—Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester!
—O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet.
—And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbour.
—Byron, of course, answered Stephen.
Heron gave the lead and all three joined in a scornful laugh.
—What are you laughing at? asked Stephen.
—You, said Heron. Byron the greatest poet! He’s only a poet for uneducated people.
—He must be a fine poet! said Boland.
—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 rode
home from the college on a pony:
As Tyson was riding into Jerusalem
He fell and hurt his Alec Kafoozelum.
This thrust put the two lieutenants to silence but Heron went on:
—In any case Byron was a heretic and immoral too.
—I don’t care what he was, cried Stephen hotly.
—You don’t care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.
—What do you know about it? shouted Stephen. You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans, or Boland
either.
—I know that Byron was a bad man, said Boland.
—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.
—I’ll tell him tomorrow, said Boland.
—Will you? said Stephen. You’d be afraid to open your lips.
—Afraid?
—Ay. Afraid of your life.
—Behave yourself! cried Heron, cutting at Stephen’s legs with his cane.
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 stump Stephen was
borne back against a barbed wire fence.
—Admit that Byron was no good.
—No.
—Admit.
—No.
—Admit.
—No. No.
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 sobbing.
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 sudden–woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel.
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 invisible wave.
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 play. Hurry
up, you better.
—He’s coming now, said Heron to the messenger with a haughty drawl, when he wants to.
The boy turned to Heron and repeated:
—But Doyle is in an awful bake.
—Will you tell Doyle with my best compliments that I damned his eyes? answered Heron.
—Well, I must go now, said Stephen, who cared little for such points of honour.
—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 hollow–sounding 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 hollow–sounding 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 call, alone or in the company of phantasmal
comrades.
In the vestry a plump fresh–faced 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
side–pockets. 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 well–dressed 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 joking and its air pungent with the smells of the gas–jets and
the grease.
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 able–bodied 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 every figure
of the group was familiar and ran down the steps angrily.
—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 sudden–risen 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 cold again.
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 and breathed slowly the rank
heavy air.
That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite
calm now. I will go back.
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 telegraph–poles 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
telegraph–poles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars. This furious music allayed his dread and,
leaning against the windowledge, he let his eyelids close again.
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 dressing–table, examining his hair and face and moustache with great care, craning his neck
across the water–jug and drawing it back sideways to see the better. While he did so he sang softly to himself with
quaint accent and phrasing:
'Tis youth and folly
Makes young men marry,
So here, my love, I’ll
No longer stay.
What can’t be cured, sure,
Must be injured, sure,
So I’ll go to
Amerikay.
My love she’s handsome,
My love she’s bony:
She’s like good whisky
When it is new;
But when 'tis old
And growing cold
It fades and dies like
The mountain dew.
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 brain. He got up
quickly to dress and, when the song had ended, said:
—That’s much prettier than any of your other COME–ALL–YOUS.
—Do you think so? asked Mr Dedalus.
—I like it, said Stephen.
—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 got. That was the boy
who could sing a COME–ALL–YOU, if you like.
Mr Dedalus had ordered drisheens for breakfast and during the meal he cross–examined the waiter for local news. For
the most part they spoke at cross purposes when a name was mentioned, the waiter having in mind the present holder
and Mr Dedalus his father or perhaps his grandfather.
—Well, I hope they haven’t moved the Queen’s College anyhow, said Mr Dedalus, for I want to show it to this
youngster of mine.
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 dozen or so paces
by some reply of the porter’s.
—Ah, do you tell me so? And is poor Pottlebelly dead?
—Yes, sir. Dead, sir.
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 irritated his ears.
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 broad–shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jack–knife,
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 in loose grey clothes and had tan boots.
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 had swept over him.
—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 good–hearted Johnny Keevers of the Tantiles.
The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile
young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket–bag. In a quiet bystreet a German band of
five players in faded uniforms and with battered brass instruments was playing to an audience of street arabs and
leisurely messenger boys. A maid in a white cap and apron was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab
of limestone in the warm glare. From another window open to the air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale rising
into the treble.
Stephen walked on at his father’s side, listening to stories he had heard before, hearing again the names of the
scattered and dead revellers who had been the companions of his father’s youth. And a faint sickness sighed in his
heart.
He recalled his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and
sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind. The letters cut in the
stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness and futile enthusiasms and making him loathe
himself for his own mad and filthy orgies. The spittle in his throat grew bitter and foul to swallow and the faint sickness
climbed to his brain so that for a moment he closed his eyes and walked on in darkness.
He could still hear his father’s voice—
—When you kick out for yourself, Stephen—as I daresay you will one of these days—remember, whatever you do, to
mix with gentlemen. When I was a young fellow I tell you I enjoyed myself. I mixed with fine decent fellows. Everyone of
us could do something. One fellow had a good voice, another fellow was a good actor, another could sing a good comic
song, another was a good oarsman or a good racket player, another could tell a good story and so on. We kept the ball
rolling anyhow and enjoyed ourselves and saw a bit of life and we were none the worse of it either. But we were all
gentlemen, Stephen—at least I hope we were—and bloody good honest Irishmen too. That’s the kind of fellows I want
you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney. I’m talking to you as a friend, Stephen. I don’t believe a son should be
afraid of his father. No, I treat you as your grandfather treated me when I was a young chap. We were more like brothers
than father and son. I’ll never forget the first day he caught me smoking. I was standing at the end of the South Terrace
one day with some maneens like myself and sure we thought we were grand fellows because we had pipes stuck in the
corners of our mouths. Suddenly the governor passed. He didn’t say a word, or stop even. But the next day, Sunday, we
were out for a walk together and when we were coming home he took out his cigar case and said:—By the by, Simon, I
didn’t know you smoked, or something like that.—Of course I tried to carry it off as best I could.—If you want a good
smoke, he said, try one of these cigars. An American captain made me a present of them last night in Queenstown.
Stephen heard his father’s voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob.
—He was the handsomest man in Cork at that time, by God he was! The women used to stand to look after him in the
street.
He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight
breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of
dark rosy light. His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the
shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or
spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no
earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and
dejected by his father’s voice. He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:
—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland.
Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria.
Names.
The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He
recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who
kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college, he had made his first
communion and eaten slim jim out of his 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 side–pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.
On the evening of the day on which the property was sold Stephen followed his father meekly about the city from bar to
bar. To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for a lob Mr Dedalus
told the same tale—that he was an old Corkonian, that he had been trying for thirty years to get rid of his Cork accent up
in Dublin and that Peter Pickackafax beside him was his eldest son but that he was only a Dublin jackeen.
They had set out early in the morning from Newcombe’s coffee–house, 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. O