CHAPTER SUMMARY AND NOTES

CHAPTER 1

Summary (continued)

At Clongowes, Stephen hears the other boys talking about some boys who had been caught near the Hill of Lyons by Mr. Gleeson and the minister. They had been hiding in a train car. Fleming asks why the boys ran away and Cecil Thunder claims that the boys stole cash from the rectorÂ’s room. He says KickhamÂ’s brother is the one who stole it, but all the boys shared it. Stephen wonders how they could have stolen. Wells comes in and refutes ThunderÂ’s story. He says the boys ran because the boys drank the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy. Stephen is afraid to say anything. He feels sick with awe. He cannot imagine what made the boys do such a thing. He thinks of the sacristy with its wooden presses and crimped surplices folded quietly. Even though it wasnÂ’t the chapel, they still spoke in whispers there because it was a holy place. One evening he had been there to be dressed as boat bearer when they had the procession to the altar in the wood. The boy who held the censer had swung it gently and how the charcoal burned quietly as the boy swung the censer. When the rector put incense in, it had hissed on the red coals.

Stephen looks at the boys standing in small groups on the playground talking. They seem smaller to him because he had broken his eye glasses the day before when a sprinter had knocked him down. The goal posts also look very thin and far away and the sky looks very far up. There is no play on the fields because cricket is coming. Stephen listens to the boys discuss if it will be Barnes who will be the professor or Flowers. On the playground, boys are "playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs." Stephen hears the sound of cricketbats. "They said pick, pack, pock, puck like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl."

Athy tells the boys they were all wrong about why the boys ran away. He points across the playground to Simon Moonan and advises the others to ask him. At their prompting, Athy says the boys ran because they were caught with Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle in the square one night smuggling. Stephen doesnÂ’t know what this means. His mind wanders to Simon MoonanÂ’s nice clothes. One night at the refectory, Simon had shown Stephen a ball of candy the other boys had given him. He remembers one day Boyle telling the others that an elephant had two tuskers, not tusks, and that was why he was called Tusker Boyle. The other boys sometimes called him Lady Boyle because he was always paring his nails.

Stephen thinks of EileenÂ’s "long thin cool white hands" like ivory and remembers his thought that that is the meaning of Tower of Ivory, but that since Protestants couldnÂ’t understand it, they made fun of it. One day he had stood with Eileen and she had put her hand into his pocket. Her fingers felt cool and thin and soft. She broke away suddenly and went running down the curve of the path. Her hair shone gold in the sunlight and he thought, "Tower of Ivory. House of Gold." He realizes, "By thinking of things you could understand them."

His thoughts return to the question of the boys smuggling in the square. He doesnÂ’t understand why it took place in the square. He pictures the square. It has thick slabs of slate and water always trickles there, leaving a stale smell. Behind the door of a closet there is a drawing of a man dressed Roman style and under the picture are the words, "Balbus was building a wall." Another wall has the words, "Julius Caesar wrote The Calico Belly." The boys stand around silently. Fleming asks if they are all to be punished for what a few boys did. Cecil Thunder threatens not to come back to the school. He complains about the punishment of three daysÂ’ silence in the refectory and getting sent up for every infraction. Wells agrees that he, too, wonÂ’t come back. Fleming suggests getting up a rebellion, but no one responds. Athy tells them the punishment for the boys will be flogging (corporal punishment) or expulsion for the higher line boys, but that Simon Moonan and Tusker must take the flogging. All the higher line boys are taking the option of expulsion except Corrigan, who will be flogged by Mr. Gleeson. The boys begin to joke about the floggings. Athy chants a saying "It canÂ’t be helped; / It must be done. / So down with your breeches / and out with your bum." The boys laugh, but Stephen can tell they are afraid.

Stephen hears the cricketbats going "pock." He thinks of it as a sound that is heard, but also something used to hit with. Then, it would be the feeling of pain. He thinks of the pandybat (instrument used for corporal punishment). It is said to be made of whale bone and leather with lead inside. Stephen realizes there are different kinds of pains that correspond with different sounds. He cannot understand why the boys are laughing. It made him feel shivery. He knows he always feels shivery when he lets down his pants. He wonders who lets the pants down, the boys or the school master.

Athy has rolled up his sleeves to show what Mr. Gleeson would do, but his hands are "knuckly inky" and Mr. Gleeson has "round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed." Stephen thinks of the long, cruel nails on the gentle white fattish hands and of the high whistle that the cane makes as it is swung through the air and of the chill of being bare-bottomed, and "yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle." He remembers that Cecil Thunder said Mr. Gleason wouldnÂ’t flog him too hard.

StephenÂ’s thoughts are interrupted by the call on the field, "All in!" In writing class, he sits and listens to the slow scraping of pens. Mr. Harford walks around the classroom giving boys individual attention. He tries to write out his letters of the sentence, "Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift," but the lines are like "fine invisible threads" and he has to close his right eye tight to see the capital letter. He is relieved that Mr. Harford is so decent as to never "get into a wax" (never get worked up into a temper). All the other masters got into terrible waxes.

He still cannot understand why all the boys had to be punished for what the higher line boys did. He remembers Wells saying the boys had drunk the wine. He wonders if they stole a monstrance and run away with it. He thinks it must be a terrible sin to go into the sacristy quietly at night and open the press and steal the flashing gold monstrance, "into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides" while the boy swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part of the benediction solo. He assures himself that God was not in the monstrance when the boys stole it. Still, he thinks it is a terrible and strange sin to touch the monstrance. He is thrilled to think of it in the silence to the scraping of the pens. However, to drink the wine and to be found out by the smell was also a sin, but not terrible and strange.

He remembers the day he made his first holy communion. He had smelled "a faint winy smell of the rectorÂ’s breath after the wine of the mass." The word "wine" is a beautiful word. It makes Stephen think of dark purple because the grapes that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples were dark purple. The smell of the rectorÂ’s breath had made him feel sick. It was supposed to be the happiest day of oneÂ’s life. Once Napoleon was asked what the happiest day of his life was and he had replied that it was the day of his first holy communion.

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