Page 219 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

yourself. I’m not. I’m a democrat and I’ll work and act for
social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the
United States of the Europe of the future.
Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. What day
of the week was it? He stopped at a newsagent’s to read the
headline of a placard. Thursday. Ten to eleven, English;
eleven to twelve, French; twelve to one, physics. He fancied
to himself the English lecture and felt, even at that distance,
restless and helpless. He saw the heads of his classmates
meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points
they were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential
definitions and examples or dates of birth or death, chief
works, a favourable and an unfavourable criticism side by
side. His own head was unbent for his thoughts wandered
abroad and whether he looked around the little class of stu-
dents or out of the window across the desolate gardens of
the green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellar-damp
and decay. Another head than his, right before him in the
first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fel-
lows like the head of a priest appealing without humility
to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him.
Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never
raise before his mind the entire image of his body but only
the image of the head and face? Even now against the grey
curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phan-
tom of a dream, the face of a severed head or death-mask,
crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an
iron crown. It was a priest-like face, priest-like in its palor,
in the wide winged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes

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