Complete Works of James Joyce (258 page)

 
— , said the clerk from the Custom-House.

 
— asked Temple.

 
— said Cranly, in “.”

So after a little talk the young men agreed to take a trip to Wicklow on the Sea-Queen. Stephen was much relieved to listen to this conversation: in a few minutes the sting of his disaster was no longer felt so acutely. Cranly at last observed Stephen walking at the edge of the path and said:

 
— .

 
—
, said Stephen.

 
— , said Cranly.

 
—
.

 
— ] ut vos in malo humore estis>.

Madden who could not talk this language well led the group back to English. The clerk from the Custom-House seemed to have it on his conscience to express admiration for Stephen’s style. He was a big stout young man with a lardy face and he carried an umbrella. He was several years [younger] older than any of his companions but he had decided to read for his degree in Mental and Moral Science. He was a constant companion of Cranly’s and it was the latter’s eloquence which had induced him to enter the night-classes in the College. Cranly spent a great part of his time persuading young men to adopt different lines of life. The clerk from the Custom-House was named O’Neill. He was a very amiable person, always laughing asthmatically at Cranly’s serious fooling, but he was interested to hear of any occasion whereby he might improve himself mentally. He attended the Debating Society and the meetings of the College Sodality because he was thus brought into ‘touch’ with University life. He was a circumspect young man but he allowed Cranly to ‘chaff’ him about girls. Stephen tried to dissuade the company from alluding to his essay but O’Neill had accepted the occasion as one to be availed of. He asked Stephen questions such as are to be found in the pages of young ladies’ confession-albums and Stephen thought that his mental heaven must greatly resemble a confectioner’s shop. Temple was a raw Gipsy-looking youth with a shambling gait and a shambling manner of speaking. He was from the West of Ireland and he was known to be very revolutionary. When O’Neill had spoken for some time to Cranly, who had answered him more politely than Stephen, Temple after a few false starts got in a phrase:

 
— I think . . . was a bloody fine paper.

Cranly turned a vacant face in the direction of the speaker but [O’Neill] Temple continued:

 
— Made ’em sit up too.

 
— asked Cranly.

—’Scuse me, sir, said [O’Neill] Temple to Stephen across the intervening bodies, do you believe in Jesus . . . I don’t believe in Jesus, he added.

Stephen laughed loudly at the tone of this statement and he continued when Temple began to shamble through a kind of apology:

—’Course I don’t know . . . if you believe in Jesus. I believe in Man . . . If you b’lieve in Jesus . . . of course . . . I oughtn’t to say anything the first time I met you . . . Do you think that?

O’Neill preserved a solemn silence until Temple’s speech had faded into indistinct mutterings; then he said, as if he were beginning an entirely new subject:

 
— I was very much interested in your paper and in the speeches too . . . What did you think of Hughes?

Stephen did not answer.

 
— Bloody cod, said Temple.

 
— I thought his speech was in very bad taste, said O’Neill sympathetically.

 
— , said Cranly.

 
— Yes, I think he went too far, said Madden, but, you see, he gets carried away by his enthusiasm.

 
— .

 
— Yes, he is a patriotic ‘cus, said O’Neill laughing wheezily. But I thought Father Butt’s speech very good, very clear and philosophical.

 
— Did you think that? cried Temple from the inside of the path, to Stephen . . . ‘Scuse me . . . I wanted to know what he thought of Butt’s speech, he explained at the same time to the other [four] three . . . Did you think . . . he was a bloody cod too?

Stephen could not help laughing at this novel form of address though Father Butt’s speech had put him into anything but a charitable mood.

 
— It was just the kind of thing he gives us every day, said Madden. You know the style.

 
— His speech annoyed me, said Stephen curtly.

 
— Why was that? said Temple eagerly. Why was it he annoyed you?

Stephen made a grimace instead of answering:

 
— Bloody cod of a speech, said Temple . . . I’m a rationalist. I don’t b’lieve in any religion.

 
— I think he meant part of his speech kindly, said Cranly slowly after a pause, turning his face full towards Stephen. Stephen answered his gaze, [and met] looking steadily into a pair of bright dark eyes, and at the moment when their eyes met he felt hope. There was nothing in the phrase to encourage; he doubted its justice very much: yet he knew that hope had touched him. He walked on beside the four young men, pondering. Cranly stopped before the window of a little huckster’s shop in one of the mean streets through which they passed, staring fixedly at an old yellow copy of the which was hanging sideways on the glass. The illustration was a winter scene. No-one said anything and as silence seemed about to set in permanently Madden asked him what he was looking at. Cranly looked at his questioner and then looked back again at the dirty picture, towards which he nodded his head heavily:

 
— What is . . . what is? asked Temple, who had been looking at some cold crubeens in the next window.

Cranly turned his vacant face again towards his questioner and pointed to the picture, saying:

 
— .

Stephen’s family circle was now increased by Isabel’s return from her convent. For some time she had been in delicate health and the nuns had recommended that she should have home care. She came home a few days after the famous day of Stephen’s paper. Stephen was standing at the little front window that looked towards the mouth of the river when he saw his parents walking from the tram with a thin pale girl walking between them. Stephen’s father did not like the prospect of another inhabitant in his house, particularly a daughter for whom he had little affection. He was annoyed that his daughter would not avail herself of the opportunity afforded her in the convent, but his sense of public duty was real if spasmodic and he would by no means permit his wife to bring the girl home without his aid. The reflection that his daughter, instead of being a help to him would be a hindrance, and the suspicion that the burden of responsibility which he had piously imposed on his eldest son’s shoulders was beginning to irk that young man troubled his vision of the future. He had a taste for contrasts, perhaps, which led him to expect industry and sobriety in his offspring, [and] but it cannot be said that he desired any material re-exaltation. It was just this impalpable excellence which he wished his son to assert again in the teeth of circumstances which gained him a conditional pardon at Stephen’s hands. But this slight threat of union between father and son had been worn away by the usages of daily life and, by reason of its tenuity and of the [failure] gradual rustiness which had begun to consume the upper station, it bore fewer and feebler messages along it.

