by Unknown
— Are you and Cranly long here?
— Not long, said Stephen.
Madden began to stuff very coarse tobacco into his pipe:
— D’ye know what, Stevie?
— What?
— Hughes . . . doesn’t like you . . . at all. I heard him speaking of you to someone.
—’Someone’ is vague.
— He doesn’t like you at all.
— His enthusiasm carries him away, said Stephen.
On the evening of the Saturday before Palm Sunday Stephen found himself alone with Cranly. The two were leaning over the marble staircase of the Library, idly watching the people coming in and going out. The big windows in front of them were thrown and the mild air [entered] came through: [them]
— Do you like the services of Holy Week? said Stephen.
— Yes, said Cranly.
— They are wonderful, said Stephen. Tenebrae — it’s so damned childish to frighten us by knocking prayerbooks on a bench. Isn’t it strange to see the Mass of the Presanctified — no lights or vestments, the altar naked, the door of the tabernacle gaping open, the priests lying prostrate on the altar steps?
— Yes, said Cranly.
— Don’t you think the Reader who begins the mass is a strange person. No-one knows where he comes from: he has no connection with the mass. He comes out by himself and opens a book at the right hand side of the altar and when he has read the lesson he closes the book and goes away as he came. Isn’t he strange?
— Yes, said Cranly.
— You know how his lesson begins?
He chanted the opening of the lesson in
— He pleads, said Stephen. He is what that chalk-faced chap was for me,
— What kind?
— An ugly little man who has taken into his body the sins of the world. Something between Socrates and a Gnostic Christ — A Christ of the Dark Ages. That’s what his mission of redemption has got for him: a crooked ugly body for which neither God nor man have pity. Jesus is on strange terms with that father of his. His father seems to me something of a snob. Do you notice that he never notices his son publicly but once — when Jesus is in full dress on the top of Thabor?
— I don’t like Holy Thursday much, said Cranly.
— Neither do I. There are too many mammas and daughters going chapel-hunting. The chapel smells too much of flowers and hot candles and women. Besides girls praying put me off my stroke.
— Do you like Holy Saturday?
— The service is always too early but I like it.
— I like it.
— Yes, the Church seems to have thought the matter over and to be saying “Well, after all, you see, it’s morning now and he wasn’t so dead as we thought he was.” The corpse has become a paschal candle with five grains of incense stuck in it instead of its five wounds. The three faithful Mary’s too who thought all was over on Friday have a candle each. The bells ring and the service is full of irrelevant alleluias.t It’s rather a technical affair, blessing this, that and the other but it’s cheerfully ceremonious.
— But you don’t imagine the damned fools of people see anything in these services, do you?
— Do they not? said Stephen.
— Bah, said Cranly.
One of Cranly’s friends came up the stairs while they were talking. He was a young man who was by day a clerk in Guinness’s Brewery and by night a student of mental and moral philosophy in the night classes of the College. It was, of course, Cranly who had induced him to attend. This young man, who was named Glynn, was unable to keep his head steady as he suffered from inherited nervousness and his hands trembled very much whenever he tried to do anything with them. He spoke with nervous hesitations and seemed to obtain satisfaction only in the methodic stamp of his feet. He was a low-sized young man, with a nigger’s face and the curly black head of a nigger. He usually carried an umbrella and his conversation was for the most part a translation of commonplaces into polysyllabic phrases. This habit he cultivated partly because it saved him from the inconvenience of cerebrating at the normal rate and perhaps because he considered it was the channel best fitted for his peculiar humour.
— Here is Professor Bloody-Big-Umbrella Glynn, said Cranly.
— Good evening, Gentlemen, said Glynn, bowing.
— Good . . . evening, said Cranly vacantly. Well, yes . . . it is a good evening.
— I can see, said Glynn shaking a trembling forefinger in reproof, I can see that you are about to make obvious remarks.
On Spy Wednesday night Cranly and Stephen attended the office of Tenebrae in the Pro-Cathedral. They went round to the back of the altar and knelt behind the students from Clonliffe who were chanting the office. Stephen was right opposite Wells and he observed the great change which a surplice made in that young man’s appearance. Stephen did not like the office which was gabbled over quickly. He said to Cranly that the chapel with its polished benches and incandescent lamps reminded him of an insurance office. Cranly arranged that on Good Friday they should attend the office in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar’s St where, he said, the office was much more homely. Cranly accompanied Stephen part of the way home and explained very minutely, using his large hands for the purpose, all the merits of Wicklow bacon.
— You are no Israelite, said Stephen, I see you eat the unclean animal.
Cranly replied that it was nonsense to consider the pig unclean because he ate dirty garbage and at the same time to consider the oyster, which fed chiefly on excrements, a delicacy. He believed that the pig was much maligned: he said there was a lot of money to be made out of pigs. He instanced all the Germans who made small fortunes in Dublin by opening porkshops.
— I often thought seriously, he said stopping in his walk to give emphasis to his remark, of opening a pork-shop, d’ye know . . . and putting
— God bless us! said Stephen. What a terrible idea!
— Ay, said Cranly walking on heavily, a flamin’ bloody fortune I’d make.
On Good Friday as Stephen was wandering aimlessly about the city he caught sight of a placard on a wall which announced that the Three Hours’ Agony would be preached by the Very Reverend W. Dillon S.J. and the Very Reverend J. Campbell S.J. in the Jesuit Church, Gardiner St. Stephen felt very solitary and purposeless as he traversed empty street after empty street and, without being keenly aware of it, he began to proceed in the direction of Gardiner St. It was a warm sunless day and the city wore an air of sacred torpor. As he passed under S. George’s Church he saw that it was already half past two; — he had been three hours wandering up and down the city. He entered the Church in Gardiner St and, passing by without honouring the table of the lay-brother who roused himself from a stupefied doze in expectation of silver, arrived in the right wing of the chapel. The chapel was crowded from altar to doors with a well-dressed multitude. Everywhere he saw the same flattered affection for the Jesuits who are in the habit of attaching to their order the souls of thousands of the insecurely respectable middle-class by offering them a refined asylum, an interested, a considerate confessional, a particular amiableness of manners which their spiritual adventures in no way entitled them to. Not very far from him in the shelter of one of the pillars Stephen saw his father and two friends. His father had directed his eyeglass upon the distant choir and his face wore an expression of impressed piety. The choir was executing some florid tracery which was intended as an expression of mourning. The walk, the heat, the crush, the darkness of the chapel overcame Stephen and, leaning against the lintel of the door, he half closed his eyes and allowe
d his thoughts to drift. Rhymes began to make themselves in his head.
He perceived dimly that a white figure had ascended the pulpit and he heard a voice saying
To avoid his father Stephen slipped round towards the body of the chapel and waited in the central porch while the common people came shuffling and stumbling past him. Here also there was admiration, satisfaction. A young workman passed out with his wife and Stephen heard the words “He knows his thayology, I tell ye.” Two women stopped beside the holy water font and after scraping their hands a vainly over the bottom crossed themselves in a slovenly fashion with their dry hands. One of them sighed and drew her brown shawl about her:
— An’ his language, said the other woman.
— Aw yis.
Here the other woman sighed in her turn and drew her shawl about her:
— On’y, said she, God bless the gintleman, he uses the words that you nor me can’t intarpit.
XXI
Between Easter and the end of May Stephen’s acquaintance with Cranly progressed night by night. As the time of the Summer Examinations was approaching Maurice and Stephen were both supposed to be hard at work. Maurice retired to his room carefully every evening after tea-time and Stephen repaired to the Library where he was supposed to be engaged in serious work. As a matter of fact he read little or nothing in the Library. He talked with Cranly by the hour either at a table, or, if removed by the librarian or by the indignant glances of students, standing at the top of the staircase. At ten o’clock when the library closed the two returned together through the central streets exchanging banalities with the other students.
