Ch4 Pt1

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter four, Part one of a portrait of the Artist
as a young man. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
Peter Bobby. A Portrait of the Artist as a young

(00:25):
man by James Joyce, Chapter four, Part one. Sunday was
dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to
the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to the Guardian Angels, Wednesday to
Saint Joseph, Thursday to the most blessed Sacrament of the Altar,

(00:45):
Friday to the Suffering Jesus, Saturday to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of
some holy image or mystery. His day began with an
heroic an offering of its every moment of thought or
action for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff, and with
an early mass. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety,

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and often as he knelt among the few worshipers at
the side altar, following with his interleaved prayer book the
Murmur of the Priest, he glanced up for an instant
towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the
two candles, which were the Old and the New Testaments,
and imagined that he was kneeling at Mass in the catacombs.

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His daily life was laid out in devotional areas by
means of ejaculations and prayers. He stored up ungrudgingly for
the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years.
Yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with
ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not

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wholly reward his zeal of prayer. Since he could never
know how much temporal punishment and he had remitted by
way of suffrage for the agonizing souls and fearful lest
in the midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from
the infernal only in that it was not everlasting, his
penance might avail no more than a drop of moisture.

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He drove his soul daily through an increasing circle of
works of supererogation, every part of his day, divided by
what he regarded now as the duties of his station
in life, circled about its own center of spiritual energy.
His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity. Every thought,

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word and deed, every instance of consciousness could be made
to re vibrate radiantly in heaven, And at times his
sense of such immediate repercussion was so lively that he
seemed to feel his soul in devotion pressing like fingers
the keyboard of a great cash register, and to see
the amount of his purchase start forth immediately in heaven,

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not as a number, but as a frail column of incense,
or as a slender flower. The rosaries, too, which he
said constantly, for he carried his beads loose in his
trousers pockets, that he might tell them as he walked
the streets, transformed themselves into coronels of flowers of such vague,

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unearthly texture that they seemed to him as hueless and
odorless as they were nameless. He offered up each of
his three daily chaplets, that his soul might grow strong
in each of the three theological virtues, in faith in
the Father who had created him, in hope in the
Son who had redeemed him, and in love of the

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holy Ghost who had sanctified him. And this thrice triple
prayer he offered to the three persons through Mary, in
the name of her joyful and sorrowful and glorious mysteries,
on each of the seven days of the week. He
further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the
Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out

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of it, day by day the seven deadly sins which
had defiled it in the past, And he prayed for
each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would
descend upon him. Though it seemed strange to him at
times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct
in their nature that each should be prayed for apart
from the others, yet he believed that at some future

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stage of his spiritual progress, this difficulty would be removed,
when his sinful soul had been raised up from its
weakness and enlightened by the third person of the Most
Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more and with trepidation,
because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the
unseen peraclet, whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind.

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To sin against whom was a sin beyond forgiveness. The eternal,
mysterious secret being to whom as God God the priests
offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet
of the tongues of Fire. The imagery through which the
nature and kinship of the three persons of the Trinity

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were darkly shadowed forth in the books of Devotion, which
he read, the Father contemplating from all eternity as in
a mirror his divine perfections, and thereby begetting eternally the
eternal Son and the Holy Spirit, proceeding out of Father
and Son from all eternity, were easier of acceptance by
his mind by reason of their august incomprehensibility, than was

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the simple fact that God had loved his soul from
all eternity for ages before he had been born into
the world, for ages before the world itself had existed.
He had heard the names of the passions of love
and hate, pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit,
had found them set forth solemnly in books, and wondered

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why his soul was unable to harbor them for any time,
or to force his lips to utter their names with conviction.
A brief anger had often invested him but he had
never been able to make it in abiding passion, and
had always felt himself passing out of it, as if
his very body were being divested with ease of some
outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark

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and murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire him with
a brief, iniquitous lust. It too had slipped beyond his grasp,
leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was
the only love, and that the only hate his soul
would harbor. But he could no longer disbelieve in the

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reality of love, since God himself had loved his individual
soul with divine love from all eternity. Gradually, as his
soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole
world forming one vast, symmetrical expression of God's power and love.
Life became a divine gift. For every moment and sensation

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of which were it, even the sight of a single
leaf hanging on the twig of a tree, His soul
should praise and thank the giver. The world for all
its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul,
save as a theorem of divine power. And love and universality.

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So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine
meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he
could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary
that he should continue to live. Yet that was part
of the divine purpose, and he dared not question its use. He,
above all others who had sinned so deeply and so

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foully against the divine purpose. Meek and debased by this
consciousness of the one, eternal, omnipresent, perfect reality, his soul
took up again her burden of pieties, masses and prayers,
and sacraments and mortifications. And only then, for the first
time since he had brooded on the great mystery of love,

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did he feel within him a warm movement like that
of some newly born life or virtue of the soul itself.
The attitude of rapture and sacred art, the raised and
parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of one
about to swoon, became for him an image of the

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soul in prayer, humiliated and faint before her creator. But
he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation,
and did not allow himself to desist from even the
least or lowliest devotion, striving also by constant mortification to
undo the sinful past, rather than to achieve a saintliness.

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Fraught with peril. Each of his senses was brought under
a rigorous discipline. In order to mortify the sense of sight,
he made it his rule to walk in the street
with downcast eyes, glancing neither to right nor left, and
never behind him. His eyes shunned every encounter with the
eyes of women. From time to time he also balked

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them by a sudden effort of the will, as by
lifting them suddenly in the middle of an unfinished sentence
and closing the book to mortify his hearing. He exerted
no control over his voice, which was then breaking. Neither
sang nor whistled, and made no attempt to flee from
noises which caused him painful nervous irritation, such as the

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sharpening of knives on the knife board, the gathering of
cinders on the fire shovel, and the twigging of the carpet.
To mortify his smell was more difficult, as he found
in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odors, whether they
were the odors of the outdoor world, such as those
of dung and tar, or the odors of his own person,

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among which he had made many curious comparisons and experiments.
He found in the end that the only odor against
which his sense of smell revolted was a certain stale,
fishy stink, like that of long standing urine. And whenever
it was possible, he subjected himself to this unpleasant odor

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to mortify the taste. He practiced strict habits at table,
observed to the letter all the fasts of the church,
and sought by distraction to divert his mind from the
savors of different foods. But it was to the mortification
of touch that he brought the most assiduous ingenuity of inventiveness.
He never consciously changed his position in bed, sat in

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the most uncomfortable positions, suffered patiently every itch and pain,
kept away from the fire, remained on his knees all
through the mass, except at the gospels, left parts of
his neck and face undried so that air might sting them.
And whenever he was not saying, his beads carried his
arms stiffly at his sides, like a runner, and never

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in his pockets or clasped behind him. He had no
temptations to sin mortally. It surprised him, however, to find that,
at the end of his course of intricate piety and
self restraint, he was so easily at the mercy of
childish and unworthy imperfections. His prayers and fasts availed him
little for the suppression of anger at hearing his mother's

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sneeze or at being disturbed in his devotions. It needed
an immense effort of his will to master the impulse
which urged him to give outlet to such irritation. Images
of the outbursts of trivial anger, which he had often
noted among his masters, their twitching mouths, close shut lips,
and flushed cheeks, recurred to his memory, discouraging him for

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all his practice of humility. By the comparison, to merge
his life in the common tide of other lives was
harder for him than any fasting prayer, And it was
his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction,
which caused in his soul at last a sensation of
spiritual dryness, together with a growth of doubts and scruples.

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His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the
sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried up sources.
His confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous
and unrepented imperfections. His actual reception of the Eucharist did
not bring him the same dissolving moments of virginal self
surrender as did those spiritual communions made by him, sometimes

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at the close of some visit to the blessed sacrament.
The book which he used for these visits was an old,
neglected book written by Saint Alphonsis Leigwori, with fading characters
and seer fox papered leaves. A faded world of fervent
love and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his
soul by the reading of its pages, in which the

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imagery of the catacules was interwoven with the communicant's prayers.
An inaudible voice seemed to caress the soul, telling her
names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal and
come away, bidding her look forth a spouse, from a mana,
and from the mountains of the Leopards, and the soul
seemed to answer with the same inaudible voice, surrendering herself

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inter ubera mea commorobtour. This idea of surrender had a
perilous attraction for his mind, now that he felt his
soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh,
which began to murmur to him again during his prayers
and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power

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to know that he could, by a single act of consent,
in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done.
He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his
naked feet, and to be waiting for the first faint, timid,
noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then, almost at

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the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of
sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from the flood,
upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of
the will or a sudden ejaculation, And seeing the silver
line of the flood far away and beginning again its
slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power

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and satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had
not yielded nor undone all when he had eluded the
flood of temptation many times. In this way, he grew
troubled and wondered whether the grace which he had refused
to lose was not being filched from him. Little by little,
the clear certitude of his own immunity grew dim and

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to it succeeded a vague fear that his soul had
really fallen unawares. It was with difficulty that he won
back his o old consciousness of his state of grace
by telling himself that he had prayed to God at
every temptation, and that the grace which he had prayed
for must have been given to him inasmuch as God
was obliged to give it. The very frequency and violence

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of temptations showed him at last the truth of what
he had heard about the trials of the saints. Frequent
and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of
the soul had not fallen, and that the devil raged
to make it fall. Often, when he had confessed his
doubts and scruples, some momentary inattentionate prayer, a movement of

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trivial anger in his soul, or a subtle wilfulness in
speech or act. He was bidden by his confessor to
name some sin of his past life before absolution was
given him. He named it with humility and shame, and
repented of it once more. It humiliated and shamed him
to think that he would never be freed from it. Wholly,

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however hoily he might live, or whatever virtues or perfections
he might attain, a restless feeling of guilt would always
be present with him. He would confess and repent and
be absolved, confess and repent again, and be absolved again fruitlessly.
Perhaps that first hasty confession, wrung from him by the

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fear of hell, had not been good. Perhaps, concerned only
for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere sorrow
for his sin. But the surest sign that his confession
had been good, and that he had had sincere sorrow
for his sin, was he knew the amendment of his life.
I have amended my life, have I not? He asked himself.

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The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his
back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown
cross blind, and as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling
and looping the cord of the other blind. Stephen stood
before him, following for a moment with his eyes the
waning of the long summer daylight above the roofs, or

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the slow, deft movements of the priestly fingers. The priest's
face was in total shadow, but the waning daylight from
behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves
of the skull. Stephen followed also with his ears the
accents and intervals of the priest's voice as he spoke
gravely and cordially of indifferent themes the vacation which had

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just ended the colleges of the Order abroad, the transference
of masters. The grave and cordial voice went on easily
with fits tail, and in the pauses Stephen felt bound
to set it on again with respectful questions. He knew
that the tale was a prelude, and his mind waited
for the sequel. Ever since the message of summons had

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come for him from the Director, his mind had struggled
to find the meaning of the message, and during the long,
restless time he had sat in the college parlor waiting
for the director to come in, his eyes had wandered
from one sober picture to another around the walls, and
his mind wandered from one guess to another, until the
meaning of the summons had almost become clear. Then, just

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as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent
the director from coming, he had heard the handle of
the door turning and the swish of a sutain. The
director had begun to speak of the Dominican and Franciscan orders,
and of the friendship between Saint Thomas and Saint Bonaventure.
The Capuchin dress, he thought was rather too Stephen's face

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gave back the priest's indulgent smile, and, not being anxious
to give an opinion, he made a slight, dubitative movement
with his lips. I believe, continued the director, that there
is some talk now among the Capucins themselves of doing
away with it, and following the example of the other Franciscans.

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I suppose they would retain it in the cloister, said Stephen. Oh, certainly,
said the director. For the cloister, it is all right,
But for the streets, I really think it would be
better to do away with it, don't you It must
be troublesome. I imagine, of course, it is of course, Just
imagine when I was in Belgium. I used to see

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them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this
thing up about their knees. It was really ridiculous. Le
jeups they called them in Belgium. The vowel was so
modified as to be indistinct. What do they call them? Lejups? Oh?

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Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile, which he
could not see on the priest's shadowed face, its image
or specter only passing rapidly across his mind. As the low,
discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed calmly before
him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of
the evening, and the faint yellow glow which hid the

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tiny flame kindling upon his cheek. The names of articles
of dress worn by women, or of certain soft and
delicate stuffs used in their making, brought always to his
mind a delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy, he
had imagined the reins by which horses are driven as

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slender silken bands, and had shocked him to feel at
Stradbrook the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him too,
when he had felt for the first time beneath his
tremulous fingers, the brittle texture of a woman stalking, for
retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed
to him an echo or a prophecy of his own state.

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It was only amid soft worded phrases, or within rose
soft stuffs, that he dared to conceive of the soul
or body of a woman moving with tender life. But
the phrase on the priest's lips was disingenuous, for he
knew that a priest should not speak lightly on that theme.
The phrase had been spoken lightly with design, and he

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felt that his face was being searched by the eyes
in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of
the craft of Jesuits, he had put aside frankly, as
not borne out by his own experience. His masters, even
when they had not attracted him, had seemed to him
always intelligent and serious priests, athletic and high spirited prefects.

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He thought of them as men who washed their bodies
briskly with cold water and wore clean cold linen. During
all the years he had lived among them in Clongoes
and in Belvidere, he had received only two pandies, And
though these had been dealt him in the wrong. He
knew that he had often escaped punishment. During all those years,

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he had never heard from any of his masters a
flippant word. It as they who had taught him Christian
doctrine and urged him to live a good life, And
when he had fallen into grievous sin, it was they
who had led him back to grace. Their presence had
made him diffident of himself when he was a muff
in Clongo's, and it had made him diffident of himself

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also while he had held his equivocal position in Belvidere.
A constant sense of this had remained with him up
to the last year of his school life. He had
never once disobeyed or allowed turbulent companions to seduce him
from his habit of quiet obedience, And even when he
doubted some statement of a master, he had never presumed

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to doubt openly. Lately, some of their judgments had sounded
a little childish in his ears, and had made him
feel a regret and pity, as though he were slowly
passing out of an accustomed world and were hearing its
language for the last time. One day, when some boys
had gathered round a priest under the shed near the chapel.
He had heard the priest say, I believe that Lord

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mac Caaulay was a man who probably never committed a
mortal sin in his life, that is to say, a
deliberate mortal sin. Some of the boys had then asked
the priest if Victor Hugo were not the greatest French writer.
The priest had answered that Victor Hugo had never written
half so well when he had turned against the Church,

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as he had written when he was a Catholic. But
there are so many eminent French critics, said the priest,
who consider that even Victor Hugo, great as he certainly was,
had not so pure a French style as Luis villeaut.
The tiny flame which the priest's illusion had kindled upon

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Stephen's cheek had sunk down again, and his eyes were
still fixed calmly on the colorless sky. But an unresting
doubt flew hither and thither before his mind masked. Memories
passed quickly before him. He recognized scenes and persons, yet
he was conscious that he had failed to perceive some
vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the grounds,

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watching the sports in clongoes and eating slim jim out
of his cricket cap. Some Jesuits were walking round the
cycle track in the company of ladies. The echoes of
certain expressions used in clongoes sounded in remote caves of
his mind. His ears were listening to these distant echoes
amid the silence of the parlor, when he became aware

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that the priest was addressing him in a different voice.
I sent for you to day, Stephen, because I wished
to speak to you on a very important subject. Yes, sir,
have you ever felt that you had a vocation? Stephen
parted his lips to answer yes, and then withheld the words. Suddenly,

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the priest waited for the answer and added, I mean,
have you ever felt within yourself in your soul a
desire to join the order? Think I have sometimes thought
of it, said Stephen. The priest let the blind courd
fall to one side, and, uniting his hands, leaned his

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chin gravely upon them. Communing with himself in a college
like this, he said at length, there is one boy,
or perhaps two or three boys, whom God calls to
the religious life. Such a boy is marked off from
his companions, by his piety, by the good example he
shows to others, he has looked up to by them

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he has chosen, perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists.
And you, Stephen, have been such a boy in this college,
prefect of our blessed Lady's sodality. Perhaps you are the
boy in this college whom God designs to call to himself.
A strong note of pride, reinforcing the gravity of the

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priest's voice made Stephen's heart quicken. In response to receive
that call, Stephen said, the priest is the greatest honor
that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No
king or emperor on this earth has the power of
the priest of God. No angel or archangel in Heaven,

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no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, has the
power of a priest of God. The power of the keys,
the power to bind and to loose from sin, the
power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the
creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them.
The power the authority to make the Great God of

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Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form
of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen. A
flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he
heard in this proud address an echo of his own
proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a

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priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which
angels and saints stood in reverence. His soul had loved
to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen
himself a young and silent mannered priest entering a confessional,
swiftly ascending the altar steps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague

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acts of the priesthood, which pleased him by reason of
their semblance of reality and of their distance from it.
In that dim life which he had lived through in
his musings, he had assumed the voices and gestures which
he had noted with various priests. He had bent his
knees sideways like such a one. He had shaken the

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thurible only slightly like such a one. His chausible had
swung open like that of such another. As he had
turned to the altar again after having blessed the people,
And above all, it had pleased him to fill the
second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He
shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him

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to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in
his own person, or that the ritual should assign to
him so clear and final an office. He longed for
the minor sacred offices to be vested with the tunicle
of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar,
forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humoral

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veil holding the pattern within its folds, or when the
sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon in a
dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant,
his hands joined and his face towards the people, and
sing the chant it a missa este. If ever he

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had seen himself celebrant, it was as in the pictures
of the mass, in his child's mass, in a church
without worshipers save for the Angel of the sacrifice, at
a bare altar, and served by an acolyte scarcely more
boyish than himself. In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone,
his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality,

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and it was partly the absence of an appointed rite,
which had always constrained him to inaction, whether he had
allowed silence to cover his anger or pride, or had
suffered only an embrace he longed to give. He listened
in reverent silence now to the priest's appeal, and through
the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding

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him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He
would know then what was the sin of Simon Magus,
and what the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which
there was no forgiveness. He would no obscure things hidden
from others, from those who were conceived and born children wrath.

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He would know the sins, the sinful longings, and sinful
thoughts and sinful acts of others, hearing them murmured into
his ears in the confessional under the shame of a
darkened chapel, by the lips of women and of girls.
But rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition
of hands, his soul would pass again, uncontaminated, to the

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white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would
linger upon the hands with which he would elevate and
break the host. No touch of sin would linger on
his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink them.
Nation to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord,
he would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being

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as sinless as the innocent, and he would be a
priest forever, according to the order of Melchisedek. I will
offer up my mass to morrow morning, said the director,
that Almighty God may reveal to you you his holy will.
And let you, Stephen, make a novena to your holy patron, Saint,

(31:06):
the first Martyr, who is very powerful with God. That
God may enlighten your mind. But you must be quite sure, Stephen,
that you have a vocation, because it would be terrible
if you found afterwards that you had none. Once a priest,
always a priest. Remember your Catechism tells you that the

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sacrament of Holy Orders is one of those which can
be received only once, because it imprints on the soul
an indelible spiritual mark which can never be effaced. It
is before you must weigh well, not after. It is
a solemn question, Stephen, because on it may depend the

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salvation of your eternal soul. But we will pray to
God together. He held open the heavy hall door and
gave his hand, as if already to a companion in
the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide
platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress
of mild evening air. Towards Findler's Church, a quartet of

(32:10):
young men were striding along with linked arms, swaying their
heads and stepping to the agile melody of their leaders concertina.
The music passed in an instant as the first bars
of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of
his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly, as a sudden

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wave dissolved the sand built turrets of children. Smiling at
the trivial air, he raised his eyes to the priest's face, and,
seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day,
detached his hands slowly, which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship.
As he descended the steps, the impression which effaced his

(32:53):
troubled self communion was that of a mirthless mask reflecting
a sunken day. From the threshold of the college, the
shadow then of the life of the college passed gravely
over his consciousness. It was a grave and ordered and
passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares.
He wondered how he would pass the first night in

(33:14):
the novitiate, and with what dismay he would wake the
first morning in the dormitory. The troubling odor of the
long corridors of klongoes came back to him, and he
heard the discreet murmur of the burning gas. Flames. At
once from every part of his being, unrest began to irradiate.
A feverish quickening of his pulses followed, and a din

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of meaningless words drove his reasoned thoughts hither and thither Confusedly.
His lungs dilated and sank, as if he were inhaling
a warm, moist, unsustaining air. And he smelt again the
warm moist air which hung in the bath in clongoes,
above the sluggish turf colored water. Some instinct, waking at

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these memories, stronger than education or piety, quickened within him
At every near approach to that life, an instinct subtle
and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The chill and
order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising
in the cold of the morning and filing down with

(34:19):
the others to early mass, and trying vainly to struggle
with his prayers against the fainting sickness of his stomach.
He saw himself sitting at dinner with the community of
a college. What then had become of that deep rooted
shyness of his which had made him loth to eat
or drink under a strange roof what had come of

