No More Learning

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. One of them, in order
to put his Latin to the proof, had made him translate short passages
from Dilectus and asked him whether it was correct to say: TEMPORA
MUTANTUR NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS or TEMPORA MUTANTUR ET NOS MUTAMUR IN
ILLIS. Another, a brisk old man, whom Mr Dedalus called Johnny Cashman,
had covered him with confusion by asking him to say which were
prettier, the Dublin girls or the Cork girls.

--He's not that way built, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him alone. He's a
level-headed thinking boy who doesn't bother his head about that kind
of nonsense.

--Then he's not his father's son, said the little old man.

--I don't know, I'm sure, said Mr Dedalus, smiling complacently.

--Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt
in the City of Cork in his day. Do you know that?

Stephen looked down and studied the tiled floor of the bar into which
they had drifted.

--Now don't be putting ideas into his head, said Mr Dedalus. Leave him
to his Maker.

--Yerra, sure I wouldn't put any ideas into his head. I'm old enough
to be his grandfather. And I am a grandfather, said the little old man
to Stephen. Do you know that?

--Are you? asked Stephen.

--Bedad I am, said the little old man. I have two bouncing
grandchildren out at Sunday's Well. Now, then! What age do you think I
am? And I remember seeing your grandfather in his red coat riding out
to hounds. That was before you were born.

--Ay, or thought of, said Mr Dedalus.

--Bedad I did, repeated the little old man. And, more than that, I can
remember even your great-grandfather, old John Stephen Dedalus, and a
fierce old fire-eater he was. Now, then! There's a memory for you!

--That's three generations--four generations, said another of the
company. Why, Johnny Cashman, you must be nearing the century.

--Well, I'll tell you the truth, said the little old man. I'm just
twenty-seven years of age.

--We're as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus. And just finish
what you have there and we'll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or
whatever your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don't
feel more than eighteen myself. There's that son of mine there not half
my age and I'm a better man than he is any day of the week.

--Draw it mild now, Dedalus. I think it's time for you to take a back
seat, said the gentleman who had spoken before.

--No, by God! asserted Mr Dedalus. I'll sing a tenor song against him
or I'll vault a five-barred gate against him or I'll run with him after
the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the
Kerry Boy and the best man for it.

--But he'll beat you here, said the little old man, tapping his
forehead and raising his glass to drain it.

--Well, I hope he'll be as good a man as his father. That's all I can
say, said Mr Dedalus.

--If he is, he'll do, said the little old man.

--And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long
and did so little harm.

--But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks
be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his
father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss
of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed
older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and
regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in
him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of
companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial
piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and
loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul
capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren
shell of the moon.


Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless. . . ?


He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation
of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity
chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.


* * * * *


Stephen's mother and his brother and one of his cousins waited at the
corner of quiet Foster Place while he and his father went up the steps
and along the colonnade where the Highland sentry was parading. When
they had passed into the great hall and stood at the counter Stephen
drew forth his orders on the governor of the bank of Ireland for thirty
and three pounds; and these sums, the moneys of his exhibition and
essay prize, were paid over to him rapidly by the teller in notes and
in coin respectively. He bestowed them in his pockets with feigned
composure and suffered the friendly teller, to whom his father chatted,
to take his hand across the broad counter and wish him a brilliant
career in after life. He was impatient of their voices and could not
keep his feet at rest. But the teller still deferred the serving of
others to say he was living in changed times and that there was nothing
like giving a boy the best education that money could buy. Mr Dedalus
lingered in the hall gazing about him and up at the roof and telling
Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they were standing in the
house of commons of the old Irish parliament.

--God help us! he said piously, to think of the men of those times,
Stephen, Hely Hutchinson and Flood and Henry Grattan and Charles Kendal
Bushe, and the noblemen we have now, leaders of the Irish people at
home and abroad. Why, by God, they wouldn't be seen dead in a ten-acre
field with them. No, Stephen, old chap, I'm sorry to say that they are
only as I roved out one fine May morning in the merry month of sweet
July.

A keen October wind was blowing round the bank. The three figures
standing at the edge of the muddy path had pinched cheeks and watery
eyes. Stephen looked at his thinly clad mother and remembered that a
few days before he had seen a mantle priced at twenty guineas in the
windows of Barnardo's.

