James Joyce ..............................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................................37

Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................................................60

Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................................................83

Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................................................96

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this

moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the

brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and

mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with

strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy

leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his

prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid

the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be

Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number

and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dogintheblanket.

He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands

were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his

pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow said to Cantwell:

Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I'd like to see you. He'd give you a toe in the rump for

That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice

mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her

nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry.

She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two

fiveshilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to

him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken

hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his

father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:

He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to

look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and

stamping. Then Jack Lawton's yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He

ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the

holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from

It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were

lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the haha and

had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the

butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers' slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of

shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something

in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell's

Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.

It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those

sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him

into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned hacking chestnut,

the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into

the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on

the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell! Dante knew a lot of

things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America

and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he

was a priest but both his father and uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a wellread

woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth: that was

The players closed around, flushed and muddy, and he went among them, glad to go in. Rody Kickham held

the ball by its greasy lace. A fellow asked him to give it one last: but he walked on without even answering

the fellow. Simon Moonan told him not to because the prefect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the

prefect's false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly.

Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by

the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down

To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks

that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the

And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in

burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellows stopped talking in the

It was the hour for sums. Father Arnall wrote a hard sum on the board and then said:

Stephen tried his best, but the sum was too hard and he felt confused. The little silk badge with the white rose

on it that was pinned on the breast of his jacket began to flutter. He was no good at sums, but he tried his best

so that York might not lose. Father Arnall's face looked very black, but he was not in a wax: he was laughing.

Then Jack Lawton cracked his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said:

Jack Lawton looked over from his side. The little silk badge with the red rose on it looked very rich because

he had a blue sailor top on. Stephen felt his own face red too, thinking of all the bets about who would get

first place in elements, Jack Lawton or he. Some weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he

got the card for first. His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and heard

Father Arnall's voice. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face

must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White

roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place

and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses

were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about

the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere

The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the corridors towards the

refectory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could not eat the damp bread. The

tablecloth was damp and limp. But he drank off the hot weak tea which the clumsy scullion, girt with a white

apron, poured into his cup. He wondered whether the scullion's apron was damp too or whether all white

things were cold and damp. Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tins. They

said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.

All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices.

He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother's lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play

Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. It will go away.

But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming

was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the

flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a

roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel.

That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He

closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it

Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy

Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who

wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line. And every single fellow

He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominoes and once or twice he was able to

hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan

O, I say, here's a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.

The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said:

O, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to bed.

They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a

moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells

must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar. He tried to think of Wells's mother but he did not

dare to raise his eyes to Wells's face. He did not like Wells's face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into

the square ditch the day before because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned hacking

chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing to do; all the fellows said it was. And how cold and

slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.

The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and the lines filed out

of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside his clothes. He still tried to think

what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean,

to kiss? You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to

kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from

seventyseven to seventysix. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come

There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the middle of clouds. Fleming

had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon.

That was like the two brushes in Dante's press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush

with the maroon velvet back for Michael Davitt. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours.

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still

they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries

were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the

top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the

Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think

about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be;

but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for

God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once

that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the

different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different

It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big. He turned over the flyleaf and

looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to

be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for

Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were

arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and

his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe

ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big

voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then

the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a

train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you

opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was

better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be

lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold

they were first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again.

Night prayers and then bed: he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a

warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so

The bell rang for night prayers and he filed out of the study hall after the others and down the staircase and

along the corridors to the chapel. The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would

be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at

night. The sea was cold day and night: but it was colder at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall

The prefect of the chapel prayed above his head and his memory knew the responses:

There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old

peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and

corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed behind him On his neck and sighed as they

prayed. They lived in Clane, a fellow said: there were little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing

at the halfdoor of a cottage with a child in her arms as the cars had come past from Sallins. It would be

lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the

warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But O, the road there

between the trees was dark! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think of how it was.

He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers. He prayed it too against the dark

His fingers trembled as he undressed himself in the dormitory. He told his fingers to hurry up. He had to

undress and then kneel and say his own prayers and be in bed before the gas was lowered so that he might not

go to hell when he died. He rolled his stockings off and put on his nightshirt quickly and knelt trembling at

his bedside and repeated his prayers quickly, fearing that the gas would go down. He felt his shoulders

He blessed himself and climbed quickly into bed and, tucking the end of the nightshirt under his feet, curled

himself together under the cold white sheets, shaking and trembling. But he would not go to hell when he

died; and the shaking would stop. A voice bade the boys in the dormitory good night. He peered out for an

instant over the coverlet and saw the yellow curtains round and before his bed that shut him off on all sides.

The prefect's shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end?

He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as

carriagelamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw

the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironingroom above the staircase. It

was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there, but the hall was still dark. A figure came

up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held

his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw

their master's face and cloak and knew that he had received his deathwound. But only the dark was where

they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his deathwound on the battlefield of Prague far

away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and

O how cold and strange it was to think of that! All the dark was cold and strange. There were pale strange

faces there, great eyes like carriagelamps. They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of marshals who

had received their deathwound on battlefields far away over the sea. What did they wish to say that their

Going home for the holidays! That would be lovely: the fellows had told him. Getting up on the cars in the

early wintry morning outside the door of the castle. The cars were rolling on the gravel. Cheers for the rector!

The cars drove past the chapel and all caps were raised. They drove merrily along the country roads. The

drivers pointed with their whips to Bodenstown. The fellows cheered. They passed the farmhouse of the Jolly

Farmer. Cheer after cheer after cheer. Through Clane they drove, cheering and cheered. The peasant women

stood at the halfdoors, the men stood here and there. The lovely smell there was in the wintry air: the smell

The train was full of fellows: a long long chocolate train with cream facings. The guards went to and fro

opening, closing, locking, unlocking the doors. They were men in dark blue and silver; they had silvery

And the train raced on over the flat lands and past the Hill of Allen. The telegraph poles were passing,

passing. The train went on and on. It knew. There were lanterns in the hall of his father's house and ropes of

green branches. There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round

the chandeliers. There were red holly and green ivy round the old portraits on the walls. Holly and ivy for

All the people. Welcome home, Stephen! Noises of welcome. His mother kissed him. Was that right? His

There was a noise of curtainrings running back along the rods, of water being splashed in the basins. There

was a noise of rising and dressing and washing in the dormitory: a noise of clapping of hands as the prefect

went up and down telling the fellows to look sharp. A pale sunlight showed the yellow curtains drawn back,

He got up and sat on the side of his bed. He was weak. He tried to pull on his stocking. It had a horrid rough

A fellow held his arms while he loosened the stocking clinging to his foot and climbed back into the hot bed.

He crouched down between the sheets, glad of their tepid glow. He heard the fellows talk among themselves

about him as they dressed for mass. It was a mean thing to do, to shoulder him into the square ditch, they

His father had told him, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. He shook his head and answered no and

The face and the voice went away. Sorry because he was afraid. Afraid that it was some disease. Canker was

a disease of plants and cancer one of animals: or another different. That was a long time ago then out on the

playgrounds in the evening light, creeping from point to point on the fringe of his line, a heavy bird flying

low through the grey light. Leicester Abbey lit up. Wolsey died there. The abbots buried him themselves.

It was not Wells's face, it was the prefect's. He was not foxing. No, no: he was sick really. He was not foxing.

And he felt the prefect's hand on his forehead; and he felt his forehead warm and damp against the prefect's

cold damp hand. That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of.

Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black slimy eyes to look out of. They could understand

how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on

The prefect was there again and it was his voice that was saying that he was to get up, that Father Minister

had said he was to get up and dress and go to the infirmary. And while he was dressing himself as quickly as

He was very decent to say that. That was all to make him laugh. But he could not laugh because his cheeks

They went together down the staircase and along the corridor and past the bath. As he passed the door he

remembered with a vague fear the warm turfcoloured bogwater, the warm moist air, the noise of plunges,

Brother Michael was standing at the door of the infirmary and from the door of the dark cabinet on his right

came a smell like medicine. That came from the bottles on the shelves. The prefect spoke to Brother Michael

and Brother Michael answered and called the prefect sir. He had reddish hair mixed with grey and a queer

look. It was queer that he would always be a brother. It was queer too that you could not call him sir because

he was a brother and had a different kind of look. Was he not holy enough or why could he not catch up on

There were two beds in the room and in one bed there was a fellow: and when they went in he called out:

He was a fellow out of the third of grammar and, while Stephen was undressing, he asked Brother Michael to

Butter you up! said Brother Michael. You'll get your walking papers in the morning when the doctor comes.

He bent down to rake the fire. He had a long back like the long back of a tramhorse. He shook the poker

Then Brother Michael went away and after a while the fellow out of third of grammar turned in towards the

That was the infirmary. He was sick then. Had they written home to tell his mother and father? But it would

be quicker for one of the priests to go himself to tell them. Or he would write a letter for the priest to bring.

How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered if he would die. You

could die just the same on a sunny day. He might die before his mother came. Then he would have a dead

mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died. All the fellows would be

at the mass, dressed in black, all with sad faces. Wells too would be there but no fellow would look at him.

The rector would be there in a cope of black and gold and there would be tall yellow candles on the altar and

round the catafalque. And they would carry the coffin out of the chapel slowly and he would be buried in the

little graveyard of the community off the main avenue of limes. And Wells would be sorry then for what he

He could hear the tolling. He said over to himself the song that Brigid had taught him.

How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said BURY ME IN THE OLD

CHURCHYARD! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but

not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!

The cold sunlight was weaker and Brother Michael was standing at his bedside with a bowl of beeftea. He

was glad for his mouth was hot and dry. He could hear them playing in the playgrounds. And the day was

Then Brother Michael was going away and the fellow out of the third of grammar told him to be sure and

come back and tell him all the news in the paper. He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father

kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother

Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of

the paper they got every day up in the castle. There was every kind of news in the paper: accidents,

Now it is all about politics in the papers, he said. Do your people talk about that too?

You have a queer name, Dedalus, and I have a queer name too, Athy. My name is the name of a town. Your

Can you answer me this one? Why is the county of Kildare like the leg of a fellow's breeches?

Because there is a thigh in it, he said. Do you see the joke? Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a

He looked at Stephen over the bedclothes as he spoke. Then he lay back on the pillow and said:

Why did he not tell it? His father, who kept the racehorses, must be a magistrate too like Saurin's father and

Nasty Roche's father. He thought of his own father, of how he sang songs while his mother played and of

how he always gave him a shilling when he asked for sixpence and he felt sorry for him that he was not a

magistrate like the other boys' fathers. Then why was he sent to that place with them? But his father had told

him that he would be no stranger there because his granduncle had presented an address to the liberator there

fifty years before. You could know the people of that time by their old dress. It seemed to him a solemn time:

and he wondered if that was the time when the fellows in Clongowes wore blue coats with brass buttons and

yellow waistcoats and caps of rabbitskin and drank beer like grownup people and kept greyhounds of their

He looked at the window and saw that the daylight had grown weaker. There would be cloudy grey light over

the playgrounds. There was no noise on the playgrounds. The class must be doing the themes or perhaps

It was queer that they had not given him any medicine. Perhaps Brother Michael would bring it back when he

came. They said you got stinking stuff to drink when you were in the infirmary. But he felt better now than

before. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a book then. There was a book in the library

about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strange looking cities and ships. It made

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves.

Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves

He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. A tiny light

twinkled at the pierhead where the ship was entering: and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the

waters' edge to see the ship that was entering their harbour. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards

the flat dark land: and by the light at the pierhead he saw his face, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.

He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters:

He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque. A wail of sorrow went up from the people.

And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle hanging from her shoulders

A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivytwined branches of the chandelier

the Christmas table was spread. They had come home a little late and still dinner was not ready: but it would

be ready in a jiffy his mother had said. They were waiting for the door to open and for the servants to come

All were waiting: uncle Charles, who sat far away in the shadow of the window, Dante and Mr Casey, who

sat in the easychairs at either side of the hearth, Stephen, seated on a chair between them, his feet resting on

the toasted boss. Mr Dedalus looked at himself in the pierglass above the mantelpiece, waxed out his

moustache ends and then, parting his coattails, stood with his back to the glowing fire: and still from time to

time he withdrew a hand from his coattail to wax out one of his moustache ends. Mr Casey leaned his head

to one side and, smiling, tapped the gland of hisneck with his fingers. And Stephen smiled too for he knew

now that it was not true that Mr Casey had a purse of silver in his throat. He smiled to think how the silvery

noise which Mr Casey used to make had deceived him. And when he had tried to open Mr Casey's hand to

see if the purse of silver was hidden there he had seen that the fingers could not be straightened out: and Mr

Casey had told him that he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria.

Mr Casey tapped the gland of his neck and smiled at Stephen with sleepy eyes: and Mr Dedalus said to him:

Yes. Well now, that's all right. O, we had a good walk, hadn't we, John? Yes...I wonder if there's any

likelihood of dinner this evening. Yes...O, well now, we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today.

Mr Dedalus dropped his coattails and went over to the sideboard. He brought forth a great stone jar of

whisky from the locker and filled the decanter slowly, bending now and then to see how much he had poured

in. Then replacing the jar in the locker he poured a little of the whisky into two glasses, added a little water

Mr Casey took the glass, drank, and placed it near him on the mantelpiece. Then he said:

Is it Christy? he said. There's more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack

He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began to speak with the voice of the

And he has such a soft mouth when he's speaking to you, don't you know. He's very moist and watery about

Mr Casey was still struggling through his fit of coughing and laughter. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel

Mr Dedalus put up his eyeglass and, staring down at him, said quietly and kindly:

The servants entered and placed the dishes on the table. Mrs Dedalus followed and the places were arranged.

When all had taken their seats he laid his hand on the cover and then said quickly, withdrawing it:

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which through Thy bounty we are about to receive through Christ our

All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled

Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that

his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn's of D'Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the

breastbone to show how good it was: and he remembered the man's voice when he had said:

Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandybat a turkey? But Clongowes was far away: and the warm

heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high

and red in the grate and the green ivy and red holly made you feel so happy and when dinner was ended the

big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire

It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the

nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel

queer and oldish: and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass,

his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And uncle Charles had said so too.

Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. Dante covered her plate with her hands and said:

He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles

was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full; but he nodded that it was.

A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest.

They have only themselves to blame, said Mr Dedalus suavely. If they took a fool's advice they would

We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election

It is religion, Dante said again. They are right. They must direct their flocks.

Certainly, said Dante. It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his

For pity sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year.

Quite right, ma'am, said uncle Charles. Now, Simon, that's quite enough now. Not another word now.

Nobody is saying a word against them, said Mr Dedalus, so long as they don't meddle in politics.

The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.

Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.

What? cried Mr Dedalus. Were we to desert him at the bidding of the English people?

Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus. I meant about the...I was thinking about the bad language of the railway porter.

Well now, that's all right. Here, Stephen, show me your plate, old chap. Eat away now. Here.

He heaped up the food on Stephen's plate and served uncle Charles and Mr Casey to large pieces of turkey

and splashes of sauce. Mrs Dedalus was eating little and Dante sat with her hands in her lap. She was red in

He held a piece of fowl up on the prong of the carving fork. Nobody spoke. He put it on his own plate,

Well, you can't say but you were asked. I think I had better eat it myself because I'm not well in my health

Well now, the day kept up fine after all. There were plenty of strangers down too.

He looked round at the others whose faces were bent towards their plates and, receiving no reply, waited for a

There could be neither luck nor grace, Dante said, in a house where there is no respect for the pastors of the

Respect! he said. Is it for Billy with the lip or for the tub of guts up in Armagh? Respect!

Tub of guts, said Mr Dedalus coarsely. He has a handsome face, mind you, in repose. You should see that

He twisted his features into a grimace of heavy bestiality and made a lapping noise with his lips.

O, he'll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly the language he heard against God and

Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and

the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he

Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like

They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them!

Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free

Come now, come now, come now! Can we not have our opinions whatever they are without this bad temper

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on by renegade

Mr Casey pushed his plate rudely into the middle of the table and, resting his elbows before him, said in a

Why then, said Mr Casey, it is a most instructive story. It happened not long ago in the county Wicklow

And I may tell you, ma'am, that I, if you mean me, am no renegade catholic. I am a catholic as my father

was and his father before him and his father before him again, when we gave up our lives rather than sell our

Catholic indeed! repeated Dante ironically. The blackest protestant in the land would not speak the language

Mr Dedalus, still crooning and swaying his head, began to sing in a grunting nasal tone:

He took up his knife and fork again in good humour and set to eating, saying to Mr Casey:

Stephen looked with affection at Mr Casey's face which stared across the table over his joined hands. He

liked to sit near him at the fire, looking up at his dark fierce face. But his dark eyes were never fierce and his

slow voice was good to listen to. But why was he then against the priests? Because Dante must be right then.

But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the

Alleghanies when her brother had got the money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. Perhaps

that made her severe against Parnell. And she did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was a

protestant and when she was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants

used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. TOWER OF IVORY they used to say, HOUSE OF

GOLD! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then? And he

remembered the evening in the infirmary in Clongowes, the dark waters, the light at the pierhead and the

Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and

white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of TOWER OF

The story is very short and sweet, Mr Casey said. It was one day down in Arklow, a cold bitter day, not long

He closed his eyes wearily and paused. Mr Dedalus took a bone from his plate and tore some meat from it

It was down in Arklow one day. We were down there at a meeting and after the meeting was over we had to

make our way to the railway station through the crowd. Such booing and baaing, man, you never heard. They

called us all the names in the world. Well there was one old lady, and a drunken old harridan she was surely,

that paid all her attention to me. She kept dancing along beside me in the mud bawling and screaming into

I let her bawl away, said Mr Casey. It was a cold day and to keep up my heart I had (saving your presence,

ma'am) a quid of Tullamore in my mouth and sure I couldn't say a word in any case because my mouth was

Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart's content, KITTY O'SHEA and the rest of it till at last she called that

lady a name that I won't sully this Christmas board nor your ears, ma'am, nor my own lips by repeating.

Do! said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of

Mr Dedalus laughed loudly and lay back in his chair while uncle Charles swayed his head to and fro.

