by James Joyce
Among the guests was an elder brother of Mrs Daniel’s, Father Healy. He had just come back from the United States of America where he had been for seven years collecting money to build a chapel near Enniscorthy. He was being feted on his home-coming. He sat in the armchair which Mr Daniel insisted on giving him and joined the tips of his fingers lightly together and smiled on the company. He was a little fat white priest whose body reminded one of a new tennis-ball and as he sat in his chair with one leg thrown smartly over the other he kept agitating quickly a fat little foot which was encased in a fat little creaky leather shoe. He spoke with a judicious American accent and when he spoke the room was all ears. He was greatly interested in the new Gaelic revival and in the new literary movement in Ireland. He paid particular attention to McCann and to Stephen, asking both of them many questions. He agreed with McCann that Gladstone was the greatest man of the nineteenth century and then Mr Daniel, who was glowing with pride at the honour he was paying so honourable a guest, told a dignified story of Gladstone and Sir Ashmead Bartlett and deepened his voice to reproduce the oratory of the grand old man. During the charades [he] Father Healy kept asking Mr Daniel to repeat to him the witticisms of the players and very often he shook laughing when Mr Daniel had told him what a player had said. He let no opportunity for increasing his knowledge of the interior life of the University escape him and every allusion was beaten out into an unmistakeable flatness before he nodded a head in satisfaction. Attacking Stephen on the literary side he began a monologue on the writings of John Boyle O’Reilly but finding Stephen too polite he began to depreciate an exclusively literary training for young men. Stephen thereupon began to tell him of the alley in the college and of the hand-ball tournament and all with discreet earnestness.
— I am sure now, said Father Healy putting his head shrewdly on one side and looking genially at the youth, I am sure you would make a good player. You’re just the build.
— O, no, said Stephen longing for Cranly’s presence, I’m a poor player.
— So you say, said Father Healy laughing, so you say.
— Really, said Stephen, smiling at this clever detection of [the] his merits as a handball-player and at the recollection of Cranly’s execrations at his play.
At last Father Healy began to yawn a little and this was taken as a signal for handing round cups of milk and slices of bread and butter to the young men and women, none of whom took anything stronger. Hughes, indeed, was so frugal that he declined to eat or drink anything at all whereat Stephen was somewhat disappointed as he could have had a good view of the idealist. McCann who represented the practical view of life ate rather noisily and asked for jam. This remark made Father Healy, who had never heard it before, laugh very heartily and made the others smile but Hughes and Stephen looked at each other very gravely across the uninhabited tablecloth. The young women were all sitting at one end of the table and the young men at the other end with the result that one end of the table was very lively and the other end very serious. Stephen after having failed to engage in conversation a maiden aunt of the family who had fulfilled her office by bringing in two tumblers of punch, one for Father Healy and the other for Mr Daniel, retired silently to the piano where he began to strum old airs and hum them to himself until someone at the table said “Do sing us something” and then he left the piano and returned to the horsehair sofa.
Her eyes were very bright. Stephen’s way through self-examinations had worn him out so much that he could not but long to repose himself in the neighbourhood of her beauty. He remembered the first mood of monstrous dissatisfaction which had overcome him on his entrance into Dublin life and how it was her beauty that had appeased him. Now she seemed to offer him rest. He wondered did she understand him or sympathise with him and was the vulgarity of her manners only a condescension of one who was consciously playing the game. He knew that it was not for such an image that he had constructed a theory of art and life and a garland of verse and yet if he could have been sure of her he would have held his art and verses lightly enough. The longing for a mad night of love came upon him, a desperate willingness to cast his soul away, his life and his art, and to bury them all with her under fathoms of lust-laden slumber. The ugly artificiality of the lives over which Father Healy was comfortably presiding struck this outrageous instant out of him and he went on repeating to himself a line from Dante for no other reason except that it contained the angry disyllable “frode.” Surely, he thought, I have as much right to use the word as ever Dante had. The spirits of Moynihan and O’Neill and Glynn seemed to him worthy of some blowing about round the verges of a hell which would be a caricature of Dante’s. The spirits of the patriotic and religious enthusiasts seemed to him fit to inhabit the fraudulent circles where hidden in hives of immaculate ice they might work their bodies to the due pitch of frenzy. The spirits of the tame sodalists, unsullied and undeserving, he would petrify amid a ring of Jesuits in the circle of foolish and grotesque virginities and ascend above them and their baffled icons to where his Emma, with no detail of her earthly form or vesture abated, invoked him from a Mohammadan paradise.
At the door he had to resign her to others and see her depart with insignificant courtesies and as he came home alone he led his mood through mazes of doubts and misgivings. After that evening he did not see her for a little time as home affairs were rather engrossing. His father’s days of grace were exciting days. It seemed likely that the family would not have where to lay its heads when at the eleventh hour Mr Daedalus found a roof with a friend from the North of Ireland who was traveller for an ironmonger. Mr Wilkinson was in possession of an oldfashioned house containing perhaps fifteen rooms of which he was nominally a tenant but, the landlord, an old miser without kith or kin in the world, having died very opportunely, Mr Wilkinson’s tenancy was untroubled by considerations of time or money. Mr Daedalus was allowed a set of apartments in this dilapidated mansion for a small weekly payment and on the night before the day fixed for his legal eviction he moved his camp by night. The little furniture which remained to them was carried on a float and Stephen and his brother and his mother and his father carried the ancestral portraits themselves as the draymen had drunk a good deal more than was good for them. It was a clear night of late summer freshened with cold as they walked in a body beside the sea-wall. Isabel had been removed earlier in the day and put in Mrs Wilkinson’s charge. Mr Daedalus was a long way in front with Maurice and in high spirits with his successful manoeuvre. Stephen followed with his mother and even she was light-hearted. The tide was lapping softly [at] by the wall, being at the full, and through the clear air Stephen heard his father’s voice like a muffled flute singing a love-song. He made his mother stop to listen and they both leaned on the heavy picture-frames and listened:
Shall carry my heart to thee
Shall carry my heart to thee
And the breath of the balmy night
Shall carry my heart to thee
In Mr Wilkinson’s house there was a lofty drawing-room panelled in oak, entirely bare of furniture except for a piano. During the winter Mr Wilkinson had been paid seven shillings a week by a dancing club for the use of the room on Tuesdays and Fridays but now he used the lower end of the room as a place of general storage for hardware samples. He was a tall one-eyed man with a silent manner and a great power of holding his drink. He had a deep appreciation of his guest whom he never addressed without the prefix “Mr.” He was married to a tall woman as silent as himself who read a great many novelettes and hung half her body out of the windows while her two young children entangled themselves in a pieces of wire-netting and coils of gas-pipes. She had a long white face and she laughed at everything. Mr Daedalus and Mr Wilkinson went to town every morning together and often came back together and, during the day, Mrs Wilkinson hung out of the windows or talked with messenger boys and milkmen while Mrs Daedalus sat by Isabel’s bedside. There could be no doubt now that the girl was in a bad way. Her eyes were piteously enlarged and her v
oice had become hollow. She sat half propped-up by pillows in the bed all day, her damp-looking hair hanging in wisps about her face, turning over the pages of an illustrated book. She began to whimper when she was told to eat or when anyone left her bedside. She showed very [few] little animation except when the piano was playing in the room below and then she made them leave the bedroom door open and closed her eyes. Money was still scarce and still the doctor ordered her delicacies. The lingering nature of her illness had spread a hopeless apathy about the household and, though she herself was little more than a child, she must have been aware of this. Stephen alone with persistent kindness preserved his usual manner of selfish cheerfulness and strove to stir a fire out of her embers of life. He even exaggerated and his mother reproved him for being so noisy. He could not go in to his sister and say to her “Live! live!” but he tried to touch her soul in the shrillness of a whistle or the vibration of a note. Whenever he went into the room he asked questions with an indifferent air as if her illness was of no importance and once or twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from the bed had guessed his meaning.
The summer closed in sultry weather. Cranly was still in Wicklow and Lynch had begun to study for an examination in October. Stephen was too concerned with himself to talk much with his brother. In a few days Maurice was to return to school, that event having been delayed a fortnight on account of what he himself called the ‘boot and clothes’ complaint. Mr Wilkinson’s household dragged out day after day, Mrs Wilkinson hanging herself out of the windows and Mrs Daedalus watching her daughter. Very often Mr Wilkinson brought his guest home after a day’s carouse and the two would sit in the kitchen for the rest of the night talking politics loudly. When Stephen turned the corner of the avenue he could often hear his father’s voice shouting or his father’s [voice] fist banging the table. When he came in the two disputants would ask him for his opinion but he always ate what supper there was without re mark and [went up] retired to his room and as he went up the stairs he could hear his father say to Mr Wilkinson “Queer chap, you know, queer chap!” and he could imagine the heavy stare of Mr Wilkinson’s eyes.
Stephen was very lonely. As at the beginning of the summer so now: he wandered vaguely through the streets. Emma had gone away to the Isles of Aran with a Gaelic party. He was hardly unhappy and yet not happy. His moods were still waited upon and courted and set down in phrases of prose and verse: and when the soles of his feet were too tired [or] his mood too dim a memory or too timid a hope, he would wander into the long lofty dusty drawing-room and sit at the piano while the sunless dusk enwrapped him. He could feel about him and above him the hopeless house and the decay of leaves and in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane. The chords that floated towards the cobwebs and rubbish and floated vainly to the dust-strewn windows were the meaningless voices of his perturbation and all they could do was flow fl meaningless succession through all the chambers of sentience. He breathed an air of tombs.
Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger upon every falsehood it contained: [an] egoism which proceeded bravely before men to be frighted by the least challenge of the conscience, freedom which would dress the world anew in [the] vestments and usages begotten of enslavement, mastery of an art understood by few which owed its very delicacy to a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours. Cemeteries revealed their ineffectual records to him, records of the lives of all those who with good grace or bad grace had accepted an obvious divinity. The vision of all those failures, and the vision, far more pitiful, of congenital lives, shuffling onwards amid yawn and howl, beset him with evil: and evil, in the similitude of a distorted ritual, called to his soul to commit fornication with her.
One evening he sat [silent] at his piano while the dusk enfolded him. The dismal sunset lingered still upon the window-panes in a smoulder of rusty fires. Above him and about him hung the shadow of decay, the decay of leaves and flowers, the decay of hope. He desisted from his chords and waited, bending upon the keyboard in silence: and his soul commingled itself with the assailing, inarticulate dusk. A form which he knew for his mother’s appeared far down in the room, standing in the doorway. In the gloom her excited face was crimson. A voice which he remembered as his mother’s, a voice of a terrified human being, called his name. The form at the piano answered:
— Do you know anything about the body? . . .
He heard his mother’s voice addressing him excitedly like the voice of a messenger in a play:
— What ought I do? There’s some matter coming away from the hole in Isabel’s . . . stomach . . . Did you ever hear of that happening?
— I don’t know, he answered trying to make sense of her words, trying to say them again to himself.
— Ought I send for the doctor . . . Did you ever hear of that? . . . What ought I do?
— I don’t know . . . What hole?
— The hole . . . the hole we all have . . . here.
XXIII
Stephen was present in the room when his sister died. As soon as her mother had been alarmed the priest was sent for. He was a diminutive man who carried his head mostly on his right shoulder and spoke in a lisping voice which was not very easily heard. He heard the girl’s confession and went away saying “Leave it to God: He knows best: leave it to God.” The doctor came with Mr Daedalus on a car, examined the girl and asked had she seen a priest. He went away saying that while there was life there was hope but that she was very low: he would call in the morning. Isabel died a little after midnight. Her father who was not quite sober walked about the room on tiptoe, cried in little fits every time his daughter showed a change and kept on saying “That’s right, duckey: take that now” whenever her mother forced her to swallow a little champagne and then nodded his head until he began to cry afresh. He kept telling everyone to keep her spirits up. Maurice sat down by the empty fireplace and gazed in the grate. Stephen sat at the head of the bed and held his sister’s hand, her mother bending over her offering her the glass and kissing her and praying. Isabel seemed to Stephen to have grown very old: her face had become a woman’s face. Her eyes turned constantly between the two figures nearest to her as if to say she had been wronged in being given life and, at Stephen’s word, she gulped down whatever was offered her. Then she could swallow no more her mother said to her “You are going home, dear, now. You are going to heaven where we will all meet again. Don’t you know? . . . Yes, dear . . . Heaven, with God” and the child fixed her great eyes on her mother’s face while her bosom began to heave loudly beneath the bedclothes.
Stephen felt very acutely the futility of his sister’s life. He would have done many things for her and, though she was almost a stranger to him, he was sorry to see her lying dead. Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain. His sister had enjoyed little more than the fact of life, few or none of its privileges. The supposition of an allwise God calling a soul home whenever it seemed good to Him could not redeem in his eyes the futility of her life. The wasted body that lay before him had existed by sufferance; the spirit that dwelt therein had literally never dared to live and had not learned anything by an abstention which it had not willed for itself. She had not been anything herself and for that reason had not attached anything to herself or herself to anything. When they were children together people had spoken of ‘Stephen and Maurice’ and her name had been added by an afterthought. Even her name, a certain lifeless name, had held her apart from the plays of life. Stephen remembered the voices of children crying with glee and venom:
Stephen, the Reephen, the Rix-Dix Deephen!
but it was always with half-hearted glee and shamefaced venom that they had called out her name:
Isabel, the Risabel, the Rix-Dix Disabel.
Isabel’s death was the occasion of bringing to the house man
y of Mrs Daedalus’ relatives. They knocked a little timidly at the hall-door and though they were very retiring in manner their host convicted them — the females, at least — privately of making a cunning use of their eyes. The males he received in the long empty drawingroom in which an early fire had been lit. During the two nights of the girl’s wake a big company assembled in the drawingroom: they did not smoke but they drank and told stories. [Every] The morning after the table looked like a marine-stores so crowded was it with empty bottles, black and green. Isabel’s two brothers assisted at this wake. The discussions were often general. One of the boys’ uncles was a very shock-headed asthmatic man who had in his youth been rather indiscreet with his landlady’s daughter and the family had been scarcely appeased by a tardy marriage. One of Mr Daedalus’ friends, a clerk in the Police Courts, told the company of the task which a friend of his in the Castle had in examining prohibited books:
— Such filth, he said. You’d wonder how any man would have the face to print it.
— When I was a boy, said Uncle John in a very flat accent, and had more of a taste for reading than now and much less money I used to go to a bookshop near Patrick’s Close. One day I went there to buy a copy of the
— I know, I know, said the clerk from the Police Courts.
— Such a book to put into the hands of a young lad! Such ideas to put in his head! Scandalous!
Maurice let a moment of respectful approval pass and then he asked:
— Did you buy the book, Uncle John?
Everyone seemed inclined to laugh but Uncle John grew very red and angry and went on:
