Complete Works of James Joyce (269 page)

He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of the college in his throat and lungs, obscuring his eyes and obfuscating his brain. The little iron watch on the table had barely passed the half hour: eleven o’clock seemed so far off. He had to open his Machiavelli and read out a paragraph until the teacher’s ear was satisfied. The dingy chronicle fell piecemeal from his lips, dull wooden words. From time to time he glanced up from the page to see the thick mouth of the priest correct his slovenly ‘o’s now with a sudden harsh ejaculation of the vowel sound, now with a slow mute protrusion of the lips. The little iron watch ticked on for another five minutes. Then the teacher began to correct the exercise. Stephen gazed wearily out of the window, across the mist-laden gardens. The air was webbed with water vapours and all the flower-beds and walks confronted the grey of the sky with a truculent sodden brown. Mackintoshes and overcoats came along the walks or down the steps of the monument under their umbrellas or surmounted by a muffled human head. The footpath inside the chains where Stephen had so often walked with his friends at night glistened like a grey mirror. Stephen watched the feet pass along the polished surface: he wondered if it was his moments of excessive vitality which cast back by revulsion on such hours of despair. He felt that he was looking at the world with Cranly’s eyes and still he continued gazing along the footpath.

 
— You cannot say, said the teacher running his pencil under a phrase. It is not Italian.

Stephen withdrew his eyes from the window suddenly and stood up:

 
— Will you please excuse me, sir. I am . . . I forgot to tell you that today I must go away earlier . . . I am afraid I shall be late, he added looking at the watch. Will you excuse me?

 
— You have an appointment now?

 
— Yes, I nearly forgot. You must excuse me for today .

 
— Certainly, certainly. You can go now.

 
— Thanks. I am afraid I . . .

 
— Certainly, certainly.

With a flying hand for the banisters he ran down the stairs, taking five steps at a time. He struggled into his raincoat in the hall and emerged panting and half-dressed on to the front steps. He ran out into the middle of the muddy roadway and peered through the dull light towards the eastern side of the square. He walked on swiftly in the middle of the road with his eyes fixed on the same point and then came in again on the footpath and began to run. When he reached the corner of Earlsfort Terrace he stopped running and turning to the right walked on again swiftly. Outside of the University he came alongside of the object which he had been pursuing.

 
— Good morning!

 
— Stephen! . . . Have you been running?

 
— Yes.

 
— Where are you going to?

 
— I saw you from the window.

 
— What window?

 
— In the college. Where are you going?

 
— I am going to Leeson Park.

 
— This way, said Stephen taking her arm.

She seemed as if she were about to resent such an act in broad daylight but after a quick glance of remonstrance allowed him to escort her. Stephen held her arm tightly to his side and discomposed her somewhat by speaking very close to her face. Her face was glistening with mist and it had begun to glow in answer to his excited and passionate manner.

 
— Where did you see me?

 
— I was in the window at my Italian lesson with Father Artifoni. I saw you come through the Green and cross the road.

 
— Did you?

 
— So I jumped up at once and asked him to excuse me as I had to keep an appointment and flew downstairs and out after you.

The colour had begun to deepen very much on her cheek and it was plain that she was trying to appear quite at her ease. At first she had been flattered but now she was becoming a little nervous. She laughed nervously when he told her [why] that he had run out after her.

 
— Goodness! Why did you do that?

Stephen did not answer but he pressed her arm fiercely to his side. At the end of the terrace she turned into a side street instinctively. Here she walked more slowly. The street was very quiet and they both lowered their voices.

 
— How did you know it was I? she said. You must have good sight.

 
— I was gazing out of the window, he answered, looking at the sky and the Green. Lord God! I felt so full of despair. Sometimes I am taken that way: I live such a strange life — without help or sympathy from anyone. Sometimes I am afraid of myself. I call those people in the college not men but vegetables . . . Then while I was cursing my own character I saw you.

 
— Yes? she said looking at the disorderly figure beside her out of her large oval eyes.

 
— You know I was delighted to see you. I had to jump up and rush out. I couldn’t have sat there another minute . . . I said, Here is a human creature at last . . . I can’t tell you how delighted I was.

 
— You strange boy! she said. You mustn’t go running about like that. You must have more sense.

 
— Emma! cried Stephen, don’t start talking to me like that today. I know you want to be very sensible. But you and I — we are both young, aren’t we?

 
— Yes, Stephen.

 
— Very good, then. If we’re young we feel happy. We feel full of desire.

 
— Desire?

 
— Do you know when I saw you . . .

 
— Yes, how did you know me?

 
— I knew the stride.

 
— Stride!

 
— Do you know, Emma, even from my window I could see your hips moving inside your waterproof? I saw a young woman walking proudly through the decayed city. Yes, that’s the way you walk: you’re proud of being young and proud of being a woman. Do you know when I caught sight of you from my window — do you know what I felt?

There was no use in her essaying indifference now. Her cheeks were covered with a persistent flush and her eyes shone like gems. She gazed straight before her and her breath began to be agitated. They stood together in the deserted street and he continued speaking, a certain ingenuous disattachment guiding his excited passion.

 
— I felt that I longed to hold you in my arms — your body. I longed for you to take me in your arms. That’s all . . . Then I thought I would run after you and say that to you . . . Just to live one night together, Emma, and then to say goodbye in the morning and never to see each other again! There is no such thing as love in the world: only people are young . . .

She tried to take her arm away from his and murmured as if she were repeating from memory:

 
— You are mad, Stephen.

Stephen let go her arm and took her hand in his, saying:

 
— Goodbye, Emma . . . I felt that I wanted to say that to you for my own sake but if I stand here in this stupid street beside you for much longer I shall begin to say more . . . You say I am mad because I do not bargain with you or say I love you or swear to you. But I believe you hear my words and understand me, don’t you?

 
— I don’t understand you indeed, she answered with a touch of anger.

 
— I will give you a chance, said Stephen, pressing her hand close in his two hands. Tonight when you are going to bed remember me and go to your window: I will be in the garden. Open the window and call my name and ask me to come in. Then come down and let me in. We will live one night together — one night, Emma, alone together and in the morning we will say goodbye.

 
— Let go my hand, please, she said pulling her hand away from him. If I had known [if] it was for this mad talk . . . You must not speak to me any more, she said moving on a pace or two and plucking her waterproof out of his reach. Who do you think I am that you can speak to me like that?

 
— It is no insult, said Stephen colouring suddenly as the reverse of the image struck him, for a man to ask a woman what I have asked you. You are annoyed at something else not at that.

 
— You are mad, I think, she said, brushing past him swiftly without taking any notice of his salute. She did not go quickly enough, however, to hide the tears that were in her eyes and he, surprised to see them and wondering at their cause, forgot to say the goodbye that was on his lips. As he watched her walk onward swiftly with her head slightly bowed he seemed to feel her soul and his falling asunder swiftly and for ever after an instant of all but union.

X
XV

Lynch chuckled very much over this adventure. He said it was the most original attempt at seduction of which he had ever heard, so original that . . .

 
— You know, he said, I must tell you that to the ordinary intelligence . . .

 
— To you, that is?

 
— To the ordinary intelligence it looks as if you had taken leave of your senses for the time being.

Stephen stared fixedly at his toes: they were sitting on a bench in the Green.

 
— It was the best I could do, he said.

 
— A very bad best, in my opinion. No girl with an ounce of brains would listen to you. That’s not the way to go about it, man. You run out suddenly after her, come up sweating and puffing and say “Let us lie together.” Did you mean it as a joke?

 
— No, I was quite serious. I thought she might . . . In fact I don’t know what I thought. I saw her, as I told you, and I ran after her and said what was in my mind. We are friends for a long time . . . Now it seems I have acted like a lunatic.

 
— O, no, said Lynch, expanding his chest, not like a lunatic but you went about the affair so strangely.

 
— If I had run after her and proposed to her, proposed marriage that is, you would not say I had acted strangely.

 
— [No, no] Even in that case . . .

 
— No, no, don’t deceive yourself, you would not. You would find an excuse for me.

 
— Well, you see, there is something relatively sane about marriage, isn’t there?

 
— For a man of your ordinary intelligence there may be: not for me. Have you ever read the Form of Solemnization of Marriage in the Book of Common Prayer?

 
— Never.

 
— You should then. Your everyday life is Protestant: you show yourself a Catholic only when you discuss. Well, to me that ceremony is not acceptable: it is not so sane as you imagine. A man who swears before the world to love a woman till death part him and her is sane neither in the opinion of the philosopher who understands what mutability is nor in the opinion of the man of the world who understands that it is safer to be a witness than an actor in such affairs. A man who swears to do something which it is not in his power to do is not accounted a sane man. For my part I do not believe that there was ever a moment of passion so fierce and energetic that it warranted a man in saying “I could love you for ever” to the adored object. Please understand the importance of Goethe . . .

 
— Still marriage is a custom. To follow a custom is a mark of sanity.

 
— It is a mark of ordinariness. I admit that many ordinary people are sane just as I know that many ordinary people have delusions. But a capacity for being deceived by others or by oneself cannot be said to constitute the essential part of sanity. It is rather a question whether a man does encourage an insane condition in himself by deceiving himself voluntarily or allowing himself to be deceived by others voluntarily.

 
— Anyhow your move was not diplomatic.

 
— We all know that, said Stephen standing up, but all genuine diplomacy is with a view to some particularly excellent plum. What plum do you think Cranly is likely to gain by a diplomacy which is highly meritorious in itself? What plum would I be likely to get by proposing a diplomatic marriage except a partner “to behold my chaste conversation, coupled with fear” — eh?

 
— The juice of the fruit, answered Lynch standing up in his turn and looking very thirsty and tired.

 
— The woman herself, you mean?

 
— Exactly.

Stephen walked along the path without saying anything for about twenty yards: then he said:

 
— I like a woman to give herself. I like to receive . . . These people count it a sin to sell holy things for money. But surely what they call the temple of the Holy Ghost should not be bargained for! Isn’t that simony?

 
— You want to sell your verses, don’t you, said Lynch abruptly, and to a public you say you despise?

 
— I do not want to sell my poetical mind to the public. I expect reward from the public for my verses because I believe my verses are to be numbered among the spiritual assets of the State. That is not a simoniacal exchange. I do not sell what Glynn calls the divine afflatus: I do not swear to love, honour and obey the public until my dying day — do I? A woman’s body is a corporal asset of the State: if she traffic with it she must sell it either as a harlot or as a married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress. But a woman is (incidentally) a human being: and a human being’s love and freedom is not a spiritual asset of the State. Can the State buy and sell electricity? It is not possible. Simony is monstrous because it revolts our notion of what is humanly possible. A human being can exert freedom to produce or to accept, or love to procreate or to satisfy. Love gives and freedom takes. The woman in the black straw hat gave something before she sold her body to the State. Emma will sell herself to the State but give nothing.

 
— You know even if you had proposed to buy her decently — for State purposes — said Lynch, kicking his toes moodily at the gravel, she would not have sold at the price.

 
— You think not. Not even if I . . .

 
— Not likely, said the other definitely. What a damn fool she is!

Stephen blushed ingenuously:

 
— You have such a nice way of putting things, he said.

The next time Stephen met Emma in the street she did not salute him. He did not tell the incident to anyone but Lynch. From Cranly he expected scant sympathy and he was deterred from speaking of it to Maurice because he had still the elder brother’s wish to appear successful. The conversation with Lynch had revealed to him with distressing effect the commonplace side of the adventure. He asked himself seriously and often had he expected that she would have answered ‘Yes’ to his proposal. His mind, he thought, must have been somewhat unbalanced that morning. And yet when he reconsidered his own defence of his conduct he found it just. The economic aspect of the affair did not present itself to him very vividly and, indeed, was only vivid enough to make him deplore the fact that the solution of moral problems should be so hopelessly entangled with merely material considerations. He was not sufficiently doctrinaire to wish to have his theory put to the test by a general [revulsion] revolution of society but he could not believe that his theory was utterly impracticable. The Roman Catholic notion that a man should be unswervingly continent from his boyhood and then be permitted to achieve his male nature, having first satisfied the Church as to his orthodoxy, financial condition, [and] prospects and general intentions, and having sworn before witnesses to love his wife forever whether he loved her or not and to beget children for the kingdom of heaven in such manner as the Church approved of — this notion seemed to him by no means satisfactory.

During the train of these reflections the Church sent an embassy of nimble pleaders into his ears. These ambassadors were of all grades and of all types of culture. They addressed every side of his nature in turn. He was a young man with a doubtful future and an unusual character: this was the first salient fact. The ambassadors met it without undue pretence or haste. They stated that it was in their power to make smooth many of the ways which promised to be rough and, by diminishing the hardships of the material nature, to allow the unusual character scope and ease to develop and approve itself. He had deplored the entanglement of merely material considerations in a problem of morals and here, at least, was a warrant that if he chose to give ear to the pleadings of the embassy the moral problem in his case would be set on the road of solving itself free from minor and unworthier cares. He had what he called a ‘modern’ reluctance to give pledges: no pledges were required. If at the end of five years he still persevered in his obduracy of heart he could still seize upon his individual liberty without fear of being called oath-breaker therefor. The practice of due consideration was an old one and a wise one. He himself was the greatest sceptic concerning the perfervid enthusiasms of the patriots. As an artist he had nothing but contempt for a work which had arisen out of any but the most stable mood of the mind. Was it possible that he would exercise less rigour on his life than he desired to exercise on his art? How could he be guilty of such foolishness, of such cynical subordination of the actual to the abstract, if he honestly believed that an institution is to be accounted valuable in proportion to its nearness to some actual human need or energy and that the epithet ‘vivisective’ should be applied to the modern spirit as distinguished from the ancient or category-burdened spirit. He desired for himself the life of an artist. Well! And he feared that the Church would obstruct his desire. But, during the formulation of his artistic creed, had he not found item after item upheld for him in advance by the greatest and most orthodox doctor of the Church and was it anything but vanity which urged him to seek out the thorny crown of the heretic while the entire theory, in accordance with which his entire artistic life was shaped, arose most conveniently for his purpose out of the mass of Catholic theology? He could not accept whole-heartedly the offers of Protestant belief: he knew that the liberty it boasted of was often only the liberty to be slovenly in thought and amorphous in ritual. No-one, not the most rabid enemy of the Church, could accuse it of being slovenly in thought: the subtlety of its disquisitions had become a byword with demagogues. No-one again could accuse the Church of being amorphous in ritual. The Puritan, the Calvinist, the Lutheran were inimical to art and to exuberant beauty: the Catholic was the friend of him who professed to interpret or divulge the beautiful. Could he assert that his own aristocratic intelligence and passion for a supremely satisfying order in all the fervours of artistic creation were not purely Catholic qualities? The ambassadors did not labour this point.

Besides, they said, it is a mark of the modern spirit to be shy in the presence of all absolute statements. However sure you may be now of the reasonableness of your convictions you cannot be sure that you will always think them reasonable. If you sincerely regard a pledge as an infringement of human liberty you cannot pledge yourself against following a reactionary impulse which is certain to overtake you some day. You cannot leave out of sight the possibility that your views of the world will change to such an extent that you will regard all interference with the course of affairs as the part of such [who] as can still be deluded by hope. In that case what will have become of your life? You will have wasted it in efforts to save people who have neither inclination nor aptitude for freedom. You believe in an aristocracy: believe also in the eminence of the aristocratic class and in the order of society which secures that eminence. Do you imagine that manners will become less ignoble, intellectual and artistic endeavour less conditioned, if the ignorant, enthusiastic, spiritual slovens whom we have subjected subject us? Not one of those slovens understands your aims as an artist or wants your sympathy: we, on the contrary, understand your aims and often are in sympathy with them and we solicit your support and consider your comradeship an honour. You are fond of saying that the Absolute is dead. If that be so it is possible that we are all wrong and if once you accept that as a possibility what remains for you but an intellectual disdain? With us you can exercise your contemptuous faculties when you are recognised as one of the patrician order and you will not even be obliged to grant a truce to the very doctrines, the success of which in the world has secured you your patricianship. Make one with us. Your life will be insured from grosser troubles, your art will be safeguarded against the intrusions of revolutionary notions which no artist of whom history tells us has ever made himself champion. Make one with us, on equal terms. In temper and in mind you are still a Catholic. Catholicism is in your blood. Living in an age which professes to have discovered evolution, can you be fatuous enough to think that simply by being wrong-headed you can recreate entirely your mind and temper or can clear your blood of what you may call the Catholic infection? A revolution such as you desire is not brought about by violence but gradually: and, within the Church you have an opportunity of beginning your revolution in a rational manner. You can sow the seeds in the careful furrows entrusted to you and if your seed is good it will prosper. But by going into the unnecessary wilderness and scattering your seed broadcast on all soils what harvest will you have? Everything seems to urge you to a course of moderation, of forbearance; and the purified will can surely display itself quite as well in acceptance as in rejection. The trees do not resent autumn nor does any exemplary thing in nature resent its limitations. Neither then do you resent the limitations of compromise.