--Well that's done, said Mr Dedalus.

--We had better go to dinner, said Stephen. Where?

--Dinner? said Mr Dedalus. Well, I suppose we had better, what?

--Some place that's not too dear, said Mrs Dedalus.

--Underdone's?

--Yes. Some quiet place.

--Come along, said Stephen quickly. It doesn't matter about the
dearness.

He walked on before them with short nervous steps, smiling. They tried
to keep up with him, smiling also at his eagerness.

--Take it easy like a good young fellow, said his father. We're not
out for the half mile, are we?

For a swift season of merrymaking the money of his prizes ran through
Stephen's fingers. Great parcels of groceries and delicacies and dried
fruits arrived from the city. Every day he drew up a bill of fare for
the family and every night led a party of three or four to the theatre
to see INGOMAR or THE LADY OF LYONS. In his coat pockets he carried
squares of Vienna chocolate for his guests while his trousers' pocket
bulged with masses of silver and copper coins. He bought presents for
everyone, overhauled his room, wrote out resolutions, marshalled his
books up and down their shelves, pored upon all kinds of price lists,
drew up a form of commonwealth for the household by which every member
of it held some office, opened a loan bank for his family and pressed
loans on willing borrowers so that he might have the pleasure of making
out receipts and reckoning the interests on the sums lent. When he
could do no more he drove up and down the city in trams. Then the
season of pleasure came to an end. The pot of pink enamel paint gave out
and the wainscot of his bedroom remained with its unfinished and
ill-plastered coat.

His household returned to its usual way of life. His mother had no
further occasion to upbraid him for squandering his money. He too
returned to his old life at school and all his novel enterprises fell
to pieces. The commonwealth fell, the loan bank closed its coffers and
its books on a sensible loss, the rules of life which he had drawn
about himself fell into desuetude.

How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a break-water of
order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to
dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial
relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless.
From without as from within the waters had flowed over his barriers:
their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not gone one step
nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless
shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and
sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood
to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and
fosterbrother.

He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which
everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in
mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and
falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realize the
enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically
with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to
defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and
by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure
that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by
night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a
lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning
pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and
humiliating sense of transgression.

He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autumnal evenings led him
from street to street as they had led him years before along the quiet
avenues of Blackrock. But no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly
lights in the windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only at
times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that was wasting
him gave room to a softer languor, the image of Mercedes traversed the
background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the
garden of rose-bushes on the road that led to the mountains and he
remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make
there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of
estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft speeches of
Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his unrest. A tender
premonition touched him of the tryst he had then looked forward to and,
in spite of the horrible reality which lay between his hope of then and
now, of the holy encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and
timidity and inexperience were to fall from him.

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The
verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken
brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood
was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering
into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound.
He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin
with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to
exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly
upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood
filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the
murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his
being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he
suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the
street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited
him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued
from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of
sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an
iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene
scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

He had wandered into a maze of narrow and dirty streets. From the foul
laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot and wrangling and the drawling
of drunken singers. He walked onward, dismayed, wondering whether he
had strayed into the quarter of the Jews. Women and girls dressed in
long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were
leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim.
The yellow gas-flames arose before his troubled vision against the
vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the
lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in
another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.

He stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring
against his bosom in a tumult. A young woman dressed in a long pink
gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his face.
She said gaily:

--Good night, Willie dear!

Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in
the copious easy-chair beside the bed.
He tried to bid his tongue speak
that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting
the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.

As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and
embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her
and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the
warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical
weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his
lips parted though they would not speak.

She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little
rascal.

--Give me a kiss, she said.

His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her
arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that
he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his
lips would not bend to kiss her.

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his
and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It
was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her,
body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure
of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his
lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between
them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of
sin, softer than sound or odour.




Chapter 3


The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day
and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the
schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would
be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat
mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flour-fattened sauce.
Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

It would be a gloomy secret night. After early nightfall the yellow
lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the
brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets,
circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until
his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner. The whores would be just
coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily
after their sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair.
He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own
will or a sudden call to his sin-loving soul from their soft perfumed
flesh. Yet as he prowled in quest of that call, his senses, stultified
only by his desire, would note keenly all that wounded or shamed them;
his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph
of two soldiers standing to attention or a gaudy playbill; his ears,
the drawling jargon of greeting:

--Hello, Bertie, any good in your mind?

--Is that you, pigeon?

--Number ten. Fresh Nelly is waiting on you.

--Good night, husband! Coming in to have a short time?

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a
widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes
and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold
itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes
opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born
and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind
outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music
accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer
and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the
moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to
crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation
began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail.
It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by
sin, spreading abroad the bale-fire of its burning stars and folding
back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.
They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin
he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find
his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had
carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded:
and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been
established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished
itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned
mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in
danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every
succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and
works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of
sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul. At most, by an
alms given to a beggar whose blessing he fled from, he might hope
wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace. Devotion had
gone by the board. What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul
lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe,
withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he
knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and
hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own
sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too
grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homage to the
All-seeing and All-knowing.

--Well now, Ennis, I declare you have a head and so has my stick! Do
you mean to say that you are not able to tell me what a surd is?

The blundering answer stirred the embers of his contempt of his
fellows. Towards others he felt neither shame nor fear. On Sunday
mornings as he passed the church door he glanced coldly at the
worshippers who stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church,
morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor hear.
Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hair-oil with which
they had anointed their heads repelled him from the altar they prayed
at. He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their
innocence which he could cajole so easily.

On the wall of his bedroom hung an illuminated scroll, the certificate
of his prefecture in the college of the sodality of the Blessed Virgin
Mary. On Saturday mornings when the sodality met in the chapel to
recite the little office his place was a cushioned kneeling-desk at the
right of the altar from which he led his wing of boys through the
responses. The falsehood of his position did not pain him. If at
moments he felt an impulse to rise from his post of honour and,
confessing before them all his unworthiness, to leave the chapel, a
glance at their faces restrained him. The imagery of the psalms of
prophecy soothed his barren pride. The glories of Mary held his soul
captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing her royal
lineage, her emblems, the late-flowering plant and late-blossoming
tree, symbolizing the age-long gradual growth of her cultus among men.
When it fell to him to read the lesson towards the close of the office
he read it in a veiled voice, lulling his conscience to its music.


QUASI CEDRUS EXALTATA SUM IN LIBANON ET QUASI CUPRESSUS IN MONTE SION.
QUASI PALMA EXALTATA SUM IN GADES ET QUASI PLANTATIO ROSAE IN JERICHO.
QUASI ULIVA SPECIOSA IN CAMPIS ET QUASI PLATANUS EXALTATA SUM JUXTA
AQUAM IN PLATEIS. SICUT CINNAMOMUM ET BALSAMUM AROMATIZANS ODOREM DEDI
ET QUASI MYRRHA ELECTA DEDI SUAVITATEM ODORIS.


His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him
nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyes seemed to regard him with
mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail
flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was
impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the impulse that moved him
was the wish to be her knight. If ever his soul, re-entering her
dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself,
was turned towards her whose emblem is the morning star, BRIGHT AND
MUSICAL, TELLING OF HEAVEN AND INFUSING PEACE, it was when her names
were murmured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and
shameful words, the savour itself of a lewd kiss.

That was strange. He tried to think how it could be. But the dusk,
deepening in the schoolroom, covered over his thoughts. The bell rang.
The master marked the sums and cuts to be done for the next lesson and
went out. Heron, beside Stephen, began to hum tunelessly.


MY EXCELLENT FRIEND BOMBADOS.


Ennis, who had gone to the yard, came back, saying:

--The boy from the house is coming up for the rector.

A tall boy behind Stephen rubbed his hands and said:

--That's game ball. We can scut the whole hour. He won't be in till
after half two. Then you can ask him questions on the catechism,
Dedalus.

Stephen, leaning back and drawing idly on his scribbler, listened to
the talk about him which Heron checked from time to time by saying:

--Shut up, will you. Don't make such a bally racket!

