Chapter II

Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested

to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse at the end of

the garden.

—Very good, Simon. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly.

Anywhere you like. The outhouse will do me nicely: it will be more

salubrious.

—Damn me, said Mr Dedalus frankly, if I know how you can smoke such

villainous awful tobacco. It’s like gunpowder, by God.

—It’s very nice, Simon, replied the old man. Very cool and mollifying.

Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but

not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and

brushed and put on his tall hat. While he smoked the brim of his tall

hat and the bowl of his pipe were just visible beyond the jambs of the

outhouse door. His arbour, as he called the reeking outhouse which he

shared with the cat and the garden tools, served him also as a

soundingbox: and every morning he hummed contentedly one of his

favourite songs: _O, twine me a bower_ or _Blue eyes and golden hair_

or _The Groves of Blarney_ while the grey and blue coils of smoke rose

slowly from his pipe and vanished in the pure air.

During the first part of the summer in Blackrock uncle Charles was

Stephen’s constant companion. Uncle Charles was a hale old man with a

well tanned skin, rugged features and white side whiskers. On week days

he did messages between the house in Carysfort Avenue and those shops

in the main street of the town with which the family dealt. Stephen was

glad to go with him on these errands for uncle Charles helped him very

liberally to handfuls of whatever was exposed in open boxes and barrels

outside the counter. He would seize a handful of grapes and sawdust or

three or four American apples and thrust them generously into his

grandnephew’s hand while the shopman smiled uneasily; and, on Stephen’s

feigning reluctance to take them, he would frown and say:

—Take them, sir. Do you hear me, sir? They’re good for your bowels.

When the order list had been booked the two would go on to the park

where an old friend of Stephen’s father, Mike Flynn, would be found

seated on a bench, waiting for them. Then would begin Stephen’s run

round the park. Mike Flynn would stand at the gate near the railway

station, watch in hand, while Stephen ran round the track in the style

Mike Flynn favoured, his head high lifted, his knees well lifted and

his hands held straight down by his sides. When the morning practice

was over the trainer would make his comments and sometimes illustrate

them by shuffling along for a yard or so comically in an old pair of

blue canvas shoes. A small ring of wonderstruck children and nursemaids

would gather to watch him and linger even when he and uncle Charles had

sat down again and were talking athletics and politics. Though he had

heard his father say that Mike Flynn had put some of the best runners

of modern times through his hands Stephen often glanced at his

trainer’s flabby stubble-covered face, as it bent over the long stained

fingers through which he rolled his cigarette, and with pity at the

mild lustreless blue eyes which would look up suddenly from the task

and gaze vaguely into the blue distance while the long swollen fingers

ceased their rolling and grains and fibres of tobacco fell back into

the pouch.

On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel

and, as the font was above Stephen’s reach, the old man would dip his

hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen’s clothes and on

the floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red

handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumb blackened

prayerbook wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page.

Stephen knelt at his side respecting, though he did not share, his

piety. He often wondered what his granduncle prayed for so seriously.

Perhaps he prayed for the souls in purgatory or for the grace of a

happy death or perhaps he prayed that God might send him back a part of

the big fortune he had squandered in Cork.

On Sundays Stephen with his father and his granduncle took their

constitutional. The old man was a nimble walker in spite of his corns

and often ten or twelve miles of the road were covered. The little

village of Stillorgan was the parting of the ways. Either they went to

the left towards the Dublin mountains or along the Goatstown road and

thence into Dundrum, coming home by Sandyford. Trudging along the road

or standing in some grimy wayside public house his elders spoke

constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of

Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen

lent an avid ear. Words which he did not understand he said over and

over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he

had glimpses of the real world about them. The hour when he too would

take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret

he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the

nature of which he only dimly apprehended.

His evenings were his own; and he pored over a ragged translation of

_The Count of Monte Cristo_. The figure of that dark avenger stood

forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of

the strange and terrible. At night he built up on the parlour table an

image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers

and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in

which chocolate is wrapped. When he had broken up this scenery, weary

of its tinsel, there would come to his mind the bright picture of

Marseilles, of sunny trellises and of Mercedes.

Outside Blackrock, on the road that led to the mountains, stood a small

whitewashed house in the garden of which grew many rosebushes: and in

this house, he told himself, another Mercedes lived. Both on the

outward and on the homeward journey he measured distance by this

landmark: and in his imagination he lived through a long train of

adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself, towards the close

of which there appeared an image of himself, grown older and sadder,

standing in a moonlit garden with Mercedes who had so many years before

slighted his love, and with a sadly proud gesture of refusal, saying:

—Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a

gang of adventurers in the avenue. Aubrey carried a whistle dangling

from his buttonhole and a bicycle lamp attached to his belt while the

others had short sticks thrust daggerwise through theirs. Stephen, who

had read of Napoleon’s plain style of dress, chose to remain unadorned

and thereby heightened for himself the pleasure of taking counsel with

his lieutenant before giving orders. The gang made forays into the

gardens of old maids or went down to the castle and fought a battle on

the shaggy weedgrown rocks, coming home after it weary stragglers with

the stale odours of the foreshore in their nostrils and the rank oils

of the seawrack upon their hands and in their hair.

Aubrey and Stephen had a common milkman and often they drove out in the

milkcar to Carrickmines where the cows were at grass. While the men

were milking the boys would take turns in riding the tractable mare

round the field. But when autumn came the cows were driven home from

the grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with

its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran

troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart. The cattle which had seemed so

beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not

even look at the milk they yielded.

The coming of September did not trouble him this year for he was not to

be sent back to Clongowes. The practice in the park came to an end when

Mike Flynn went into hospital. Aubrey was at school and had only an

hour or two free in the evening. The gang fell asunder and there were

no more nightly forays or battles on the rocks. Stephen sometimes went

round with the car which delivered the evening milk: and these chilly

drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no

repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat.

