]

The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical
literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon
himself as the centre of an epical event and this form
progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant
from the artist himself and from others. The
narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality
of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing
round and round the persons and the action like a vital
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. 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 esthetic image in the dramatic form
is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.
The mystery of esthetic like that of material
creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of
the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent,
paring his fingernails.—

— Trying to refine them also out of existence—said
Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and
they turned into the duke’s lawn, to reach the national
library before the shower came.

—What do you mean—Lynch asked surlily — by
prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable
God forsaken island? No wonder the artist retired

[252]

within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated
this country.—

The rain fell faster. When they passed through the
passage beside the royal Irish academy they found many
students sheltering under the arcade of the library.
Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth
with a sharpened match, listening to some companions.
Some girls stood near the entrance door. Lynch whispered
to Stephen:

— Your beloved is here.—

Stephen took his place silently on the step below the
group of students, heedless of the rain which fell fast,
turning his eyes towards her from time to time. She
too stood silently among her companions. She has no
priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious bitterness,
remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was
right. 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…—

— Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing,
pure stewing.—

[253]

—Don’t mind him. There’s plenty of money to be
made in a big commercial city.—

—Depends on the practice.—

—Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox,
simpliciter sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio.—

Their voices reached his ears as if from a distance in
interrupted pulsation. She was preparing to go away
with her companions.

The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in
clusters of diamonds among the shrubs of the quadrangle
where an exhalation was breathed forth by the blackened
earth. 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.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a
simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a
bird’s life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired
at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird’s
heart?

****

Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His
soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale
cool waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul
lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music.
His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning
knowledge, a morning inspiration. A spirit filled him,
pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music.
But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly,
as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him!
His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly.
It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes

[254]

and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies
forth silently.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been
enchanted. In a dream or vision he had known the
ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant of enchantment
only or long hours and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected
from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances
of what had happened or of what might
have happened. 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.
O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word
was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the
virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his
spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to
a rose and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was
her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had known
or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the
world: and lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs
of the seraphim were falling from heaven.

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

The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring
them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a
villanelle pass through them. The roselike glow sent
forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise.
Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of
men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her
wilful heart.

[255]

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began
again to move and beat. And then? Smoke, incense
ascending from the altar of the world.

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the
vapoury oceans, smoke of her praise. The earth was
like a swinging swaying censer, a ball of incense, an
ellipsoidal ball. The rhythm died out at once; the cry
of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the
first verses over and over; then went on stumbling
through half verses, stammering and baffled; then
stopped. The heart’s cry was broken.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the
panes of the naked window the morning light was
gathering. A bell beat faintly very far away. A bird
twittered; two birds, 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.

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his
elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was neither
on the table; only the soup plate he had eaten the rice
from for supper and the candlestick with its tendrils of
tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame.
He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the
bed, groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat

[256]

that hung 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. 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. Then he saw himself sitting at the old piano,
striking chords softly from its speckled keys and singing,
amid the talk which had risen again in the room,
to her who leaned beside the mantelpiece a dainty song
of the Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the
victory chant of Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves.
While he sang and she listened, or feigned to
listen his heart was at rest but when the quaint old
songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the
room he remembered his own sarcasm: the house where
young men are called by their christian names a little
too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him
but he had waited in vain. She passed now dancing
lightly across his memory as she had been that night
at the carnival ball, her white dress a little lifted, a
white spray nodding in her hair. She danced lightly
in the round. She was dancing towards him and, as she
came, her eyes were a little averted and a faint glow

[257]

was on her cheek. At the pause in the chain of hands
her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft merchandise.

—You are a great stranger now.

—Yes. I was born to be a monk.—

— I am afraid you are a heretic.

—Are you much afraid? —

For answer she had danced away from him along the
chain of hands, dancing lightly and discreetly, giving
herself to none. The white spray nodded to her dancing
and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on
her cheek.

A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of
the cloister, a heretic Franciscan, willing and willing
not to serve, spinning like Gherardino da Borgo San
Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and whispering in her
ear.

No, it was not his image. It was like the image of
the young priest in whose company he had seen her
last, looking at him out of dove’s eyes, toying with the
pages of her Irish phrasebook.

—Yes, yes, the ladies are coming round to us. I can
see it every day. The ladies are with us. The best
helpers the language has.—

—And the church, Father Moran? —

— The church too. Coming round too. The work is
going ahead there too. Don’t fret about the church.—

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain.
He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the
library. He had done well to leave her to flirt with her
priest, to toy with a church which was the scullery-maid
of Christendom.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of
ecstasy from his soul. It broke up violently her fair

[258]

image and flung the fragments 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 batlike 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. 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. 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

[259]

to him, a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting
the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of
everliving life.

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an
instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries
arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving.

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
Tell no more of enchanted days.

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.

The full morning light had come. 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. 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,
imaging a roseway from where he lay upwards to heaven
all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He
too was weary of ardent ways.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed
over him, descending along his spine from his closely
cowled head. He felt it descend and, seeing himself as
he lay, smiled. Soon he would sleep.

[260]

He had written verses for her again after ten years.
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.
The conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often
in the green light of the lamp. They stood on the steps
of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. 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. Let be
Let be!

Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly.
If he sent her the verses? They would be read out at
breakfast amid the tapping of eggshells. 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 armchair would
hold the page at arm’s length, read it smiling and approve
of the literary form.

No, no: that was folly. Even if he sent her the verses
she would not show them to others. No, no: she could
not.

He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense
of her innocence moved him almost to pity her, an
innocence he had never understood till he had come to
the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which
she too had not understood while she was innocent or
before the strange humiliation of her nature had first
come upon her. 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

[261]

pallor and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark
shame of womanhood.

While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor
where had she been? Might it be, in the mysterious
ways of spiritual life, that her soul at those same
moments had been conscious of his homage? It might
be.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and
fulfilled all his body. 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. 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.

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

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of 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.

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

[262]

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
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.

****

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. The air of the late March
evening made clear their flight, their dark darting quivering
bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a
limp hung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash,
a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them
before all their darting quivering bodies passed: Six,
ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in
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.

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind
the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes
were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of
vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the
flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and
clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light
unwound from whirring spools.

[263]

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.

Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the
porch, hearing their shrill twofold cry, watching their
flight? For an augury of good or evil? A phrase
of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then
there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from
Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things
of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have
their knowledge and know their times and seasons because
they, unlike man, are in the order of their life
and have not perverted that order by reason.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing
at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him
think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant
on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an
augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the
heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents,
of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of
his captivity on osier woven wings, of Thoth, the god
of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing
on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god’s image, for it
made him think of a bottle-nosed judge in a wig, putting
commas into a document which he held at arm’s length
and he knew that he would not have remembered the
god’s name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was
folly. But was it for this folly that he was about to
leave for ever the house of prayer and prudence into

[264]

which he had been born and the order of life out of
which he had come?

They came back with shrill cries over the jutting
shoulder of the house, flying darkly against the fading
air. What birds were they? He thought that they must
be swallows who had come back from the south. Then
he was to go away? for they were birds ever going and
coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves
of men’s houses and ever leaving the homes they had
built to wander.

Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel,
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave before
He wander the loud waters.

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 seadusk
over the flowing waters.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the
soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away,
lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white
bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and
soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury
he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the
pale space of sky above him had come forth from his
heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly.

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. He was alone

[265]

at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at
the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry
scenecloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps
of the stage. A burly policeman sweated behind him
and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls
and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the
hall from his scattered fellow students.

—A libel on Ireland! —

—Made in Germany—

—Blasphemy! —

—We never sold our faith! —

—No Irish woman ever did it! —

—We want no amateur atheist.—

—We want no budding buddhists.—

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. He turned into the pillared
hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and passed
in through the clicking turnstile.

Cranly was sitting over near the dictionaries. A thick
book, opened at the frontispiece, lay before him on the
wooden rest. He leaned back in his chair, inclining his
ear like that of a confessor to the face of the medical
student who was reading to him a problem from the
chess page of a journal. 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.

Cranly gazed after him blandly and vaguely. The
medical student went on in a softer voice:

— Pawn to king’s fourth.—

—We had better go, Dixon—said Stephen in warning.—
He has gone to complain.—

[266]

Dixon folded the journal and rose with dignity, saying:

— Our men retired in good order.—

—With guns and cattle — added Stephen, pointing to
the titlepage of Cranly’s book on which was written Diseases
of the Ox.

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

— Cranly, I want to speak to you.—

Cranly did not answer or turn. He laid his book on
the counter and passed out, his well shod feet sounding
flatly on the floor. On the staircase he paused and
gazing absently at Dixon repeated:

— Pawn to king’s bloody fourth.—

— Put it that way if you like — Dixon said.

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.

As they crossed the hall a man of dwarfish stature
came towards them. 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.

