No More Learning

A birdcage hung in the sunny
window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the
pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

_I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility. _


Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

_And no more turn aside and brood. _


Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,
roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely
fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's
shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me
alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on
their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata rutilantium te
confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat. _

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

--Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry,
heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

--Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.

--I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.

--Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.

His head disappeared and reappeared.

--I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

--I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

--The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

--If you want it, Stephen said.

--Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll
have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent
sovereigns.

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent:

_O, won't we have a merry time,
Drinking whisky, beer and wine!
On coronation,
Coronation day!
O, won't we have a merry time
On coronation day! _


Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there
all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.
So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and
yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its
yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor
from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of
coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

--We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open
the inner doors.

--Have you the key? a voice asked.

--Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked!

He howled, without looking up from the fire:

--Kinch!

--It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the
doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and
sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside
him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set
them down heavily and sighed with relief.

--I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when. . . But, hush! Not a
word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines,
come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.
Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

--What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

--We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the
locker.

--O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

--That woman is coming up with the milk.

--The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here,
I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.

He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three
plates, saying:

--_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. _

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

--I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don't you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's
wheedling voice:

--When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
makes water I makes water.

--By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

--_So I do, Mrs Cahill,_ says she. _Begob, ma'am,_ says Mrs Cahill, _God
send you don't make them in the one pot. _

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.

--That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five
lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
brows:

--Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken
of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?

--I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

--Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

--I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.

Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.

--Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth
and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:

_--For old Mary Ann
She doesn't care a damn.
But, hising up her petticoats. . . _


He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

--The milk, sir!

--Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.

--That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

--To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

--The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
the collector of prepuces.

--How much, sir? asked the old woman.

--A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and
a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe
a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.
Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her
toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed
about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old
woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of
an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common
cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid,
whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

--It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

--Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

--If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten
guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with
dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

--Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.

--I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.

--Look at that now, she said.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she
slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there
is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in
God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids
her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

--Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

--Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

--Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

--I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the
west, sir?

--I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

--He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak
Irish in Ireland.

--Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak
the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.

--Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?

--No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

--Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

--Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at
twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a
shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.

Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his
trouser pockets.

--Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.
Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the
thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in
his fingers and cried:

--A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

--Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

--We'll owe twopence, he said.

--Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good
morning, sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant:

_--Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet. _


He turned to Stephen and said:

--Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland
expects that every man this day will do his duty.

--That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.

--Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

--Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

--The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

--All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

--I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here's a spot.

--That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth
of tone:

--Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

--Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

--Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
the hammock, said:

--I don't know, I'm sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and
said with coarse vigour:

--You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

--Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.

--I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

--I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.

--From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

--To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all.
Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
resignedly:

--Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

--There's your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,
we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and
green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of
his talking hands.

--And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
doorway:

--Are you coming, you fellows?

--I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out
with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

--And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and
locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

--Did you bring the key?

--I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

--Down, sir! How dare you, sir!

Haines asked:

--Do you pay rent for this tower?

--Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

--To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

--Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

--Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
the sea. But ours is the _omphalos_.

--What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

--No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas
and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I
have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
primrose waistcoat:

--You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

--It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

--You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?

--Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.

--What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:

--O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

--We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this
tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. _That beetles
o'er his base into the sea,_ isn't it?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did
not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in
cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

--It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail
tacking by the Muglins.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked
at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved
a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and
began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

_--I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
So here's to disciples and Calvary. _


He held up a forefinger of warning.

_--If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That i make when the wine becomes water again. _


He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward
to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or
wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

_--Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy. . . Goodbye, now, goodbye! _


He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh
wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said:

--We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of
it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

--O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

--Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

--You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.

--There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

--Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang
it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk
towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

--Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe
or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a
personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?

--You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels.
My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line
along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark.
He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt
bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his
eyes.

--After all, Haines began. . .

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not
all unkind.

--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.

--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an
Italian.

--Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
spoke.

--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph
of their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam
ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own
rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the
mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in
affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church
militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies
fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of
whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the
consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning
Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who
held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken
a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void
awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a
worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host,
who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their
shields.

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. _Zut! Nom de Dieu!