But what was the name the woman had called Kitty O'Shea that Mr Casey would not repeat? He thought of

Mr Casey walking through the crowds of people and making speeches from a wagonette. That was what he

had been in prison for and he remembered that one night Sergeant O'Neill had come to the house and had

stood in the hall, talking in a low voice with his father and chewing nervously at the chinstrap of his cap. And

that night Mr Casey had not gone to Dublin by train but a car had come to the door and he had heard his

He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the

esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the

Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always

Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money In the

job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would

If we are a priestridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God's eye. TOUCH THEM

And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead

A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The

He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.

Didn't the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address

of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn't the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in

1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn't they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in

the confession box? And didn't they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?

His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled

O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God's eye!

God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world.

Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.

Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the

table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a

No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland. Away with God!

Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.

Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides

Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along

the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her

towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed

Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.

Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father's eyes were full of tears.

I know why, Cecil Thunder said. Because they had fecked cash out of the rector's room.

Stephen bent forward his head to hear. Wells looked round to see if anyone was coming. Then he said

Well, they drank that and it was found out who did it by the smell. And that's why they ran away, if you

The fellows all were silent. Stephen stood among them, afraid to speak, listening. A faint sickness of awe

made him feel weak. How could they have done that? He thought of the dark silent sacristy. There were dark

wooden presses there where the crimped surplices lay quietly folded. It was not the chapel but still you had to

speak under your breath. It was a holy place. He remembered the summer evening he had been there to be

dressed as boatbearer, the evening of the Procession to the little altar in the wood. A strange and holy place.

The boy that held the censer had swung it lifted by the middle chain to keep the coals lighting. That was

called charcoal: and it had burned quietly as the fellow had swung it gently and had given off a weak sour

smell. And then when all were vested he had stood holding out the boat to the rector and the rector had put a

The fellows were talking together in little groups here and there on the playground. The fellows seemed to

him to have grown smaller: that was because a sprinter had knocked him down the day before, a fellow out of

second of grammar. He had been thrown by the fellow's machine lightly on the cinder path and his spectacles

had been broken in three pieces and some of the grit of the cinders had gone Into his mouth.

That was why the fellows seemed to him smaller and farther away and the goalposts so thin and far and the

soft grey sky so high up. But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming: and some said

that Barnes would be prof and some said it would be Flowers. And all over the playgrounds they were

playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket

bats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly

Athy pointed across the playground to where Simon Moonan was walking by himself kicking a stone before

Do you know why those fellows scut? I will tell you but you must not let on you know.

Stephen looked at the faces of the fellows but they were all looking across the playground. He wanted to ask

somebody about it. What did that mean about the smugging in the square? Why did the five fellows out of the

higher line run away for that? It was a joke, he thought. Simon Moonan had nice clothes and one night he had

shown him a ball of creamy sweets that the fellows of the football fifteen had rolled down to him along the

carpet in the middle of the refectory when he was at the door. It was the night of the match against the

Bective Rangers; and the ball was made just like a red and green apple only it opened and it was full of the

creamy sweets. And one day Boyle had said that art elephant had two tuskers instead of two tusks and that

was why he was called Tusker Boyle but some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at his

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. They were like ivory; only soft. That was

the meaning of TOWER OF IVORY but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. One day he

had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the

flagstaff and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket

where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were

funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping

curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. TOWER OF IVORY.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. It was all thick slabs of slate and

water trickled all day out of tiny pinholes and there was a queer smell of stale water there. And behind the

door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick

Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard. And on

Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod. But all

the same it was queer what Athy said and the way he said it. It was not a cod because they had run away. He

I won't come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said. Three days' silence in the refectory and sending us up for

Yes, said Wells. And old Barrett has a new way of twisting the note so that you can't open it and fold it

Yes, said Cecil Thunder, and the prefect of studies was in second of grammar this morning.

All the fellows were silent. The air was very silent and you could hear the cricket bats but more slowly than

Simon Moonan and Tusker are going to be flogged, Athy said, and the fellows in the higher line got their

All are taking expulsion except Corrigan, Athy answered. He's going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson.

I know why, Cecil Thunder said. He is right and the other fellows are wrong because a flogging wears off

after a bit but a fellow that has been expelled from college is known all his life on account of it. Besides

I wouldn't like to be Simon Moonan and Tusker Cecil Thunder said. But I don't believe they will be

No, no, said Athy. They'll both get it on the vital spot. Wells rubbed himself and said in a crying voice:

The fellows laughed; but he felt that they were a little afraid. In the silence of the soft grey air he heard the

cricket bats from here and from there: pock. That was a sound to hear but if you were hit then you would feel

a pain. The pandybat made a sound too but not like that. The fellows said it was made of whalebone and

leather with lead inside: and he wondered what was the pain like. There were different kinds of sounds. A

long thin cane would have a high whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain like. It made him

shivery to think of it and cold: and what Athy said too. But what was there to laugh at in it? It made him

shivery: but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers. It was the same

in the bath when you undressed yourself. He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy

He looked at Athy's rolledup sleeves and knuckly inky hands. He had rolled up his sleeves to show how Mr

Gleeson would roll up his sleeves. But Mr Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish

white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he pared them too like Lady Boyle. But

they were terribly long and pointed nails. So long and cruel they were, though the white fattish hands were

not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the

high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself

yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and

gentle. And he thought of what Cecil Thunder had said: that Mr Gleeson would not flog Corrigan hard. And

Fleming had said he would not because it was best of his play not to. But that was not why

During the writing lesson he sat with his arms folded, listening to the slow scraping of the pens. Mr Harford

went to and fro making little signs in red pencil and sometimes sitting beside the boy to show him how to

hold his pen. He had tried to spell out the headline for himself though he knew already what it was for it was

the last of the book. Zeal WITHOUT PRUDENCE IS LIKE A SHIP ADRIFT. But the lines of the letters

were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight and staring out of the left eye

But Mr Harford was very decent and never got into a wax. All the other masters got into dreadful waxes. But

why were they to suffer for what fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some of

the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell.

Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible

sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was

put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at

both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But

God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He

thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the

pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the press and be found out by the smell was a sin too:

but it was not terrible and strange. It only made you feel a little sickish on account of the smell of the wine.

Because on the day when he had made his first holy communion in the chapel he had shut his eyes and

opened his mouth and put out his tongue a little: and when the rector had stooped down to give him the holy

communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector's breath after the wine of the mass. The word was

beautiful: wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece

outside houses like white temples. But the faint smell of the rector's breath had made him feel a sick feeling

on the morning of his first communion. The day of your first communion was the happiest day of your life.

And once a lot of generals had asked Napoleon what was the happiest day of his life. They thought he would

say the day he won some great battle or the day he was made an emperor. But he said:

Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first holy communion.

Father Arnall came in and the Latin lesson began and he remained still, leaning on the desk with his arms

folded. Father Arnall gave out the themebooks and he said that they were scandalous and that they were all

to be written out again with the corrections at once. But the worst of all was Fleming's theme because the

pages were stuck together by a blot: and Father Arnall held it up by a corner and said it was an insult to any

master to send him up such a theme. Then he asked Jack Lawton to decline the noun MARE and Jack Lawton

You should be ashamed of yourself, said Father Arnall sternly. You, the leader of the class!

Then he asked the next boy and the next and the next. Nobody knew. Father Arnall became very quiet, more

and more quiet as each boy tried to answer it and could not. But his face was blacklooking and his eyes

were staring though his voice was so quiet. Then he asked Fleming and Fleming said that the word had no

Kneel out there in the middle of the class. You are one of the idlest boys I ever met. Copy out your themes

Fleming moved heavily out of his place and knelt between the two last benches. The other boys bent over

their themebooks and began to write. A silence filled the classroom and Stephen, glancing timidly at Father

Was that a sin for Father Arnall to be in a wax or was he allowed to get into a wax when the boys were idle

because that made them study better or was he only letting on to be in a wax? It was because he was allowed,

because a priest would know what a sin was and would not do it. But if he did it one time by mistake what

would he do to go to confession? Perhaps he would go to confession to the minister. And if the minister did it

he would go to the rector: and the rector to the provincial: and the provincial to the general of the jesuits. That

was called the order: and he had heard his father say that they were all clever men. They could all have

become highup people in the world if they had not become jesuits. And he wondered what Father Arnall

and Paddy Barrett would have become and what Mr McGlade and Mr Gleeson would have become if they

had not become jesuits. It was hard to think what because you would have to think of them in a different way

with different coloured coats and trousers and with beards and moustaches and different kinds of hats.

The door opened quietly and closed. A quick whisper ran through the class: the prefect of studies. There was

an instant of dead silence and then the loud crack of a pandybat on the last desk. Stephen's heart leapt up in

Any boys want flogging here, Father Arnall? cried the prefect of studies. Any lazy idle loafers that want

Hoho! he cried. Who is this boy? Why is he on his knees? What is your name, boy?

Hoho, Fleming! An idler of course. I can see it in your eye. Why is he on his knees, Father Arnall?

He wrote a bad Latin theme, Father Arnall said, and he missed all the questions in grammar.

Of course he did! cried the prefect of studies, of course he did! A born idler! I can see it in the corner of his

Fleming held out his hand. The pandybat came down on it with a loud smacking sound: one, two, three, four,

Fleming knelt down, squeezing his hands under his armpits, his face contorted with pain; but Stephen knew

how hard his hands were because Fleming was always rubbing rosin into them. But perhaps he was in great

pain for the noise of the pandybat was terrible. Stephen's heart was beating and fluttering.

At your work, all of you! shouted the prefect of studies. We want no lazy idle loafers here, lazy idle little

schemers. At your work, I tell you. Father Dolan will be in to see you every day. Father Dolan will be in

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, said the prefect of studies. Make up your minds for that. Every day

Broke? What is this I hear? What is this your name is! said the prefect of studies.

Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses?

Stephen lifted his eyes in wonder and saw for a moment Father Dolan's whitegrey not young face, his baldy

whitegrey head with fluff at the sides of it, the steel rims of his spectacles and his nocoloured eyes looking

Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your

Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect

of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane

as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick

made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears

were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled

burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though

the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry

Stephen drew back his maimed and quivering right arm and held out his left hand. The soutane sleeve

swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning

pain made his hand shrink together with the palms and fingers in a livid quivering mass. The scalding water

burst forth from his eyes and, burning with shame and agony and fear, he drew back his shaking arm in terror

and burst out into a whine of pain. His body shook with a palsy of fright and in shame and rage he felt the

scalding cry come from his throat and the scalding tears falling out of his eyes and down his flaming cheeks.

Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands to his sides. To think of them beaten and swollen with

pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else's that he

felt sorry for. And as he knelt, calming the last sobs in his throat and feeling the burning tingling pain pressed

into his sides, he thought of the hands which he had held out in the air with the palms up and of the firm

touch of the prefect of studies when he had steadied the shaking fingers and of the beaten swollen reddened

Get at your work, all of you, cried the prefect of studies from the door. Father Dolan will be in every day to

see if any boy, any lazy idle little loafer wants flogging. Every day. Every day.

The hushed class continued to copy out the themes. Father Arnall rose from his seat and went among them,

helping the boys with gentle words and telling them the mistakes they had made. His voice was very gentle

Fleming and Stephen rose and, walking to their seats, sat down. Stephen, scarlet with shame, opened a book

It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home

to his father that morning to send him a new pair. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study till the

new glasses came. Then to be called a schemer before the class and to be pandied when he always got the

card for first or second and was the leader of the Yorkists! How could the prefect of studies know that it was

a trick? He felt the touch of the prefect's fingers as they had steadied his hand and at first he had thought he

was going to shake hands with him because the fingers were soft and firm: but then in an instant he had heard

the swish of the soutane sleeve and the crash. It was cruel and unfair to make him kneel in the middle of the

class then: and Father Arnall had told them both that they might return to their places without making any

difference between them. He listened to Father Arnall's low and gentle voice as he corrected the themes.

Perhaps he was sorry now and wanted to be decent. But it was unfair and cruel. The prefect of studies was a

priest but that was cruel and unfair. And his whitegrey face and the nocoloured eyes behind the

steelrimmed spectacles were cruel looking because he had steadied the hand first with his firm soft fingers

It's a stinking mean thing, that's what it is, said Fleming in the corridor as the classes were passing out in file

Of course he did! said Fleming. I wouldn't stand it. I'd go up and tell the rector on him.

Yes, said Cecil Thunder eagerly, and I saw him lift the pandybat over his shoulder and he's not allowed to

I wouldn't stand it, Fleming repeated, from Baldyhead or any other Baldyhead. It's a stinking mean low

trick, that's what it is. I'd go straight up to the rector and tell him about it after dinner.

Yes, do. Yes, go up and tell the rector on him, Dedalus, said Nasty Roche, because he said that he'd come in

And there were some fellows out of second of grammar listening and one of them said:

The senate and the Roman people declared that Dedalus had been wrongly punished.

It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel; and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory

the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his

face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be;

He could not eat the blackish fish fritters they got on Wednesdays in lent and one of his potatoes had the

mark of the spade in it. Yes, he would do what the fellows had told him. He would go up and tell the rector

that he had been wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history, by some

great person whose head was in the books of history. And the rector would declare that he had been wrongly

punished because the senate and the Roman people always declared that the men who did that had been

wrongly punished. Those were the great men whose names were in Richmal Magnall's Questions. History

was all about those men and what they did and that was what Peter Parley's Tales about Greece and Rome

were all about. Peter Parley himself was on the first page in a picture. There was a road over a heath with

grass at the side and little bushes: and Peter Parley had a broad hat like a protestant minister and a big stick

It was easy what he had to do. All he had to do was when the dinner was over and he came out in his turn to

go on walking but not out to the corridor but up the staircase on the right that led to the castle. He had nothing

to do but that: to turn to the right and walk fast up the staircase and in half a minute he would be in the low

dark narrow corridor that led through the castle to the rector's room. And every fellow had said that it was

unfair, even the fellow out of second of grammar who had said that about the senate and the Roman people.

He heard the fellows of the higher line stand up at the top of the refectory and heard their steps as they came

down the matting: Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard and the Portuguese and the fifth was big

Corrigan who was going to be flogged by Mr Gleeson. That was why the prefect of studies had called him a

schemer and pandied him for nothing: and, straining his weak eyes, tired with the tears, he watched big

Corrigan's broad shoulders and big hanging black head passing in the file. But he had done something and

besides Mr Gleeson would not flog him hard: and he remembered how big Corrigan looked in the bath. He

had skin the same colour as the turfcoloured bogwater in the shallow end of the bath and when he walked

along the side his feet slapped loudly on the wet tiles and at every step his thighs shook a little because he

The refectory was half empty and the fellows were still passing out in file. He could go up the staircase

because there was never a priest or a prefect outside the refectory door. But he could not go. The rector would

side with the prefect of studies and think it was a schoolboy trick and then the prefect of studies would come

in every day the same, only it would be worse because he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to

the rector about him. The fellows had told him to go but they would not go themselves. They had forgotten

all about it. No, it was best to forget all about it and perhaps the prefect of studies had Only said he would

come in. No, it was best to hide out of the way because when you were small and young you could often

The fellows at his table stood up. He stood up and passed out among them in the file. He had to decide. He

was coming near the door. If he went on with the fellows he could never go up to the rector because he could

not leave the playground for that. And if he went and was pandied all the same all the fellows would make

fun and talk about young Dedalus going up to the rector to tell on the prefect of studies.

He was walking down along the matting and he saw the door before him. It was impossible: he could not. He

thought of the baldy head of the prefect of studies with the cruel nocoloured eyes looking at him and he

heard the voice of the prefect of studies asking him twice what his name was. Why could he not remember

the name when he was told the first time? Was he not listening the first time or was it to make fun out of the

name? The great men in the history had names like that and nobody made fun of them. It was his own name

that he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun. Dolan: it was like the name of a woman who

He had reached the door and, turning quickly up to the right, walked up the stairs and, before he could make

up his mind to come back, he had entered the low dark narrow corridor that led to the castle. And as he

crossed the threshold of the door of the corridor he saw, without turning his head to look, that all the fellows

He passed along the narrow dark corridor, passing little doors that were the doors of the rooms of the

community. He peered in front of him and right and left through the gloom and thought that those must be

portraits. It was dark and silent and his eyes were weak and tired with tears so that he could not see. But he

thought they were the portraits of the saints and great men of the order who were looking down on him

silently as he passed: saint Ignatius Loyola holding an open book and pointing to the words AD MAJOREM

DEI GLORIAM in it; saint Francis Xavier pointing to his chest; Lorenzo Ricci with his berretta on his head

like one of the prefects of the lines, the three patrons of holy youth saint Stanislaus Kostka, saint Aloysius

Gonzago, and Blessed John Berchmans, all with young faces because they died when they were young, and

He came out on the landing above the entrance hall and looked about him. That was where Hamilton Rowan

had passed and the marks of the soldiers' slugs were there. And it was there that the old servants had seen the

An old servant was sweeping at the end of the landing. He asked him where was the rector's room and the old

servant pointed to the door at the far end and looked after him as he went on to it and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again more loudly and his heart jumped when he heard a muffled voice

He turned the handle and opened the door and fumbled for the handle of the green baize door inside. He

He saw the rector sitting at a desk writing. There was a skull on the desk and a strange solemn smell in the

His heart was beating fast on account of the solemn place he was in and the silence of the room: and he

I wrote home, sir, said Stephen, and Father Arnall said I am not to study till they come.

Stephen swallowed down the thing again and tried to keep his legs and his voice from shaking.

The rector looked at him in silence and he could feel the blood rising to his face and the tears about to rise to

On the cinderpath, sir. A fellow was coming out of the bicycle house and I fell and they got broken. I don't

O well then, said the rector, Father Dolan did not understand. You can say that I excuse you from your

Yes, sir, but Father Dolan said he will come in tomorrow to pandy me again for it.

Very well, the rector said, it is a mistake and I shall speak to Father Dolan myself. Will that do now?

The rector held his hand across the side of the desk where the skull was and Stephen, placing his hand in it

He bowed and walked quietly out of the room, closing the doors carefully and slowly.

But when he had passed the old servant on the landing and was again in the low narrow dark corridor he

began to walk faster and faster. Faster and faster he hurried on through the gloom excitedly. He bumped his

elbow against the door at the end and, hurrying down the staircase, walked quickly through the two corridors

He could hear the cries of the fellows on the playgrounds. He broke into a run and, running quicker and

quicker, ran across the cinderpath and reached the third line playground, panting.