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

—Warm weather for March —said Cranly.— They
have the windows open upstairs.—

Dixon smiled and turned his ring. The blackish
monkey puckered face pursed its human mouth with
gentle pleasure and its voice purred:

— Delightful weather for March. Simply delightful.—

[267]

— There are two nice young ladies upstairs, captain,
tired of waiting — Dixon said.

Cranly smiled and said kindly:

— The captain has only one love: sir Walter Scott.
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.—

He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the
air in time to his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat
often over his sad eyes.

Sadder to Stephen’s ear was his speech: a genteel accent,
low and moist, marred by errors: and, listening
to it, he wondered was the story true and was the thin
blood that flowed in his shrunken frame noble and come
of an incestuous love?

The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell
still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A
game of swans flew there and the water and the shore
beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime. They
embraced softly impelled by the grey rainy light, the
wet silent trees, the shield like witnessing lake, the
swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his
arm about his sister’s 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 redbrown hair and tender shapely strong freckled
hands. Face? There was no face seen. The brother’s
face was bent upon her fair rain fragrant hair. The
hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing
was Davin’s hand.

[268]

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the
shrivelled mannikin who had called it forth. His
father’s gibes at the Bantry gang leaped out of his
memory. He held them at a distance and brooded un-
easily on his own thought again. Why were they not
Cranly’s hands? Had Davin’s simplicity and innocence
stung him more secretly?

He walked on across the hall with Dixon, leaving
Cranly to take leave elaborately of the dwarf.

Under the colonnade Temple was standing in the midst
of a little group of students. One of them cried:

— Dixon, come over till you hear. Temple is in grand
form.—

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.

— You’re a hypocrite, O’Keeffe — he said. — And
Dixon is a smiler. By hell, I think that’s a good literary
expression.—

He laughed slily, looking in Stephen’s face, repeat-
ing:

— By hell, I’m delighted with that name. A smiler.—

A stout student who stood below them on the steps
said:

— Come back to the mistress, Temple. We want to
hear about that.—

— He had, faith — Temple said. — And he was a mar-
ried man too. And all the priests used to be dining
there. By hell, I think they all had a touch.—

— We shall call it riding a hack to spare the hunter —
said Dixon.

— Tell us, Temple — O’Keeffe said — how many
quarts of porter have you in you? —

— All your intellectual soul is in that phrase, O’Keeffe
— said Temple with open scorn.

[269]
He moved with a shambling gait round the group and
spoke to Stephen.

— Did you know that the Forsters are the kings of
Belgium? — he asked.

Cranly came out through the door of the entrance
hall, his hat thrust back on the nape of his neck and pick-
ing his teeth with care.

— And here’s the wiseacre — said Temple. — Do you
know that about the Forsters? —

He paused for an answer. Cranly dislodged a fig seed
from his teeth on the point of his rude toothpick and
gazed at it intently.

— The Forster family — Temple said — is descended
from Baldwin the First, king of Flanders. He was
called the Forester. 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. Then there
are the Blake Forsters. That’s a different branch.—

— From Baldhead, king of Flanders. — Cranly repeated,
rooting again deliberately at his gleaming uncov-
ered teeth.

— Where did you pick up all that history? — O’Keeffe
asked.

— I know all the history of your family too — Temple
said, turning to Stephen. — Do you know what Giraldus
Cambrensis says about your family? —

— Is he descended from Baldwin too? — asked a tall
consumptive student with dark eyes.

— Baldhead — Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice
in his teeth.

— Pernobilis et pervetusta familia — Temple said to
Stephen.

[270]

The stout student who stood below them on the steps
farted briefly. 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 had it on my mind to say that — Goggins an-
swered firmly. — It did no one any harm, did it? —

— We hope — Dixon said suavely — that it was not
of the kind known to science as a paulo post futurum.—

— Didn’t I tell you he was a smiler? — said Temple,
turning right and left. — Didn’t I give him that name? —

— You did. We’re not deaf — said the tall consump-
tive.

Cranly still frowned at the stout student below him.
Then, with a snort of disgust, he shoved him violently
down the steps.

— Go away from here — he said rudely. — Go away,
you stinkpot. And you are a stinkpot.—

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once
returned to his place with good humour. 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 try-
ing to say? — asked Cranly, facing round on him with an
expression of wonder.

— The most profound sentence ever written — Temple
said with enthusiasm — is the sentence at the end of the
zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.—

He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said
eagerly:

[271]
— Do you feel how profound that is because you are a
poet? —

Cranly pointed his long forefinger.

