A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
a few last figures in distant pools.
Chapter V
He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing
the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into
the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like
a boghole and the pool under it brought back to his memory the dark
turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes. The box of pawn tickets at
his elbow had just been rifled and he took up idly one after another in
his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and
creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.
1 Pair Buskins.
1 D. Coat.
3 Articles and White.
1 Man’s Pants.
Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box,
speckled with louse marks, and asked vaguely:
—How much is the clock fast now?
His mother straightened the battered alarm clock that was lying on its
side in the middle of the mantelpiece until its dial showed a quarter
to twelve and then laid it once more on its side.
—An hour and twenty-five minutes, she said. The right time now is
twenty past ten. The dear knows you might try to be in time for your
lectures.
—Fill out the place for me to wash, said Stephen.
—Katey, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.
—Boody, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.
—I can’t, I’m going for blue. Fill it out, you, Maggy.
When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and
the old washing glove flung on the side of it he allowed his mother to
scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the
interstices at the wings of his nose.
—Well, it’s a poor case, she said, when a university student is so
dirty that his mother has to wash him.
—But it gives you pleasure, said Stephen calmly.
An ear-splitting whistle was heard from upstairs and his mother thrust
a damp overall into his hands, saying:
—Dry yourself and hurry out for the love of goodness.
A second shrill whistle, prolonged angrily, brought one of the girls to
the foot of the staircase.
—Yes, father?
—Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?
—Yes, father.
—Sure?
—Yes, father.
—Hm!
The girl came back, making signs to him to be quick and go out quietly
by the back. Stephen laughed and said:
—He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine.
—Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and
you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how
it has changed you.
—Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of
his fingers in adieu.
The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it
slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad
nun screeching in the nuns’ madhouse beyond the wall.
—Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!
He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and
hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already
bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His father’s whistle, his
mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so
many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth.
He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration; but, as
he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about
him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the
wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.
The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of
the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory
of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches
mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had
begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he
would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman; that as he
walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the
provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti
and smile; that as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot
Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a
spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine
dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson
which begins:
I was not wearier where I lay.
His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the
spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas turned often for its pleasure to
the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture of a
doubting monk, stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to
hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank laughter
of waistcoateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of
chambering and false honour stung his monkish pride and drove him on
from his lurking-place.
The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that
it had rapt him from the companionship of youth was only a garner of
slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a
_Synopsis Philosophiæ Scholasticæ ad mentem divi Thomæ_. His thinking
was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the
lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in
those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been
fireconsumed; and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes
of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty
had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had
been acquainted with nobility. But when this brief pride of silence
upheld him no longer he was glad to find himself still in the midst of
common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth
of the city fearlessly and with a light heart.
Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the
doll’s face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of
the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate
overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a
divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to
see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes
to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him,
but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he
heard it for it made him think of MacCann; and he saw him a squat figure
in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in
the wind at Hopkins’ corner, and heard him say:
—Dedalus, you’re an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I’m not.
I’m a democrat and I’ll work and act for social liberty and equality
among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the
future.
Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. What day of the week was
it? He stopped at a newsagent’s to read the headline of a placard.
Thursday. Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to
one, physics. He fancied to himself the English lecture and felt, even
at that distance, restless and helpless. He saw the heads of his
classmates meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points they
were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential definitions and
examples or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable and an
unfavourable criticism side by side. His own head was unbent for his
thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class
of students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the
green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellardamp and decay. Another
head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised
squarely above its bending fellows like the head of a priest appealing
without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about
him. Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise
before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the
head and face? Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw
it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head
or death mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as
by an iron crown. It was a priestlike face, priestlike in its pallor,
in the wide winged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the
jaws, priestlike in the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly
smiling; and Stephen, remembering swiftly how he had told Cranly of all
the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and
night by night, only to be answered by his friend’s listening silence,
would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who
heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he
felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.
Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of
speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not
yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend’s
listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and
deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to
another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so
silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend
bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up
sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead
language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain
and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and
disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall,
And whines and twines upon the wall,
The yellow ivy upon the wall,
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy
whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also.
And what about ivory ivy?
The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory
sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants. _Ivory, ivoire, avorio,
ebur._ One of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run:
_India mittit ebur;_ and he recalled the shrewd northern face of the
rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a
courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds
and chines of bacon. He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of
Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.
Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.
The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history were handed on
to him in the trite words _in tanto discrimine_ and he had tried to
peer into the social life of the city of cities through the words
_implere ollam denariorum_ which the rector had rendered sonorously as
the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his timeworn Horace
never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they
were human pages and fifty years before they had been turned by the
human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William
Malcolm Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf
and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as
fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender
and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but
a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture and that the monkish
learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic
philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle
and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.
The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s
ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind
downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet