by Unknown
Stephen stood on one of the steps of the porch but Cranly did not honour him with any kind of welcome. Stephen inserted a few phrases into the conversation but his presence was still a unhonoured by Cranly. He was not in the least daunted by this reception, much as he was puzzled by it, and waited quietly for his opportunity. Once he addressed Cranly directly but got no answer. His mind began to ruminate upon this and at last his ruminations expressed themselves in a prolonged smile. While he was enjoying his smile he saw that Lynch was observing him. Lynch came down from the group and said ‘Good evening.’ He then took a packet of Woodbine cigarettes from his side pocket and offered one to Stephen, saying:
— Five a penny.
Stephen, who knew that Lynch was a very poor young man, accepted the cigarette appreciatively. They smoked in silence for some minutes and at length the group under the porch fell silent also:
— Have you a copy of your essay? said Lynch
— Do you want it?
— I’d like to read it.
— I’ll bring it to you tomorrow night, said Stephen going up the steps.
He went up to Cranly who was leaning against a pillar and gazing straight before him and touched him lightly on the shoulder:
— I want to speak to you, he said.
Cranly turned slowly round and looked at him. Then he asked:
— Now?
— Yes.
They walked together up along Kildare St without speaking. When they came to the Green Cranly said:
— I’m going home on Saturday. Will you come as far as Harcourt St Station? I want to see the hour the train goes at
— All right.
In the station Cranly spent a great deal of time reading the time-tables and making abstruse calculations. Then he went up to the platform and watched for a long time the shunting of the engine of a goods train on to a passenger train. The engine was steaming and blowing a deafening whistle and rolling billows of thick smoke towards the roof of the station. Cranly said that the engine-driver came from his part of the country and that he was the son of a cobbler in Tinahely. The engine executed a series of indecisive movements and finally settled itself on to the train. The engine-driver stuck his head out through the side and gazed languidly along the train:
— I suppose you would call him sooty Jaysus, said Cranly.
— Cranly, said Stephen, I have left the Church.
Cranly took his arm at the word and they turned away from the platform and went down the staircase. As soon as they had emerged into the street he said encouragingly:
— You have left the Church?
Stephen went over the interview phrase by phrase.
— Then you do not believe any longer?
— I cannot believe.
— But you could at one time.
— I cannot now.
— You could now if you wanted to.
— Well, I don’t want to.
— Are you sure you do not believe?
— Quite sure.
— Why do you not go to the altar?
— Because I do not believe.
— Would you make a sacrilegious communion?
— Why should I?
— For your mother’s sake.
— I don’t see why I should.
— Your mother will suffer very much. You say you do not believe. The Host for you is a piece of ordinary bread. Would you not eat a piece of ordinary bread to avoid causing your mother pain?
— I would in many cases.
— And why not in this case? Have you any reluctance to commit a sacrilege? If you do not believe you should not have any.
— Wait a minute, said Stephen. At present I have a reluctance to commit a sacrilege. I am a product of Catholicism; I was sold to Rome before my birth. Now I have broken my slavery but I cannot in a moment destroy every feeling in my nature. That takes time. However if it were a case of needs must — for my life, for instance — I would commit any enormity with the host.
— Many Catholics would do the same, said Cranly, if their lives were at stake.
— Believers?
— Ay, believers. So by your own showing you are a believer.
— It is not from fear that I refrain from committing a sacrilege.
— Why then?
— I see no reason for committing sacrilege.
— But you have always made your Easter Duty. Why do you change? The thing for you is mockery, mummery.
— If I mum it is an act of submission, a public act of submission to the Church. I will not submit to the Church.
— Even so far as to mum?
— It is mumming with an intention. The outward show is nothing but it means a good deal.
— Again you are speaking like a Catholic. The host is nothing in outward show — a piece of bread.
— I admit: but all the same I insist on disobeying the Church. I will not submit any longer.
— But could you not be more diplomatic? Could you not rebel in your heart and yet conform out of contempt? You could be a rebel in spirit.
— That cannot be done for long by anyone who is sensitive. The Church knows the value of her services: her priest must hypnotise himself every morning before the tabernacle. If I get up every morning, go to the looking-glass and say to myself “You are the Son of God” at the end of twelve months I will want disciples.
— If you could make your religion pay like Christianity I would advise you to get up every morning and go to the lookingglass.
— That would be good for my vicars on earth but I would find crucifixion a personal inconvenience.
— But here in Ireland by following your new religion of unbelief you may be crucifying yourself like Jesus — only socially not physically.