— Look at him! — he said with scorn to the others —
Look at Ireland’s hope! —

They laughed at his words and gesture. Temple
turned on him bravely, saying:

— Cranly, you’re always sneering at me. I can seen
that. But I am as good as you any day. Do you know
what I think about you now as compared with myself? —

— My dear man — said Cranly urbanely — you are
incapable, do you know, absolutely incapable of think-
ing.—

— 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.— 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 de-
spair — I am and I know am. And I admit it that I
am.—

Dixon patted him lightly on the shoulder and said
mildly:

— And it does you every credit, Temple.—

— But he — Temple said, pointing to Cranly — he is a
ballocks, too, like me. Only he doesn’t know it. And
that’s the only difference, I see.—

A burst of laughter covered his words. But he turned
again to Stephen and said with a sudden eagerness:

— That word is a most interesting word. That’s the
only English dual number. Did you know? —

— Is it? — Stephen said vaguely.

[272]

He was watching Cranly’s firm featured suffering
face, lit up now by a smile of false patience. The gross
name had passed over it like foul water poured over
an old stone image, patient of injuries: and, as he
watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and un-
cover the black hair that Stood up stiffly from his fore-
head like an iron crown.

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

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 way-
ward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for he
had found this rudeness also in himself. And he remem-
bered an evening when he had dismounted from a bor-
rowed creaking bicycle to pray to God in a wood near
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. 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. The talk about him ceased for a moment:
and a soft hiss fell again from a window above. But no
other sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight
had followed with idle eyes were sleeping.

She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the
air was silent save for one soft hiss that fell, And there-

[273]

fore the tongues about him had ceased their babble.
Darkness was falling.

Darkness falls from the air.

A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like
a fairy host around him. 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.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that
dimmed the breaking east. 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. And
he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines,
dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan: and saw
with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent
Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths
and the pox fouled wenches of the taverns and young
wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and
clipped again.

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure.
They were secret and enflaming but her image was not
entangled by them. That was not the way to think of
her. It was not even the way in which he thought of
her. Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases,
sweet only with a disinterred sweetness like the fig seeds
Cranly rooted out of his gleaming teeth.

[274]

It was not thought nor vision, though he knew vaguely
that her figure was passing homeward through the city.
Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body.
A conscious unrest seethed in his 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. 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. There came to his mind a curious phrase
from Cornelius a Lapide which said that the lice born
of human sweat were not created by God with the other
animals on the sixth day. But the tickling of the skin
of his neck made his mind raw and red. 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. Yes; and it was
not darkness that fell from the air. It was brightness.

Brightness falls from the air.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All
the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred
vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of
sloth.

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards
the group of students. Well then let her go and be
damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who

[275]

washed himself every morning to the waist and had black
hair on his chest. Let her.

Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply
in his pocket and was eating it slowly and noisily.
Temple sat on the pediment of a pillar, leaning back,
his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes. A squat young
man came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked
under his armpit. He marched towards the group, strik-
ing the flags with the heels of his boots and with the fer-
rule of his heavy umbrella. 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. The tall
consumptive student and Dixon and O’Keeffe were
speaking in Irish and did not answer him. Then, turn-
ing to Cranly, he said:

— Good evening, particularly to you.—

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered
again. Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered
with loud movements of his jaws.

— Good? Yes. It is a good evening.—

The squat student looked at him seriously and shook
his umbrella gently and reprovingly.

— I can see —he said — that you are about to make
obvious remarks.—

— 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.

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… —

[276]

He broke off, pointed bluntly to the munched pulp of
the fig and said loudly:

— I allude to that.—

— Um — Cranly said as before.

— Do you intend that now — the squat student said
— as ipso facto or, let us say, as so to speak? —

Dixon turned aside from his group, saying:

— Goggins was waiting for you, Glynn. He has gone
round to the Adelphi to look for you and Moynihan.
What have you there? — he asked, tapping the portfolio
under Glynn’s arm.

— Examination papers — Glynn 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.

— Tuition! — said Cranly rudely. — I suppose you
mean the barefooted children that are taught by a bloody
ape like you. God help them! —

He bit off the rest of the fig and flung away the butt.

—I suffer little children to come unto me — Glynn
said 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.—

— Go to sleep again. Temple — said O’Keeffe.

— Very well, then — Temple continued, still addressing
Glynn — and if Jesus suffered the children to come why
does the church send them all to hell if they die un-
baptised? Why is that? —

[277]

— Were you baptised yourself, Temple? — the consumptive
student asked.

— But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were
all to come? — Temple said, his eyes searching Glynn’s
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.