It would seem at first somewhat strange and improbable that these two young men should have anything in common beyond an incurable desire for leisure. Stephen had begun to regard himself seriously as a literary artist: he professed scorn for the rabblement and contempt for authority. Cranly’s chosen companions represented the rabblement in a stage of partial fermentation when it is midway between vat and flagon and Cranly seemed to please himself in the spectacle of this caricature of his own unreadiness. Anyhow towards rabblement and authority alike he behaved with submissive deference and Stephen would have been disposed to regard this too mature demeanour as a real sign of interior corruption had he not daily evidence that Cranly was willing to endanger his own fair name as a member of the Sodality and as a general lay-servant of the Church by association with one who was known to be contaminated. Cranly, however, might have wished the fathers to suppose that he went with the rebellious young artist with the secret purpose of leading him back again to good ways and, as if from a secret appreciation of his own fitness for such a task, he always enlarged and interpreted the doctrines of the Church side by side with Stephen’s theories. Thus confronted, it was a trick of the pleader for orthodoxy to suggest a possible reconciliation between neighbours and to suggest [even] further that the Church would not be over hasty in condemning vagaries of architecture or even the use of pagan emblems and flourishes so long as her ground rent was paid quarterly in advance. These accommodating business terms, which would have seemed of suspicious piety to more simple souls, were not likely to startle two young men who were fond of tracing even moral phenomena back to the region of their primal cells. The moral doctrine of Catholicism [with] so cunningly lined and interwoven with a studious alloy of conscience was capable under the management of a nimble spirit of performing feats of extension and contraction. After a thousand such changes of form this elastic body was suddenly detected in a change of position and a point hitherto external was now seen to be well enclosed within it: and all this imperceptibly, while the eye was lulled by the mere exhibition of so many variations executed with a certain amoeboid instinct.
As for artistic sympathies Cranly could hardly be said to offer these. He had all the rustic’s affection for the prosaic things of the six days of the week and, in addition to this, he lacked the hypocritical taste which the rustic affects for the fine arts on the seventh day. In the Library he read.nothing but the weekly illustrated papers. Sometimes he took a big book from the counter and carried it solemnly to his place where he opened it and studied the title-page and preface for an hour or so. Of fine literature he had, almost literally speaking, no knowledge. His acquaintance with English prose seemed to be limited to a hazy acquaintance with the beginning of
It was in favour of this young man that Stephen decided to break his commandment of reticence. Cranly, on his side, must have been above all the accidents of life if he had not suffered a slight commotion from such delicately insistent flattery. Stephen spoke to his impoverished ear out of the plenitude of an amassed vocabulary, and confronted the daring commonplaces of his companion’s moods with a complex radiance of thought. Cranly seldom or never obtruded his presence upon these monologues. He listened to all, seemed to understand all, and seemed to think it was the duty of his suppositious character to listen [to] and understand. He never refused his ear. Stephen claimed it in and out of season as he felt the need for intelligent sympathy. They promenaded miles of the streets together, arm-in-arm. They halted in wet weather under spacious porches, desisting at the sight of some inviting triviality. They sat sometimes in the pit of a music-hall and one unfolded to the other the tapestry of his poetical aims while the band bawled to the comedian and the comedian bawled to the band. Cranly grew used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analysed before him at the very instant of their apparition. Such concentration upon oneself was unknown to [Cranly] him and he wondered at first with the joy of solitary possession at Stephen’s ingenuous arrogance. This phenomenon, which called all his previous judgments to account, and opened out a new system of life at the last limit of [Cranly’s] his world, rankled somewhat in [Cranly’s] his mind. It irritated him also because he knew too well the large percentage of Christian sentiment which concealed itself under [a] his
veneer of Stoicism to suspect himself of any talent for a similar extravagance. And yet, hearing the whole-hearted young egoist pour out his pride and anger at his feet like some costly ointment, and benefiting by a liberality which seemed to keep nothing in reserve, much as he would have liked to hold himself aloof from such ties he felt himself gradually answering the appeal by a silent, perverse affection. He affected more brutality than was in his nature and, as if infected by his companion’s arrogance, seemed to expect that the practice of aggressive criticism would be suspended in his case.
A licence which he allowed himself rather freely was that of impolite abstraction, so deep as to suggest great mental activity but issuing at last in some blunt actuality. If a [conversation] monologue which had set out from a triviality seemed to him likely to run on unduly he would receive it with a silence through which aversion was just discernible and at a lull bring his hammer down brutally on the poor original object. At times Stephen found this ultra-classical habit very unpalatable. One evening the monologue was interrupted time after time. Stephen had mentioned his sister’s illness and had spread out a few leagues of theory on the subject of the tyranny of home. Cranly never actually broke in upon the oration but he continued inserting question after question whenever he had an opening. He asked Isabel’s age, her symptoms, her doctor’s name, her treatment, her diet, her appearance, how her mother nursed her, whether they had sent for a priest or not, whether she had ever been sick before or not. Stephen answered all these questions and still Cranly was not satisfied. He continued his questions until the monologue had in all decency to be abandoned: and Stephen, thinking over his manner, was unable to decide whether such conduct was to be considered the sign of a deep interest in a human illness or the sign of irritated dissatisfaction with an inhuman theorist.