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the pride of his spirit, which had always made him
conceive himself as a being, a part in every order?
The Reverend Stephen Daedalus s j his name in that
new life, leaped into characters before his eyes, and to
it there followed a mental sensation of an undefined face

(35:01):
or color of a face. The color faded and became strong,
like a changing glow of pallid brick red. Was it
the raw, reddish glow he had so often seen on
wintry mornings on the shaven gills of the priests. The
face was eyeless and sour favored, and devout, shot with
pink tinges of suffocated anger. Was it not a mental

(35:25):
specter of the face of one of the Jesuits, whom
some of the boys called lantern Jaws and others Foxy Campbell.
He was passing at that moment before the Jesuit House
in Gardener Street, and wondered vaguely which window would be
his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered
at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of

(35:47):
his soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary
at the frail hold which so many years of order
and obedience had of him. When once a definite and
irrevocable act of his threatened to and forever in time
and in eternity his freedom, the voice of the Director,
urging upon him, the proud claims of the Church, and

(36:09):
the mystery and power of the priestly office, repeated itself
idly in his memory. His soul was not there to
hear and greet it, and he knew now that the
exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle,
formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle.
As priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social

(36:33):
or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did
not touch him to the quick. He was destined to
learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn
the wisdom of others, himself wandering among the snares of
the world. The snares of the world were its ways
of sin. He would fall, he had not yet fallen,

(36:55):
but he would fall silently in an instant, not to
fall too hard, too hard, And he felt the silent
lapse of his soul, as it would be at some
instant to come falling, falling but not yet fallen, Still unfallen,
but about to fall. He crossed the bridge over the

(37:17):
stream of the Tolkah and turned his eyes coldly for
an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin,
which stood fowl wise on a pole in the middle
of a ham shaped encampment of poor cottages. Then, bending
to the left, he followed the lane which led up
to his house. The faint, sour stink of rotted cabbages

(37:39):
came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising
ground above the river. He smiled to think that it
was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house,
and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win
the day in his soul. Then a short laugh broke
from his lips as he thought of that solitary farm

(37:59):
head in the kitchen gardens behind their house, whom they
had nicknamed the man with the Hat. A second laugh,
taking rise from the first, after a pause, broke from
him involuntarily as he thought of how the man with
the hat worked, considering in turn the four points of
the sky, and then regretfully plunging his spade in the earth.

(38:23):
He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and
passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A group
of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table.
Tea was nearly over, and only the last of the
second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small
glass jars and jam pots which did service for tea cups.

(38:44):
Discarded crusts and lumps of sugar bread, turned brown by
the tea which had been poured over them, lay scattered
on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and
there on the board, and a knife with a broken
ivory handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged
turn over. The sad, quiet, gray blue glow of the

(39:05):
dying day came through the window, and the open door,
covering over and laying quietly. A sudden instinct of remorse
in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had
been freely given to him the eldest. But the quiet
glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign
of rancor. He sat near them at the table and

(39:29):
asked where his father and mother were. One answered gone
bro to Braul de Broux at bro A bro Housborough,
still another removal. A boy named Fallon and Belvedere had
often asked him, with a silly laugh why they moved
so often. A frown of scorn darkened quickly his forehead

(39:49):
as he heard again the silly laughter of the questioner.
He asked, why are we on the move again? If
it's a fair question. The same sister answered because Borough
though Borough Landborough Lord Borough Wilborough Putbroau Osborough Outbrough. The
voice of his youngest brother, from the farther side of

(40:11):
the fireplace, began to sing the air oft in the
silly night. One by one, the others took up the
air until a full choir of voices was singing. They
would sing so for hours, melody after melody, glee after
glee till the last pale light died down on the horizon,

(40:32):
till the first dark night clouds came forth and night fell.
He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took
up the air with them. He was listening with pain
of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their fail fresh,
innocent voices, even before they set out on life's journey,

(40:54):
they seemed weary already of the way. He heard the
choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through
an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children,
and heard in all the echoes an echo also of
the recurring note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary

(41:16):
of life, even before entering upon it. And he remembered
that Newman had heard this note also in the broken
lines of Virgil, giving utterance, like the voice of nature herself,
to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things,
which has been the experience of her children in every time.

(41:40):
End of Chapter four, Part one,