Whenever the car drew up before a house he waited to catch a glimpse of

a well scrubbed kitchen or of a softly lighted hall and to see how the

servant would hold the jug and how she would close the door. He thought

it should be a pleasant life enough, driving along the roads every

evening to deliver milk, if he had warm gloves and a fat bag of

gingernuts in his pocket to eat from. But the same foreknowledge which

had sickened his heart and made his legs sag suddenly as he raced round

the park, the same intuition which had made him glance with mistrust at

his trainer’s flabby stubblecovered face as it bent heavily over his

long stained fingers, dissipated any vision of the future. In a vague

way he understood that his father was in trouble and that this was the

reason why he himself had not been sent back to Clongowes. For some

time he had felt the slight change in his house; and those changes in

what he had deemed unchangeable were so many slight shocks to his

boyish conception of the world. The ambition which he felt astir at

times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of

the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare’s hoofs

clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can

swaying and rattling behind him.

He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange

unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and

led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace

of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender

influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play

annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than

he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not

want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial

image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to

seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this

image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would

meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst,

perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be

alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of

supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into

something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be

transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from

him in that magic moment.

Two great yellow caravans had halted one morning before the door and

men had come tramping into the house to dismantle it. The furniture had

been hustled out through the front garden which was strewn with wisps

of straw and rope ends and into the huge vans at the gate. When all had

been safely stowed the vans had set off noisily down the avenue: and

from the window of the railway carriage, in which he had sat with his

redeyed mother, Stephen had seen them lumbering along the Merrion Road.

The parlour fire would not draw that evening and Mr Dedalus rested the

poker against the bars of the grate to attract the flame. Uncle Charles

dozed in a corner of the half furnished uncarpeted room and near him

the family portraits leaned against the wall. The lamp on the table

shed a weak light over the boarded floor, muddied by the feet of the

vanmen. Stephen sat on a footstool beside his father listening to a

long and incoherent monologue. He understood little or nothing of it at

first but he became slowly aware that his father had enemies and that

some fight was going to take place. He felt, too, that he was being

enlisted for the fight, that some duty was being laid upon his

shoulders. The sudden flight from the comfort and reverie of Blackrock,

the passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare

cheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy:

and again an intuition, a foreknowledge of the future came to him. He

understood also why the servants had often whispered together in the

hall and why his father had often stood on the hearthrug, with his back

to the fire, talking loudly to uncle Charles who urged him to sit down

and eat his dinner.

—There’s a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr

Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with fierce energy. We’re not dead

yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) nor half dead.

Dublin was a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so

witless that he could no longer be sent out on errands and the disorder

in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in

Blackrock. In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly

round the neighbouring square or, at most, going half way down one of

the side streets but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his

mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the

Custom House. He passed unchallenged among the docks and along the

quays wondering at the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the

surface of the water in a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay

porters and the rumbling carts and the illdressed bearded policeman.

The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales

of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds

of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him

wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes.

And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied himself in

another Marseilles but that he missed the bright sky and the sun-warmed

trellises of the wineshops. A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him

as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies

and yet he continued to wander up and down day after day as if he

really sought someone that eluded him.

He went once or twice with his mother to visit their relatives: and

though they passed a jovial array of shops lit up and adorned for

Christmas his mood of embittered silence did not leave him. The causes

of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with

himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses,

angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world

about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent

nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw,

detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.

He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen. A lamp with

a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light

his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees. She

looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said

musingly:

—The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said

softly:

—What is she in, mud?

—In a pantomime, love.

The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother’s sleeve,

gazing on the picture and murmured as if fascinated:

—The beautiful Mabel Hunter!

As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting

eyes and she murmured devotedly:

—Isn’t she an exquisite creature?

And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his

stone of coal, heard her words. He dropped his load promptly on the

floor and hurried to her side to see. He mauled the edges of the paper

with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and

complaining that he could not see.

He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old

darkwindowed house. The firelight flickered on the wall and beyond the

window a spectral dusk was gathering upon the river. Before the fire an

old woman was busy making tea and, as she bustled at the task, she told

in a low voice of what the priest and the doctor had said. She told too

of certain changes they had seen in her of late and of her odd ways and

sayings. He sat listening to the words and following the ways of

adventure that lay open in the coals, arches and vaults and winding

galleries and jagged caverns.

Suddenly he became aware of something in the doorway. A skull appeared

suspended in the gloom of the doorway. A feeble creature like a monkey

was there, drawn thither by the sound of voices at the fire. A whining

voice came from the door asking:

—Is that Josephine?

The old bustling woman answered cheerily from the fireplace:

—No, Ellen, it’s Stephen.

—O... O, good evening, Stephen.

He answered the greeting and saw a silly smile break over the face in

the doorway.

—Do you want anything, Ellen? asked the old woman at the fire.

But she did not answer the question and said:

—I thought it was Josephine. I thought you were Josephine, Stephen.

And, repeating this several times, she fell to laughing feebly.

He was sitting in the midst of a children’s party at Harold’s Cross.

His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part

in the games. The children, wearing the spoils of their crackers,

danced and romped noisily and, though he tried to share their

merriment, he felt himself a gloomy figure amid the gay cocked hats and

sunbonnets.

But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the

room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in

the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was

like a soothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from

other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the

circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance

travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his

heart.

In the hall the children who had stayed latest were putting on their

things: the party was over. She had thrown a shawl about her and, as

they went together towards the tram, sprays of her fresh warm breath

flew gaily above her cowled head and her shoes tapped blithely on the

glassy road.

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their

bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the

driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty

seats of the tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of

footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke the peace of the

night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and

shook their bells.

They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She

came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between

their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments

on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart

danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her

eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim

past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before. He

saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black

stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a

voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him

would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand.

