A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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,