Stephen’s father was quite capable of talking himself into believing what he knew to be untrue. He knew that his own ruin had been his own handiwork but he had talked himself into believing that it was the handiwork of others. He had his son’s distaste for responsibility without his son’s courage. He was one of those illogical wiseacres with whom no evidence can outreason the first impression. His wife had fulfilled her duties to him with startling literalness and yet she had never been able to expiate the offence of her blood. Misunderstanding such as this, which is accepted as natural in higher social grades, is wrongly refused recognition in the burgher class where it is often found to issue in feuds of insatiable, narrow hatred. Mr Daedalus hated his wife’s maiden name with a medieval intensity: it stunk in his nostrils. His alliance therewith was the only sin of which, in the entire honesty of his cowardice, he could accuse himself. Now that he was making for the final decades of life with the painful consciousness of having diminished comfortable goods and of having accumulated uncomfortable habits he consoled and revenged himself by tirades so prolonged and so often repeated that he was in danger of becoming a monomaniac. The hearth at night was the sacred witness of these revenges, pondered, muttered, growled and execrated. The exception which his clemency had originally made in favour of his wife was soon out of mind and she began to irritate him by her dutiful symbolism. The great disappointment of his life was accentuated by a lesser and keener loss — the loss of a coveted fame. On account of a certain income and of certain sociable gifts Mr Daedalus had been accustomed to regard himself as the centre of a little world, the darling of a little society. This position he still strove to maintain but at the cost of a reckless liberality from which his household had to suffer both in deed and in spirit. He imagined that while he strove to retain this infatuating position his home affairs would, through the agency of a son whom he made no effort to understand, in some divine manner right themselves. This hope when indulged in would sometimes embitter his affection for a son whom he thereby acknowledged as superior but, now that he was led to suspect that his hope was fatuous, an embitterment of that affection seemed likely to fix itself permanently among his emotional landmarks. His son’s notion of aristocracy was not the one which he could sympathise with and his son’s silence during the domestic battles no longer seemed to him a conveyed compliment. He was, in fact, sufficiently acute to observe here a covert menace against castellar rights and he would not have been wrong if he had imagined that his son regarded [these] assistance at these tortuous and obscene monologues as the tribute exacted by a father for affording a wayward child a base of supplies . . .

Stephen did not consider his parents very seriously. In his opinion they had opened up misleading and unnatural relations between themselves and him and he considered their affection for him requited by a studious demeanour towards them and by a genuine goodwill to perform for them a great number of such material services as, in his present state of fierce idealism, he could look upon as trifles. The only material services he would refuse them were those which he judged to be spiritually dangerous and it is as well to admit that this exception all but nullified his charity for he had cultivated an independence of the soul which could brook very few subjections. Divine exemplars abetted him in this. The phrase which preachers elaborate into a commandment of obedience seemed to him meagre, ironical and inconclusive and the narrative of the life of Jesus did not in any way impress him [with] as the narrative of the life of one who was subject to others. When he had been a Roman Catholic in the proper sense of the term the figure of Jesus had always seemed to him too remote and too passionless and he had never uttered from his heart a single fervent prayer to the Redeemer: it was to Mary, as to a weaker and more engaging vessel of salvation, that he had entrusted his spiritual affairs. Now his enfranchisement from the discipline of the Church seemed to be coincident with an [natural] instinctive return to the Founder thereof and this impulse would have led him perhaps to a consideration of the merits of Protestantism had not another natural impulse inclined him to bring even the self-contradictory and the absurd into order. He did not know, besides, whether the haughtiness of the Papacy was not as derivable from Jesus himself as the reluctance to be pressed beyond “Amen: I say to you” for an account of anything but he was quite sure that behind the enigmatic utterances of Jesus there was a very much more definite conception than any which could be supposed [to] discoverable behind Protestant theology:

 
— Put this in your diary, he said to transcriptive Maurice. Protestant Orthodoxy is like Lanty McHale’s dog: it goes a bit of the road with everyone.

 
— It seems to me that S. Paul trained that dog, said Maurice.

One day when Stephen had gone to the College by accident he found McCann standing in the hall holding a long testimonial. Another part of the testimonial was on the hall-table and nearly all the young men in the College were signing their names to it. McCann was speaking volubly to a little group and Stephen discovered that the testimonial was the tribute of Dublin University students to the Tsar of Russia. World-wide peace: solution of all disputes by arbitration: general disarming of the nations: these were the benefits for which the students were returning their thanks. On the hall table there were two photographs, one of the Tsar of Russia, the other of the Editor of the : both of the photographs were signed by the famous couple. As McCann was standing sideways to the light Stephen amused himself in tracing a resemblance between him and the pacific Emperor whose photograph had been taken in profile. The Tsar’s air of besotted Christ moved him to scorn and he turned for support to Cranly who was standing beside the door. Cranly wore a very dirty yellow straw hat of the shape of an inverted bucket in the shelter of which his face was composed to a glaucuous [] calm.