— Are you quite orthodox on that point, Temple? —
Dixon said suavely.

— Saint Augustine says that about unbaptised children
going to hell — Temple answered — because he was a
cruel old sinner too.—

— I bow to you — Dixon said — but I had the impres-
sion that limbo existed for such cases.—

— Don’t argue with him, Dixon — Cranly said
brutally. — Don’t talk to him or look at him. Lead
him home with a sugan the way you’d lead a bleating
goat.—

— Limbo! — Temple cried. —
That’s a fine invention too. Like hell.—

— But with the unpleasantness left out— Dixon said.

He turned smiling to the others and said:

— I think I am voicing the opinions of all present in
saying so much.—

— You are — Glynn said in a firm tone. — On that
point Ireland is united.—

He struck the ferrule of his umbrella on the stone floor
of the colonnade.

[278]

— Hell — Temple said. — I can respect that invention
of the grey spouse of Satan. 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.

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

— Hoosh! —

Temple moved away nimbly.

— Do you know what limbo is? — he cried.—
Do you know what we call a notion like that in Roscom-
mon? —

— Hoosh! Blast you! — Cranly cried, clapping his
hands.

— Neither my arse nor my elbow! — Temple cried out
scornfully — And that’s what I call limbo.—

— Give us that stick here — Cranly said.

He snatched the ashplant roughly from Stephen’s
hand and sprang down the steps: but Temple, hearing
him move in pursuit, fled through the dusk like a wild
creature, nimble and fleet footed. 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. Stephen
felt that his anger had another cause, but feigning pa-
tience, touched his arm slightly and said quietly:

— Cranly, I told you I wanted to speak to you. Come
away.—

Cranly looked at him for a few moments and asked:

— Now? —

[279]

— Yes, now — Stephen said — We can’t speak here.
Come away.—

They crossed the quadrangle together without speak-
ing. The bird call from Siegfried whistled softly fol-
lowed them from the steps 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 Kil-
dare Street opposite Maple’s hotel he stood to wait,
patient again. The name of the hotel, a colourless pol-
ished wood, and its colourless front stung him like a
glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the
softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined
the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in
calm. They thought of army commissions and land
agents: peasants greeted them along the roads in the
country: they knew the names of certain French dishes
and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched provin-
cial voices which pierced through their skintight ac-
cents.

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his
shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before
their squires begat upon them, that they might breed
a race less ignoble than their own? And under the
deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the
race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the
dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams
and near the pool mottled bogs. 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

[280]

bed: for Davin had the mild eyes of one who could be
secret. But him no woman’s eyes had wooed.

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

— Let us eke go.—
They walked southward in silence. 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.—

But his voice was no longer angry and Stephen won-
dered was he thinking of her greeting to him under the
porch.

They turned to the left and walked on as before.
When they had gone on so far for some time Stephen
said:

— Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening.—

— With your people? — Cranly asked.

— With my mother.—

— About religion? —

— Yes — Stephen answered.

After a pause Cranly asked:

— What age is your mother? —

— Not old — Stephen said. — She wishes me to make
my easter duty.—

— And will you? —

— I will not — Stephen said.

— Why not? — Cranly said.

— I will not serve — answered Stephen.

— That remark was made before — Cranly said calmly.

— It is made behind now — said Stephen hotly.

Cranly pressed Stephen’s arm, saying:

— Go easy, my dear man. You’re an excitable bloody
man, do you know.—

[281]

He laughed nervously as he spoke and, looking up
into Stephen’s face with moved and friendly eyes,
said:

— Do you know that you are an excitable man? —

— I daresay I am —said Stephen, laughing also.

Their minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have
been drawn closer, one to the other.

— Do you believe in the eucharist? — Cranly asked.

— I do not — Stephen 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.
— Are your doubts on that point too strong? —

— I do not wish to overcome them — Stephen an-
swered.

Cranly, embarrassed for a moment, took another fig
from his pocket and was about to eat it when Stephen
said:

— Don’t, please. You cannot discuss this question
with your mouth full of chewed fig.—

Cranly examined the fig by the light of a lamp under
which he halted. Then he smelt it with both nostrils,
bit a tiny piece, spat it out and threw the fig rudely into
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 judgment? —

— What is offered me on the other hand? — Stephen
asked. — An eternity of bliss in the company of the dean
of studies? —

[282]
— Remember — Cranly said — that he would be glory-
fied.—

— Ay — Stephen said somewhat bitterly — bright
agile, impassible and, above all, subtle.