And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the

hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on

the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny

lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of

laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then,

he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the

scene before him.

—She too wants me to catch hold of her, he thought. That’s why she came

with me to the tram. I could easily catch hold of her when she comes up

to my step: nobody is looking. I could hold her and kiss her.

But he did neither: and, when he was sitting alone in the deserted

tram, he tore his ticket into shreds and stared gloomily at the

corrugated footboard.

The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours.

Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald

exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first

page the initial letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first

line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to

write: To E—— C——. He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen

similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had

written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into

a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw

himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning after the discussion

at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on

the back of one of his father’s second moiety notices. But his brain

had then refused to grapple with the theme and, desisting, he had

covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his

classmates:

Roderick Kickham

John Lawton

Anthony MacSwiney

Simon Moonan

Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint of brooding on the

incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all

those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the

scene. There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen

nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told

only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the

moon. Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the

protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and

when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld

by one, was given by both. After this the letters L. D. S. were written

at the foot of the page, and, having hidden the book, he went into his

mother’s bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of

her dressingtable.

But his long spell of leisure and liberty was drawing to its end. One

evening his father came home full of news which kept his tongue busy

all through dinner. Stephen had been awaiting his father’s return for

there had been mutton hash that day and he knew that his father would

make him dip his bread in the gravy. But he did not relish the hash for

the mention of Clongowes had coated his palate with a scum of disgust.

—I walked bang into him, said Mr Dedalus for the fourth time, just at

the corner of the square.

—Then I suppose, said Mrs Dedalus, he will be able to arrange it. I

mean about Belvedere.

—Of course he will, said Mr Dedalus. Don’t I tell you he’s provincial

of the order now?

—I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers

myself, said Mrs Dedalus.

—Christian brothers be damned! said Mr Dedalus. Is it with Paddy Stink

and Micky Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God’s name since he

began with them. They’ll be of service to him in after years. Those are

the fellows that can get you a position.

—And they’re a very rich order, aren’t they, Simon?

—Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes.

Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.

Mr Dedalus pushed his plate over to Stephen and bade him finish what

was on it.

—Now then, Stephen, he said, you must put your shoulder to the wheel,

old chap. You’ve had a fine long holiday.

—O, I’m sure he’ll work very hard now, said Mrs Dedalus, especially

when he has Maurice with him.

—O, Holy Paul, I forgot about Maurice, said Mr Dedalus. Here, Maurice!

Come here, you thick-headed ruffian! Do you know I’m going to send you

to a college where they’ll teach you to spell c.a.t. cat. And I’ll buy

you a nice little penny handkerchief to keep your nose dry. Won’t that

be grand fun?

Maurice grinned at his father and then at his brother.

Mr Dedalus screwed his glass into his eye and stared hard at both his

sons. Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his father’s gaze.

—By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector, or provincial

rather, was telling me that story about you and Father Dolan. You’re an

impudent thief, he said.

—O, he didn’t, Simon!

—Not he! said Mr Dedalus. But he gave me a great account of the whole

affair. We were chatting, you know, and one word borrowed another. And,

by the way, who do you think he told me will get that job in the

corporation? But I’ll tell you that after. Well, as I was saying, we

were chatting away quite friendly and he asked me did our friend here

wear glasses still, and then he told me the whole story.

—And was he annoyed, Simon?

—Annoyed? Not he! _Manly little chap!_ he said.

Mr Dedalus imitated the mincing nasal tone of the provincial.

Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father

Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. _You better mind yourself,

Father Dolan_, said I, _or young Dedalus will send you up for twice

nine_. We had a famous laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Mr Dedalus turned to his wife and interjected in his natural voice:

—Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. O, a jesuit

for your life, for diplomacy!

He reassumed the provincial’s voice and repeated:

—I told them all at dinner about it and Father Dolan and I and all of

us we had a hearty laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!

The night of the Whitsuntide play had come and Stephen from the window

of the dressingroom looked out on the small grassplot across which

lines of Chinese lanterns were stretched. He watched the visitors come

down the steps from the house and pass into the theatre. Stewards in

evening dress, old Belvedereans, loitered in groups about the entrance

to the theatre and ushered in the visitors with ceremony. Under the

sudden glow of a lantern he could recognise the smiling face of a

priest.

The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the tabernacle and the

first benches had been driven back so as to leave the dais of the altar

and the space before it free. Against the walls stood companies of

barbells and Indian clubs; the dumbbells were piled in one corner: and

in the midst of countless hillocks of gymnasium shoes and sweaters and

singlets in untidy brown parcels there stood the stout leatherjacketed

vaulting horse waiting its turn to be carried up on the stage and set

in the middle of the winning team at the end of the gymnastic display.

Stephen, though in deference to his reputation for essay writing he had

been elected secretary to the gymnasium, had had no part in the first

section of the programme but in the play which formed the second

section he had the chief part, that of a farcical pedagogue. He had

been cast for it on account of his stature and grave manners for he was

now at the end of his second year at Belvedere and in number two.

A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came

pattering down from the stage, through the vestry and into the chapel.

The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The

plump bald sergeant major was testing with his foot the springboard of

the vaulting horse. The lean young man in a long overcoat, who was to

give a special display of intricate club swinging, stood near watching

with interest, his silver-coated clubs peeping out of his deep

sidepockets. The hollow rattle of the wooden dumbbells was heard as

another team made ready to go up on the stage: and in another moment

the excited prefect was hustling the boys through the vestry like a

flock of geese, flapping the wings of his soutane nervously and crying

to the laggards to make haste. A little troop of Neapolitan peasants

were practising their steps at the end of the chapel, some circling

their arms above their heads, some swaying their baskets of paper

violets and curtseying. In a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel

side of the altar a stout old lady knelt amid her copious black skirts.