— There is this difference. Jesus was good-humoured over it. I will die hard.
— How can you propose such a future to yourself and yet be afraid to trust yourself to perform even the simplest mumming in a church? said Cranly.
— That is my business, said Stephen, tapping at his forehead.
When they had come to the Green they crossed the streets and began to walk round the enclosure inside the chains. A few mechanics and their sweethearts were sitting on the swinging-chains turning the shadows to account. The footpath was deserted except for the metallic image of a distant policeman who had been posted well in the gaslight as an admonition. When the two young men passed the college they both looked up at the same moment towards the dark windows.
— May I ask you why you left the Church? asked CranlY.
— I could not observe the precepts.
— Not even with grace?
— No.
— Jesus gives very simple precepts. The Church is severe.
— Jesus or the Church — it’s all the same to me. I can’t follow him. I must have liberty to do as I please.
— No man can do as he pleases.
— Morally.
— No, not morally either.
— You want me, said Stephen, to toe the line with those sycophants and hypocrites in the college. I will never do so.
— No. I mentioned Jesus.
— Don’t mention him. I have made it a common noun. They don’t believe in him; they don’t observe his precepts. In any case let us leave Jesus aside. My sight will only carry me as far as his lieutenant in Rome. It is quite useless: I will not be frightened into paying tribute in money or in thought.
— You told me — do you remember the evening we were standing at the top of the staircase talking about . . .
— Yes, yes, I remember, said Stephen who hated Cranly’s a method of remembering the past, what did I tell you?
— You told me the idea you had of Jesus on Good Friday, an ugly misshapen Jesus. Did it ever strike you that Jesus may have been a conscious impostor?
— I have never believed in his chastity — that is since I began to think about him. I am sure he [is] was no eunuch priest. His interest in loose women is too persistently hu
mane. All the women associated with him are of dubious character.
— You don’t think he was God?
— What a question! Explain it: explain the hypostatic union: tell me if the figure which a that policeman worships as the Holy Ghost is intended for a spermatozoon with wings added. What a question! He makes general remarks on life, that’s all I know: and I disagree with them.
— For example?
— For example . . . Look here, I cannot talk on this subject. I am not a scholar and I receive no pay as a minister of God. I want to live, do you understand. McCann wants air and food: I want them and a hell of a lot of other things too. I don’t care whether I am right or wrong. There is always that risk in human affairs, I suppose. But even if I am wrong at least I shall not have to endure Father Butt’s company for eternity.
Cranly laughed.
— Remember he would be glorified.
— Heaven for climate, isn’t that it, and hell for society . . . the whole affair is too damn idiotic. Give it up. I am very young. When I have a beard to my middle I will study Hebrew and then write to you about it.
— Why are you so impatient with the Jesuits? asked Cranly.
Stephen did not answer and, when they arrived in the next region of light Cranly exclaimed:
— Your face is red!
— I feel it, said Stephen.
— Most people think you are self-restrained, said Cranly after a pause.
— So I am, said Stephen.
— Not on this subject. Why do you get so excited: I can’t understand that. It is a thing for you to think out.
— I can think out things when I like. I have thought this affair out very carefully though you may not believe me when I tell you. But my escape excites me: I must talk as I do. I feel a flame in my face. I feel a wind rush through me.
—’Like a mighty wind rushing,’ said Cranly.
— You urge me to postpone life — till when? Life is now — this is life: if I postpone it I may never live. To walk nobly on the surface of the earth, to express oneself without pretence, to acknowledge one’s own humanity! You mustn’t think I rhapsodise: I am quite serious. I speak from my soul.
— Soul?
— Yes: from my soul, my spiritual nature. Life is not a yawn. Philosophy, love, art will not disappear from my world because I no longer believe that by entertaining an emotion of desire for the tenth part of a second I prepare for myself an eternity of torture. I am happy.
— Can you say that?
— Jesus is sad. Why is he so sad? He is solitary . . . I say, you must feel the truth of what I say. You are holding up the Church against me .
— Allow me .
— But what is the Church? It is not Jesus, the magnificent solitary with his inimitable abstinences. The Church is made by me and my like — her services, legends, practices, paintings, music, traditions. These her artists gave her. They made her what she is. They accepted Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle as the Word of God and made her what she is.
— And why will you not help her to be so still — you as an artist?
— I see you recognise the truth of what I say though you won’t admit it.
— The Church allows the individual conscience to have great . . . in fact, if you believe . . . believe, that is, said Cranly stamping each heavy foot on the words, honestly and truly . . .
