A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Page 7

fellows and said:
--O, I say, here's a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.
The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under
their eyes and said:
--I do not.
Wells said:
--O, I say, here's a fellow says he doesn't kiss his mother before he goes to bed.
They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and
confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and

still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar.
He tried to think of Wells's mother but he did not dare to raise his eyes to Wells's face.
He did not like Wells's face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into the square ditch
the day before because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells's seasoned
hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing to do; all the fellows said it
was. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat
jump plop into the scum.
The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and
the lines filed out of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside
his clothes. He still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his
mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up
like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His
mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they
made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?
Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up
inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away:
but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.
There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the
middle of clouds. Fleming had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had
coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon. That was like the two brushes in Dante's
press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush with the maroon
velvet back for Michael Davitt. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours.
Fleming had done it himself.
He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places
in America. Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in
different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the
world and the world was in the universe.
He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his
name and where he was.
Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare
Ireland Europe The World The Universe
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite
page:
Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And
heaven my expectation.
He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf
from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down
the page again. What was after the universe?
Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the
nothing place began?
It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was
very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to
think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's
name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God's
name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it
was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in

all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who
prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and
God's real name was God.
It made him very tired to think that way. It made him