Page 136 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

the Holy Ghost. Amen!
As he walked home with silent companions, a thick fog
seemed to compass his mind. He waited in stupor of mind
till it should lift and reveal what it had hidden. He ate his
dinner with surly appetite and when the meal was over and
the grease-strewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose
and went to the window, clearing the thick scum from his
mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he
had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after
meat. This was the end; and a faint glimmer of fear began
to pierce the fog of his mind. He pressed his face against the
pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street.
Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And
that was life. The letters of the name of Dublin lay heav-
ily upon his mind, pushing one another surlily hither and
thither with slow boorish insistence. His soul was fattening
and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in
its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk while the body
that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of
darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed, and human for a bovine
god to stare upon.
The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his
soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear
became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher
blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the
death chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards
the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright cen-
tres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the
last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the

136 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man