by James Joyce
The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime. They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his arm about his sister’s neck. A grey woollen cloak was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist: and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose redbrown hair and tender shapely strong freckled hands. Face? There was no face seen. The brother’s face was bent upon her fair rain fragrant hair. The hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was Davin’s hand.
He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin oi who had called it forth. His father’s gibes at the Bantry gangoj leaped out of his memory. He held them at a distance and brooded uneasily on his own thought again. Why were they not Cranly’s hands? Had Davin’s simplicity and innocence stung him more secretly?
He walked on across the hall with Dixon, leaving Cranly to take leave elaborately of the dwarf.
Under the colonnade Temple was standing in the midst of a little group of students. One of them cried:
-Dixon, come over till you hear. Temple is in grand form.
Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.
—You’re a hypocrite, O’Keeffe, he said. And Dixon is a smiler. By hell, I think that’s a good literary expression.
He laughed slily, looking in Stephen’s face, repeating:
-By hell, I’m delighted with that name. A smiler.
A stout student who stood below them on the steps said:
-Come back to the mistress, Temple. We want to hear about that.
-He had, faith, Temple said. And he was a married man too. And all the priests used to be dining there. By hell, I think they all had a touch.ok
—We shall call it riding a hackol to spare the hunter, said Dixon.
-Tell us, Temple, O’Keeffe said, how many quarts of porter have you in you?
—All your intellectual soul is in that phrase, O’Keeffe, said Temple with open scorn.
He moved with a shambling gait round the group and spoke to Stephen.
-Did you know that the Forsters are the kings of Belgium?om he asked.
Cranly came out through the door of the entrance hall, his hat thrust back on the nape of his neck and picking his teeth with care.
—And here’s the wiseacre, said Temple. Do you know that about the Forsters?
He paused for an answer. Cranly dislodged a fig seed from his teeth on the point of his rude toothpick and gazed at it intently.
—The Forster family, Temple said, is descended from Baldwin the First, king of Flanders. He was called the Forester. Forester and Forster are the same name. A descendant of Baldwin the First, captain Francis Forster, settled in Ireland and married the daughter of the last chieftain of Clanbrassil. Then there are the Blake Forsters.19 That’s a different branch.
-From Baldhead, king of Flanders, Cranly repeated, rooting again deliberately at his gleaming uncovered teeth.
—Where did you pick up all that history? O’Keeffe asked.
—I know all the history of your family too, Temple said, turning to Stephen. Do you know what Giraldus Cambrensison says about your family?
-Is he descended from Baldwin too? asked a tall consumptive student with dark eyes.
-Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth.
—Pernobilis et pervetusta familia,oo Temple said to Stephen.
The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him saying in a soft voice:
-Did an angel speak?
Cranly turned also and said vehemently but without anger:
-Goggins, you’re the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know.
—I had it on my mind to say that, Goggins answered firmly. It did no one any harm, did it?
-We hope, Dixon said suavely, that it was not of the kind known to science as a paulo post futurum.op
—Didn’t I tell you he was a smiler? said Temple, turning right and left. Didn’t I give him that name?
-You did. We’re not deaf, said the tall consumptive.
Cranly still frowned at the stout student below him. Then, with a snort of disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps.
-Go away from here, he said rudely. Go away you stinkpot. And you are a stinkpot.
Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place with good humour. Temple turned back to Stephen and asked:
-Do you believe in the law of heredity?
-Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked Cranly, facing round on him with an expression of wonder.
-The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.
He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly:
-Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?
Cranly pointed his long forefinger.
-Look at him! he said with scorn to the other. Look at Ireland’s hope!
They laughed at his words and gesture. Temple turned on him bravely, saying:
-Cranly, you’re always sneering at me. I can see that. But I am as good as you any day. Do you know what I think about you now as compared with myself?
-My dear man, said Cranly urbanely, you are incapable, do you know, absolutely incapable of thinking.
-But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself compared together?
-Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps. Get it out in bits!
Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures as he spoke.
-I’m a ballocks,oq he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I know I am. And I admit it that I am.
Dixon patted him lightly on the shoulder and said mildly:
-And it does you every credit, Temple.
-But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like me. Only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the only difference, I see.
A burst of laughter covered his words. But he turned again to Stephen and said with a sudden eagerness:
-That word is a most interesting word. That’s the only English dual number.or Did you know?
-Is it? Stephen said vaguely.
He was watching Cranly’s firm featured suffering face, lit up now by a smile of false patience. The gross name had passed over it like foul water poured over an old stone image, patient of injuries: and, as he watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and uncover the black hair that stood up stiffly from his forehead like an iron crown.
She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen in reply to Cranly’s greeting. He also? Was there not a slight flush on Cranly’s cheek? Or had it come forth at Temple’s words? The light had waned. He could not see.
Did that explain his friend’s listless silence, his harsh comments, the sudden intrusions of rude speech with which he had shattered so often Stephen’s ardent wayward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for he had found this rudeness also in himself. And he remembered an evening when he had dismounted from a borrowed creaking bicycle to pray to God in a wood near Malahide. He had lifted up his arms and spoken in ecstasy to the sombre nave of the trees, knowing that he stood on holy ground and in a holy hour. And when two constabulary men had come into sight round a bend in the gloomy road he had broken off his prayer to whistle loudly an air from the last pantomime.
He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a pillar. Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he could wait. The talk about him ceased for a moment: and a soft hiss fell again from a window above. But no other sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight had followed with idle eyes were sleeping.
She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the
air was silent save for one soft hiss that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.
Darkness falls from the air.os
A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?
He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade, beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery from the students whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back to itself the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nash.ot
Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering ? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart.ou And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan:ov and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the pox fouledow wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.
The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. They were secret and enflaming but her image was not entangled by them. That was not the way to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her. Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet only with a disinterred sweetness like the fig seeds Cranly rooted out of his gleaming teeth.
It was not thought nor vision, though he knew vaguely that her figure was passing homeward through the city. Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body. A conscious unrest seethed in his blood. Yes, it was her body he smelt: a wild and languid smell: the tepid limbs over which his music had flowed desirously and the secret soft linen upon which her flesh distilled odour and a dew.
A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and forefinger deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it. He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger for an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die. There came to his mind a curious phrase from Cornelius a Lapideox which said that the lice born of human sweat were not created by God with the other animals on the sixth day. But the tickling of the skin of his neck made his mind raw and red. The life of his body, ill clad, ill fed, louse eaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair : and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell. Yes; and it was not darkness that fell from the air. It was brightness.
Brightness falls from the air.
He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.
He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students. Well then let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.
Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply in his pocket and was eating it slowly and noisily. Temple sat on the pediment of a pillar, leaning back, his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes. A squat young man came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit. He marched towards the group, striking the flagsoy with the ferrule oz of his heavy umbrella. Then, raising the umbrella in salute, he said to all:
-Good evening, sirs.
He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a slight nervous movement. The tall consumptive student and Dixon and O’Keeffe were speaking in Irish and did not answer him. Then, turning to Cranly, he said:
-Good evening, particularly to you.
He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again. Cranly, who was still chewing the fig, answered with loud movements of his jaws.
-Good? Yes. It is a good evening.
The squat student looked at him seriously and shook his umbrella gently and reprovingly.
—I can see, he said, that you are about to make obvious remarks.
-Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the half chewed fig and jerking it towards the squat student’s mouth in sign that he should eat.
The squat student did not eat it but, indulging his special humour, said gravely, still tittering and prodding his phrase with his umbrella:
-Do you intend that ...
He broke off, pointed bluntly to the munched pulp of the fig and said loudly:
—I allude to that.
—Um, Cranly said as before.
-Do you intend that now, the squat student said, as ipso facto or, let us say, as so to speak?