When she stood up a pinkdressed figure, wearing a curly golden wig and

an oldfashioned straw sunbonnet, with black pencilled eyebrows and

cheeks delicately rouged and powdered, was discovered. A low murmur of

curiosity ran round the chapel at the discovery of this girlish figure.

One of the prefects, smiling and nodding his head, approached the dark

corner and, having bowed to the stout old lady, said pleasantly:

—Is this a beautiful young lady or a doll that you have here, Mrs

Tallon?

Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf

of the bonnet, he exclaimed:

—No! Upon my word I believe it’s little Bertie Tallon after all!

Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest

laugh together and heard the boys’ murmurs of admiration behind him as

they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the

sunbonnet dance by himself. A movement of impatience escaped him. He

let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on

which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.

He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked

the garden. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the

audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers’ band. The light

spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive

ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns

looping her to her moorings. A side door of the theatre opened suddenly

and a shaft of light flew across the grassplots. A sudden burst of

music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the side

door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the

music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple

movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of

all his day’s unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before.

His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of

flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns

in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It

was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the

stage.

At the far end of the shed near the street a speck of pink light showed

in the darkness and as he walked towards it he became aware of a faint

aromatic odour. Two boys were standing in the shelter of a doorway,

smoking, and before he reached them he had recognised Heron by his

voice.

—Here comes the noble Dedalus! cried a high throaty voice. Welcome to

our trusty friend!

This welcome ended in a soft peal of mirthless laughter as Heron

salaamed and then began to poke the ground with his cane.

—Here I am, said Stephen, halting and glancing from Heron to his

friend.

The latter was a stranger to him but in the darkness, by the aid of the

glowing cigarette tips, he could make out a pale dandyish face over

which a smile was travelling slowly, a tall overcoated figure and a

hard hat. Heron did not trouble himself about an introduction but said

instead:

—I was just telling my friend Wallis what a lark it would be tonight if

you took off the rector in the part of the schoolmaster. It would be a

ripping good joke.

Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector’s

pedantic bass and then, laughing at his failure, asked Stephen to do

it.

—Go on, Dedalus, he urged, you can take him off rippingly. _He that

will not hear the churcha let him be to theea as the heathena and the

publicana._

The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis

in whose mouthpiece the cigarette had become too tightly wedged.

—Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and

smiling and frowning upon it tolerantly. It’s always getting stuck like

that. Do you use a holder?

—I don’t smoke, answered Stephen.

—No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn’t smoke and he

doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything

or damn all.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival’s flushed and mobile

face, beaked like a bird’s. He had often thought it strange that

Vincent Heron had a bird’s face as well as a bird’s name. A shock of

pale hair lay on the forehead like a ruffled crest: the forehead was

narrow and bony and a thin hooked nose stood out between the closeset

prominent eyes which were light and inexpressive. The rivals were

school friends. They sat together in class, knelt together in the

chapel, talked together after beads over their lunches. As the fellows

in number one were undistinguished dullards, Stephen and Heron had been

during the year the virtual heads of the school. It was they who went

up to the rector together to ask for a free day or to get a fellow off.

—O by the way, said Heron suddenly, I saw your governor going in.

The smile waned on Stephen’s face. Any allusion made to his father by a

fellow or by a master put his calm to rout in a moment. He waited in

timorous silence to hear what Heron might say next. Heron, however,

nudged him expressively with his elbow and said:

—You’re a sly dog.

—Why so? said Stephen.

—You’d think butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, said Heron. But I’m

afraid you’re a sly dog.

—Might I ask you what you are talking about? said Stephen urbanely.

—Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn’t we? And

deucedly pretty she is too. And inquisitive! _And what part does

Stephen take, Mr Dedalus? And will Stephen not sing, Mr Dedalus?_ Your

governor was staring at her through that eyeglass of his for all he was

worth so that I think the old man has found you out too. I wouldn’t

care a bit, by Jove. She’s ripping, isn’t she, Wallis?

—Not half bad, answered Wallis quietly as he placed his holder once

more in a corner of his mouth.

A shaft of momentary anger flew through Stephen’s mind at these

indelicate allusions in the hearing of a stranger. For him there was

nothing amusing in a girl’s interest and regard. All day he had thought

of nothing but their leavetaking on the steps of the tram at Harold’s

Cross, the stream of moody emotions it had made to course through him

and the poem he had written about it. All day he had imagined a new

meeting with her for he knew that she was to come to the play. The old

restless moodiness had again filled his breast as it had done on the

night of the party, but had not found an outlet in verse. The growth

and knowledge of two years of boyhood stood between then and now,

forbidding such an outlet: and all day the stream of gloomy tenderness

within him had started forth and returned upon itself in dark courses

and eddies, wearying him in the end until the pleasantry of the prefect

and the painted little boy had drawn from him a movement of impatience.

—So you may as well admit, Heron went on, that we’ve fairly found you

out this time. You can’t play the saint on me any more, that’s one sure

five.

A soft peal of mirthless laughter escaped from his lips and, bending

down as before, he struck Stephen lightly across the calf of the leg

with his cane, as if in jesting reproof.

Stephen’s moment of anger had already passed. He was neither flattered

nor confused but simply wished the banter to end. He scarcely resented

what had seemed to him a silly indelicateness for he knew that the

adventure in his mind stood in no danger from these words: and his face

mirrored his rival’s false smile.

—Admit! repeated Heron, striking him again with his cane across the

calf of the leg.

The stroke was playful but not so lightly given as the first one had

been. Stephen felt the skin tingle and glow slightly and almost

painlessly; and, bowing submissively, as if to meet his companion’s

jesting mood, began to recite the _Confiteor_. The episode ended well,

for both Heron and Wallis laughed indulgently at the irreverence.

