CHAPTER IV
Read Chapter III here.
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
the Suffering Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin
Mary.
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 side altar, following with his interleaved
prayer book 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
[170]
punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the
agonising 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 his soul daily
through an increasing circle of works of supererogation.
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 as a
number but as a frail column of incense or as a slender
flower.
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 name
of her joyful and sorrowful and glorious mysteries.
On each of the seven days of the week he further
prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost
[171]
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,
orbed in the scarlet of the tongues of fire.
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 had been born into the
world, for ages before the world itself had existed.
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
[172]
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 would
harbour.
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
[173]
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 and faint before
her Creator.
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 noise which caused him painful
nervous irritation such as the sharpening of knives on
the knifeboard, 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
[174]
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 that
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 parts 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.
[175]
His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the
sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried
up 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 self-surrender 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 inaudible voice, surrendering herself: Inter ubera
mea commorabitur.
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
[176]
shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden
ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the floor far
away and beginning again its slow advance towards his
feet, a new thrill of power and satisfaction shook his
soul to know that he had not yielded nor undone all.
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
[177]
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 amendment
of his life.
— I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself.—
* * * *
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
[178]
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 coming,
he had heard the handle of the door turning and the
swish of a soutane.
The director had begun to speak of the Dominican and
Franciscan orders and of the friendship between Saint
Thomas and Saint Bonaventure. The Capuchin dress,
he thought, was rather too….
Stephen’s face gave back the priest’s indulgent smile
and, not being anxious to give an opinion, he made a
slight dubitative movement with his lips.
—I believe,— continued the director,—that there is
some talk now among the Capuchins themselves of doing
away with it and following the example of the other
Franciscans.—
— I suppose they would retain it in the cloisters? —
said Stephen.
— O, certainly,—said the director.—For the cloister it
is all right, but for the street I really think it would be
better to do away with, don’t you? —
— It must be troublesome, I imagine? —
— 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.—
The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.
— What do they call them? —
— Les jupes.—
— O! —
Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he
[179]
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 the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny
flame kindling upon his cheek.
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 stuffs that he dared to conceive
of the soul or body of a woman moving with tender
life.
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
[180]
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 muff in 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 judgments 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 near the chapel, he heard the priest say:
— I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably
never committed a mortal sin in his life, that is to
say, a deliberate mortal sin.—
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
written when he was a catholic.
—But there are many eminent French critics,—said
[181]
the priest,—who consider that even Victor Hugo, great
as he certainly was, had not so pure a French style as
Louis Veuillot.—
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 recognised
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 chocolate out of his
cricketcap. Some jesuits were walking round the cycletrack
in the company of ladies. The echoes of certain
expressions used in Clongowes sounded in remote caves
of his mind.
His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid
the silence of the parlour when he became aware that
the priest was addressing him in a different voice.
— I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to
speak to you on a very important subject.—
— Yes, sir.—
— Have you ever felt that you had a vocation? —
Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld
the word suddenly. The priest waited for the answer
and added:
— I mean have you ever felt within yourself, in your
soul, a desire to join the order. Think.—
— I have sometimes thought of it,— said Stephen.
The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting
his hands, leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing
with himself.
— In a college like this,—he said at length,—there is
[182]
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 college whom God designs to call to Himself.—
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
[183]
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 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 anger or pride or had suffered only
an embrace he longed to give.
He listened in reverent silence now to the priest’s
appeal and through the words he heard even more dis-
[184]
tinctly 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 Melchisedec.
— 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, be-
[185]
cause on it may depend the salvation of your eternal
soul. But we will pray to God together.—
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 quartette 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 acquiesced
faintly in that companionship.
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 gas flames. 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
[186]
moist unsustaining air, and he smelt again the moist
warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes above
the sluggish turfcoloured water.
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?
The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.
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 Foxy Campbell?
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
[187]
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 among
the snares of the world.
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 sour 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
[188]
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 regretfully plunging his spade
in the earth.
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
handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover.
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:
— Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.—
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 questioner.
[189]
He asked:
—Why are we on the move again, if it’s a fair question?—
— Becauseboro theboro landboro lordboro willboro
putboro usboro outboro.—
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 first
dark nightclouds came forth and night fell.
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
journey they seemed weary already of the way.
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 Nature herself, to that pain
and weariness yet hope of better things which has been
the experience of her children in every time.”
****
He could wait no longer.
From the door of Byron’s public-house to the gate of
Clontarf Chapel, from the gate of Clontarf Chapel to
the door of Byron’s public-house, and then back again
[190]
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: but he could wait no longer.
He set off abruptly for the Bull, walking rapidly lest
his father’s shrill whistle might call him back; and in a
few moments he had rounded the curve at the police
barrack and was safe.
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 their lives.
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 diminishing fourth, upwards a tone and
[191]
downwards a major third, like triple-branching 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 remembered only a proud cadence
from Newman: —
—Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath
the everlasting arms.—
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 oils
of ordination would never anoint his body. He had
refused. Why?
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
[192]
swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection
therein of their topheavy silk hats, and humble
tapelike collars and loosely hanging clerical clothes.
— Brother Hickey.
Brother Quaid.
Brother MacArdle.
Brother Keogh.—
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 neighbours
as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love
but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it
softly to himself:
—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.—
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised 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
[193]
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 spine of
rocks that pointed against the river’s mouth.
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 subjection
than in the days of the thingmote.
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
[194]
an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede,
to recede; and from each receding trail of nebulous music
there fell always one long-drawn calling note, piercing
like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again!
A voice from beyond the world was calling.
— Hello, Stephanos! —
—Here comes The Dedalus! —
—Ao!… Eh, give it over, Dwyer, I’m telling you
or I’ll give you a stuff in the kisser for yourself….
Ao! —
— Good man, Towser! Duck him! —
— Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos!
Bous Stephaneforos! —
—Duck him! Guzzle him now, Towser! —
— Help! Help!… Ao! —
He recognised 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 suns, gleamed with the wet of the
sea. Their divingstone, poised on its rude supports and
rocking under their plunges, and the rough-hewn 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
with cold seawater: and drenched with cold brine was
their matted hair.
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 sword-like
[195]
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, remembered in
what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.
— Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous
Stephaneforos! —
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 were 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
[196]
breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept
limbs.
— One! Two!… Look out! —
— O, Cripes, I ‘m drownded! —
— One! Two! Three and away! —
— The next! The next! —
— One!… Uk! —
— Stephaneforos! —
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.
— Stephaneforos! —
What were they now but the 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 linens of the grave?
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,
new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
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
[197]
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.
Where?
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 figures,
wading and delving.
In a 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
clambered down the slope of the breakwater.
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: and a new wild life was singing in his veins.
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 wreaths
that withered at the touch? Or, where was he.
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to
[198]
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 the air.
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 slate-blue 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 dark-plumaged
dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish,
and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
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 cheek.
— Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst
of profane joy.—
[199]
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 the sea,
crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to
him.
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 on and on!
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 sand knolls 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
beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken
him to her breast.
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
[200]
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 deeper
than other.
Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and
arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly
and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.
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 sky line, 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.
[201]
Chapter V.