— It is a curious thing, do you know — Cranly said
Dispassionately — how your mind is supersaturated with
the religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you
believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.—

— I did — Stephen answered.

— And were you happier then? — Cranly asked softly

— happier than you are now, for instance? —

— Often happy — Stephen said — and often unhappy.
I was someone else then.—

— How someone else? What do you mean by that
statement? —

— I mean — said Stephen — that I was not myself as
I am now, as I had to become.—

— Not as you are now, not as you had to become —
Cranly repeated. — Let me ask you a question. Do you
love your mother? —

Stephen shook his head slowly.

— I don’t know what your words mean — he said
simply.

— Have you never loved anyone? — Cranly asked.

— Do you mean women? —

— I am not speaking of that — Cranly said in a colder
tone. — I ask you if you ever felt love towards anyone
or anything.—

Stephen walked on beside his friend, staring gloomily
at the footpath.

— I tried to love God — he said at length. — It seems
now I failed. It is very difficult. I tried to unite my
will with the will of God instant by instant. In that I

[283]

did not always fail. I could perhaps do that still…

Cranly cut him short by asking:

— Has your mother had a happy life? —

— How do I know? — Stephen said.

— How many children had she? —

— Nine or ten — Stephen answered. — Some died.

— Was your father…. — Cranly interrupted him-
self for an instant: and then said: — I don ‘t want to
pry into your family affairs. But was your father what
is called well-to-do? I mean when you were growing
up? —

—Yes — Stephen said.

— What was he? — Cranly asked after a pause.

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attri-
butes.

— A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur
actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small
investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, some-
body’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer,
a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.—

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen’s arm,
and said:

— The distillery is damn good.—

— Is there anything else you want to know? —
Stephen asked.

— Are you in good circumstances at present? —

— Do I look it? — Stephen asked bluntly.

— So then — Cranly went on musingly — you were
born in the lap of luxury.—

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 con-
viction.

[284]

— Your mother must have gone through a good deal
of suffering —he said then. — Would you not try to
save her from suffering more even if… or would
you? —

— If I could — Stephen said — that would cost me
very little.—

— Then do so — Cranly said. — Do as she wishes you
to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is
a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at
rest.—

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained
silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his
own thought, he said:

— Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of
a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you
into the world, carries you first in her body. What do
we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels,
it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our
ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody
bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too.
Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.—

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

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

— Pascal was a pig — said Cranly.

— Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind —
Stephen said.

— And he was another pig then — said Cranly.

— The church calls him a saint — Stephen objected.

— I don’t care a flaming damn what anyone calls him

[285]

— Cranly said rudely and flatly. — I call him a pig.—

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, con-
tinued:

— Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with
scant courtesy in public but Suarez a jesuit theologian
and Spanish gentleman, has apologised for him.—

— Did the idea ever occur to you — Cranly asked —
that Jesus was not what he pretended to be? —

— The first person to whom that idea occurred —
Stephen answered — was Jesus himself.—

— I mean — Cranly said, hardening in his speech —
did the idea ever occur to you that he was himself a
conscious hypocrite, what he called the jews of his time,
a white sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that he
was a blackguard? —

— That idea never occurred to me — Stephen an-
swered. — 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.—

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone: —
Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I
said? —

— Somewhat— Stephen said.

— 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. — He is
more like a son of God than a son of Mary.—

— And is that why you will not communicate —
Cranly asked — because you are not sure of that too,
because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and

[286]
blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread?
And because you fear that it may be? —

— Yes — Stephen said quietly — I feel that and I also
fear it.—

— I see. — Cranly said.

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the
discussion at once by saying:

— I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea,
thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night. —

— But why do you fear a bit of bread? —

— I imagine — Stephen said — that there is a malevo-
lent reality behind those things I say I fear. —

— 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. — 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. —

— 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.
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 selfrespect. What kind of
liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which
is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illog-
ical and incoherent? —

They had walked on towards the township of Pem-

[287]
broke and now, as they went on slowly along the avenues,
the trees and the scattered lights in the villas soothed
their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused
about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind
a hedge of laurel a light glimmered in the window of a
kitchen and the voice of a servant was heard singing
as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken bars,

Rosie O’Grady —

Cranly stopped to listen, saying:

— Mulier cantat.—

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. The strife of their minds was
quelled. The figure of woman as she appears in the
liturgy of the church passed silently through the dark-
ness: a white robed figure, small and slender as a boy,
and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high as a
boy’s, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first
words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour
of the first chanting of the passion:

— Et tu cum Jesu Galiloeo eras.—

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice,
shining like a young star, shining clearer as the voice
intoned the proparoxyton and more faintly as the
cadence died.

The singing ceased. They went on together, Cranly
repeating in strongly stressed rhythm the end of the re-
frain:

And when we are married,
O, how happy we’ll be
For I love sweet Rosie O’Grady
And Rosie O’Grady loves me.

[288]

— There’s real poetry for you — he said. — There’s
real love.—

He glanced sideways at Stephen with a strange smile
and said:

— Do you consider that poetry? Or do you know
what the words mean? —

— I want to see Rosie first — said Stephen.

— She’s easy to find — Cranly said.

His hat had come down on his forehead. 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. Yes. His face was handsome: and his body was
strong and hard. 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. A voice spoke softly to
Stephen’s lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him
that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he
would go. He could not strive against another. He
knew his part.

— Probably I shall go away — he said.

— Where? — Cranly asked.

— Where I can — Stephen said.

— Yes — Cranly said. — It might be difficult for you to
live here now. But is it that makes you go? —

— I have to go — Stephen answered.

— Because — Cranly continued — you need not look
upon yourself as driven away if you do not wish to go or
as a heretic or an outlaw. There are many good believers
who think as you do. Would that surprise you? The
church is not the stone building nor even the clergy
and their dogmas. It is the whole mass of those born

[289]

into it. 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 washingpot head of
him! —

He broke out into a loud long laugh.

— Well? — Stephen said. — Do you remember the
rest?

— What you said, is it? — Cranly asked. — Yes, I re-
member it. To discover the mode of life or of art
whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered
freedom.—

Stephen raised his hat in acknowledgment.

— Freedom! — Cranly repeated. — But you are not
free enough yet to commit a sacrilege. Tell me would
you rob? —

— I would beg first — 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 Tala-
vera who will also explain to you in what circumstances
you may lawfully kill your king and whether you had

[290]

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 chastise-
ment of the secular arm? —

— And would you? —

— I think — Stephen said — it would pain me as much
to do as to be robbed.—

— I see — Cranly said.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice
between two teeth. Then he said carelessly:

— Tell me, for example, would you deflower a vir-
gin? —

— Excuse me — Stephen said politely — is that not
the ambition of most young gentlemen? —

— What then is your point of view? — 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. You have asked me
what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell
you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not
serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call
itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I
will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as
freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my
defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, ex-
ile and cunning.—

Cranly seized his arm and steered him round so as to
lead back towards Lesson Park. He laughed almost slyly
and pressed Stephen’s arm with an elder’s affection.

— Cunning indeed! — he said. — Is it you? You poor
poet, you! —

[291]

— And you made me confess to you — Stephen said,
thrilled by his touch —as I have confessed to you so
many other things, have I not? —

— Yes, my child — Cranly said, still gaily.

— You made me confess the fears that I have. But I
will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to
be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave what-
ever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a
mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and per-
haps as long as eternity too.—

Cranly, now grave again, slowed his pace and said:

— Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that.
And you know what that word means? Not only to
be separate from all others but to have not even one
friend.—

— I will take the risk — 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.—

His words seemed to have struck some deep chord
in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself
as he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face
for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there.
He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which
he feared.

— Of whom are you speaking? — Stephen asked at
length.

Cranly did not answer.

****

March 20. Long talk with Cranly on the subject of
my revolt.

He had his grand manner on. I supple and suave.

[292]

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. Can see him. Strong farmer type.
Pepper and salt suit. Square feet. Unkempt grizzled
beard. Probably attends coursing matches. Pays his
dues regularly but not plentifully to Father Dwyer of
Larras. Sometimes talks to girls after nightfall. But
his mother? Very young or very old? Hardly the first.
If so, Cranly would not have spoken as he did. Old
then. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranly’s despair
of soul: the child of exhausted loins.

March 21, morning. Thought this in bed last night
but was too lazy and free to add it. Free, 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 fold. Puzzled
for the moment by saint John at the Latin gate. What
do I see? A decollated precursor trying to pick the
lock.

March 21, night. Free. Soul free and fancy free.
Let the dead bury the dead. Ay. And let the dead
marry the dead.

March 22. In company with Lynch followed a sizable
hospital nurse. Lynch’s idea. Dislike it. Two lean
hungry greyhounds walking after a heifer.

March 23. Have not seen her since that night. Un-
well? Sits at the fire perhaps with mamma’s shawl on
her shoulders. But not peevish. A nice bowl of gruel?
Won’t you now?