Dixon turned aside from his group, saying:
-Goggins was waiting for you, Glynn. He has gone round to the Adelphipa to look for you and Moynihan. What have you there? he asked, tapping the portfolio under Glynn’s arm.
-Examination papers, Glynn answered. I give them monthly examinations to see that they are profiting by my tuition.
He also tapped the portfolio and coughed gently and smiled.
-Tuition! said Cranly rudely. I suppose you mean the barefooted children that are taught by a bloody ape like you. God help them!
He bit off the rest of the fig and flung away the butt.
—I suffer little children to come unto me,pb Glynn said amiably.
-A bloody ape, Cranly repeated with emphasis, and a blasphemous bloody ape!
Temple stood up and, pushing past Cranly addressed Glynn:
-That phrase you said now, he said, is from the new testament about suffer the children to come to me.
-Go to sleep again, Temple, said O’Keeffe.
-Very well, then, Temple continued, still addressing Glynn, and if Jesus suffered the children to come why does the church send them all to hell if they die unbaptised?pc Why is that?
-Were you baptised yourself, Temple? the consumptive student asked.
-But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were all to come? Temple said, his eyes searching Glynn’s eyes.
Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous titter in his voice and moving his umbrella at every word:
—And, as you remark, if it is thus I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.
-Because the church is cruel like all old sinners, Temple said.
-Are you quite orthodox on that point, Temple? Dixon said suavely.
-Saint Augustine says that about unbaptised children going to hell, Temple answered, because he was a cruel old sinner too.
—I bow to you, Dixon said, but I had the impression that limbopd existed for such cases.
—Don’t argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. Don’t talk to him or look at him. Lead him home with a suganpe the way you’d lead a bleating goat.
-Limbo! Temple cried. That’s a fine invention too. Like hell.
-But with the unpleasantness left out, Dixon said.
He turned smiling to the others and said:
—I think I am voicing the opinions of all present in saying so much.
-You are, Glynn said in a firm tone. On that point Ireland is united.
He struck the ferrule of his umbrella on the stone floor of the colonnade.
-Hell, Temple said. I can respect that invention of the grey spouse of Satan.pf Hell is Roman, like the walls of the Romans, strong and ugly. But what is limbo?
-Put him back into the perambulator,pg Cranly, O’Keeffe called out. Cranly made a swift step towards Temple, halted, stamping his foot, crying as if to a fowl:
-Hoosh!
Temple moved away nimbly.
-Do you know what limbo is? he cried. Do you know what we call a notion like that in Roscommon?ph
-Hoosh! Blast you! Cranly cried, clapping his hands.
-Neither my arse nor my elbow! Temple cried out scornfully. And that’s what I call limbo.
-Give us that stick here,
Cranly said.
He snatched the ashplant roughly from Stephen’s hand and sprang down the steps: but Temple, hearing him move in pursuit, fled through the dusk like a wild creature, nimble and fleet footed. Cranly’s heavy boots were heard loudly charging across the quadrangle and then returning heavily, foiled and spurning the gravel at each step.
His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick back into Stephen’s hand. Stephen felt that his anger had another cause, but feigning patience, touched his arm slightly and said quietly:
-Cranly, I told you I wanted to speak to you. Come away.
Cranly looked at him for a few moments and asked:
-Now?
—Yes, now, Stephen said. We can’t speak here. Come away.
They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. The bird call from Siegfriedpi whistled softly followed them from the steps of the porch. Cranly turned: and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:
—Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?
They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards to be played in the Adelphi hotel. Stephen walked on alone and out into the quiet of Kildare Street opposite Maple’s hotel he stood to wait, patient again. The name of the hotel, a colourless polished wood, and its colourless front stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm. They thought of army commissions and land agents:pj peasants greeted them along the roads in the country: they knew the names of certain French dishes and gave orders to jarviespk in highpitched provincial voices which pierced through their skintight accents.
How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes, under trees by the edges of streams and near the pool mottled bogs. A woman had waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her bed: for Davin had the mild eyes of one who could be secret. But him no woman’s eyes had wooed.