Page 113 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria
and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria.
Names.
The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He
tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not.
He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes.
A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman
who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been
sent away from home to a college, he had made his first
communion and eaten slim jim out of his cricket cap and
watched the firelight leaping and dancing on the wall of a
little bedroom in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead,
of mass being said for him by the rector in a black and gold
cope, of being buried then in the little graveyard of the com-
munity off the main avenue of limes. But he had not died
then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead
in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he
had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or
had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How
strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a
way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being
lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe! It was strange
to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy
in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his side-pockets and
his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands.
On the evening of the day on which the property was
sold Stephen followed his father meekly about the city from
bar to bar. To the sellers in the market, to the barmen and
barmaids, to the beggars who importuned him for a lob Mr

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