Page 109 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

the porter aiding him, searched the desks for his initials.
Stephen remained in the background, depressed more than
ever by the darkness and silence of the theatre and by the air
it wore of jaded and formal study. On the desk he read the
word FOETUS cut several times in the dark stained wood.
The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the
absent students of the college about him and to shrink from
their company. A vision of their life, which his father’s words
had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of
the word cut in the desk. A broad-shouldered student with a
moustache was cutting in the letters with a jack-knife, seri-
ously. Other students stood or sat near him laughing at his
handiwork. One jogged his elbow. The big student turned
on him, frowning. He was dressed in loose grey clothes and
had tan boots.
Stephen’s name was called. He hurried down the steps
of the theatre so as to be as far away from the vision as he
could be and, peering closely at his father’s initials, hid his
flushed face.
But the word and the vision capered before his eyes as he
walked back across the quadrangle and towards the college
gate. It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what
he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of
his own mind. His monstrous reveries came thronging into
his memory. They too had sprung up before him, suddenly
and furiously, out of mere words. He had soon given in to
them and allowed them to sweep across and abase his intel-
lect, wondering always where they came from, from what
den of monstrous images, and always weak and humble to-

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