— Enough! said Stephen gripping his companion’s arm. You need not defend me. I will take the odds as they are.
They paced along three sides of the Green in silence while the couples began to leave the chains and return meekly to their modest resting-places and after a while Cranly began to explain to Stephen how he too had felt a desire for life — a life of freedom and happiness — when he had been younger and how at that time he too had been about to leave the Church in search of happiness but that many considerations had restrained him.
XXII
Cranly went to Wicklow at the end of the week leaving Stephen to find another auditor. Luckily Maurice was enjoying his holidays and though Stephen spent a great deal of his time roaming through the slums of the city while Maurice was out on the Bull the two brothers often met and discoursed. Stephen reported his long conversations with Cranly of which Maurice made full notes. The younger sceptic did not seem to share his brother’s high opinion of Cranly though he said little. It was not from jealousy but rather from an over-estimate of Cranly’s rusticity that Maurice allowed himself this prejudice. To be rustic, in his eyes, was to be a mass of cunning and stupid and cowardly habits. He had spoken with Cranly only once but he had often seen him. He gave it as his opinion that Cranly never thought until someone spoke to him and then he [gives] gave birth to some commonplace which he would have liked to have been able to disbelieve. Stephen thought this exaggerated [and] saying that Cranly was daringly commonplace, that he a could talk like a pint, and that it was possible to credit him with a certain perverse genius. Cranly’s undue scepticism and his heavy feet moved Maurice a to hit the rustic in him with a name. He called him Thomas Squaretoes and he would not even admit that [Cranly] he had to a certain extent the grand manner. Cranly, in his opinion, went to Wicklow because it was necessary for him to play the god to an audience. He will grow to dislike you, said the shrewd young heathen, when you begin to play the god to someone else. He will give you nothing in exchange for what you give him whether he has it or not because his [nature] character is naturally overbearing. He cannot possibly understand half of what you say to him and yet he would like to be thought the only one who could understand you. He wants to become more and more necessary to you until he can have you in his power. Be careful never to show any weakness to him when you are together. You can have him in your power so long as you hold the whip-hand. Stephen replied that he thought this was a very novel conception of friendship which could not be proved true or false by debate alone but that he was himself the conscious possessor of an intuitive instrument which might be trusted to register any enmity as soon as it appeared. He defended his friend and his friendship at the same time.
The summer was dull and warm. a Nearly every day Stephen wandered through the slums watching the sordid lives of the inhabitants. He read all the street-ballads which were stuck in the dusty windows of the Liberties. He read the racing names and prices scrawled in blue pencil outside the dingy tobacco-shops, the windows of which were adorned with scarlet police journals. He examined all the book-stalls which offered old directories and volumes of sermons and unheard-of treatises [for] at the rate of a penny each or three for twopence. He often posted himself opposite one of the factories in old Dublin at two o’clock to watch the hands coming out to dinner — principally young boys and girls with colourless, expressionless faces, who seized the opportunity to be gallant in their way. He drifted in and out of interminable chapels in which an old man dozed on a bench or a clerk dusted the woodwork or an old woman prayed before the candle she had lighted. As he walked slowly through the maze of poor streets he stared proudly in return for the glances of stupid wonder that he received and watched from under his eyes the great cow-like trunks of police constables swing slowly round after him as he passed them. These wanderings filled him with deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island [whereof] the inhabitants of which entrust their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis, an island in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar [professes] confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement which is bidden ironically to take to itself this consolation in hardship “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
This mood of indignation which was not guiltless of a certain superficiality was undoubtedly due to the excitement of release and it was hardly co
untenanced by him before he realised the dangers of being a demagogue. The attitude which was constitutional with him was a silent self-occupied, contemptuous manner and his intelligence, moreover, persuaded him that the tomahawk, as an effective instrument of warfare, had become obsolete. He acknowledged to himself in honest egoism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse: but at the same time he was nothing in the world so little as an amateur artist. He wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society which he would enrich and also for his own benefit, seeing that it was part of his life to do so. It was not part of his life to undertake an extensive alteration of society but he felt the need to express himself such an urgent need, such a real need, that he was determined no conventions of a society, however plausibly mingling pity with its tyranny, should be allowed to stand in his way, and though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, [in] from his general attitude he might have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians, who are often very seriously upbraided by [believers] opponents who believe in Jehovahs, and decalogues and judgments [for] with sacrificing the reality to an abstraction.