The fellows had seen him running. They closed round him in a ring, pushing one against another to hear.

He told them what he had said and what the rector had said and, when he had told them, all the fellows flung

They made a cradle of their locked hands and hoisted him up among them and carried him along till he

struggled to get free. And when he had escaped from them they broke away in all directions, flinging their

And they gave three groans for Baldyhead Dolan and three cheers for Conmee and they said he was the

The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free; but he would not be anyway

proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something

The air was soft and grey and mild and evening was coming. There was the smell of evening in the air, the

smell of the fields in the country where they digged up turnips to peel them and eat them when they went out

for a walk to Major Barton's, the smell there was in the little wood beyond the pavilion where the gallnuts

The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could

hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats:

pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

Uncle Charles smoked such black twist that at last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke

Very good, Simon. All serene, Simon, said the old man tranquilly. Anywhere you like. The outhouse will do

Damn me, said Mr Dedalus frankly, if I know how you can smoke such villainous awful tobacco. It's like

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

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,

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 stubblecovered 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

On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel and, as the font was above Stephen's

reach, the old man would dip his hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen's clothes and on the

floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumb

blackened prayer book wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page. Stephen knelt at his side

respecting, though he did not share, his piety. He often wondered what his 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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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 revery of

Blackrock, the passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare cheerless house in which they

were now to live made his heart heavy, and again an intuition, a foreknowledge of the future came to him. He

understood also why the servants had often whispered together in the hall and why his father had often stood

on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, talking loudly to uncle Charles who urged him to sit down and eat

There's a crack of the whip left in me yet, Stephen, old chap, said Mr Dedalus, poking at the dull fire with

fierce energy. We're not dead yet, sonny. No, by the Lord Jesus (God forgive me) not half dead.

Dublin was a new and complex sensation. Uncle Charles had grown so witless that he could no longer be sent

out on errands and the disorder in settling in the new house left Stephen freer than he had been in Blackrock.

In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighbouring square or, at most, going

half way down one of the side streets but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he

followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the customhouse. He passed unchallenged among the

docks and along the quays wondering at the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the surface of the water in

a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay porters and the rumbling carts and the 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 Marseille but that he missed the bright sky and the sumwarmed

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

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 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

The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother's sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if

As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured devotedly:

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

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

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

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

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,

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

It was the last tram. The lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The

conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. On the empty seats of the

tram were scattered a few coloured tickets. No sound of footsteps came up or down the road. No sound broke

the peace of the night save when the lank brown horses rubbed their noses together and shook their bells.

They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and

went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments

on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a

cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim

past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and

sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him

spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch

out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds,

watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on

the sunny lawn and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the

sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the

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

The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new pen, a new

bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the

initial letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was

trying to write: To E C . He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected

poems of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into a

daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray

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

back of one of his father's second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with the theme

and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his classmates:

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

confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the

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

Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes. Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.

Now then, Stephen, he said, you must put your shoulder to the wheel, old chap. You've had a fine long

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 thickheaded

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?

Mr Dedalus screwed his glass into his eye and stared hard at both his sons. Stephen mumbled his bread

By the bye, said Mr Dedalus at length, the rector, or provincial rather, was telling me that story about you

Not he! said Mr Dedalus. But he gave me a great account of the whole affair. We were chatting, you know,

and one word borrowed another. And, by the way, who do you think he told me will get that job in the

corporation? But I `Il tell you that after. Well, as I was saying, we were chatting away quite friendly and he

asked me did our friend here wear glasses still, and then he told me the whole story.

Father Dolan and I, when I told them all at dinner about it, Father Dolan and I had a great laugh over it. YOU

Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there. O, a jesuit for your life, for diplomacy!

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

The Blessed Sacrament had been removed from the tabernacle and the first benches had been driven back so

as to leave the dais of the altar and the space before it free. Against the walls stood companies of barbells and

Indian clubs; the dumbbells were piled in one corner: and in the midst of countless hillocks of gymnasium

shoes and sweaters and singlets in untidy brown parcels there stood the stout leather jacketed vaulting horse

waiting its turn to be carried up on the stage and set in the middle of the winning team at the end of the

Stephen, though in deference to his reputation for essay writing he had been elected secretary to the

gymnasium, had had no part in the first section of the programme but in the play which formed the second

section he had the chief part, that of a farcical pedagogue. He had been cast for it on account of his stature

and grave manners for he was now at the end of his second year at Belvedere and in number two.

A score of the younger boys in white knickers and singlets came pattering down from the stage, through the

vestry and to the chapel. The vestry and chapel were peopled with eager masters and boys. The plump bald

sergeant major was testing with his foot the springboard of the vaulting horse. The lean young man in a long

overcoat, who was to give a special display of intricate club swinging, stood near watching with interest, his

silvercoated 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

curtsying. In a dark corner of the chapel at the gospel side of the altar a stout old lady knelt amid her copious

black skirts. When she stood up a 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

Then, bending down to peer at the smiling painted face under the leaf of the bonnet, he exclaimed:

Stephen at his post by the window heard the old lady and the priest laugh together and heard the boys'

murmurs of admiration behind him as they passed forward to see the little boy who had to dance the

sunbonnet dance by himself. A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge of the blind fall and,

stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.

He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theatre opposite

came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The light spread

upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her

frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A side door of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of

light flew across the grass plots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and

when the side door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the

opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the

cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him

like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns

in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It was the clapping that greeted the entry

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,

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

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.

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

Heron made a poor attempt to imitate for his friend Wallis the rector's pedantic bass and then, laughing at his

Go on, Dedalus, he urged, you can take him off rippingly. HE THAT WILL NOT HEAR THE CHURCHA

The imitation was prevented by a mild expression of anger from Wallis in whose mouthpiece the cigarette

Damn this blankety blank holder, he said, taking it from his mouth and smiling and frowning upon it

No, said Heron, Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn't smoke and he doesn't go to bazaars and he doesn't

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.

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

You'd think butter wouldn't melt in your mouth said Heron. But I'm afraid you're a sly dog.

Indeed you might, answered Heron. We saw her, Wallis, didn't we? And deucedly pretty she is too. And

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

So you may as well admit, Heron went on, that we've fairly found you out this time. You can't play the saint

A soft peal of mirthless laughter escaped from his lips and, bending down as before, he struck Stephen lightly

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

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

It was towards the close of his first term in the college when he was in number six. His sensitive nature was

still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast

down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in

the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or

allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the

leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and

violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

The essay was for him the chief labour of his week and every Tuesday, as he marched from home to the

school, he read his fate in the incidents of the way, pitting himself against some figure ahead of him and

quickening his pace to outstrip it before a certain goal was reached or planting his steps scrupulously in the

spaces of the patchwork of the pathway and telling himself that he would be first and not first in the weekly

On a certain Tuesday the course of his triumphs was rudely broken. Mr Tate, the English master, pointed his

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.

Here. It's about the Creator and the soul. Rrmrrm rrmAh! WITHOUT A POSSIBILITY OF EVER

It was a submission and Mr Tate, appeased, folded up the essay and passed it across to him, saying:

But the class was not so soon appeased. Though nobody spoke to him of the affair after class he could feel

A few nights after this public chiding he was walking with a letter along the Drumcondra Road when he

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

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

O, many say that Newman has the best prose style, Heron said to the other two in explanation, of course

You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people.

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

What do you know about it? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans,

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.

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

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

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

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

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

He's coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he wants to.

Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes? answered Heron.

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

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

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

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

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

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart

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

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:

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

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

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

news. For the most part they spoke at cross purposes when a name was mentioned, the waiter having in mind

Well, I hope they haven't moved the Queen's College anyhow, said Mr Dedalus, for I want to show it to this

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

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

They passed into the anatomy theatre where Mr Dedalus, the porter aiding him, searched the desks for his

initials. Stephen remained in the background, depressed more than ever by the darkness and silence of the

theatre and by the air it wore of jaded and formal study. On the desk he read the word FOETUS cut several

times in the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the absent students of

the college about him and to shrink from their company. A vision of their life, which his father's words had

been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk. A 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

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

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

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

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

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

When you kick out for yourself, Stephen as I daresay you will one of these days remember, whatever you

do, to mix with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent

fellows. Everyone of us could lo something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor,

another could sing a good comic song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell

a good story and so on. We kept the ball rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we

were none the worse of it either. But we were all gentlemen, Stephen at least I hope we were and bloody

good honest Irishmen too. That's the kind of fellows I want you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney.

I'm talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don't believe a son should be afraid of his father. No, I treat you as

your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers than father and son. I `Il

never forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of the South Terrace one day with

some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the

corners of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn't say a word, or stop even. But the next day,

Sunday, we were out for a walk together and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and

said: By the by, Simon, I didn't know you smoked, or something like that. Of course I tried to carry it off as

best I could. If you want a good smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An American captain made me a

He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The women used to stand to look after

He heard the sob passing loudly down his father's throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The

sunlight breakingsuddenly 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

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

The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could

not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an

old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he

had made his first communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and watched the firelight leaping and

dancing on the wall of a little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of mass being said for

him by the rector in a black and gold cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the community off

the main avenue of limes. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in

the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or

had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence

in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the

universe! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His

hands were in his 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

They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe's coffeehouse, where Mr Dedalus's cup had rattled

noisily against its saucer, and Stephen had tried to cover that shameful sign of his father's drinking bout of the

night before by moving his chair and coughing. One humiliation had succeeded another the false smiles of

the market sellers, the curvetings and oglings of the barmaids with whom his father flirted, the compliments

and encouraging words of his father's friends. They had told him that he had a great look of his grandfather

and Mr Dedalus had agreed that he was an ugly likeness. They had unearthed traces of a Cork accent in his

speech and made him admit that the Lee was a much finer river than the Liffey. One of them, in order to put

his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages from Dilectus and asked him whether it was

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

Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the City of Cork in his day. Do you

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

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.

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 fireeater 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

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

Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it's time for you to take a back seat, said the gentleman who had spoken

No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. I'll sing a tenor song against him or I'll vault a fivebarred 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

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.

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

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

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

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 tenacre 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

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.

He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried to keep up with him, smiling also at

Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We're hot out for the half mile, are we?

For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through Stephen's fingers. Great parcels of

groceries and delicacies and dried fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for the

family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre to see INGOMAR or THE LADY OF

LYONS. In his coat pockets he carried squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers' pocket

bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for everyone, overhauled his room, wrote

out resolutions, marshalled his books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists, drew up a

form of commonwealth for the household by which every member of it held some office, opened a loan bank

for his family and pressed loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making out

receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he could do no more he drove up and down the

city in trams. Then the season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave out and the

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

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 waters had flowed

over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to

approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister.

He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He

cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside

the savage desire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore

cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever

image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A

figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding

darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the

morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of

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

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse

riot and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering whether he

had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street

from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The

yellow 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

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

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

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

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

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.

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull

square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for

dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered

It would be a gloomy secret night. After early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the

squalid quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always

nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner. The whores

would be just coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their sleep and

settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair. He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement

of his own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul from their soft perfumed flesh. Yet as he prowled in

quest of that call, his senses, stultified only by his desire, would note keenly all that wounded or shamed

them; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to attention

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a

peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together

again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing

were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its

verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The

music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering

companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to

spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin,

spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of

him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him

on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed but

a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold

indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while

he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt

and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of

sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul. At most, by an alms given to a beggar whose blessing he

fled from, he might hope wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace. Devotion had gone by the

board. What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a

certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God's

power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in

his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or

Well now, Ennis, I declare you have a head and so has my stick! Do you mean to say that you are not able

The blundering answer stirred the embers of his contempt of his fellows. Towards others he felt neither

shame nor fear. On Sunday mornings as he passed the church door he glanced coldly at the worshippers who

stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church, morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor

hear. Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hairoil with which they had anointed their heads

repelled him from the altar they prayed at. He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their

On the wall of his bedroom hung an illuminated scroll, the certificate of his prefecture in the college of the

sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On Saturday mornings when the sodality met in the chapel to recite the

little office his place was a cushioned kneelingdesk at the right of the altar from which he led his wing of

boys through the responses. The falsehood of his position did not pain him. If at moments he felt an impulse

to rise from his post of honour and, confessing before them all his unworthiness, to leave the chapel, a glance

at their faces restrained him. The imagery of the psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride. The glories of

Mary held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing her royal lineage, her

emblems, the lateflowering plant and lateblossoming tree, symbolizing the agelong gradual growth of her

cultus among men. When it fell to him to read the lesson towards the close of the office he read it in a veiled

His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyes

seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not

humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the

impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after

the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself, was turned towards her whose emblem is the morning star,

were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a

That was strange. He tried to think how it could be. But the dusk, deepening in the schoolroom, covered over

his thoughts. The bell rang. The master marked the sums and cuts to be done for the next lesson and went out.

That's game ball. We can scut the whole hour. He won't be in till after half two. Then you can ask him

Stephen, leaning back and drawing idly on his scribbler, listened to the talk about him which Heron checked

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of

the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation.

The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all,

had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From

the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others,

covetousness In using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not

reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering

anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole

As he sat in his bench gazing calmly at the rector's shrewd harsh face, his mind wound itself in and out of the

curious questions proposed to it. If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a

huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with

the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water

before saying the words is the child baptized? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while

the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart the second beatitude promises also to

the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two

species of bread and wine if Jesus `Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and

in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ

or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption

after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

A boy from his post at the window had seen the rector come from the house. All the catechisms were opened

and all heads bent upon them silently. The rector entered and took his seat on the dais. A gentle kick from the

The rector did not ask for a catechism to hear the lesson from. He clasped his hands on the desk and said:

The retreat will begin on Wednesday afternoon in honour of saint Francis Xavier whose feast day is

Saturday. The retreat will go on from Wednesday to Friday. On Friday confession will be heard all the

afternoon after beads. If any boys have special confessors perhaps it will be better for them not to change.

Mass will be on Saturday morning at nine o'clock and general communion for the whole college. Saturday

will be a free day. But Saturday and Sunday being free days some boys might be inclined to think that

Monday is a free day also. Beware of making that mistake. I think you, Lawless, are likely to make that

A little wave of quiet mirth broke forth over the class of boys from the rector's grim smile. Stephen's heart

You are all familiar with the story of the life of saint Francis Xavier, I suppose, the patron of your college.

He came of an old and illustrious Spanish family and you remember that he was one of the first followers of

saint Ignatius. They met in Paris where Francis Xavier was professor of philosophy at the university. This

young and brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the ideas of our glorious founder

and you know that he, at his own desire, was sent by saint Ignatius to preach to the Indians. He is called, as

you know, the apostle of the Indies. He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from

India to Japan, baptizing the people. He is said to have baptized as many as ten thousand idolaters in one

month. It is said that his right arm had grown powerless from having been raised so often over the heads of

those whom he baptized. He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God but he died of fever

on the island of Sancian. A great saint, saint Francis Xavier! A great soldier of God!

He had the faith in him that moves mountains. Ten thousand souls won for God in a single month! That is a

true conqueror, true to the motto of our order: AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM! A saint who has great power

in heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief; power to obtain whatever we pray for if it be for

the good of our souls; power above all to obtain for us the grace to repent if we be in sin. A great saint, saint

He ceased to shake his clasped hands and, resting them against his forehead, looked right and left of them

In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow. Stephen's heart had withered up like a flower

dear little brothers in Christ, from the book of Ecclesiastes, seventh chapter, fortieth verse. In the name of the

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. Father Arnall sat at a table to the left of the altar. He wore about

his shoulders a heavy cloak; his pale face was drawn and his voice broken with rheum. The figure of his old

master, so strangely rearisen, brought back to Stephen's mind his life at Clongowes: the wide playgrounds,

swarming with boys; the square ditch; the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he had dreamed

of being buried; the firelight on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick; the sorrowful face of Brother

Michael. His soul, as these memories came back to him, became again a child's soul.

We are assembled here today, my dear little brothers in Christ, for one brief moment far away from the busy

bustle of the outer world to celebrate and to honour one of the greatest of saints, the apostle of the Indies, the

patron saint also of your college, saint Francis Xavier. Year after year, for much longer than any of you, my

dear little boys, can remember or than I can remember, the boys of this college have met in this very chapel to

make their annual retreat before the feast day of their patron saint. Time has gone on and brought with it its

changes. Even in the last few years what changes can most of you not remember? Many of the boys who sat

in those front benches a few years ago are perhaps now in distant lands, in the burning tropics, or immersed

in professional duties or in seminaries, or voyaging over the vast expanse of the deep or, it may be, already

called by the great God to another life and to the rendering up of their stewardship. And still as the years roll

by, bringing with them changes for good and bad, the memory of the great saint is honoured by the boys of

this college who make every year their annual retreat on the days preceding the feast day set apart by our

Holy Mother the Church to transmit to all the ages the name and fame of one of the greatest sons of catholic

Now what is the meaning of this word RETREAT and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary

practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear

boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to

examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why

we are here in this world. During these few days I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four

last things. They are, as you know from your catechism, death, judgement, hell, and heaven. We shall try to

understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting

benefit to our souls. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and

for one thing alone: to do God's holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless. One thing

alone is needful, the salvation of one's soul. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the

loss of his immortal soul? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this wretched world that can

I will ask you, therefore, my dear boys, to put away from your minds during these few days all worldly

thoughts, whether of study or pleasure or ambition, and to give all your attention to the state of your souls. I

need hardly remind you that during the days of the retreat all boys are expected to preserve a quiet and pious

demeanour and to shun all loud unseemly pleasure. The elder boys, of course, will see that this custom is not

infringed and I look especially to the prefects and officers of the sodality of Our Blessed Lady and of the

Let us try, therefore, to make this retreat in honour of saint Francis with our whole heart and our whole

mind. God's blessing will then be upon all your year's studies. But, above and beyond all, let this retreat be

one to which you can look back in after years when maybe you are far from this college and among very

different surroundings, to which you can look back with joy and thankfulness and give thanks to God for

having granted you this occasion of laying the first foundation of a pious honourable zealous christian life.

And if, as may so happen, there be at this moment in these benches any poor soul who has had the unutterable

misfortune to lose God's holy grace and to fall into grievous sin, I fervently trust and pray that this retreat

may be the turning point in the life of that soul. I pray to God through the merits of His zealous servant

Francis Xavier, that such a soul may be led to sincere repentance and that the holy communion on saint

Francis's day of this year may be a lasting covenant between God and that soul. For just and unjust, for saint

Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ. Help me by your pious attention, by your own devotion, by your

outward demeanour. Banish from your minds all worldly thoughts and think only of the last things, death,

judgement, hell, and heaven. He who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall not sin for ever. He

who remembers the last things will act and think with them always before his eyes. He will live a good life

and die a good death, believing and knowing that, if he has sacrificed much in this earthly life, it will be

given to him a hundredfold and a thousandfold more in the life to come, in the kingdom without end a

blessing, my dear boys, which I wish you from my heart, one and all, in the name of the Father and of the Son

As he walked home with silent companions, a thick fog seemed to compass his mind. He waited in stupor of

mind till it should lift and reveal what it had hidden. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and when the meal

was over and the greasestrewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clearing

the thick scum from his mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he had sunk to the state of a

beast that licks his chaps after meat. This was the end; and a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the fog of

his mind. He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street. Forms

passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life. The letters of the name of Dublin lay

heavily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow boorish insistence. His soul

was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre

threatening dusk while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes,

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint

glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He

suffered its agony. He felt the death chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film

of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat

oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing,

the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless

human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He he himself his

body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it. Nail it down into a wooden box the corpse.

Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the

ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured by scuttling

And while the friends were still standing in tears by the bedside the soul of the sinner was judged. At the last

moment of consciousness the whole earthly life passed before the vision of the soul and, ere it had time to

reflect, the body had died and the soul stood terrified before the judgement seat. God, who had long been

merciful, would then be just. He had long been patient, pleading with the sinful soul, giving it time to repent,

sparing it yet awhile. But that time had gone. Time was to sin and to enjoy, time was to scoff at God and at

the warnings of His holy church, time was to defy His majesty, to disobey His commands, to hoodwink one's

fellow men, to commit sin after sin and to hide one's corruption from the sight of men. But that time was

over. Now it was God's turn: and He was not to be hoodwinked or deceived. Every sin would then come forth

from its lurking place, the most rebellious against the divine will and the most degrading to our poor corrupt

nature, the tiniest imperfection and the most heinous atrocity. What did it avail then to have been a great

emperor, a great general, a marvellous inventor, the most learned of the learned? All were as one before the

judgement seat of God. He would reward the good and punish the wicked. One single instant was enough for

the trial of a man's soul. One single instant after the body's death, the soul had been weighed in the balance.

The particular judgement was over and the soul had passed to the abode of bliss or to the prison of purgatory

Nor was that all. God's justice had still to be vindicated before men: after the particular there still remained

the general judgement. The last day had come. The doomsday was at hand. The stars of heaven were falling

upon the earth like the figs cast by the figtree which the wind has shaken. The sun, the great luminary of the

universe, had become as sackcloth of hair. The moon was bloodred. The firmament was as a scroll rolled

away. The archangel Michael, the prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky.

With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the arch angelical trumpet the brazen death

of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more. At

the last blast the souls of universal humanity throng towards the valley of Jehoshaphat, rich and poor, gentle

and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked. The soul of every human being that has ever existed, the

souls of all those who shall yet be born, all the sons and daughters of Adam, all are assembled on that

supreme day. And lo, the supreme judge is coming! No longer the lowly Lamb of God, no longer the meek

Jesus of Nazareth, no longer the Man of Sorrows, no longer the Good Shepherd, He is seen now coming upon

the clouds, in great power and majesty, attended by nine choirs of angels, angels and archangels,

principalities, powers and virtues, thrones and dominations, cherubim and seraphim, God Omnipotent, God

Everlasting. He speaks: and His voice is heard even at the farthest limits of space, even In the bottomless

abyss. Supreme Judge, from His sentence there will be and can be no appeal. He calls the just to His side,

bidding them enter into the kingdom, the eternity of bliss prepared for them. The unjust He casts from Him,

crying in His offended majesty: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED, INTO EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH

WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS. O, what agony then for the miserable sinners!

Friend is torn apart from friend, children are torn from their parents, husbands from their wives. The poor

sinner holds out his arms to those who were dear to him in this earthly world, to those whose simple piety

perhaps he made a mock of, to those who counselled him and tried to lead him on the right path, to a kind

brother, to a loving sister, to the mother and father who loved him so dearly. But it is too late: the just turn

away from the wretched damned souls which now appear before the eyes of all in their hideous and evil

character. O you hypocrites, O, you whited sepulchres, O you who present a smooth smiling face to the world

while your soul within is a foul swamp of sin, how will it fare with you in that terrible day?

And this day will come, shall come, must come: the day of death and the day of judgement. It is appointed

unto man to die and after death the judgement. Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether

from long disease or from some unexpected accident: the Son of God cometh at an hour when you little

expect Him. Be therefore ready every moment, seeing that you may die at any moment. Death is the end of us

all. Death and judgement, brought into the world by the sin of our first parents, are the dark portals that close

our earthly existence, the portals that open into the unknown and the unseen, portals through which every

soul must pass, alone, unaided save by its good works, without friend or brother or parent or master to help it,

alone and trembling. Let that thought be ever before our minds and then we cannot sin. Death, a cause of

terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path, fulfilling the duties of his

station in life, attending to his morning and evening prayers, approaching the holy sacrament frequently and

performing good and merciful works. For the pious and believing catholic, for the just man, death is no cause

of terror. Was it not Addison, the great English writer, who, when on his deathbed, sent for the wicked young

earl of Warwick to let him see how a christian can meet his end? He it is and he alone, the pious and

Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The

preacher's knife had probed deeply into his disclosed conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in

sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God's turn had come. Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own

filth but the blasts of the angel's trumpet had driven him forth from the darkness of sin into the light. The

words of doom cried by the angel shattered in an instant his presumptuous peace. The wind of the last day

blew through his mind, his sins, the jeweleyed harlots of his imagination, fled before the hurricane,

As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ear. The frail

gay sound smote his heart more strongly than a trumpet blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside

and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and

flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him, and under her eyes the flood of shame

rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust

had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The

sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils. The sootcoated packet of pictures which he had

hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for

hours sinning In thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with

gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly

for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath

some hingeless door in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and

read them secretly. Mad! Mad! Was it possible he had done these things? A cold sweat broke out upon his

When the agony of shame had passed from him he tried to raise his soul from its abject powerlessness. God

and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure

and holy. But he imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed

In the wide land under a tender lucid evening sky, a cloud drifting westward amid a pale green sea of heaven,

they stood together, children that had erred. Their error had offended deeply God's majesty though it was the

error of two children; but it had not offended her whose beauty IS NOT LIKE EARTHLY BEAUTY,

BRIGHT AND MUSICAL. The eyes were not offended which she turned upon him nor reproachful. She

Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred but you are always

my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be

The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through the lowered blinds; and through the

fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed

brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battleworn mail armour of angels.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water

would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the

monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs,

children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights

taken, my dear little brothers in Christ Jesus, from the book of Isaias, fifth chapter, fourteenth verse. In the

The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within his soutane and, having considered its dial for a

Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents, and you will remember that they were

created by God in order that the seats in heaven left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels

might be filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell:

he fell and there fell with him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his rebellious

angels into hell. What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful

thought conceived in an instant: NON SERVIAM: I WILL NOT SERVE. That instant was his ruin.

He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell

Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the plain of Damascus, that lovely garden

resplendent with sunlight and colour, teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them her

bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not the ills our flesh is heir to, disease and

poverty and death: all that a great and generous God could do for them was done. But there was one condition

imposed on them by God: obedience to His word. They were not to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Alas, my dear little boys, they too fell. The devil, once a shining angel, a son of the morning, now a foul

fiend came in the shape of a serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field. He envied them. He, the fallen

great one, could not bear to think that man, a being of clay, should possess the inheritance which he by his sin

had forfeited for ever. He came to the woman, the weaker vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence into

her ear, promising her O, the blasphemy of that promise! that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit

they would become as gods, nay as God Himself. Eve yielded to the wiles of the archtempter. She ate the

apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her. The poison tongue of Satan had

And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His creature man to account: and Michael,

prince of the heavenly host, with a sword of flame in his hand, appeared before the guilty pair and drove them

forth from Eden into the world, the world of sickness and striving, of cruelty and disappointment, of labour

and hardship, to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. But even then how merciful was God! He took

pity on our poor degraded parents and promised that in the fullness of time He would send down from heaven

One who would redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the kingdom of heaven:

and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be God's only begotten Son, the Second Person of the

He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He was born in a poor cowhouse in Judea

and lived as a humble carpenter for thirty years until the hour of His mission had come. And then, filled with

Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized and bound like a common criminal,

mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes, crowned

with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of

his garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of

Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, Our Merciful Redeemer had pity for mankind. Yet even

there, on the hill of Calvary, He founded the holy catholic church against which, it is promised, the gates of

hell shall not prevail. He founded it upon the rock of ages, and endowed it with His grace, with sacraments

and sacrifice, and promised that if men would obey the word of His church they would still enter into eternal

life; but if, after all that had been done for them, they still persisted in their wickedness, there remained for

The preacher's voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the

justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and

dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness

of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In

earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of

his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the

damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four

thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm,

writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of

God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of

hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of

darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon

another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten

one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the

offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible

conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious

quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a

pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world.

The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed.

Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain

rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to

flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome

decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from

the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting

human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected.

The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place

your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was

created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts,

whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant

sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or

less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or

frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially

designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same

time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property,

that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the

lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked

the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the

burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not

afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless

fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils

in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a

And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when

compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the

punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its

own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the

body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and

every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours,

the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless

suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the

several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues

upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and

fanned into everlasting and everincreasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.

Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned

themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company

of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned there is no thought of family or

country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage

intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten.

The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are

full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls

which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who

had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which

were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those lawgivers who framed such a law,

which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But

what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched

lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who

aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their

minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them

from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are

Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company

of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We

can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has

written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk

until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become

as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged

down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin?

Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and

good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why

did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your

confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the

hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you

of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time

was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of

your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least,

are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so

many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would

not restore those illgotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your

religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous

temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred

and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as

alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul

devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which

degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I

say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this

chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for

ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection:

He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had

been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the

overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every

step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening one of his books at random and

poring over it. Every word for him. It was true. God was almighty. God could call him now, call him as he sat

at his desk, before he had time to be conscious of the summons. God had called him. Yes? What? Yes? His

flesh shrank together as it felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about it the

swirl of stifling air. He had died. Yes. He was judged. A wave of fire swept through his body: the first. Again

a wave. His brain began to glow. Another. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking

tenement of the skull. Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla, shrieking like voices:

He leaned back weakly in his desk. He had not died. God had spared him still. He was still in the familiar

world of the school. Mr Tate and Vincent Heron stood at the window, talking, jesting, gazing out at the bleak

I wish it would clear up. I had arranged to go for a spin on the bike with some fellows out by Malahide. But

The voices that he knew so well, the common words, the quiet of the classroom when the voices paused and

the silence was filled by the sound of softly browsing cattle as the other boys munched their lunches

There was still time. O Mary, refuge of sinners, intercede for him! O Virgin Undefiled, save him from the

The English lesson began with the hearing of the history. Royal persons, favourites, intriguers, bishops,

passed like mute phantoms behind their veil of names. All had died: all had been judged. What did it profit a

man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul? At last he had understood: and human life lay around him, a

plain of peace whereon antlike men laboured in brotherhood, their dead sleeping under quiet mounds. The

elbow of his companion touched him and his heart was touched: and when he spoke to answer a question of

his master he heard his own voice full of the quietude of humility and contrition.

His soul sank back deeper into depths of contrite peace, no longer able to suffer the pain of dread, and

sending forth, as he sank, a faint prayer. Ah yes, he would still be spared; he would repent in his heart and be

forgiven; and then those above, those in heaven, would see what he would do to make up for the past: a

A messenger came to the door to say that confessions were being heard in the chapel. Four boys left the

room; and he heard others passing down the corridor. A tremulous chill blew round his heart, no stronger

than a little wind, and yet, listening and suffering silently, he seemed to have laid an ear against the muscle of

his own heart, feeling it close and quail, listening to the flutter of its ventricles.

No escape. He had to confess, to speak out in words what he had done and thought, sin after sin. How? How?

The thought slid like a cold shining rapier into his tender flesh: confession. But not there in the chapel of the

college. He would confess all, every sin of deed and thought, sincerely; but not there among his school

companions. Far away from there in some dark place he would murmur out his own shame; and he besought

God humbly not to be offended with him if he did not dare to confess in the college chapel and in utter

abjection of spirit he craved forgiveness mutely of the boyish hearts about him.

He sat again in the front bench of the chapel. The daylight without was already failing and, as it fell slowly

through the dull red blinds, it seemed that the sun of the last day was going down and that all souls were

I AM CAST AWAY FROM THE SIGHT OF THINE EYES: words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ,

from the Book of Psalms, thirtieth chapter, twentythird verse. In the name of the Father and of the Son and

The preacher began to speak in a quiet friendly tone. His face was kind and he joined gently the fingers of

This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make what our holy founder calls in his book

of spiritual exercises, the composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the

mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the physical torments which all

who are in hell endure. This evening we shall consider for a few moments the nature of the spiritual torments

Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the promptings of our corrupt nature to the

lower instincts, to that which is gross and beastlike; and it is also a turning away from the counsel of our

higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God Himself. For this reason mortal sin is

Now of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a

torment greater than all the others. Saint Thomas, the greatest doctor of the church, the angelic doctor, as he

is called, says that the worst damnation consists in this, that the understanding of man is totally deprived of

divine light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of God. God, remember, is a being

infinitely good, and therefore the loss of such a being must be a loss infinitely painful. In this life we have not

a very clear idea of what such a loss must be, but the damned in hell, for their greater torment, have a full

understanding of that which they have lost, and understand that they have lost it through their own sins and

have lost it for ever. At the very instant of death the bonds of the flesh are broken asunder and the soul at

once flies towards God as towards the centre of her existence. Remember, my dear little boys, our souls long

to be with God. We come from God, we live by God, we belong to God: we are His, inalienably His. God

loves with a divine love every human soul, and every human soul lives in that love. How could it be

otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of our brain, every instant of life proceeds from God's

inexhaustible goodness. And if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child, for a man to be exiled from

hearth and home, for friend to be sundered from friend, O think what pain, what anguish it must be for the

poor soul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving Creator Who has called that soul

into existence from nothingness and sustained it in life and loved it with an immeasurable love. This, then, to

be separated for ever from its greatest good, from God, and to feel the anguish of that separation, knowing

full well that it is unchangeable: this is the greatest torment which the created soul is capable of bearing,

The second pain which will afflict the souls of the damned in hell is the pain of conscience. Just as in dead

bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from

the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple

sting. The first sting inflicted by this cruel worm will be the memory of past pleasures. O what a dreadful

memory will that be! In the lake of alldevouring flame the proud king will remember the pomps of his court,

the wise but wicked man his libraries and instruments of research, the lover of artistic pleasures his marbles

and pictures and other art treasures, he who delighted in the pleasures of the table his gorgeous feasts, his

dishes prepared with such delicacy, his choice wines; the miser will remember his hoard of gold, the robber

his illgotten wealth, the angry and revengeful and merciless murderers their deeds of blood and violence in

which they revelled, the impure and adulterous the unspeakable and filthy pleasures in which they delighted.

They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their sins. For how miserable will all those pleasures

seem to the soul condemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages. How they will rage and fume to think that

they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily

comforts, for a tingling of the nerves. They will repent indeed: and this is the second sting of the worm of

conscience, a late and fruitless sorrow for sins committed. Divine justice insists that the understanding of

those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the sins of which they were guilty, and moreover, as saint

Augustine points out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin, so that sin will appear to them in

all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of God Himself. They will behold their sins in all their foulness

and repent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good occasions which they neglected. This is

the last and deepest and most cruel sting of the worm of conscience. The conscience will say: You had time

and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up religiously by your parents. You had the

sacraments and grace and indulgences of the church to aid you. You had the minister of God to preach to you,

to call you back when you had strayed, to forgive you your sins, no matter how many, how abominable, if

only you had confessed and repented. No. You would not. You flouted the ministers of holy religion, you

turned your back on the confessional, you wallowed deeper and deeper in the mire of sin. God appealed to

you, threatened you, entreated you to return to Him. O, what shame, what misery! The Ruler of the universe

entreated you, a creature of clay, to love Him Who made you and to keep His law. No. You would not. And

now, though you were to flood all hell with your tears if you could still weep, all that sea of repentance would

not gain for you what a single tear of true repentance shed during your mortal life would have gained for you.

You implore now a moment of earthly life wherein to repent: In vain. That time is gone: gone for ever.

Such is the threefold sting of conscience, the viper which gnaws the very heart's core of the wretches in hell,

so that filled with hellish fury they curse themselves for their folly and curse the evil companions who have

brought them to such ruin and curse the devils who tempted them in life and now mock them in eternity and

even revile and curse the Supreme Being Whose goodness and patience they scorned and slighted but Whose

The next spiritual pain to which the damned are subjected is the pain of extension. Man, in this earthly life,

though he be capable of many evils, is not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one evil corrects and

counteracts another just as one poison frequently corrects another. In hell, on the contrary, one torment,

instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as the internal faculties are more

perfect than the external senses, so are they more capable of suffering. Just as every sense is afflicted with a

fitting torment, so is every spiritual faculty; the fancy with horrible images, the sensitive faculty with

alternate longing and rage, the mind and understanding with an interior darkness more terrible even than the

exterior darkness which reigns in that dreadful prison. The malice, impotent though it be, which possesses

these demon souls is an evil of boundless extension, of limitless duration, a frightful state of wickedness

which we can scarcely realize unless we bear in mind the enormity of sin and the hatred God bears to it.

Opposed to this pain of extension and yet coexistent with it we have the pain of intensity. Hell is the centre

of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no

contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell. Nay, things which are

good in themselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort to the afflicted, will be

there a continual torment: knowledge, so much longed for as the chief good of the intellect, will there be

hated worse than ignorance: light, so much coveted by all creatures from the lord of creation down to the

humblest plant in the forest, will be loathed intensely. In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not

very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their

weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are

at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and reendowing that

which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame. Nor can nature escape from these intense and various tortures

by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained and maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the

greater. Boundless extension of torment, incredible intensity of suffering, unceasing variety of torture this is

what the divine majesty, so outraged by sinners, demands; this is what the holiness of heaven, slighted and

set aside for the lustful and low pleasures of the corrupt flesh, requires; this is what the blood of the innocent

Lamb of God, shed for the redemption of sinners, trampled upon by the vilest of the vile, insists upon.

Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and

dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even

though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined

to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense,

unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What

must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for

an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore.

How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which

a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth

to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in

thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are

leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals,

atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to

that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of

centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons

upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one

instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity

would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird

came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are

stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales

upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably

vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a

period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would

A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him

that he stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock. The ticking went

on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the

words ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the

presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded

with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have the conscience upbraid one, the memory

enrage, the mind filled with darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the foul demons

who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits;

ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony,

never to receive, even for an instant, God's pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never to

be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O, what a dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless

bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony limitless in

intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of

anguish that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is

itself an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an

Yes, a just God! Men, reasoning always as men, are astonished that God should mete out an everlasting and

infinite punishment in the fires of hell for a single grievous sin. They reason thus because, blinded by the

gross illusion of the flesh and the darkness of human understanding, they are unable to comprehend the

hideous malice of mortal sin. They reason thus because they are unable to comprehend that even venial sin is

of such a foul and hideous nature that even if the omnipotent Creator could end all the evil and misery in the

world, the wars, the diseases, the robberies, the crimes, the deaths, the murders, on condition that he allowed

a single venial sin to pass unpunished, a single venial sin, a lie, an angry look, a moment of wilful sloth, He,

the great omnipotent God could not do so because sin, be it in thought or deed, is a transgression of His law

A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer and a third part of the cohort of angels fall

from their glory. A sin, an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death

and suffering into the world. To retrieve the consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came

down to earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross.

O, my dear little brethren in Christ Jesus, will we then offend that good Redeemer and provoke His anger?

Will we trample again upon that torn and mangled corpse? Will we spit upon that face so full of sorrow and

love? Will we too, like the cruel jews and the brutal soldiers, mock that gentle and compassionate Saviour

Who trod alone for our sake the awful winepress of sorrow? Every word of sin is a wound in His tender

side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head. Every impure thought, deliberately yielded to, is a keen

lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart. No, no. It is impossible for any human being to do that which

offends so deeply the divine majesty, that which is punished by an eternity of agony, that which crucifies

I pray to God that my poor words may have availed today to confirm in holiness those who are in a state of

grace, to strengthen the wavering, to lead back to the state of grace the poor soul that has strayed if any such

be among you. I pray to God, and do you pray with me, that we may repent of our sins. I will ask you now,

all of you, to repeat after me the act of contrition, kneeling here in this humble chapel in the presence of God.

He is there in the tabernacle burning with love for mankind, ready to comfort the afflicted. Be not afraid. No

matter how many or how foul the sins if you only repent of them they will be forgiven you. Let no worldly

shame hold you back. God is still the merciful Lord who wishes not the eternal death of the sinner but rather

He calls you to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love. His

arms are open to receive you even though you have sinned against Him. Come to Him, poor sinner, poor vain

The priest rose and, turning towards the altar, knelt upon the step before the tabernacle in the fallen gloom.

He waited till all in the chapel had knelt and every least noise was still. Then, raising his head, he repeated

the act of contrition, phrase by phrase, with fervour. The boys answered him phrase by phrase. Stephen, his

O my God! O my God! I am heartily sorry I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee for

having offended Thee and I detest my sins and I detest my sins above every other evil above

every other evil because they displease Thee, my God because they displease Thee, my God Who art

so deserving Who art so deserving of all my love of all my love and I firmly purpose and I

firmly purpose by Thy holy grace by Thy holy grace never more to offend Thee never more to

He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul, and at every step his soul seemed to

sigh; at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.

He halted on the landing before the door and then, grasping the porcelain knob, opened the door quickly. He

waited in fear, his soul pining within him, praying silently that death might not touch his brow as he passed

over the threshold, that the fiends that inhabit darkness might not be given power over him. He waited still at

the threshold as at the entrance to some dark cave. Faces were there; eyes: they waited and watched.

We knew perfectly well of course that though it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable

difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavour to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary

Murmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark shell of the cave. He feared intensely

in spirit and in flesh but, raising his head bravely, he strode into the room firmly. A doorway, a room, the

same room, same window. He told himself calmly that those words had absolutely no sense which had

seemed to rise murmurously from the dark. He told himself that it was simply his room with the door open.

He closed the door and, walking swiftly to the bed, knelt beside it and covered his face with his hands. His

hands were cold and damp and his limbs ached with chill. Bodily unrest and chill and weariness beset him,

routing his thoughts. Why was he kneeling there like a child saying his evening prayers? To be alone with his

soul, to examine his conscience, to meet his sins face to face, to recall their times and manners and

circumstances, to weep over them. He could not weep. He could not summon them to his memory. He felt

only an ache of soul and body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary.

That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and overcloud his conscience, assailing him at the gates

of the cowardly and sincorrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his weakness, he crawled

up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets closely about him, covered his face again with his hands. He had

sinned. He had sinned so deeply against heaven and before God that he was not worthy to be called God's

Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had

done them, secretly, filthily, time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to wear the

mask of holiness before the tabernacle itself while his soul within was a living mass of corruption. How came

it that God had not struck him dead? The leprous company of his sins closed about him, breathing upon him,

bending over him from all sides. He strove to forget them in an act of prayer, huddling his limbs closer

together and binding down his eyelids: but the senses of his soul would not be bound and, though his eyes

were shut fast, he saw the places where he had sinned and, though his ears were tightly covered, he heard. He

desired with all his will not to hear or see. He desired till his frame shook under the strain of his desire and

until the senses of his soul closed. They closed for an instant and then opened. He saw.

A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettlebunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay

battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the

ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards

Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish

creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as indiarubber. The malice of evil

glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of

cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn flannel waistcoat,

another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their

spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through

the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer

and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared

He flung the blankets from him madly to free his face and neck. That was his hell. God had allowed him to

see the hell reserved for his sins: stinking, bestial, malignant, a hell of lecherous goatish fiends. For him! For

He sprang from the bed, the reeking odour pouring down his throat, clogging and revolting his entrails. Air!

The air of heaven! He stumbled towards the window, groaning and almost fainting with sickness. At the

washstand a convulsion seized him within; and, clasping his cold forehead wildly, he vomited profusely in

When the fit had spent itself he walked weakly to the window and, lifting the sash, sat in a corner of the

embrasure and leaned his elbow upon the sill. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from

point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still

and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid peace and

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

When evening had fallen he left the house, and the first touch of the damp dark air and the noise of the door

as it closed behind him made ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears. Confess! Confess! It was

not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a prayer. He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy

Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before he heard again the footboard of the

housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let him in, before he saw again the table in the kitchen set

The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the dark streets. There were so many

flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that City and so many cities in the world. Yet

eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a mortal sin. It could happen in an instant. But how

so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see the thing, without having wished first to see.

Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle

beast of the field. It must understand when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant

after instant, sinfully. It feels and understands and desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that,

a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman

thing moved by a lower soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the

tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O why?

He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abasing himself in the awe of God Who had made all things and all

men. Madness. Who could think such a thought? And, cowering in darkness and abject, he prayed mutely to

his guardian angel to drive away with his sword the demon that was whispering to his brain.

The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in thought and word and deed

wilfully through his own body. Confess! He had to confess every sin. How could he utter in words to the

priest what he had done? Must, must. Or how could he explain without dying of shame? Or how could he

have done such things without shame? A madman! Confess! O he would indeed to be free and sinless again!

He walked on and on through illlit streets, fearing to stand still for a moment lest it might seem that he held

back from what awaited him, fearing to arrive at that towards which he still turned with longing. How

beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when God looked upon it with love!

Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dank hair hung trailed over their brows. They

were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls

were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God loved them, seeing them.

A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he had fallen, to feel that those

souls were dearer to God than his. The wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads and myriads of

other souls on whom God's favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter and now dimmer

sustained and failing. And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and failing, merged in a moving

breath. One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost. The end: black, cold,

Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt, unlived. The

squalid scene composed itself around him; the common accents, the burning gasjets in the shops, odours of

fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. An old woman was about to cross the street, an

She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him; and, as she held out her reeking withered right hand

under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower towards her, saddened and soothed by her voice.

The candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of incense still floated down the dim

nave. Bearded workmen with pious faces were guiding a canopy out through a side door, the sacristan aiding

them with quiet gestures and words. A few of the faithful still lingered praying before one of the sidealtars

or kneeling in the benches near the confessionals. He approached timidly and knelt at the last bench in the

body, thankful for the peace and silence and fragrant shadow of the church. The board on which he knelt was

narrow and worn and those who knelt near him were humble followers of Jesus. Jesus too had been born in

poverty and had worked in the shop of a carpenter, cutting boards and planing them, and had first spoken of

the kingdom of God to poor fishermen, teaching all men to be meek and humble of heart.

He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart be meek and humble that he might be like those who

knelt beside him and his prayer as acceptable as theirs. He prayed beside them but it was hard. His soul was

foul with sin and he dared not ask forgiveness with the simple trust of those whom Jesus, in the mysterious

ways of God, had called first to His side, the carpenters, the fishermen, poor and simple people following a

lowly trade, handling and shaping the wood of trees, mending their nets with patience.

A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred; and at the last moment, glancing up swiftly, he

saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a capuchin. The priest entered the box and was hidden. Two

penitents rose and entered the confessional at either side. The wooden slide was drawn back and the faint

His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its

doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men. They stirred,

The slide was shot back. The penitent emerged from the side of the box. The farther side was drawn. A

woman entered quietly and deftly where the first penitent had knelt. The faint murmur began again.

He could still leave the chapel. He could stand up, put one foot before the other and walk out softly and then

run, run, run swiftly through the dark streets. He could still escape from the shame. Had it been any terrible

crime but that one sin! Had it been murder! Little fiery flakes fell and touched him at all points, shameful

thoughts, shameful words, shameful acts. Shame covered him wholly like fine glowing ashes falling

continually. To say it in words! His soul, stifling and helpless, would cease to be.

The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide was drawn. A

penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise floated in vaporous cloudlets

out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft whispering vapour, whispering and

He beat his breast with his fist humbly, secretly under cover of the wooden armrest. He would be at one with

others and with God. He would love his neighbour. He would love God who had made and loved him. He

would kneel and pray with others and be happy. God would look down on him and on them and would love

It was easy to be good. God's yoke was sweet and light. It was better never to have sinned, to have remained

always a child, for God loved little children and suffered them to come to Him. It was a terrible and a sad

thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry. How true that was! That was indeed

The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next. He stood up in terror and walked blindly

At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to the white crucifix suspended above

him. God could see that he was sorry. He would tell all his sins. His confession would be long, long.

Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. But God

had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. He was sorry. He clasped his hands and raised them towards the

white form, praying with his darkened eyes, praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro

The slide clicked back and his heart bounded in his breast. The face of an old priest was at the grating,

averted from him, leaning upon a hand. He made the sign of the cross and prayed of the priest to bless him

for he had sinned. Then, bowing his head, he repeated the CONFITEOR in fright. At the words MY MOST

He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul,

festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was

The priest passed his hand several times over his face. Then, resting his forehead against his hand, he leaned

towards the grating and, with eyes still averted, spoke slowly. His voice was weary and old.

You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It

kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for

God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or

where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one

farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady

when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I

am sure you do. And you will promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more

The old and weary voice fell like sweet rain upon his quaking parching heart. How sweet and sad!

Do so my poor child. The devil has led you astray. Drive him back to hell when he tempts you to dishonour

your body in that way the foul spirit who hates our Lord. Promise God now that you will give up that sin,

Blinded by his tears and by the light of God's mercifulness he bent his head and heard the grave words of

absolution spoken and saw the priest's hand raised above him in token of forgiveness.

He knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave; and his prayers ascended to heaven from his

The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making

light his limbs. In spite of all he had done it. He had confessed and God had pardoned him. His soul was

It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful to live in grace a life of peace and virtue and

He sat by the fire in the kitchen, not daring to speak for happiness. Till that moment he had not known how

beautiful and peaceful life could be. The green square of paper pinned round the lamp cast down a tender

shade. On the dresser was a plate of sausages and white pudding and on the shelf there were eggs. They

would be for the breakfast in the morning after the communion in the college chapel. White pudding and eggs

and sausages and cups of tea. How simple and beautiful was life after all! And life lay all before him.

In a dream he fell asleep. In a dream he rose and saw that it was morning. In a waking dream he went through

The boys were all there, kneeling in their places. He knelt among them, happy and shy. The altar was heaped

with fragrant masses of white flowers; and in the morning light the pale flames of the candles among the

He knelt before the altar with his classmates, holding the altar cloth with them over a living rail of hands. His

hands were trembling and his soul trembled as he heard the priest pass with the ciborium from communicant

Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid; and he would hold upon his tongue the host and God would

Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would

Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the

Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with

an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and

with an early mass. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety; and often as he knelt among the few

worshippers at the sidealtar, following with his interleaved prayerbook the murmur of the priest, he

glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the two candles, which

were the old and the new testaments, and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs.

His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up

ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph

which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his

zeal of prayer, since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of

suffrage for the agonizing souls; and fearful lest in the midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the

infernal only in that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a drop of moisture, he drove

Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life, circled about its

own centre of spiritual energy. His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word, and deed,

every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven; and at times his sense of such

immediate repercussion was so lively that he seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers the

keyboard of a great cash register and to see the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven, not

The rosaries, too, which he said constantly for he carried his beads loose in his trousers' pockets that he

might tell them as he walked the streets transformed themselves into coronals of flowers of such vague

unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and odourless as they were nameless. He offered up each

of his three daily chaplets that his soul might grow strong in each of the three theological virtues, in faith in

the Father Who had created him, in hope in the Son Who had redeemed him and in love of the Holy Ghost

Who had sanctified him; and this thrice triple prayer he offered to the Three Persons through Mary in the

On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might

descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past;

and he prayed for each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend upon him, though it seemed

strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that

each should be prayed for apart from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage of his spiritual

progress this difficulty would be removed when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness and

enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with

trepidation, because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols

were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness, the eternal mysterious

secret Being to Whom, as God, the priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of

The imagery through which the nature and kinship of the Three Persons of the Trinity were darkly shadowed

forth in the books of devotion which he read the Father contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His

Divine Perfections and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son and the Holy Spirit proceeding out of

Father and Son from all eternity were easier of acceptance by his mind by reason of their august

incomprehensibility than was the simple fact that God had loved his soul from all eternity, for ages before he

He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit,

had found them set forth solemnly in books and had wondered why his soul was unable to harbour them for

any time or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction. A brief anger had often invested him but he

had never been able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself passing out of it as if his very

body were being divested with ease of some outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark, and murmurous

presence penetrate his being and fire him with a brief iniquitous lust: it, too, had slipped beyond his grasp

leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was the only love and that the only hate his soul

But he could no longer disbelieve in the reality of love, since God Himself had loved his individual soul with

divine love from all eternity. Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole

world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God's power and love. Life became a divine gift for every

moment and sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, his soul

should praise and thank the Giver. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for

his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable was this

sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in

any way necessary that he should continue to live. Yet that was part of the divine purpose and he dared not

question its use, he above all others who had sinned so deeply and so foully against the divine purpose. Meek

and abased by this consciousness of the one eternal omnipresent perfect reality his soul took up again her

burden of pieties, masses and prayers and sacraments and mortifications, and only then for the first time since

he had brooded on the great mystery of love did he feel within him a warm movement like that of some

newly born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted hands,

the parted lips and eyes as of one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer, humiliated

But he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation and did not allow himself to desist from

even the least or lowliest devotion, striving also by constant mortification to undo the sinful past rather than

to achieve a saintliness fraught with peril. Each of his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline. In

order to mortify the sense of sight he made it his rule to walk in the street with downcast eyes, glancing

neither to right nor left and never behind him. His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of women.

From time to time also he balked them by a sudden effort of the will, as by lifting them suddenly in the

middle of an unfinished sentence and closing the book. To mortify his hearing he exerted no control over his

voice which was then breaking, neither sang nor whistled, and made no attempt to flee from noises which

caused him painful nervous irritation such as the sharpening of knives on the knife board, the gathering of

cinders on the fireshovel and the twigging of the carpet. To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found

in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odours whether they were the odours of the outdoor world, such

as those of dung or tar, or the odours of his own person among which he had made many curious comparisons

and experiments. He found in the end that the only odour against which his sense of smell revolted was a

certain stale fishy stink like that of longstanding urine; and whenever it was possible he subjected himself to

this unpleasant odour. To mortify the taste he practised strict habits at table, observed to the letter all the fasts

of the church and sought by distraction to divert his mind from the savours of different foods. But it was to

the mortification of touch he brought the most assiduous ingenuity of inventiveness. He never consciously

changed his position in bed, sat in the most uncomfortable positions, suffered patiently every itch and pain,

kept away from the fire, remained on his knees all through the mass except at the gospels, left part of his neck

and face undried so that air might sting them and, whenever he was not saying his beads, carried his arms

stiffly at his sides like a runner and never in his pockets or clasped behind him.

He had no temptations to sin mortally. It surprised him however to find that at the end of his course of

intricate piety and selfrestraint he was so easily at the mercy of childish and unworthy imperfections. His

prayers and fasts availed him little for the suppression of anger at hearing his mother sneeze or at being

disturbed in his devotions. It needed an immense effort of his will to master the impulse which urged him to

give outlet to such irritation. Images of the outbursts of trivial anger which he had often noted among his

masters, their twitching mouths, closeshut lips and flushed cheeks, recurred to his memory, discouraging

him, for all his practice of humility, by the comparison. To merge his life in the common tide of other lives

was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction

which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples.

His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into

driedup sources. His confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented

imperfections. His actual reception of the eucharist did not bring him the same dissolving moments of

virginal selfsurrender as did those spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit

to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was an old neglected book written by saint

Alphonsus Liguori, with fading characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love and

virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading of its pages in which the imagery of the

canticles was interwoven with the communicant's prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul,

telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal and come away, bidding her look forth, a

spouse, from Amana and from the mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer with the same

This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the

insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave

him an intense sense of power to know that he could, by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought,

undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to be

waiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then, almost at the instant of that

touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from the flood upon a dry

shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation; and, seeing the silver line of the flood far

away and beginning again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfaction shook his

When he had eluded the flood of temptation many times in this way he grew troubled and wondered whether

the grace which he had refused to lose was not being filched from him little by little. The clear certitude of

his own immunity grew dim and to it succeeded a vague fear that his soul had really fallen unawares. It was

with difficulty that he won back his old consciousness of his state of grace by telling himself that he had

prayed to God at every temptation and that the grace which he had prayed for must have been given to him

inasmuch as God was obliged to give it. The very frequency and violence of temptations showed him at last

the truth of what he had heard about the trials of the saints. Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that

the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

Often when he had confessed his doubts and scruples some momentary inattention at prayer, a movement of

trivial anger in his soul, or a subtle wilfulness in speech or act he was bidden by his confessor to name some

sin of his past life before absolution was given him. He named it with humility and shame and repented of it

once more. It humiliated and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from it wholly, however

holily he might live or whatever virtues or perfections he might attain. A restless feeling of guilt would

always be present with him: he would confess and repent and be absolved, confess and repent again and be

absolved again, fruitlessly. Perhaps that first hasty confession wrung from him by the fear of hell had not

been good? Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere sorrow for his sin? But

the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew,

The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown

crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind, Stephen

stood before him, following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight above the

roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers. The priest's face was in total shadow, but the waning

daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull.

Stephen followed also with his ears the accents and intervals of the priest's voice as he spoke gravely and

cordially of indifferent themes, the vacation which had just ended, the colleges of the order abroad, the

transference of masters. The grave and cordial voice went on easily with its tale and in the pauses Stephen

felt bound to set it on again with respectful questions. He knew that the tale was a prelude and his mind

waited for the sequel. Ever since the message of summons had come for him from the director his mind had

struggled to find the meaning of the message; and, during the long restless time he had sat in the college

parlour waiting for the director to come in, his eyes had wandered from one sober picture to another around

the walls and his mind wandered from one guess to another until the meaning of the summons had almost

become clear. Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent the director from

The director had begun to speak of the dominican and franciscan orders and of the friendship between saint

Stephen's face gave back the priest's indulgent smile and, not being anxious to give an opinion, he made a

I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among the capuchins themselves of doing away

O certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but for the street I really think it would be better

Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I used to see them out cycling in all kinds of

weather with this thing up about their knees! It was really ridiculous. LES JUPES, they call them in Belgium.

Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he could not see on the priest's shadowed face, its image

or spectre only passing rapidly across his mind as the low discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed calmly

before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening and of the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny

The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making

brought always to his mind a delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy he had imagined the reins by which

horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to feel at Stradbrooke the greasy leather of

harness. It had shocked him, too, when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers the brittle

texture of a woman's stocking for, retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a

prophecy of his own state, it was only amid softworded phrases or within rosesoft stuff's that he dared to

But the phrase on the priest's lips was disingenuous for he knew that a priest should not speak lightly on that

theme. The phrase had been spoken lightly with design and he felt that his face was being searched by the

eyes in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft of jesuits he had put aside frankly as not borne

out by his own experience. His masters, even when they had not attracted him, had seemed to him always

intelligent and serious priests, athletic and highspirited prefects. He thought of them as men who washed

their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold linen. During all the years he had lived among them

in Clongowes and in Belvedere he had received only two pandies and, though these had been dealt him in the

wrong, he knew that he had often escaped punishment. During all those years he had never heard from any of

his masters a flippant word: it was they who had taught him christian doctrine and urged him to live a good

life and, when he had fallen into grievous sin, it was they who had led him back to grace. Their presence had

made him diffident of himself when he was a muffin Clongowes and it had made him diffident of himself

also while he had held his equivocal position in Belvedere. A constant sense of this had remained with him

up to the last year of his school life. He had never once disobeyed or allowed turbulent companions to seduce

him from his habit of quiet obedience; and, even when he doubted some statement of a master, he had never

presumed to doubt openly. Lately some of their judgements had sounded a little childish in his ears and had

made him feel a regret and pity as though he were slowly passing out of an accustomed world and were

hearing its language for the last time. One day when some boys had gathered round a priest under the shed

I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably never committed a mortal sin in his life, that is to

Some of the boys had then asked the priest if Victor Hugo were not the greatest French writer. The priest had

answered that Victor Hugo had never written half so well when he had turned against the church as he had

But there are many eminent French critics, said the priest, who consider that even Victor Hugo, great as he

The tiny flame which the priest's allusion had kindled upon Stephen's cheek had sunk down again and his

eyes were still fixed calmly on the colourless sky. But an unresting doubt flew hither and thither before his

mind. Masked memories passed quickly before him: he recognized scenes and persons yet he was conscious

that he had failed to perceive some vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the grounds

watching the sports in Clongowes and eating slim jim out of his cricket cap. Some jesuits were walking round

the cycletrack in the company of ladies. The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes sounded in

His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the parlour when he became aware that the

I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very important subject.

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly. The priest waited for the answer

I mean, have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order? Think.

The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting his hands, leaned his chin gravely upon them,

In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the

religious life. Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he shows to

others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists. And you, Stephen,

have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady's sodality. Perhaps you are the boy in this

A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest's voice made Stephen's heart quicken in response.

To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour that the Almighty God can bestow upon a

man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven,

no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, has the power of a priest of God: the power of the keys, the

power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God

the evil spirits that have power over them; the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come

down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud

musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which

angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself,

a young and silentmannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing,

genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance

of reality and of their distance from it. In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had

assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests. He had bent his knee sideways like

such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of

such another as he turned to the altar again after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him

to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because

it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual should

assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle

of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a

humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as

deacon in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards

the people, and sing the chant ITE MISSA EST. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the pictures

of the mass in his child's massbook, in a church without worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a

bare altar, and served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague sacrificial or sacramental

acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality; and it was partly the absence of an

appointed rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had allowed silence to cover his

He listened in reverent silence now to the priest's appeal and through the words he heard even more distinctly

a voice bidding him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what

was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. He

would know obscure things, hidden from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath.

He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts, of others, hearing them

murmured into his ears in the confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women and of

girls; but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands, his soul would pass

again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands with which

he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and

drink damnation to himself not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret knowledge and

secret power, being as sinless as the innocent, and he would be a priest for ever according to the order of

I will offer up my mass tomorrow morning, said the director, that Almighty God may reveal to you His holy

will. And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy patron saint, the first martyr, who is very powerful

with God, that God may enlighten your mind. But you must be quite sure, Stephen, that you have a vocation

because it would be terrible if you found afterwards that you had none. Once a priest always a priest,

remember. Your catechism tells you that the sacrament of Holy Orders is one of those which can be received

only once because it imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark which can never be effaced. It is before

you must weigh well, not after. It is a solemn question, Stephen, because on it may depend the salvation of

He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a companion in the spiritual life. Stephen

passed out on to the wide platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild evening air.

Towards Findlater's church a quartet of young men were striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads

and stepping to the agile melody of their leader's concertina. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars

of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly

as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to

the priest's face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had

As he descended the steps the impression which effaced his troubled selfcommunion was that of a mirthless

mask reflecting a sunken day from the threshold of the college. The shadow, then, of the life of the college

passed gravely over his consciousness. It was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life

without material cares. He wondered how he would pass the first night in the novitiate and with what dismay

he would wake the first morning in the dormitory. The troubling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes

came back to him and he heard the discreet murmur of the burning gasflames. At once from every part of his

being unrest began to irradiate. A feverish quickening of his pulses followed, and a din of meaningless words

drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly. His lungs dilated and sank as if he were inhaling a

warm moist unsustaining air and he smelt again the moist warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes

Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him at every

near approach to that life, an instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and

order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the cold of the morning and filing down with the

others to early mass and trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the fainting sickness of his

stomach. He saw himself sitting at dinner with the community of a college. What, then, had become of that

deeprooted shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a strange roof? What had come of

the pride of his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?

His name in that new life leaped into characters before his eyes and to it there followed a mental sensation of

an undefined face or colour of a face. The colour faded and became strong like a changing glow of pallid

brick red. Was it the raw reddish glow he had so often seen on wintry mornings on the shaven gills of the

priests? The face was eyeless and sourfavoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger. Was

it not a mental spectre of the face of one of the jesuits whom some of the boys called Lantern Jaws and others

He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which

window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the

remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so

many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to

end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims

of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul

was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen

into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to

be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He

was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently,

in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some

instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

He crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka and turned his eyes coldly for an instant towards the faded

blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin which stood fowlwise on a pole in the middle of a hamshaped

encampment of poor cottages. Then, bending to the left, he followed the lane which led up to his house. The

faint dour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the

river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the

stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul. Then a short laugh broke from his lips as he

thought of that solitary farmhand in the kitchen gardens behind their house whom they had nicknamed the

man with the hat. A second laugh, taking rise from the first after a pause, broke from him involuntarily as he

thought of how the man with the hat worked, considering in turn the four points of the sky and then

He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A

group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the

second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass jars and jampots which did service for teacups.

Discarded crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them, lay

scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and there on the board, and a knife with a broken ivory

The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over

and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had been

freely given to him, the eldest; but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour.

He sat near them at the table and asked where his father and mother were. One answered:

Still another removal! A boy named Fallon in Belvedere had often asked him with a silly laugh why they

moved so often. A frown of scorn darkened quickly his forehead as he heard again the silly laugh of the

The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the fireplace began to sing the air OFT IN THE

STILLY NIGHT. One by one the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing. They would

sing so for hours, melody after melody, glee after glee, till the last pale light died down on the horizon, till the

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain

of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life's

He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the

choirs of endless generations of children and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of

weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. And he remembered that Newman

had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil, GIVING UTTERANCE, LIKE THE VOICE OF

From the door of Byron's publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel, from the gate of Clontail Chapel to the

door of Byron's publichouse and then back again to the chapel and then back again to the public house he

had paced slowly at first, planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath, then

timing their fall to the fall of verses. A full hour had passed since his father had gone in with Dan Crosby, the

tutor, to find out for him something about the university. For a full hour he had paced up and down, waiting:

He set off abruptly for the Bull, walking rapidly lest his father's shrill whistle might call him back; and in a

Yes, his mother was hostile to the idea, as he had read from her listless silence. Yet her mistrust pricked him

more keenly than his father's pride and he thought coldly how he had watched the faith which was fading

down in his soul ageing and strengthening in her eyes. A dim antagonism gathered force within him and

darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene

and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of

The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had stood as guardians of his

boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends. Pride

after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves. The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led

him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be

opened to him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a

diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triplebranching flames leaping fitfully,

flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew

wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs and grasses wild

creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves. Their feet passed in pattering tumult over his

mind, the feet of hares and rabbits, the feet of harts and hinds and antelopes, until he heard them no more and

The pride of that dim image brought back to his mind the dignity of the office he had refused. All through his

boyhood he had mused upon that which he had so often thought to be his destiny and when the moment had

come for him to obey the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward instinct. Now time lay between: the

He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to the thin wooden bridge he felt the

planks shaking with the tramp of heavily shod feet. A squad of christian brothers was on its way back from

the Bull and had begun to pass, two by two, across the bridge. Soon the whole bridge was trembling and

resounding. The uncouth faces passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the sea, and, as he

strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to

his own face. Angry with himself he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down sideways into the

shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection therein of their topheavy silk hats and

Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their clothes, and it was idle for him to tell himself

that their humble and contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a

gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. It was idle for him to move himself to be generous

towards them, to tell himself that if he ever came to their gates, stripped of his pride, beaten and in beggar's

weeds, that they would be generous towards him, loving him as themselves. Idle and embittering, finally, to

argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love our

neighbour as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them

to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the

greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself.

Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or

was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the

glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the

contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land again. At that instant, as it seemed to him, the air was

chilled and, looking askance towards the water, he saw a flying squall darkening and crisping suddenly the

tide. A faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his throat told him once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold

infrahuman odour of the sea; yet he did not strike across the downs on his left but held straight on along the

A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the

course of the slowflowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the

city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man's weariness, the image of the seventh

city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of

Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slowdrifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were

voyaging across the deserts of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward

bound. The Europe they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish Sea, Europe of strange tongues and

valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused music

within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an

instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede, and from each receding trail of nebulous music

there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A

Ao! Eh, give it over, Dwyer, I'm telling you, or I'll give you a stuff in the kisser for yourself. Ao!

He recognized their speech collectively before he distinguished their faces. The mere sight of that medley of

wet nakedness chilled him to the bone. Their bodies, corpsewhite or suffused with a pallid golden light or

rawly tanned by the sun, gleamed with the wet of the sea. Their divingstone, poised on its rude supports and

rocking under their plunges, and the roughhewn stones of the sloping breakwater over which they scrambled

in their horseplay gleamed with cold wet lustre. The towels with which they smacked their bodies were heavy

He stood still in deference to their calls and parried their banter with easy words. How characterless they

looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and

Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets! It was a pain to see them, and a swordlike

pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. Perhaps they had taken

refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence,

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his

strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his

own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes

had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped City. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he

seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing

the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and

symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and

had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his

workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring

sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air

beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made

radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his

deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties

and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild

flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death the fear he had walked in night and day,

the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without cerements, the

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create

proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing,

He started up nervously from the stoneblock for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt

his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to

set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night

fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces.

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of

the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of

sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide

and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad

Inca few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their

knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salteaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift

of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The

water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds. The clouds were

drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still

Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon

the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful

and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle

and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic

had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a

crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her

thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers

were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and

dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some

darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes

turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze

and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with

her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and

whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was

aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes

had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life,

to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn

and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the

sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay

down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the

earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning

into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world,

a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening

flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest

rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon

cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in

fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

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

Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box, speckled with louse marks, and asked

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 twentyfive minutes, she said. The right time now is twenty past ten. The dear knows you

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, it's a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you'll live to rue the day you set your

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.

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:

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 lurkingplace.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the

companionship of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle's poetics and psychology and a

SYNOPSIS PHILOSOPHIAE SCHOLASTICAE AD MENTEM DIVI THOMAE. His thinking was a dusk

of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a

splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been 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 revery 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

Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll's face and the brimless hat coming

towards him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and

holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and

peered into a dairy to see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he

turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him, but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He

laughed as he heard it for it made him think of McCann, and he saw him a squat figure in a shooting jacket

and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in the wind at Hopkins' corner, and heard him say:

Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat and I `Il 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 deathmask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown. It

was a priestlike face, priestlike in its palor, 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

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 be 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

Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow 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

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

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city's ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous

ring, pulled his mind downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of

the reformed conscience he came upon the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the soul crept over it like unseen vermin,

over the shuffling feet and up the folds of the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious

of its indignity. It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the

peasant student. It was a jesting name between them, but the young peasant bore with it lightly:

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first

heard for he was as formal in speech with others as they were with him. Often, as he sat in Davin's rooms in

Grantham Street, wondering at his friend's wellmade boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating

for his friend's simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and

dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again,

drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of

its delight in rude bodily skill for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael repelling swiftly

and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or by a dull stare of terror in the eyes,

the terror of soul of a starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant

worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland. The gossip of his fellowstudents which strove to render the flat

life of the college significant at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. His nurse had taught him

Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards the myth upon

which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided against

themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the

attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way

of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password; and of the world that lay beyond

Coupling this ambition with the young man's humour Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese and

there was even a point of irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed in his

friend which seemed so often to stand between Stephen's mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the violent or luxurious language in which Stephen escaped

from the cold silence of intellectual revolt, had called up before Stephen's mind a strange vision. The two

were walking slowly towards Davin's rooms through the dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and I never told it to a living soul and

you are the first person now I ever told it to. I disremember if it was October or November. It was October

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend's face, flattered by his confidence and won over to

I don't know if you know where that is at a hurling match between the Croke's Own Boys and the Fearless

Thurles and by God, Stevie, that was the hard fight. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff

that day minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time and shouting like mad.

I never will forget that day. One of the Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his caman and I

declare to God he was within an aim's ace of getting it at the side of his temple. Oh, honest to God, if the

I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely that's not the strange thing that happened

you? Well, I suppose that doesn't interest you, but leastways there was such noise after the match that I

missed the train home and I couldn't get any kind of a yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it, there

was a mass meeting that same day over in Castletownroche and all the cars in the country were there. So

there was nothing for it only to stay the night or to foot it out. Well, I started to walk and on I went and it was

coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills, that's better than ten miles from Kilmallock and there's

a long lonely road after that. You wouldn't see the sign of a christian house along the road or hear a sound. It

was pitch dark almost. Once or twice I stopped by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the

dew was thick I'd have stretched out there and slept. At last, after a bend of the road, I spied a little cottage

with a light in the window. I went up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there and I answered I

was over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that I'd be thankful for a glass of water. After a

while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed as if

she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging and I thought by her figure and by

something in the look of her eyes that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long while at the

door, and I thought it strange because her breast and her shoulders were bare. She asked me was I tired and

would I like to stop the night there. She said she was all alone in the house and that her husband had gone that

morning to Queenstown with his sister to see her off. And all the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her

eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. When I handed her back the

mug at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold and said: `COME IN AND STAY THE

NIGHT HERE. YOU'VE NO CALL TO BE FRIGHTENED. THERE'S NO ONE IN IT BUT OURSELVES.'

I didn't go in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a fever. At the first bend of the road I

The last words of Davin's story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth

reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the

college cars drove by, as a type of her race and of his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of

itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without

Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir! The first handsel today, gentleman. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you,

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images

of guilelessness, and he halted till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse

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

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to jibing and wishing to be out of the way before

she offered her ware to another, a tourist from England or a student of Trinity. Grafton Street, along which he

walked, prolonged that moment of discouraged poverty. In the roadway at the head of the street a slab was set

to the memory of Wolfe Tone and he remembered having been present with his father at its laying. He

remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry tribute. There were four French delegates in a brake and

one, a plump smiling young man, held, wedged on a stick, a card on which were printed the words: VIVE

But the trees in Stephen's Green were fragrant of rain and the rainsodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a

faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant venal city which his

elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a

moment when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck

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

led to the physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not

unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley's time there was a secret staircase there? Or

was the jesuit house extraterritorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows.

A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean

of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and approached the fireplace.

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

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

He produced four candlebutts from the sidepockets of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals

and twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and

busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and candlebutts he seemed more than ever a humble server

making ready the place of sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levite's robe of plain linen

the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure of one whom the canonicals or the bellbordered ephod

would irk and trouble. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord in tending the fire upon the

altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden and yet had

remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. Nay, his very soul had waxed old in that service

without growing towards light and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctity a mortified will

no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than was to the thrill of love or combat his ageing body,

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

You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object

of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

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

In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be

beautiful. But Aquinas also says BONUM EST IN QUOD TENDIT APPETITUS. In so far as it satisfies the

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit

look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of

Ignatius's enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled

books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used

the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their

handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience back

upon themselves and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all,

the ends he served. SIMILITER ATQUE SENIS BACULUS, he was, as the founder would have had him,

like a staff in an old man's hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather, to lie with a

When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of

Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down

If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking

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

I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the

lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he

An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.

He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron lamp before a statue of one of the gods

and that a thief stole the lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character of a thief

to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean's candle butts and fused itself in Stephen's consciousness

with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest's voice, too, had a hard jingling

tone. Stephen's mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest's face

which seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it or within it? A dull

torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of

One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to

the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's in

which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the

To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you

must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

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

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the English convert with the same eyes as the

elder brother in the parable may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of clamorous

conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have entered on the stage of jesuit history when that

strange play of intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all but given through a

latecomer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious

dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the

need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle

men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of

a sudden in winding up to the end like a reel of cotton some finespun line of reasoning upon insufflation on

the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him

follow, like that disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of some zincroofed

The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant

foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME,

CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of

spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or

accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean added, to distinguish between moral

beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean's firm, dry tone, was silent; and through the silence a distant

In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is, however, the danger of perishing of

inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will

see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take

You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in us. I most certainly should not be

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

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and impartially every Student of the class and

could almost see the frank smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like dew upon his

easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the

clergy, more venal than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he would never call his

ghostly father; and he thought how this man and his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the

hands not of the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during all their history, at the bar

The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish fire from the heavy boots of those

students who sat on the highest tier of the gloomy theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. The calling of

the roll began and the responses to the names were given out in all tones until the name of Peter Byrne was

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

Try Leopardstown! Said a voice from the bench behind. Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan's

snoutish face, outlined on the grey light, was impassive. A formula was given out. Amid the rustling of the

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the

professor, the spectrelike symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen's mind. He had heard

some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless

patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics

from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever

So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps some of you gentlemen may be familiar

with the works of Mr W. S. Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks of the billiard sharp who is condemned to

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

His fellow student's rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister of Stephen's mind, shaking into gay life

limp priestly vestments that hung upon the walls, setting them to sway and caper in a sabbath of misrule. The

forms of the community emerged from the gustblown vestments, the dean of studies, the portly florid bursar

with his cap of grey hair, the president, the little priest with feathery hair who wrote devout verses, the squat

peasant form of the professor of economics, the tall form of the young professor of mental science discussing

on the landing a case of conscience with his class like a giraffe cropping high leafage among a herd of

antelopes, the grave troubled prefect of the sodality, the plump roundheaded professor of Italian with his

rogue's eyes. They came ambling and stumbling, tumbling and capering, kilting their gowns for leap frog,

holding one another back, shaken with deep false laughter, smacking one another behind and laughing at their

rude malice, calling to one another by familiar nicknames, protesting with sudden dignity at some rough

The professor had gone to the glass cases on the side wall, from a shelf of which he took down a set of coils,

blew away the dust from many points and, bearing it carefully to the table, held a finger on it while he

proceeded with his lecture. He explained that the wires in modern coils were of a compound called platinoid

He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan whispered from behind:

Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a subject for electrocution. He can have

Moynihan, seeing the professor bend over the coils, rose in his bench and, clacking noiselessly the fingers of

Platinoid, the professor said solemnly, is preferred to German silver because it has a lower coefficient of

resistance by changes of temperature. The platinoid wire is insulated and the covering of silk that insulates it

is wound on the ebonite bobbins just where my finger is. If it were wound single an extra current would be

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied science. A heavybuilt

student, wearing gold spectacles, stared with some wonder at the questioner. Moynihan murmured from

Stephen looked coldly on the oblong Skull beneath him overgrown with tangled twinecoloured hair. The

voice, the accent, the mind of the questioner offended him and he allowed the offence to carry him towards

wilful unkindness, bidding his mind think that the student's father would have done better had he sent his son

The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and yet the shaft came back to its

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

Patience. Can you Say with certitude by whom the soul of your race was bartered and its elect betrayed by

the questioner or by the mocker? Patience. Remember Epictetus. It is probably in his character to ask such a

question at such a moment in such a tone and to pronounce the word SCIENCE as a monosyllable.

The droning voice of the professor continued to wind itself slowly round and round the coils it spoke of,

doubling, trebling, quadrupling its somnolent energy as the coil multiplied its ohms of resistance.

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. On a table near the door were two photographs in frames

and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures. MacCann went briskly to and fro

among the students, talking rapidly, answering rebuffs and leading one after another to the table. In the inner

hall the dean of studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin gravely and nodding his head.

Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted irresolutely. From under the wide falling leaf of a soft hat

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

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

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

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed, turned again to meet

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

A dull scowl appeared on Cranly's forehead. He stared at the table where Moynihan had bent to write his

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

It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same

tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire.

Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly's speech,

unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish

idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an

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

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

That question is out of order, said Stephen. Next business. His smiling eyes were fixed on a silverwrapped

tablet of milk chocolate which peeped out of the propagandist's breastpocket. A little ring of listeners closed

round to hear the war of wits. A lean student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the

two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his open

moist mouth. Cranly took a small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine it closely, turning it

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the strawcoloured goatee which hung

The gipsylike student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in an indistinct bleating voice.

By hell, that's a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a mercenary notion.

His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned his olive face, equine in expression,

MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar's rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament

arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new

gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the

Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. I'll stand you a pint after.

I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is

Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and repeated:

Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin foam:

Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought

was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers

The affair doesn't interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You know that well. Why do you make a

Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?

Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts. Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his

Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of universal peace.

Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of a peaceoffering, saying:

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the direction of the Tsar's image, saying:

By hell, that's a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that's a fine expression. I like that

He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase and, fumbling at the peak of

Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man. Of course, I don't know if you believe in man. I admire you, sir. I

admire the mind of man independent of all religions. Is that your opinion about the mind of Jesus?

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

for you. He thinks I'm an imbecile, Temple explained to Stephen, because I'm a believer in the power of

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

My signature is of no account, he said politely. You are right to go your way. Leave me to go mine.

Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you're a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of

Stephen, recognizing the harsh tone of MacAlister's voice did not turn in the direction of the voice. Cranly

pushed solemnly through the throng of students, linking Stephen and Temple like a celebrant attended by his

Did you hear MacAlister what he said? That youth is jealous of you. Did you see that? I bet Cranly didn't

As they crossed the inner hall, the dean of studies was in the act of escaping from the student with whom he

had been conversing. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare soutane

gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding his head often and repeating:

I n the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was speaking earnestly, in a soft querulous voice,

with a boarder. As he spoke he wrinkled a little his freckled brow and bit, between his phrases, at a tiny bone

I hope the matric men will all come. The first arts' men are pretty sure. Second arts, too. We must make sure

Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the doorway, and said in a swift whisper:

Do you know that he is a married man? he was a married man before they converted him. He has a wife and

children somewhere. By hell, I think that's the queerest notion I ever heard! Eh?

His whisper trailed off into sly cackling laughter. The moment they were through the doorway Cranly seized

You flaming floundering fool! I'll take my dying bible there isn't a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than

Temple wriggled in his grip, laughing still with sly content, while Cranly repeated flatly at every rude shake:

They crossed the weedy garden together. The president, wrapped in a heavy loose cloak, was coming towards

them along one of the walks, reading his office. At the end of the walk he halted before turning and raised his

eyes. The students saluted, Temple fumbling as before at the peak of his cap. They walked forward in silence.

As they neared the alley Stephen could hear the thuds of the players' hands and the wet smacks of the ball and

The three students halted round the box on which Davin sat to follow the game. Temple, after a few

Excuse me, I wanted to ask you, do you believe that JeanJacques Rousseau was a sincere man?

Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask from the grass at his feet, turned

Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you know, to anybody on any subject, I'll

Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Don't talk to him at all. Sure, you might as well be talking, do

you know, to a flaming chamberpot as talking to Temple. Go home, Temple. For God's sake, go home.

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

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

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

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

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

His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against the wall, his peaked cap down

on his eyes. The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a So muscular frame, seemed like the whinny

of an elephant. The student's body shook all over and, to ease his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly

Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle. When their faces had flushed with the struggle they

drew apart, panting. Stephen bent down towards Davin who, intent on the game, had paid no heed to the talk

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

Now that you have signed the petition for universal peace, said Stephen, I suppose you will burn that little

That's a different question, said Davin. I'm an Irish nationalist, first and foremost. But that's you all out.

When you make the next rebellion with hurleysticks, said Stephen, and want the indispensable informer, tell

I can't understand you, said Davin. One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against

Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my family, said Stephen.

Then be one of us, said Davin. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the

Oh, come now, he said. Is it on account of that certain young lady and Father Moran? But that's all in your

Do you remember, he said, when we knew each other first? The first morning we met you asked me to show

you the way to the matriculation class, putting a very strong stress on the first syllable. You remember? Then

you used to address the jesuits as father, you remember? I ask myself about you: IS HE A INNOCENT AS

I'm a simple person, said Davin. You know that. When you told me that night in Harcourt Street those

things about your private life, honest to God, Stevie, I was not able to eat my dinner. I was quite bad. I was

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

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

My ancestors threw off their language and took another Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners

to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections

from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him

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

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

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more

mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it

to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

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

Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly. But in a moment his sadness

left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. A match of

four was arranged, Cranly insisting, however, that his ball should be used. He let it rebound twice or thrice to

his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its thud:

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. Then he plucked him by the sleeve to come away.

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

hall notice in the frame. At the foot of the steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his

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

Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say Lynch halted and said bluntly:

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

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human

sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence

of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother

whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of

the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the

instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are

phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic

emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to

go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them,

pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is

You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the

I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming

Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without

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

from his laughter, answered his look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath the long

pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptilelike in

glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the

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

But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire and loathing excited by improper

esthetic means are really not esthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because

they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it

desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is

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

simply a reflex action of the nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is

kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to

induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved

Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an

esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty; and, please remember, though I did eat a

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

We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their

nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from

the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our

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

mirrored in the sluggish water and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course

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

That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepyheaded wretch, said Stephen, when I began to try to

think out the matter for myself. Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk about

Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You

If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another cigarette. I don't care about it. I don't

even care about women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can't get

Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one that remained, saying simply:

Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases.

I remember that, he said, PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT. He uses the word VISA, said

Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other

avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which

excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a

stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil across the hypotenuse of a rightangled triangle.

Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don't think that it

has a meaning, but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by

the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the

most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and

scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle's entire system of philosophy

rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the

same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the

direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of

But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another definition. Something we see and like! Is

Let us take woman, said Stephen. Let us take her! said Lynch fervently. The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese,

the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze

out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical

quality admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for the

propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For

my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a

new gaudy lectureroom where MacCann, with one hand on THE ORION OF SPECIES and the other hand

on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would

bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's hospital covering the end of

Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath

after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a

This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem

beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and

coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to

you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now,

It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time like a jolly round friar. Are you

MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic

philosophy extends, Aquinas will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of artistic

conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal

Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you

will tell me about the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and finish the

Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me better than you. He was a poet

himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI.

They say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing hymn. I like it; but there is no

hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth,

Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked. Halpin and O'Flynn are through the

home civil. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clark's

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success,

his small fatencircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephen's his eyes and his voice came forth again from their lurkingplaces.

Yes, MacCullagh and I; he said. He's taking pure mathematics and I'm taking constitutional history. There

are twenty subjects. I'm taking botany too. You know I'm a member of the field club.

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a plump woollengloved hand on his breast

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

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

I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics. Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic

school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic, German,

I must go, he said softly and benevolently, I have a strong suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face resembled a devil's mask:

To think that that yellow pancakeeating excrement can get a good job, he said at length, and I have to

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in silence.

To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must

therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of

WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are

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

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

In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the

visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the

object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the

esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable

background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You

Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part

against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate

perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that

it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of

Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact.

It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the

supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the

shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic

discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make

the esthetic image a' universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I

understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to

its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically

permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the

scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the

esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened

beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the

esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and

fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that

cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as

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

What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the

word has in the literary tradition. In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the

second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in the first place by the art itself and by the form of that

art. The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses

of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms

progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his

image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate

relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate

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

I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down questions which are more amusing than

yours were. In finding the answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to explain. Here

are some questions I set myself: IS A CHAIR FINELY MADE TRAGIC OR COMIC? IS THE PORTRAIT

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

Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not

present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most

spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant

of emotion a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up

a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The

simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon

himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is

equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The

personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action

like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in

the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed

and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and

intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and

lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image

in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic,

like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind

or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke's lawn to reach the national

What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable

Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this

The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside Kildare house they found many students

sheltering under the arcade of the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth with a

sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to

Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of students, heedless of the rain which fell fast,

turning his eyes towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her companions. She has no

priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was

right. His mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.

He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two friends who had passed the final medical

examination, of the chances of getting places on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.

Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful hole he said it was. Nothing but

Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country than in a rich city like that? I know a fellow.

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

The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds among the shrubs of the quadrangle

where an exhalation was breathed forth by the blackened earth. Their trim boots prattled as they stood on the

steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning

angles against the few last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a

bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?

Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale cool

waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music. His

mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure

as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly, as

if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly.

It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream or vision he had known the ecstasy

of seraphic life. Was it an instant of enchantment only or long hours and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy

circumstances of what had happened or of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of

light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O!

In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin's

chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose

and ardent light. That rose and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had known or

would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world; and lured by that ardent roselike glow the

The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a

villanelle pass through them. The roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise.

Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat. And then? Smoke, incense

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of her praise. The earth was like a

swinging swaying censer, a ball of incense, an ellipsoidal fall. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of his

heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over and over; then went on stumbling through

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked window the morning light was

gathering. A bell beat faintly very far away. A bird twittered; two birds, three. The bell and the bird ceased;

and the dull white light spread itself east and west, covering the world, covering the roselight in his heart.

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was neither on

the table; only the soup plate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with its tendrils of

tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame. He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed,

groping with his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found a pencil and then a

cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the packet, placed the last cigarette on the window ledge and

began to write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the rough cardboard surface.

Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them again. The lumps of knotted flock

under his head reminded him of the lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on which he used to

sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come, displeased with her and with himself, confounded by

the print of the Sacred Heart above the untenanted sideboard. He saw her approach him in a lull of the talk

and beg him to sing one of his curious songs. Then he saw himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords

softly from its speckled keys and singing, amid the talk which had risen again in the room, to her who leaned

beside the mantelpiece a dainty song of the Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the victory chant of

Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves. While he sang and she listened, or feigned to listen, his heart was at

rest but when the quaint old songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the room he remembered his

own sarcasm: the house where young men are called by their christian names a little too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had waited in vain. She passed now dancing

lightly across his memory as she had been that night at the carnival ball, her white dress a little lifted, a white

spray nodding in her hair. She danced lightly in the round. She was dancing towards him and, as she came,

her eyes were a little averted and a faint glow was on her cheek. At the pause in the chain of hands her hand

For answer she had danced away from him along the chain of hands, dancing lightly and discreetly, giving

herself to none. The white spray nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on

A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a heretic franciscan, willing and willing not to

serve, spinning like Gherardino da Borgo San Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and whispering in her ear.

No, it was not his image. It was like the image of the young priest in whose company he had seen her last,

looking at him out of dove's eyes, toying with the pages of her Irish phrasebook.

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

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

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the

library! He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the

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

image and flung the fragments on all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his

memory: the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair and a hoyden's face who had called herself

his own girl and begged his handsel, the kitchengirl in the next house who sang over the clatter of her plates,

with the drawl of a country singer, the first bars of BY KILLARNEY'S LAKES AND FELLS, a girl who had

laughed gaily to see him stumble when the iron grating in the footpath near Cork Hill had caught the broken

sole of his shoe, a girl he had glanced at, attracted by her small ripe mouth, as she passed out of Jacob's

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was also a form of homage. He

had left the classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay

behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly as he

walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat like soul waking to

the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with

her mild lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. His anger

against her found vent in coarse railing at her paramour, whose name and voice and features offended his

baffled pride: a priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in Dublin and a brother a potboy in Moycullen.

To him she would unveil her soul's shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a

formal rite rather than to him, a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet

indulgence; then copied them painfully to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on his bolster.

The full morning light had come. No sound was to be heard; but he knew that all around him life was about

to awaken in common noises, hoarse voices, sleepy prayers. Shrinking from that life he turned towards the

wall, making a cowl of the blanket and staring at the great overblown scarlet flowers of the tattered

wallpaper. He tried to warm his perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining a roseway from where he lay

upwards to heaven all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He too was weary of ardent ways.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him descending along his spine from his closely

cowled head. He felt it descend and, seeing himself as he lay, smiled. Soon he would sleep.

He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before she had worn her shawl cowlwise about

her head, sending sprays of her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road. It was

the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their bells to the clear night in admonition. The

conductor talked with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood on the steps of

the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came up to his step many times between their phrases and

went down again and once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went down. Let be!

Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her the verses? They would be read out at

breakfast amid the tapping of eggshells. Folly indeed! Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the page

from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest, her uncle, seated in his armchair, would

hold the page at arm's length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form.

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

He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her innocence moved him almost to pity her, an

innocence he had never understood till he had come to the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which

she too had not understood while she was innocent or before the strange humiliation of her nature had first

come upon her. Then first her soul had begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned, and a tender

compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail pallor and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark

While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where had she been? Might it be, in the mysterious ways

of spiritual life, that her soul at those same moments had been conscious of his homage? It might be.

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

waking from odorous sleep, the temptress of his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor, were

opening to his eyes. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavishlimbed, enfolded him

like a shining cloud, enfolded him like water with a liquid life; and like a cloud of vapour or like waters

circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his

What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at them, leaning wearily on his ashplant.

They flew round and round the jutting shoulder of a house in Molesworth Street. The air of the late March

evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them

before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in

number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low

but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were

long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks

clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from

The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches murmured insistently and

the dark frail quivering bodies wheeling and fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the tenuous sky

Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their shrill twofold cry, watching their

flight? For an augury of good or evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there

flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the

intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because

they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him

think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an

augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of

the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings, of Thoth, the god

of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god's image for it made him think of a bottlenosed judge in a wig, putting

commas into a document which he held at arm's length, and he knew that he would not have remembered the

god's name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was folly. But was it for this folly that he was about to leave

for ever the house of prayer and prudence into which he had been born and the order of life out of which he

They came back with shrill cries over the jutting shoulder of the house, flying darkly against the fading air.

What birds were they? He thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the south. Then he

was to go away for they were birds ever going and coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace

of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away,

lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and

soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale

space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

Symbol of departure or of loneliness? The verses crooned in the ear of his memory composed slowly before

his remembering eyes the scene of the hall on the night of the opening of the national theatre. He was alone at

the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin In the stalls and at the tawdry

scenecloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage. A burly policeman sweated behind

him and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts

A sudden swift hiss fell from the windows above him and he knew that the electric lamps had been switched

on in the reader's room. He turned into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and passed in

Cranly was sitting over near the dictionaries. A thick book, opened at the frontispiece, lay before him on the

wooden rest. He leaned back in his chair, inclining his ear like that of a confessor to the face of the medical

student who was reading to him a problem from the chess page of a journal. Stephen sat down at his right and

the priest at the other side of the table closed his copy of THE TABLET with an angry snap and stood up.

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

With guns and cattle, added Stephen, pointing to the titlepage of Cranly's book on which was printed

Cranly did not answer or turn. He laid his book on the counter and passed out, his wellshod feet sounding

flatly on the floor. On the staircase he paused and gazing absently at Dixon repeated:

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his plump clean hand he displayed at

As they crossed the hall a man of dwarfish stature came towards them. Under the dome of his tiny hat his

unshaven face began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy as those

Dixon smiled and turned his ring. The blackish, monkeypuckered face pursed its human mouth with gentle

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

What are you reading now, captain? Dixon asked. THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR? I love old Scott,

the flexible lips said, I think he writes something lovely. There is no writer can touch sir Walter Scott.

He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat

Sadder to Stephen's ear was his speech: a genteel accent, low and moist, marred by errors, and, listening to it,

he wondered was the story true and was the thin blood that flowed in his shrunken frame noble and come of

The park trees were heavy with rain; and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of

swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime. They

embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the

swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his arm about his sister's neck. A grey woollen cloak was

wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose

redbrown hair and tender shapely strong freckled hands. Face? There was no face seen. The brother's face

was bent upon her fair rainfragrant hair. The hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin who had called it forth. His father's jibes

at the Bantry gang leaped out of his memory. He held them at a distance and brooded uneasily on his own

thought again. Why were they not Cranly's hands? Had Davin's simplicity and innocence stung him more

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

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

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

He had, faith, Temple said. And he was a married man too. And all the priests used to be dining there. By

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

Cranly came out through the door of the entrance hall, his hat thrust back on the nape of his neck and picking

He paused for an answer. Cranly dislodged a figseed from his teeth on the point of his rude toothpick and

The Forster family, Temple said, is descended from Baldwin the First, king of Flanders. He was called the

Forester. Forester and Forster are the same name. A descendant of Baldwin the First, captain Francis Forster,

settled in Ireland and married the daughter of the last chieftain of Clanbrassil. Then there are the Blake

From Baldhead, king of Flanders, Cranly repeated, rooting again deliberately at his gleaming uncovered

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

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

PERNOBILIS ET PERVETUSTA FAMILIA, Temple said to Stephen. The stout student who stood below

them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:

I had it on my mind to say that, Goggins answered firmly. It did no one any harm, did it?

We hope, Dixon said suavely, that it was not of the kind known to science as a PAULO POST FUTURUM.

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

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

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

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with good humour. Temple turned

Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked Cranly, facing round on him with an

The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the

Cranly, you're always sneering at me. I can see that. But I am as good as you any day. Do you know what I

My dear man, said Cranly urbanely, you are incapable, do you know, absolutely incapable of thinking.

But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared together?

Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps. Get it out in bits!

I'm a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I know I am. And I admit it that I am.

But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like me. Only he doesn't know it. And that's

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

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

He was watching Cranly's firmfeatured suffering face, lit up now by a smile of false patience. The gross

name had passed over it like foul water poured over an old stone image, patient of injuries; and, as he

watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and uncover the black hair that stood stiffly from his forehead

She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen in reply to Cranly's greeting. He also?

Was there not a slight flush on Cranly's cheek? Or had it come forth at Temple's words? The light had waned.

Did that explain his friend's listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude speech with

which he had shattered so often Stephen's ardent wayward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for he

had found this rudeness also in himself. And he remembered an evening when he had dismounted from a

borrowed creaking bicycle to pray to God in a wood near Malahide. He had lifted up his arms and spoken in

ecstasy to the sombre nave of the trees, knowing that he stood on holy ground and in a holy hour. And when

two constabulary men had come into sight round a bend in the gloomy road he had broken off his prayer to

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar. Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he

could wait. The talk about him ceased for a moment and a soft hiss fell again from a window above. But no

other sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight he had followed with idle eyes were sleeping.

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

A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through

the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?

He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade, beating the stone softly with

his stick to hide his revery from the students whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back to

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace

but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the

cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying

fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent

Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the poxfouled wenches of the taverns and

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. They were secret and inflaming but her image was not

entangled by them. That was not the way to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her.

Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet only with a disinterred sweetness like the figseeds

It was not thought nor vision though he knew vaguely that her figure was passing homeward through the city.

Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body. A conscious unrest seethed in his blood. Yes, it was

her body he smelt, a wild and languid smell, the tepid limbs over which his music had flowed desirously and

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose

collar, he caught it. He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an

instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. There came to his mind a curious

phrase from CORNELIUS A LAPIDE which said that the lice born of human sweat were not created by God

with the other animals on the sixth day. But the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and red.

The life of his body, ill clad, ill fed, louseeaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair

and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash's line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students. Well then, let her go and be

damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had

Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply in his pocket and was eating it slowly and noisily. Temple

sat on the pediment of a pillar, leaning back, his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes. A squat young man

came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit. He marched towards the group, striking the

flags with the heels of his boots and with the ferrule of his heavy umbrella. Then, raising the umbrella in

He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a slight nervous movement. The tall

consumptive student and Dixon and O'Keeffe were speaking in Irish and did not answer him. Then, turning to

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again. Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered with

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

Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the half chewed fig and jerking it towards the squat

The squat student did not eat it but, indulging his special humour, said gravely, still tittering and prodding his

Do you intend that now, the squat student said, as IPSO FACTO or, let us say, as so to speak?

Goggins was waiting for you, Glynn. He has gone round to the Adelphi to look for you and Moynihan.

Examination papers, Glynn answered. I give them monthly examinations to see that they are profiting by

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

That phrase you said now, he said, is from the new testament about suffer the children to come to me.

Very well, then, Temple continued, still addressing Glynn, and if Jesus suffered the children to come why

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

Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous titter in his voice and moving his

And, as you remark, if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

Saint Augustine says that about unbaptized children going to hell, Temple answered, because he was a cruel

I bow to you, Dixon said, but I had the impression that limbo existed for such cases.

Don't argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. Don't talk to him or look at him. Lead him home with a

But with the unpleasantness left out, Dixon said. He turned smiling to the others and said:

Hell, Temple said. I can respect that invention of the grey spouse of Satan. Hell is Roman, like the walls of

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

Do you know what limbo is? he cried. Do you know what we call a notion like that in Roscommon?

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

He snatched the ashplant roughly from Stephen's hand and sprang down the steps: but Temple, hearing him

move in pursuit, fled through the dusk like a wild creature, nimble and fleetfooted. Cranly's heavy boots

were heard loudly charging across the quadrangle and then returning heavily, foiled and spurning the gravel

His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick back into Stephen's hand. Stephen felt

that his anger had another cause but, feigning patience, touched his arm slightly and said quietly:

Cranly, I told you I wanted to speak to you. Come away. Cranly looked at him for a few moments and

They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. The bird call from SIGFRIED whistled softly

followed them from the steps of the porch. Cranly turned, and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be played in the Adelphi hotel.

Stephen walked on alone and out into the quiet of Kildare Street opposite Maple's hotel he stood to wait,

patient again. The name of the hotel, a colourless polished wood, and its colourless front stung him like a

glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he

imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm. They thought of army commissions and

land agents: peasants greeted them along the roads in the country; they knew the names of certain French

dishes and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched provincial voices which pierced through their skintight

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before

their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the

deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats across the

dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams and near the poolmottled bogs. A woman had waited

in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her

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

That blithering idiot, Temple! I swear to Moses, do you know, that I'll be the death of that fellow one time.

But his voice was no longer angry and Stephen wondered was he thinking of her greeting to him under the

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

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

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

Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome them or put them aside, Cranly said.

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

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

Cranly examined the fig by the light of a lamp under which he halted. Then he smelt it with both nostrils, bit

Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire! Taking Stephen's arms, he went on again and said:

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

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

It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the

religion in which you say you disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you did.

And were you happier then? Cranly asked softly, happier than you are now, for instance?

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

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

I tried to love God, he said at length. It seems now I failed. It is very difficult. I tried to unite my will with

the will of God instant by instant. In that I did not always fail. I could perhaps do that stillp

Was your...father Cranly interrupted himself for an instant, and then said: I don't want to pry into your

family affairs. But was your father what is called welltodo? I mean, when you were growing up?

A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small

investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a

He used the phrase broadly and loudly as he often used technical expressions, as if he wished his hearer to

Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her

Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form:

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

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you

into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels,

it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating

goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

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

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

I don't care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely and flatly. I call him a pig.

Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and

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

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

I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever occur to you that he was himself a conscious

hypocrite, what he called the jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that he was a

That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a

He turned towards his friend's face and saw there a raw smile which some force of will strove to make finely

And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false

I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.

And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you

feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because

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

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

I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.

Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if

The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action

which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries

Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in

I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation

would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and

They had walked on towards the township of Pembroke and now, as they went on slowly along the avenues,

the trees and the scattered lights in the villas soothed their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused about

them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind a hedge of laurel a light glimmered in the window of a

kitchen and the voice of a servant was heard singing as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken bars:

The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch

fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman's hand. The strife of their minds was

quelled. The figure of a woman as she appears in the liturgy of the church passed silently through the

darkness: a whiterobed figure, small and slender as a boy, and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high

as a boy's, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a young star, shining clearer as the voice

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

His hat had come down on his forehead. He shoved it back and in the shadow of the trees Stephen saw his

pale face, framed by the dark, and his large dark eyes. Yes. His face was handsome and his body was strong

and hard. He had spoken of a mother's love. He felt then the sufferings of women, the weaknesses of their

bodies and souls; and would shield them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them.

Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen's lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him

that his friendship was coming to an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew his

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

Because, Cranly continued, you need not look upon yourself as driven away if you do not wish to go or as a

heretic or an outlaw. There are many good believers who think as you do. Would that surprise you? The

church is not the stone building nor even the clergy and their dogmas. It is the whole mass of those born into

it. I don't know what you wish to do in life. Is it what you told me the night we were standing outside

Yes, Stephen said, smiling in spite of himself at Cranly's way of remembering thoughts in connexion with

places. The night you spent half an hour wrangling with Doherty about the shortest way from Sallygap to

Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. What does he know about the way from Sallygap to Larras? Or

what does he know about anything for that matter? And the big slobbering washingpot head of him!

What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it. To discover the mode of life or of art whereby your

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

You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are provisional, and that in certain

circumstances it is not unlawful to rob. Everyone would act in that belief. So I will not make you that answer.

Apply to the jesuit theologian, Juan Mariana de Talavera, who will also explain to you in what circumstances

you may lawfully Kill your King and whether you had better hand him his poison in a goblet or smear it for

him upon his robe or his saddlebow. Ask me rather would I suffer others to rob me, or if they did, would I

call down upon them what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular arm?

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

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

His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen's brain, over which

Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you

what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself

my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely

as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use silence, exile, and

Cranly seized his arm and steered him round so as to lead him back towards Leeson Park. He laughed almost

And you made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his touch, as I have confessed to you so many

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be

alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a

mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.

Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate

And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest

His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself as

he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there. He

He had his grand manner on. I supple and suave. Attacked me on the score of love for one's mother. Tried to

imagine his mother: cannot. Told me once, in a moment of thoughtlessness, his father was sixtyone when he

was born. Can see him. Strong farmer type. Pepper and salt suit. Square feet. Unkempt, grizzled beard.

Probably attends coursing matches. Pays his dues regularly but not plentifully to Father Dwyer of Larras.

Sometimes talks to girls after nightfall. But his mother? Very young or very old? Hardly the first. If so,

Cranly would not have spoken as he did. Old then. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranly's despair of soul:

MARCH 21, MORNING. Thought this in bed last night but was too lazy and free to add to it. Free, yes. The

exhausted loins are those of Elizabeth and Zacchary. Then he is the precursor. Item: he eats chiefly belly

bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey. Also, when thinking of him, saw always a stern severed

head or death mask as if outlined on a grey curtain or veronica. Decollation they call it in the gold. Puzzled

for the moment by saint John at the Latin gate. What do I see? A decollated percursor trying to pick the lock.

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

MARCH 22. In company with Lynch followed a sizeable hospital nurse. Lynch's idea. Dislike it. Two lean

MARCH 23. Have not seen her since that night. Unwell? Sits at the fire perhaps with mamma's shawl on her

MARCH 24. Began with a discussion with my mother. Subject: B.V.M. Handicapped by my sex and youth.

To escape held up relations between Jesus and Papa against thosebetween Mary and her son. Said religion

was not a lyingin hospital. Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and have read too much. Not true.

Have read little and understood less. Then she said I would come back to faith because I had a restless mind.

This means to leave church by back door of sin and reenter through the skylight of repentance. Cannot

Then went to college. Other wrangle with little round head rogue's eye Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the

Nolan. Began in Italian and ended in pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was

terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me recipe for what he calls RISOTTO ALLA

BERGAMASCA. When he pronounces a soft O he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel.

Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogue's tears, one from each eye.

Crossing Stephen's, that is, my green, remembered that his countrymen and not mine had invented what

Cranly the other night called our religion. A quartet of them, soldiers of the ninetyseventh infantry regiment,

sat at the foot of the cross and tossed up dice for the overcoat of the crucified.

Went to library. Tried to read three reviews. Useless. She is not out yet. Am I alarmed? About what? That she

I was once at a diorama in Rotunda. At the end were pictures of big nobs. Among them William Ewart

A long curving gallery. From the floor ascend pillars of dark vapours. It is peopled by the images of fabulous

kings, set in stone. Their hands are folded upon their knees in token of weariness and their eyes are darkened

Strange figures advance as from a cave. They are not as tall as men. One does not seem to stand quite apart

from another. Their faces are phosphorescent, with darker streaks. They peer at me and their eyes seem to ask

MARCH 30. This evening Cranly was in the porch of the library, proposing a problem to Dixon and her

brother. A mother let her child fall into the Nile. Still harping on the mother. A crocodile seized the child.

Mother asked it back. Crocodile said all right if she told him what he was going to do with the child, eat it or

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

APRIL 2. Saw her drinking tea and eating cakes in Johnston's, Mooney and O'Brien's. Rather, lynxeyed

Lynch saw her as we passed. He tells me Cranly was invited there by brother. Did he bring his crocodile? Is

he the shining light now? Well, I discovered him. I protest I did. Shining quietly behind a bushel of Wicklow

APRIL 3. Met Davin at the cigar shop opposite Findlater's church. He was in a black sweater and had a

hurley stick. Asked me was it true I was going away and why. Told him the shortest way to Tara was VIA

Holyhead. Just then my father came up. Introduction. Father polite and observant. Asked Davin if he might

offer him some refreshment. Davin could not, was going to a meeting. When we came away father told me he

had a good honest eye. Asked me why I did not join a rowing club. I pretended to think it over. Told me then

how he broke Pennyfeather's heart. Wants me to read law. Says I was cut out for that. More mud, more

APRIL 5. Wild spring. Scudding clouds. O life! Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which appletrees have

cast down their delicate flowers. Eyes of girls among the leaves. Girls demure and romping. All fair or

APRIL 6. Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch says all women do. Then she remembers the time of her

childhood and mine, if I was ever a child. The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only

because it brings forth the future. Statues of women, if Lynch be right, should always be fully draped, one

APRIL 6, LATER. Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he

presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press

APRIL 10. Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which has turned from dreams to

dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly

now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the darkened windows, the silence is cloven

by alarm as by an arrow. They are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems,

hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journey's end what heart? bearing what tidings?

APRIL 11. Read what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion. Would she like it? I think so.

APRIL 13. That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old

blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own

APRIL 14. John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic

papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short

pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. Mulrennan

spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:

I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day

APRIL 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton Street. The crowd brought us together. We both stopped.

She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time.

Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean.

Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritualheroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented

in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made

a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into

the air. People began to look at us. She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I

Yes, I liked her today. A little or much? Don't know. I liked her and it seems a new feeling to me. Then, in

that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before now, in fact. O,

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of

tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are

alone come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as

they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn

in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy