A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - HTML preview

Chapter 5

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 turf–coloured water of the bath in Clongowes. The box of pawn tickets at his elbow

had just been rifled and he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and

sanded and creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.

1 Pair Buskins.

1 D. Coat.

3 Articles and White.

1 Man’s Pants.

Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box, speckled with louse marks, and asked vaguely:

—How much is the clock fast now?

His mother straightened the battered alarm clock that was lying on its side in the middle of the mantelpiece until its dial

showed a quarter to twelve and then laid it once more on its side.

—An hour and twenty–five minutes, she said. The right time now is twenty past ten. The dear knows you might try to be

in time for your lectures.

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

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

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

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

When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and the old washing glove flung on the side of it he

allowed his mother to scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of his nose.

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

—But it gives you pleasure, said Stephen calmly.

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

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

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

—Yes, father?

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

—Yes, father.

—Sure?

—Yes, father.

—Hm!

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

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

—Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that

place. I know how it has changed you.

—Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of his fingers in adieu.

The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet

rubbish, he heard a mad nun screeching in the nuns' madhouse beyond the wall.

—Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering

offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His father’s whistle, his mother’s mutterings, the

screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his

youth. He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration; but, as he walked down the avenue and felt the

grey morning light falling about him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the wet leaves and

bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.

The rain–laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart

Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of

quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he

would think of the cloistral silver–veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly

at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went

by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of

wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer’s shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by

Ben Jonson which begins:

I was not wearier where I lay.

His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas turned

often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk, stood often in

shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank laughter of

waist–coateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of chambering and false honour stung his monkish

pride and drove him on from his lurking–place.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the companionship of youth

was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a SYNOPSIS PHILOSOPHIAE

SCHOLASTICAE AD MENTEM DIVI THOMAE. His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self–mistrust, lit up at moments by

the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet

as if it had been fire–consumed; and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering

eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in 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 with a light

heart.

Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the doll’s face and the brimless hat coming towards

him down the slope of the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate overcoat, and holding his furled

umbrella a span or two from him like a divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to see the time.

The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near

him, but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he heard it for it made him think of 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’ll work and act for social

liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.

Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. What day of the week was it? He stopped at a newsagent’s to read the

headline of a placard. Thursday. Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to one, physics. He fancied to

himself the English lecture and felt, even at that distance, restless and helpless. He saw the heads of his classmates

meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points they were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential

definitions and examples or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable and an unfavourable criticism side by side.

His own head was unbent for his thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class of students or

out of the window across the desolate gardens of the green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellar–damp and decay.

Another head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fellows like the head

of a priest appealing without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him. Why was it that when he

thought of Cranly he could never raise before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the head and

face? Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a

severed head or death–mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown. It was a priest–like

face, priest–like in its palor, in the wide winged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the jaws, priest–like in

the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly smiling; and Stephen, remembering swiftly how he had told Cranly of all

the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and night by night, only to be answered by his friend’s

listening silence, would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he

had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling

that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend’s listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air

around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and He found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right

or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend

bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among

heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words

themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:

The ivy whines upon the wall,

And whines and twines upon the wall,

The yellow ivy upon the wall,

Ivy, ivy up the wall.

Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all

right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants. IVORY,

IVOIRE, AVORIO, EBUR. One of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: INDIA MITTIT EBUR; and he

recalled the shrewd northern face of the rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a courtly

English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds and chines of bacon. He had learnt what little he knew

of the laws of Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.

Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.

The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history were handed on to him in the trite words IN TANTO

DISCRIMINE and he had tried to peer into the social life of the city of cities through the words IMPLERE OLLAM

DENARIORUM which the rector had rendered sonorously as the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his time–

worn Horace never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they were human pages and fifty years

before they had been turned by the human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William Malcolm

Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses

were as fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender and vervain; but yet it wounded him to

think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of

which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and

curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his

mind downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet from the fetters of the reformed conscience he

came upon the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the soul crept over it like unseen vermin, over the

shuffling feet and up the folds of the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly conscious of its indignity. It

was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the peasant student. It was a

jesting name between them, but the young peasant bore with it lightly:

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

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had touched Stephen pleasantly when first heard for

he was as formal in speech with others as they were with him. Often, as he sat in Davin’s rooms in Grantham Street,

wondering at his friend’s well–made boots that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend’s simple ear the

verses and cadences of others which were the veils of his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his

listener had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a

quaint turn of old English speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skill—for Davin had sat at the feet of Michael

Cusack, the Gael—repelling swiftly and suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or by a dull

stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of soul of a starving Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat Davin, the athlete, the young peasant

worshipped the sorrowful legend of Ireland. The gossip of his fellow–students which strove to render the flat life of the

college significant at any cost loved to think of him as a young fenian. His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude

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 dull–witted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or of

feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password;

and of the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he spoke of serving.

Coupling this ambition with the young man’s humour Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese and there

was even a point of irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed in his friend which

seemed so often to stand between Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life.

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the violent or luxurious language in which Stephen escaped from the

cold silence of intellectual revolt, had called up before Stephen’s mind a strange vision. The two were walking slowly

towards Davin’s rooms through the dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

—A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and I never told it to a living soul and you are the

first person now I ever told it to. I disremember if it was October or November. It was October because it was before I

came up here to join the matriculation class.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friend’s face, flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by

the speaker’s simple accent.

—I was away all that day from my own place over in Buttevant.

—I don’t know if you know where that is—at a hurling match between the Croke’s Own Boys and the Fearless Thurles

and by God, Stevie, that was the hard fight. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff that day minding cool

for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time and shouting like mad. I never will forget that day. One of

the Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his caman and I declare to God he was within an aim’s ace of

getting it at the side of his temple. Oh, honest to God, if the crook of it caught him that time he was done for.

—I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely that’s not the strange thing that happened you?

—Well, I suppose that doesn’t interest you, but leastways there was such noise after the match that I missed the train

home and I couldn’t get any kind of a yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it, there was a mass meeting that

same day over in Castletownroche and all the cars in the country were there. So there was nothing for it only to stay the

night or to foot it out. Well, I started to walk and on I went and it was coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills,

that’s better than ten miles from Kilmallock and there’s a long lonely road after that. You wouldn’t see the sign of a

christian house along the road or hear a sound. It was pitch dark almost. Once or twice I stopped by the way under a

bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was thick I’d have stretched out there and slept. At last, after a bend of the

road, I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. I went up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there

and I answered I was over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that I’d be thankful for a glass of water.

After a while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed as if she

was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging and I thought by her figure and by something in the look

of her eyes that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long 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 looked back and she was standing at the door.

The last words of Davin’s story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth reflected in

other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the college cars drove by,

as a type of her race and of his own, a bat–like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and

loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.

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

—Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir! The first handsel today, gentleman. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you, gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images of

guilelessness, and he halted till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and

hoydenish face.

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

—I have no money, said Stephen.

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

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

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

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

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to 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 L’IRLANDE!

But the trees in Stephen’s Green were fragrant of rain and the rain–sodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint

incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told

him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered

the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley.

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

physics theatre. The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it

because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the jesuit house extra–

territorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure

was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting

the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly and approached the fireplace.

—Good morning, sir! Can I help you?

The priest looked up quickly and said:

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

have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

—I will try to learn it, said Stephen.

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

He produced four candle–butts from the side–pockets of his soutane and placed them deftly among the coals and

twisted papers. Stephen watched him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and busied with the

disposition of his wisps of paper and candle–butts he seemed more than ever a humble server making ready the place of

sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levite’s robe of plain linen the faded worn soutane draped the

kneeling figure of one whom the canonicals or the bell–bordered 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, spare and sinewy, greyed with a silver–pointed down.

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

—I am sure I could not light a fire.

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

artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

—Can you solve that question now? he asked.

—Aquinas, answered Stephen, says PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT.

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

—In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But

Aquinas also says BONUM EST IN QUOD TENDIT APPETITUS. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth

fire is a good. In hell, however, it is an evil.

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

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

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

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at

him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’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 lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

—When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked.

—From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

—These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the

depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and