The confession came only from Stephen’s lips and, while they spoke the

words, a sudden memory had carried him to another scene called up, as

if by magic, at the moment when he had noted the faint cruel dimples at

the corners of Heron’s smiling lips and had felt the familiar stroke of

the cane against his calf and had heard the familiar word of

admonition:

—Admit.

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

in number six. His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes

of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted

and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a

two years’ spell of reverie to find himself in the midst of a new

scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately,

disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening,

filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure

which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive

writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his

brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

The essay was for him the chief labour of his week and every Tuesday,

as he marched from home to the school, he read his fate in the

incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him

and quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was

reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the

patchwork of the pathway and telling himself that he would be first and

not first in the weekly essay.

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr

Tate, the English master, pointed his finger at him and said bluntly:

—This fellow has heresy in his essay.

A hush fell on the class. Mr Tate did not break it but dug with his

hand between his thighs while his heavily starched linen creaked about

his neck and wrists. Stephen did not look up. It was a raw spring

morning and his eyes were still smarting and weak. He was conscious of

failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and

felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.

A short loud laugh from Mr Tate set the class more at ease.

—Perhaps you didn’t know that, he said.

—Where? asked Stephen.

Mr Tate withdrew his delving hand and spread out the essay.

—Here. It’s about the Creator and the soul. Rrm... rrm... rrm... Ah!

_without a possibility of ever approaching nearer._ That’s heresy.

Stephen murmured:

—I meant _without a possibility of ever reaching_.

It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and

passed it across to him, saying:

—O... Ah! _ever reaching._ That’s another story.

But the class was not so soon appeased. Though nobody spoke to him of

the affair after class he could feel about him a vague general

malignant joy.

A few nights after this public chiding he was walking with a letter

along the Drumcondra Road when he heard a voice cry:

—Halt!

He turned and saw three boys of his own class coming towards him in the

dusk. It was Heron who had called out and, as he marched forward

between his two attendants, he cleft the air before him with a thin

cane, in time to their steps. Boland, his friend, marched beside him, a

large grin on his face, while Nash came on a few steps behind, blowing

from the pace and wagging his great red head.

As soon as the boys had turned into Clonliffe Road together they began

to speak about books and writers, saying what books they were reading

and how many books there were in their fathers’ bookcases at home.

Stephen listened to them in some wonderment for Boland was the dunce

and Nash the idler of the class. In fact after some talk about their

favourite writers Nash declared for Captain Marryat who, he said, was

the greatest writer.

—Fudge! said Heron. Ask Dedalus. Who is the greatest writer, Dedalus?

Stephen noted the mockery in the question and said:

—Of prose do you mean?

—Yes.

—Newman, I think.

—Is it Cardinal Newman? asked Boland.

—Yes, answered Stephen.

The grin broadened on Nash’s freckled face as he turned to Stephen and

said:

—And do you like Cardinal Newman, Dedalus?

—O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the

other two in explanation, of course he’s not a poet.

—And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland.

—Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron.

—O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a

book.

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

out:

—Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester!

—O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest

poet.

—And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his

neighbour.

—Byron, of course, answered Stephen.

Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.

—What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.

—You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He’s only a poet for

uneducated people.

—He must be a fine poet! said Boland.

—You may keep your mouth shut, said Stephen, turning on him boldly. All

you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard

and were going to be sent to the loft for.

Boland, in fact, was said to have written on the slates in the yard a

couplet about a classmate of his who often rode home from the college

on a pony:

As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem

He fell and hurt his Alec Kafoozelum.

This thrust put the two lieutenants to silence but Heron went on:

—In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too.

—I don’t care what he was, cried Stephen hotly.

—You don’t care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.

—What do you know about it? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of

anything in your life except a trans or Boland either.

—I know that Byron was a bad man, said Boland.

—Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out.

In a moment Stephen was a prisoner.

—Tate made you buck up the other day, Heron went on, about the heresy

in your essay.

—I’ll tell him tomorrow, said Boland.

—Will you? said Stephen. You’d be afraid to open your lips.

—Afraid?

—Ay. Afraid of your life.

—Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen’s legs with his cane.

It was the signal for their onset. Nash pinioned his arms behind while

Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter.

Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the

knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence.

—Admit that Byron was no good.

—No.

—Admit.

—No.

—Admit.

—No. No.

At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free. His

tormentors set off towards Jones’s Road, laughing and jeering at him,

while he, half blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists

madly and sobbing.

While he was still repeating the _Confiteor_ amid the indulgent

laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode

were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why

he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not

forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it

called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and

hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal.

Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones’s Road he had felt

that some power was divesting him of that suddenwoven anger as easily

as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.

He remained standing with his two companions at the end of the shed

listening idly to their talk or to the bursts of applause in the

theatre. She was sitting there among the others perhaps waiting for him

to appear. He tried to recall her appearance but could not. He could

remember only that she had worn a shawl about her head like a cowl and

that her dark eyes had invited and unnerved him. He wondered had he

been in her thoughts as she had been in his. Then in the dark and

unseen by the other two he rested the tips of the fingers of one hand

upon the palm of the other hand, scarcely touching it lightly. But the

pressure of her fingers had been lighter and steadier: and suddenly the

memory of their touch traversed his brain and body like an invisible

wave.

A boy came towards them, running along under the shed. He was excited

and breathless.

—O, Dedalus, he cried, Doyle is in a great bake about you. You’re to go

in at once and get dressed for the play. Hurry up, you better.

—He’s coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl,

when he wants to.

The boy turned to Heron and repeated:

—But Doyle is in an awful bake.

—Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes?

answered Heron.

—Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of

honour.

—I wouldn’t, said Heron, damn me if I would. That’s no way to send for

one of the senior boys. In a bake, indeed! I think it’s quite enough

that you’re taking a part in his bally old play.

This spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in

his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience.

He mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such

comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. The

question of honour here raised was, like all such questions, trivial to

him. While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and

turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the

constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a

gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above

all things. These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears.

