第77章

-- Are you in good circumstances at present?

-- Do, look it? Stephen asked bluntly.

-- So then, Cranly went on musingly, you were born in the lap of luxury.

He used the phrase broadly and loudly as he often used technical expressions, as if he wished his hearer to understand that they were used by him without conviction.

-- Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if or would you?

-- If I could, Stephen said, that would cost me very little.

-- Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

-- Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions?

Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:

-- Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

-- Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

-- Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said.

-- And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

-- The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

-I don't care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely and flatly. I call him a pig.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

-- Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has apologized for him.

-- Did the idea ever occur to you, Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what he pretended to be?

-- The first person to whom that idea occurred, Stephen answered, was Jesus himself.

-- I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever occur to you that he was himself a conscious hypocrite, what he called the jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that he was a blackguard?

-- That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

He turned towards his friend's face and saw there a raw smile which some force of will strove to make finely significant.

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:

-- Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

-- Somewhat, Stephen said.

-- And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?

-- I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.

-- And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?

-- Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.

-- I see, Cranly said.

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once by saying:

-- I fear many things: dogs, horses, fire-arms, the sea, thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.

-- But why do you fear a bit of bread?

-- I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear.

-- Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious communion?

-- The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I

fear more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.

-- Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

-- I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

-- Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

-- I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

They had walked on towards the township of Pembroke and now, as they went on slowly along the avenues, the trees and the scattered lights in the villas soothed their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind a hedge of laurel a light glimmered in the window of a kitchen and the voice of a servant was heard singing as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken bars: Rosie O'Grady. Cranly stopped to listen, saying: -- Mulier cantat. The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman's hand. The strife of their minds was quelled.

The figure of a woman as she appears in the liturgy of the church passed silently through the darkness: a white-robed figure, small and slender as a boy, and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high as a boy's, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first chanting of the passion: Et tu cum Jesu Galilaeo eras. And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a young star, shining clearer as the voice intoned the pro-paroxytone and more faintly as the cadence died.

The singing ceased. They went on together, Cranly repeating in strongly stressed rhythm the end of the refrain: And when we are married, O, how happy we'll be For I love sweet Rosie O'Grady And Rosie O'Grady loves me. -- There's real poetry for you, he said. There's real love.