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to
the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating
into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own
condemnation. The sentence of saint James which says that he who
offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all, had seemed to him
first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness
of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly
sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others,
covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures,
envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious
murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food,
the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the
swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

As he sat in his bench gazing calmly at the rector's shrewd harsh face,
his mind wound itself in and out of the curious questions proposed to
it. If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to
amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he
had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest
accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism
pour the water before saying the words is the child baptized? Is
baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while the first
beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart the
second beatitude promises also to the meek that they shall possess the
land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two
species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood,
soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a
tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood
of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine
change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they
have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their
species as God and as man?

--Here he is! Here he is!

A boy from his post at the window had seen the rector come from the
house. All the catechisms were opened and all heads bent upon them
silently. The rector entered and took his seat on the dais. A gentle
kick from the tall boy in the bench behind urged Stephen to ask a
difficult question.

The rector did not ask for a catechism to hear the lesson from. He
clasped his hands on the desk and said:

--The retreat will begin on Wednesday afternoon in honour of saint
Francis Xavier whose feast day is Saturday. The retreat will go on from
Wednesday to Friday. On Friday confession will be heard all the
afternoon after beads. If any boys have special confessors perhaps it
will be better for them not to change. Mass will be on Saturday morning
at nine o'clock and general communion for the whole college. Saturday
will be a free day. But Saturday and Sunday being free days some boys
might be inclined to think that Monday is a free day also. Beware of
making that mistake. I think you, Lawless, are likely to make that
mistake.

--I sir? Why, sir?

A little wave of quiet mirth broke forth over the class of boys from
the rector's grim smile. Stephen's heart began slowly to fold and fade
with fear like a withering flower.

The rector went on gravely:

--You are all familiar with the story of the life of saint Francis
Xavier, I suppose, the patron of your college. He came of an old and
illustrious Spanish family and you remember that he was one of the
first followers of saint Ignatius. They met in Paris where Francis
Xavier was professor of philosophy at the university. This young and
brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the
ideas of our glorious founder and you know that he, at his own desire,
was sent by saint Ignatius to preach to the Indians. He is called, as
you know, the apostle of the Indies. He went from country to country in
the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptizing the
people. He is said to have baptized as many as ten thousand idolaters
in one month. It is said that his right arm had grown powerless from
having been raised so often over the heads of those whom he baptized.
He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God but he
died of fever on the island of Sancian. A great saint, saint Francis
Xavier! A great soldier of God!

The rector paused and then, shaking his clasped hands before him, went
on:

--He had the faith in him that moves mountains. Ten thousand souls won
for God in a single month! That is a true conqueror, true to the motto
of our order: AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM! A saint who has great power in
heaven, remember: power to intercede for us in our grief; power to
obtain whatever we pray for if it be for the good of our souls; power
above all to obtain for us the grace to repent if we be in sin. A great
saint, saint Francis Xavier! A great fisher of souls!

He ceased to shake his clasped hands and, resting them against his
forehead, looked right and left of them keenly at his listeners out of
his dark stern eyes.

In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow.
Stephen's heart had withered up like a flower of the desert that feels
the simoom coming from afar.


* * * * *


--REMEMBER ONLY THY LAST THINGS AND THOU SHALT NOT SIN FOR EVER--words
taken, my dear little brothers in Christ, from the book of
Ecclesiastes, seventh chapter, fortieth verse. In the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Stephen sat in the front bench of the chapel. Father Arnall sat at a
table to the left of the altar. He wore about his shoulders a heavy
cloak; his pale face was drawn and his voice broken with rheum. The
figure of his old master, so strangely re-arisen, brought back to
Stephen's mind his life at Clongowes: the wide playgrounds, swarming
with boys; the square ditch; the little cemetery off the main avenue of
limes where he had dreamed of being buried; the firelight on the wall
of the infirmary where he lay sick; the sorrowful face of Brother
Michael. His soul, as these memories came back to him, became again a
child's soul.

--We are assembled here today, my dear little brothers in Christ, for
one brief moment far away from the busy bustle of the outer world to
celebrate and to honour one of the greatest of saints, the apostle of
the Indies, the patron saint also of your college, saint Francis
Xavier. Year after year, for much longer than any of you, my dear
little boys, can remember or than I can remember, the boys of this
college have met in this very chapel to make their annual retreat
before the feast day of their patron saint. Time has gone on and
brought with it its changes. Even in the last few years what changes
can most of you not remember? Many of the boys who sat in those front
benches a few years ago are perhaps now in distant lands, in the
burning tropics, or immersed in professional duties or in seminaries,
or voyaging over the vast expanse of the deep or, it may be, already
called by the great God to another life and to the rendering up of
their stewardship. And still as the years roll by, bringing with them
changes for good and bad, the memory of the great saint is honoured by
the boys of this college who make every year their annual retreat on
the days preceding the feast day set apart by our Holy Mother the
Church to transmit to all the ages the name and fame of one of the
greatest sons of catholic Spain.

--Now what is the meaning of this word RETREAT and why is it allowed
on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead
before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my
dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our
life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state
of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to
understand better why we are here in this world. During these few days
I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four last
things. They are, as you know from your catechism, death, judgement,
hell, and heaven. We shall try to understand them fully during these
few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting
benefit to our souls. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been
sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God's
holy will and to save our immortal souls. All else is worthless. One
thing alone is needful, the salvation of one's soul. What doth it
profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his
immortal soul? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this
wretched world that can make up for such a loss.

--I will ask you, therefore, my dear boys, to put away from your minds
during these few days all worldly thoughts, whether of study or
pleasure or ambition, and to give all your attention to the state of
your souls. I need hardly remind you that during the days of the
retreat all boys are expected to preserve a quiet and pious demeanour
and to shun all loud unseemly pleasure. The elder boys, of course, will
see that this custom is not infringed and I look especially to the
prefects and officers of the sodality of Our Blessed Lady and of the
sodality of the holy angels to set a good example to their
fellow-students.

--Let us try, therefore, to make this retreat in honour of saint
Francis with our whole heart and our whole mind. God's blessing will
then be upon all your year's studies. But, above and beyond all, let
this retreat be one to which you can look back in after years when
maybe you are far from this college and among very different
surroundings, to which you can look back with joy and thankfulness and
give thanks to God for having granted you this occasion of laying the
first foundation of a pious honourable zealous christian life. And if,
as may so happen, there be at this moment in these benches any poor
soul who has had the unutterable misfortune to lose God's holy grace
and to fall into grievous sin, I fervently trust and pray that this
retreat may be the turning point in the life of that soul. I pray to
God through the merits of His zealous servant Francis Xavier, that such
a soul may be led to sincere repentance and that the holy communion on
saint Francis's day of this year may be a lasting covenant between God
and that soul. For just and unjust, for saint and sinner alike, may
this retreat be a memorable one.

--Help me, my dear little brothers in Christ. Help me by your pious
attention, by your own devotion, by your outward demeanour. Banish from
your minds all worldly thoughts and think only of the last things,
death, judgement, hell, and heaven. He who remembers these things, says
Ecclesiastes, shall not sin for ever. He who remembers the last things
will act and think with them always before his eyes. He will live a
good life and die a good death, believing and knowing that, if he has
sacrificed much in this earthly life, it will be given to him a
hundredfold and a thousandfold more in the life to come, in the kingdom
without end--a blessing, my dear boys, which I wish you from my heart,
one and all, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost. Amen!

As he walked home with silent companions, a thick fog seemed to compass
his mind. He waited in stupor of mind till it should lift and reveal
what it had hidden. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and when the
meal was over and the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table,
he rose and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his mouth
with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he had sunk to the
state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. This was the end; and
a faint glimmer of fear began to pierce the fog of his mind. He pressed
his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the
darkening street. Forms passed this way and that through the dull
light. And that was life. The letters of the name of Dublin lay heavily
upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and thither with slow
boorish insistence. His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross
grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening
dusk while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured,
gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed, and human for a
bovine god to stare upon.

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from
its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of
spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He
suffered its agony. He felt the death chill touch the extremities and
creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the
bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the
last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs,
the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing
faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor
breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling
and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He--he himself--his
body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it. Nail it
down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the
shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole
in the ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping
worms and to be devoured by scuttling plump-bellied rats.

And while the friends were still standing in tears by the bedside the
soul of the sinner was judged. At the last moment of consciousness the
whole earthly life passed before the vision of the soul and, ere it had
time to reflect, the body had died and the soul stood terrified before
the judgement seat. God, who had long been merciful, would then be
just. He had long been patient, pleading with the sinful soul,
giving it time to repent, sparing it yet awhile. But that time had
gone.