When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging

him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards

national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice

had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language

and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice

would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and,

meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent

fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his

best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these

hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of

phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when

he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of

phantasmal comrades.

In the vestry a plump freshfaced jesuit and an elderly man, in shabby

blue clothes, were dabbling in a case of paints and chalks. The boys

who had been painted walked about or stood still awkwardly, touching

their faces in a gingerly fashion with their furtive fingertips. In the

middle of the vestry a young jesuit, who was then on a visit to the

college, stood rocking himself rhythmically from the tips of his toes

to his heels and back again, his hands thrust well forward into his

sidepockets. His small head set off with glossy red curls and his newly

shaven face agreed well with the spotless decency of his soutane and

with his spotless shoes.

As he watched this swaying form and tried to read for himself the

legend of the priest’s mocking smile there came into Stephen’s memory a

saying which he had heard from his father before he had been sent to

Clongowes, that you could always tell a jesuit by the style of his

clothes. At the same moment he thought he saw a likeness between his

father’s mind and that of this smiling welldressed priest: and he was

aware of some desecration of the priest’s office or of the vestry

itself whose silence was now routed by loud talk and joking and its air

pungent with the smells of the gasjets and the grease.

While his forehead was being wrinkled and his jaws painted black and

blue by the elderly man he listened distractedly to the voice of the

plump young jesuit which bade him speak up and make his points clearly.

He could hear the band playing _The Lily of Killarney_ and knew that in

a few moments the curtain would go up. He felt no stage fright but the

thought of the part he had to play humiliated him. A remembrance of

some of his lines made a sudden flush rise to his painted cheeks. He

saw her serious alluring eyes watching him from among the audience and

their image at once swept away his scruples, leaving his will compact.

Another nature seemed to have been lent him: the infection of the

excitement and youth about him entered into and transformed his moody

mistrustfulness. For one rare moment he seemed to be clothed in the

real apparel of boyhood: and, as he stood in the wings among the other

players, he shared the common mirth amid which the drop scene was

hauled upwards by two ablebodied priests with violent jerks and all

awry.

A few moments after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas

and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void.

It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals

for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own.

It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with

their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void

filled with applause and, through a rift in a side scene, saw the

simple body before which he had acted magically deformed, the void of

faces breaking at all points and falling asunder into busy groups.

He left the stage quickly and rid himself of his mummery and passed out

through the chapel into the college garden. Now that the play was over

his nerves cried for some further adventure. He hurried onwards as if

to overtake it. The doors of the theatre were all open and the audience

had emptied out. On the lines which he had fancied the moorings of an

ark a few lanterns swung in the night breeze, flickering cheerlessly.

He mounted the steps from the garden in haste, eager that some prey

should not elude him, and forced his way through the crowd in the hall

and past the two jesuits who stood watching the exodus and bowing and

shaking hands with the visitors. He pushed onward nervously, feigning a

still greater haste and faintly conscious of the smiles and stares and

nudges which his powdered head left in its wake.

When he came out on the steps he saw his family waiting for him at the

first lamp. In a glance he noted that every figure of the group was

familiar and ran down the steps angrily.

—I have to leave a message down in George’s Street, he said to his

father quickly. I’ll be home after you.

Without waiting for his father’s questions he ran across the road and

began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he

was walking. Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart

sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He

strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded

pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before

his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above

him till at last the air was clear and cold again.

A film still veiled his eyes but they burned no longer. A power, akin

to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought

his steps to rest. He stood still and gazed up at the sombre porch of

the morgue and from that to the dark cobbled laneway at its side. He

saw the word _Lotts_ on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the

rank heavy air.

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to

breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go

back.

Stephen was once again seated beside his father in the corner of a

railway carriage at Kingsbridge. He was travelling with his father by

the night mail to Cork. As the train steamed out of the station he

recalled his childish wonder of years before and every event of his

first day at Clongowes. But he felt no wonder now. He saw the darkening

lands slipping away past him, the silent telegraphpoles passing his

window swiftly every four seconds, the little glimmering stations,

manned by a few silent sentries, flung by the mail behind her and

twinkling for a moment in the darkness like fiery grains flung

backwards by a runner.

He listened without sympathy to his father’s evocation of Cork and of

scenes of his youth, a tale broken by sighs or draughts from his pocket

flask whenever the image of some dead friend appeared in it or whenever

the evoker remembered suddenly the purpose of his actual visit. Stephen

heard but could feel no pity. The images of the dead were all strangers

to him save that of uncle Charles, an image which had lately been

fading out of memory. He knew, however, that his father’s property was

going to be sold by auction, and in the manner of his own dispossession

he felt the world give the lie rudely to his phantasy.

At Maryborough he fell asleep. When he awoke the train had passed out

of Mallow and his father was stretched asleep on the other seat. The

cold light of the dawn lay over the country, over the unpeopled fields

and the closed cottages. The terror of sleep fascinated his mind as he

watched the silent country or heard from time to time his father’s deep

breath or sudden sleepy movement. The neighbourhood of unseen sleepers

filled him with strange dread, as though they could harm him, and he

prayed that the day might come quickly. His prayer, addressed neither

to God nor saint, began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze

crept through the chink of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in

a trail of foolish words which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of

the train; and silently, at intervals of four seconds, the

telegraphpoles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual

bars. This furious music allayed his dread and, leaning against the

windowledge, he let his eyelids close again.

They drove in a jingle across Cork while it was still early morning and

Stephen finished his sleep in a bedroom of the Victoria Hotel. The

bright warm sunlight was streaming through the window and he could hear

the din of traffic. His father was standing before the dressingtable,

examining his hair and face and moustache with great care, craning his

neck across the waterjug and drawing it back sideways to see the

better. While he did so he sang softly to himself with quaint accent

and phrasing:

’Tis youth and folly

Makes young men marry,

So here, my love, I’ll

No longer stay.

What can’t be cured, sure,

Must be injured, sure,

So I’ll go to

Amerikay.

My love she’s handsome,

My love she’s bony:

She’s like good whisky

When it is new;

But when ’tis old

And growing cold

It fades and dies like

The mountain dew.

The consciousness of the warm sunny city outside his window and the

tender tremors with which his father’s voice festooned the strange sad

happy air, drove off all the mists of the night’s ill humour from

Stephen’s brain. He got up quickly to dress and, when the song had

ended, said:

—That’s much prettier than any of your other _come-all-yous_.

—Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus.

—I like it, said Stephen.

—It’s a pretty old air, said Mr Dedalus, twirling the points of his

moustache. Ah, but you should have heard Mick Lacy sing it! Poor Mick

Lacy! He had little turns for it, grace notes that he used to put in

that I haven’t got. That was the boy who could sing a _come-all-you_,

if you like.

Mr Dedalus had ordered drisheens for breakfast and during the meal he

cross-examined the waiter for local news. For the most part they spoke

at cross purposes when a name was mentioned, the waiter having in mind

the present holder and Mr Dedalus his father or perhaps his

grandfather.

—Well, I hope they haven’t moved the Queen’s College anyhow, said Mr

Dedalus, for I want to show it to this youngster of mine.

Along the Mardyke the trees were in bloom. They entered the grounds of

the college and were led by the garrulous porter across the quadrangle.

But their progress across the gravel was brought to a halt after every

dozen or so paces by some reply of the porter’s.

—Ah, do you tell me so? And is poor Pottlebelly dead?

—Yes, sir. Dead, sir.

During these halts Stephen stood awkwardly behind the two men, weary of

the subject and waiting restlessly for the slow march to begin again.

By the time they had crossed the quadrangle his restlessness had risen

to fever. He wondered how his father, whom he knew for a shrewd

suspicious man, could be duped by the servile manners of the porter;

and the lively southern speech which had entertained him all the

morning now irritated his ears.

They passed into the anatomy theatre where Mr Dedalus, the porter

aiding him, searched the desks for his initials. Stephen remained in

the background, depressed more than ever by the darkness and silence of

the theatre and by the air it wore of jaded and formal study. On the

desk he read the word _Fœtus_ cut several times in the dark stained

wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the

absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their

company. A vision of their life, which his father’s words had been

powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the

desk. A broadshouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the

letters with a jackknife, seriously. Other students stood or sat near

him laughing at his handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student

turned on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and had

tan boots.

Stephen’s name was called. He hurried down the steps of the theatre so

as to be as far away from the vision as he could be and, peering

closely at his father’s initials, hid his flushed face.

But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he walked back

across the quadrangle and towards the college gate. It shocked him to

find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a

brutish and individual malady of his own mind. His monstrous reveries

came thronging into his memory. They too had sprung up before him,

suddenly and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given in to them

and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intellect, wondering

always where they came from, from what den of monstrous images, and

always weak and humble towards others, restless and sickened of himself

when they had swept over him.

—Ay, bedad! And there’s the Groceries sure enough! cried Mr Dedalus.

You often heard me speak of the Groceries, didn’t you, Stephen. Many’s

the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of

us, Harry Peard and little Jack Mountain and Bob Dyas and Maurice

Moriarty, the Frenchman, and Tom O’Grady and Mick Lacy that I told you

of this morning and Joey Corbet and poor little goodhearted Johnny

Keevers of the Tantiles.

The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in

the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels

and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicketbag. In a quiet

bystreet a German band of five players in faded uniforms and with

battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs

and leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was

watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone

in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound

of a piano, scale after scale rising into the treble.

Stephen walked on at his father’s side, listening to stories he had

heard before, hearing again the names of the scattered and dead

revellers who had been the companions of his father’s youth. And a

faint sickness sighed in his heart. He recalled his own equivocal

position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own

authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the

squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind. The letters cut

in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily

weakness and futile enthusiasms and making him loathe himself for his

own mad and filthy orgies. The spittle in his throat grew bitter and

foul to swallow and the faint sickness climbed to his brain so that for

a moment he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness.

He could still hear his father’s voice—

—When you kick out for yourself, Stephen—as I daresay you will one of

these days—remember, whatever you do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was

a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent

fellows. Everyone of us could do something. One fellow had a good

voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic

song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could

tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and

enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of

it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen—at least I hope we

were—and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That’s the kind of fellows I

want you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney. I’m talking to

you as a friend, Stephen. I don’t believe a son should be afraid of his

father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a

young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son. I’ll never

forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of

the South Terrace one day with some maneens like myself and sure we

thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the corners

of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn’t say a word, or

stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we were out for a walk together

and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and said:—By

the by, Simon, I didn’t know you smoked, or something like that.—Of

course I tried to carry it off as best I could.—If you want a good

smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An American captain made me a

present of them last night in Queenstown.

Stephen heard his father’s voice break into a laugh which was almost a

sob.

—He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The

women used to stand to look after him in the street.

He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat and opened his

eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his

sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses

with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and

powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of

the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself

beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from

the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries

within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and

insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship,

wearied and dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognise

as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:

—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is

Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is

in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and

Stephen and Victoria. Names.

The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth

some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante,

Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an

old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent

away from home to a college, he had made his first communion and eaten

slim jim out of his cricketcap and watched the firelight leaping and

dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of

being dead, of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and

gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the

community off the main avenue of limes. But he had not died then.

Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and

no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the

sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer

existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a

way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and

forgotten somewhere in the universe! It was strange to see his small

body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His

hands were in his sidepockets and his trousers were tucked in at the

knees by elastic bands.

