Dubliners E-Book

James Joyce

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Dubliners is a wonderfully engaging and accessible collection of stories by James Joyce, an author famed for being difficult to read. It contains fifteen stories, among them The Dead, made into a memorable film by John Huston. This beautiful new edition, with an introduction by John Boyne, was chosen as the One Book, One City title for Dublin in 2012.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

The Sisters

An Encounter

Araby

Eveline

After the Race

Two Gallants

The Boarding House

A Little Cloud

Counterparts

Clay

A Painful Case

Ivy Day in the Committee Room

A Mother

Grace

The Dead

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

by John Boyne

My first encounter with Dubliners came when I was fifteen years old.

My older sister was leaving home to take up a place at an English university and I wanted to give her a present before she went. I wandered into a bookshop close to my school in Terenure during lunch break – not the type of school or area depicted in any of Joyce’s stories – and the book caught my eye. I have it on my desk now as I write this, that same edition, slightly torn, with yellowed edges, the date ‘1986’ inscribed on the title page. The drawing on the front shows a young woman looking up nervously as an enormous feather flies towards her; I have no idea what this is supposed to signify or why the feather is bigger than her head. In the background appears to be the General Post Office, although the Liffey is flowing directly in front of it, which doesn’t make a lot of sense either. But at fifteen, questions like that would never have entered my mind and I chose the book simply because I thought it would remind her of home.

It makes me wonder – how many emigrants over the years have put a paperback copy of Dubliners in their bags before heading to the airport, the docks or the ferry terminals as they made their way to England, America or Australia as a reminder of the city of their birth, a city from which they have found themselves exiled through economic necessity? How many of them are doing it again now?

Before giving my sister the book, however, I began to glance through it, wondering whether I should have a go at it myself even though I was half convinced that it would bore the pants off me. We had a copy of Ulysses in our school library and I had spent an afternoon a few months before navigating the tense waters between Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus and the student Haines as they made their way along the shore in front of Sandycove’s Martello Tower and, although I had stuck with the opening section, the prospect of another 700 pages had filled me with dread. (Again, I was fifteen; I’d only recently traded in Adrian Mole for Holden Caulfield so the meanderings of stately, plump Anyone around my own city were nowhere near as interesting as the wanderings of the catcher in the rye around the streets of Manhattan, picking up girls and saying dirty words.) But Dubliners, I had to admit, looked a lot easier. It was shorter for one thing, less intimidating. I picked a story at random, ‘Two Gallants’, a tale of a couple of bowsies, Corley and Lenehan, who have a terrible attitude towards women, seducing them, stringing them along and then finally swindling one out of a gold coin. I thought they seemed like great fellows altogether. Except I wasn’t quite sure what had happened at the end and so I read it again, this time feeling a little less comfortable with their obvious misogyny and cruel natures.

Still, the story made an impression on me and I wondered whether there might be something in this Joyce fellow after all. I turned back to the beginning, to ‘The Sisters’, and began to read.

I didn’t encounter Dubliners again until university. I was studyingEnglish at Trinity College and, unlike my Terenure days, the streets around College Green, running north across the river onto Parnell Square, past the Garden of Remembrance and onto Dorset Street, brought the world of Joyce alive to me as these were streets that I was walking along every day, streets that were familiar to me and to which I felt an intimate and personal connection. My interest in literature was fully developing by now and I thought it was quite something to be a Dubliner, with a father from the city centre – from Boyne Street, no less – and a literary heritage that was the match of any city in the world.

Reading Dubliners then made me realise something that I had never quite understood before about the short story: that a collection did not have to be a random assortment of disparate fictions gathered together and bound between covers to make a book, but that a writer could and should make connections between the stories, links between the characters, that each would have their place in the greater work and be set there for a reason. I thought of it like a concept album. But then, I was in university at the time so this was the frame of reference I was working in.

Returning to it now as an adult it strikes me how economical Joyce is with language. We still think of Ulysses as a long work filled with classical allusion and historical reference points, but most of the stories in Dubliners are only a few thousand words at most and remain firmly inside their own milieu and yet they linger in the mind and invite re-reading time and again to understand the minds and decipher the intentions of their protagonists. The complexity of thought in ‘The Boarding House’ for example would merit an academic study longer than the story itself. How long has Mrs Mooney known of the relationship between her tenant and her daughter? What has happened to Doran to make him think so contemptuously of his paramour’s station in life? What on earth is Polly actually up to with her mood swings?

Joyce manages to presage themes that would, almost a century later, be common refrains in Irish literature. Reading ‘An Encounter’, it’s hard to imagine a more subtle exploration of potential child abuse than the one that appears in the meeting between the old man and the two boys.

‘I say! Look what he’s doing!’ exclaims the boy Mahony when the old man stands up and steps away from them for a few moments. And what is he doing? Everything is inferred, everything is suggestion, no explanations are needed.

The collection separates itself into three parts exploring the lives of children, the middle-aged and the elderly. It begins with a child contemplating the death of a priest who has had a formative influence on him, a death that he cannot fully comprehend when the whole of life seems open before him now, an endless adventure. There is first love in ‘Araby’, a moving story of a boy’s desperate desire to purchase the right gift from a bazaar for the girl he likes and his pained inability to do so. There is lost love too, only a story later, in ‘Eveline’. By the centre of the collection we encounter the frustrations of middle-age; Farrington’s gradual loss of temper in ‘Counterparts’, his loss of masculinity in the arm-wrestling contest, Mrs Sinico’s loneliness in ‘A Painful Case’, Mrs Kearney’s attempt to re-live her youth vicariously through her daughter in ‘A Mother’. And then, finally, the collection draws to a close with the masterpiece ‘The Dead’.

For the young reader coming to Joyce for the first time, Dubliners is certainly the place to start. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are books that you have to build yourself up for but Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are different kettles of fish altogether, as Joyce himself might have put it. There’s a very pure engagement with storytelling in these fifteen stories, the narratives are to the fore even if it takes the reader a little time to mine down towards the meaning below the surface. The language makes one smile and feel a little unsettled at the same time, such as when the old man in ‘An Encounter’ remarks that what a boy wants is “a nice warm whipping”. And there are still words that, even now, I need to look up in a dictionary as I have no idea what they mean (simoniac, sedulously, bostoons, amongst others), although perhaps this says more about me than it does about the author.

The ‘One City, One Book’ concept, employed in various cities around the world, is a wonderful way to get an entire community engaged in reading, talking about books and sharing their opinions. It’s the biggest book club you can join and there’s no limit on the number of available places. In past years, Dubliners have engaged with classic fiction by Flann O’Brien, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, whose books have illuminated the city through humour, fantasy, horror and mythology. We’ve opened ourselves to new novels by Sebastian Barry and Joseph O’Connor, who have examined the plight of Dublin soldiers in the First World War and an actress recalling her experience during the cultural revolution instigated by Synge, Lady Gregory and Yeats.

But it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate book for ‘One City One Book’, 2012 than Dubliners. It’s interested in all of us, rich and poor, old and young, men and women. It’s filled with humour and love, pain and loss, and which of our lives do not contain elements of each of these? Above all, it rings out with a love of these streets, of the voices of the people who inhabit them, their wit, their style, their optimism even as the world collapses around them.

Dubliners might have been inspired by the city that gave the collection its name but the city itself, this one city with this one book, continues to be defined by the stories we write about it.

THE SISTERS

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout1 he said, as if returning to some former remark of his:

“No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly… but there was something queer… there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion…”

He began to puff at his pipe, no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery.

“I have my own theory about it,” he said. “I think it was one of those… peculiar cases…. But it’s hard to say…”

He began to puff again at his pipe without giving us his theory. My uncle saw me staring and said to me:

“Well, so your old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear.”

“Who?” said I.

“Father Flynn.”

“Is he dead?”

“Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house.”

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

“The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him.”

“God have mercy on his soul,” said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me but I would not satisfy him by looking up from my plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

“I wouldn’t like children of mine,” he said, “to have too much to say to a man like that.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Cotter?” asked my aunt.

“What I mean is,” said old Cotter, “it’s bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be… Am I right, Jack?”

“That’s my principle, too,” said my uncle. “Let him learn to box his corner. That’s what I’m always saying to that Rosicrucian2 there: take exercise. Why, when I was a nipper every morning of my life I had a cold bath, winter and summer. And that’s what stands to me now. Education is all very fine and large. … Mr. Cotter might take a pick of that leg of mutton,” he added to my aunt.

“No, no, not for me,” said old Cotter.

My aunt brought the dish from the safe and put it on the table.

“But why do you think it’s not good for children, Mr. Cotter?” she asked.

“It’s bad for children,” said old Cotter, “because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things like that, you know, it has an effect…”

I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!

It was late when I fell asleep. Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child, I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. But the grey face still followed me. It murmured, and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery. The drapery consisted mainly of children’s bootees and umbrellas; and on ordinary days a notice used to hang in the window, saying: Umbrellas Re-covered. No notice was visible now for the shutters were up. A crape3bouquet was tied to the door-knocker with ribbon. Two poor women and a telegram boy were reading the card pinned on the crape. I also approached and read:

July 1st, 1895The Revd. James Flynn(formerly of S. Catherine’s Church, Meath Street),aged sixty-five years. R. I. P.

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his armchair by the fire, nearly smothered in his greatcoat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious.

I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip – a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream. I remembered that I had noticed long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange – in Persia, I thought… But I could not remember the end of the dream.

In the evening my aunt took me with her to visit the house of mourning. It was after sunset; but the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. The old woman pointed upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt’s nodding, proceeded to toil up the narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister-rail. At the first landing she stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the dead-room. My aunt went in and the old woman, seeing that I hesitated to enter, began to beckon to me again repeatedly with her hand.

I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman’s mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.

But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odour in the room – the flowers.

We crossed ourselves and came away. In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his armchair in state. I groped my way towards my usual chair in the corner while Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wine-glasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister’s bidding, she filled out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa where she sat down behind her sister. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace.

My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said:

“Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world.”

Eliza sighed again and bowed her head in assent. My aunt fingered the stem of her wineglass before sipping a little.

“Did he… peacefully?” she asked.

“Oh, quite peacefully, ma’am,” said Eliza. “You couldn’t tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised.”

“And everything…?”

“Father O’Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared him and all.”

“He knew then?”

“He was quite resigned.”

“He looks quite resigned,” said my aunt.

“That’s what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

“Yes, indeed,” said my aunt.

She sipped a little more from her glass and said:

“Well, Miss Flynn, at any rate it must be a great comfort for you to know that you did all you could for him. You were both very kind to him, I must say.”

Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees.

“Ah, poor James!” she said. “God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are – we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it.”

Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.

“There’s poor Nannie,” said Eliza, looking at her, “she’s wore out. All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the mass in the chapel. Only for Father O’Rourke I don’t know what we’d done at all. It was him brought us all them flowers and them two candlesticks out of the chapel and wrote out the notice for the Freeman’s General4 and took charge of all the papers for the cemetery and poor James’s insurance.”

“Wasn’t that good of him?” said my aunt

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends,” she said, “when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust.”

“Indeed, that’s true,” said my aunt. “And I’m sure now that he’s gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and all your kindness to him.”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza. “He was no great trouble to us. You wouldn’t hear him in the house any more than now. Still, I know he’s gone and all to that…”

“It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him,” said my aunt.

“I know that,” said Eliza. “I won’t be bringing him in his cup of beef-tea any more, nor you, ma’am, sending him his snuff. Ah, poor James!”

She stopped, as if she were communing with the past and then said shrewdly:

“Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly. Whenever I’d bring in his soup to him there I’d find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.”

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned: then she continued:

“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them newfangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap – he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that… Poor James!”

“The Lord have mercy on his soul!” said my aunt.

Eliza took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with it. Then she put it back again in her pocket and gazed into the empty grate for some time without speaking.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said. “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him. And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

“Yes,” said my aunt. “He was a disappointed man. You could see that.”

A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the corner. Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep reverie. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence: and after a long pause she said slowly:

“It was that chalice he broke… That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still… They say it was the boy’s fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!”

“And was that it?” said my aunt. “I heard something…”

Eliza nodded.

“That affected his mind,” she said. “After that he began to mope by himself, talking to no one and wandering about by himself. So one night he was wanted for to go on a call and they couldn’t find him anywhere. They looked high up and low down; and still they couldn’t see a sight of him anywhere. So then the clerk suggested to try the chapel. So then they got the keys and opened the chapel and the clerk and Father O’Rourke and another priest that was there brought in a light for to look for him … And what do you think but there he was, sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself?”

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.

Eliza resumed:

“Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself… So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…’’

AN ENCOUNTER

IT WAS Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:

“Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”

Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel.

“This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’… Go on! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’… Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?”

Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.

“What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were… National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or…”

This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people whoremain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of school-life for one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching5. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge. Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own sixpence. When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:

“Till tomorrow, mates!”

That night I slept badly. In the morning I was first-comer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed6overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.

When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony’s grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:

“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.”

“And his sixpence…?” I said.

“That’s forfeit,” said Mahony. “And so much the better for us – a bob and a tanner instead of a bob.”

We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too small, and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: “Swaddlers! Swaddlers!” thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr. Ryan.

We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and, as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce – the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. We were serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we had observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion… The sailors’ eyes were blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell:

“All right! All right!”