[293]

March 24. Began with a discussion with my mother.
Subject: B.V.M. Handicapped by my sex and youth.
To escape held up relations between Jesus and Papa
against those between Mary and her son. Said religion
was not a lying-in hospital. Mother indulgent. Said
I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true.
Have read little and understood less. Then she said I
would come back to faith because I had a restless mind.
This means to leave church by backdoor of sin and re-
enter through the skylight of repentance. Cannot re-
pent. Told her so and asked for sixpence. Got three-
pence.

Then went to 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 ter-
ribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow.
Then gave me recipe for what he calls ristollo alla ber-
gamasca. 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 ninetyseventh 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. Use-
less. She is not out yet. Am I alarmed? About what?
That she will never be out again.

Blake wrote:

[294]

I wonder if William Bond will die.
For assuredly he is very ill.

Alas, poor William!

I was once at a diorama in Rotunda. At the end were
pictures of big nobs. Among them William Ewart Glad-
stone, just then dead. Orchestra played O, Willie, we
have missed you,

A race of clodhoppers!

March 25, 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. One does not seem to stand quite
apart from another. Their faces are phosphorescent,
with darker streaks. They peer at me and their eyes
seem to ask me something. They do not speak.

March 30. This evening Cranly was in the porch of
the library, proposing a problem to Dixon and her
brother. A mother let her child fall into the Nile. Still
harping on the mother. A crocodile seized the child.
Mother asked it back. Crocodile said all right if she
told him what he was going to do with the child, eat it or
not eat it.

This mentality, Lepidus would say, is indeed bred out
of your mud by the operation of your sun.

And mine? Is it not too? Then into Nile mud with
it!

[295]

April 1. Disapprove of this last phrase.

April 2. Saw her drinking tea and eating cakes in
Johnston’s, Mooney and O’Brien’s. Rather, lynx eyed
Lynch saw her as we passed. He tells me Cranly was
invited there by brother. Did he bring his crocodile?
Is he the shining light now? Well, I discovered him.
I protest I did. Shining quietly behind a bushel of
Wicklow bran.

April 3. Met Davin at the cigar shop opposite Find-
later’s church. He was in a black sweater and had a
hurley stick. Asked me was it true I was going away
and why. Told him the shortest way to Tara was via
Holyhead. Just then my father came up. Introduction.
Father, polite and observant. Asked Davin if he might
offer him some refreshment. Davin could not, was go-
ing to a meeting. When we came away father told me he
had a good honest eye. Asked me why I did not join a
rowing club. I pretended to think it over. Told me
then how he broke Pennyfeather’s heart. Wants me to
read law. Says I was cut out for that. More mud, more
crocodiles.

April 5. Wild spring. Scudding clouds. O life!
Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which apple trees
have cast down their delicate flowers. Eyes of girls
among the leaves. Girls demure and romping. All fair
or auburn: no dark ones. They blush better. Houp-la!

April 6. Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch
says all women do. Then she remembers the time of her
childhood — and mine if I was ever a child. The past
is consumed in the present and the present is living only
because it brings forth the future. Statues of women,
if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one

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hand of the woman feeling regretfully her own hinder
parts.

April. 6, later. Michael Robartes remembers forgot-
ten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses
in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the
world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my
arms the loveliness which has.not yet come 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. 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. 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. Read what I wrote last night. Vague
words for a vague emotion. Would she like it? I think
so. Then I should have to like it also.

April 13. That tundish has been on my mind for a
long time. I looked it up and find it English and good
old blunt English too. 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. Damn him one
way or the other!

April 14. John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned
from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic
papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there
in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short
pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish.

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Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulren-
nan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat,
listened, smoked, spat. Then said:

— Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the lat-
ter end of the world.—

I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is
with him I must struggle all through this night till day
come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy
throat till… Till what? Till he yield to me? No.
I mean him no harm.

April 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton
Street. The crowd brought us together. We both
stopped. She asked me why I never came, said she
had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only
to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About
whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt
sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and
opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, in-
vented 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 up into the air. 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.

Now I call that friendly, don’t you?

Yes, I liked her today. A little or much? Don’t
know. I liked her and it seems a new feeling to me.
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… O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!

April 16. Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads,

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their promise of close embraces and the black arms of
tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of dis-
tant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone
— come. And the voices say with them: We are your
kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as
they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shak-
ing the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand
clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may
learn in my own life and away from home and friends
what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth
time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy
of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and
ever in good stead.

THE END

Dublin, 1904.
Trieste, 1914.

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Notes on the text