On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen

followed his father meekly about the city from bar to bar. To the

sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who

importuned him for a lob Mr Dedalus told the same tale, that he was an

old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of

his Cork accent up in Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was

his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen.

They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe’s coffeehouse,

where Mr Dedalus’ cup had rattled noisily against its saucer, and

Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father’s drinking

bout of the night before by moving his chair and coughing. One

humiliation had succeeded another—the false smiles of the market

sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his

father flirted, the compliments and encouraging words of his father’s

friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather

and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had

unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his speech and made him admit that

the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. One of them, in order

to put his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages

from Dilectus and asked him whether it was correct to say: _Tempora

mutantur nos et mutamur in illis_ or _Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur

in illis._ Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus called Johnny

Cashman, had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were

prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.

—He’s not that way built, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him alone. He’s a

levelheaded thinking boy who doesn’t bother his head about that kind of

nonsense.

—Then he’s not his father’s son, said the little old man.

—I don’t know, I’m sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.

—Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt

in the city of Cork in his day. Do you know that?

Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which

they had drifted.

—Now don’t be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him

to his Maker.

—Yerra, sure I wouldn’t put any ideas into his head. I’m old enough to

be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old man to

Stephen. Do you know that?

—Are you? asked Stephen.

—Bedad I am, said the little old man. I have two bouncing grandchildren

out at Sunday’s Well. Now, then! What age do you think I am? And I

remember seeing your grandfather in his red coat riding out to hounds.

That was before you were born.

—Ay, or thought of, said Mr Dedalus.

—Bedad I did, repeated the little old man. And, more than that, I can

remember even your greatgrandfather, old John Stephen Dedalus, and a

fierce old fire-eater he was. Now, then! There’s a memory for you!

—That’s three generations—four generations, said another of the

company. Why, Johnny Cashman, you must be nearing the century.

—Well, I’ll tell you the truth, said the little old man. I’m just

twentyseven years of age.

—We’re as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus. And just finish what

you have there and we’ll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatever

your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don’t feel more

than eighteen myself. There’s that son of mine there not half my age

and I’m a better man than he is any day of the week.

—Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it’s time for you to take a back

seat, said the gentleman who had spoken before.

—No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. I’ll sing a tenor song against him or

I’ll vault a five-barred gate against him or I’ll run with him after

the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the

Kerry Boy and the best man for it.

—But he’ll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his forehead

and raising his glass to drain it.

—Well, I hope he’ll be as good a man as his father. That’s all I can

say, said Mr Dedalus.

—If he is, he’ll do, said the little old man.

—And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long

and did so little harm.

—But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks

be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his

father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss

of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed

older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and

regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in

him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of

companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial

piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and

loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul

capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren

shell of the moon.

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless...?

He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley’s fragment. Its alternation

of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity

chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.

Stephen’s mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the

corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps

and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When

they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen

drew forth his orders on the governor of the bank of Ireland for thirty

and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and

essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and

in coin respectively. He bestowed them in his pockets with feigned

composure and suffered the friendly teller, to whom his father chatted,

to take his hand across the broad counter and wish him a brilliant

career in after life. He was impatient of their voices and could not

keep his feet at rest. But the teller still deferred the serving of

others to say he was living in changed times and that there was nothing

like giving a boy the best education that money could buy. Mr Dedalus

lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the roof and telling

Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing in the

house of commons of the old Irish parliament.

—God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times,

Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal

Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at

home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn’t be seen dead in a ten-acre

field with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I’m sorry to say that they are

only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet

July.

A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures

standing at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery

eyes. Stephen looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a

few days before he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the

windows of Barnardo’s.

—Well that’s done, said Mr Dedalus.

—We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where?

—Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

—Some place that’s not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.

—Underdone’s?

—Yes. Some quiet place.

—Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn’t matter about the

dearness.

He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried

to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness.

—Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We’re not out

for the half mile, are we?

For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through

Stephen’s fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried

fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for

the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre

to see _Ingomar_ or _The Lady of Lyons_. In his coat pockets he carried

squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers’ pocket

bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for

everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his

books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists,

drew up a form of commonwealth for the household by which every member

of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed

loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making

out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he

could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams. Then the

season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave

out and the wainscot of his bedroom remained with its unfinished and

illplastered coat.

His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no

further occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He, too,

returned to his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell

to pieces. The commonwealth fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and

its books on a sensible loss, the rules of life which he had drawn

about himself fell into desuetude.

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of

order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to

dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial

relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless.

From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers:

their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He saw clearly, too, his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step

nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless

shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and

sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood

to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and

fosterbrother.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which

everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in

mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and

falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the

enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically

with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to

defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and

by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure

that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by

night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a

lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning

pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and

humiliating sense of transgression.

He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him

from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet

avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly

lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at

times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting

him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the

background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the

garden of rosebushes on the road that led to the mountains and he

remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make

there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of

estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft speeches of

Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender

premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and,

in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and

now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and

timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The

verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken

brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood

was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering

into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound.

He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin

with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to

exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly

upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood

filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the

murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his

being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he

suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the

street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited

him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued

from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of

sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an

iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene

scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul

laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling

of drunken singers. He walked onward, undismayed, wondering whether he

had strayed into the quarter of the jews. Women and girls dressed in

long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were

leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim.

The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the

vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the

lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in

another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring

against his bosom in a tumult. A young woman dressed in a long pink

gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face.

She said gaily:

—Good night, Willie dear!

Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in

the copious easychair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak

that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting

the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and

embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her

and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the

warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical

weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his

lips parted though they would not speak.

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

rascal.

—Give me a kiss, she said.

His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her

arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that

he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his

lips would not bend to kiss her.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his

and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It

was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her,

body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure

of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his

lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between

them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of

sin, softer than sound or odour.