Page 50 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

thinking of things you could understand them.
But why in the square? You went there when you wanted
to do something. It was all thick slabs of slate and water
trickled all day out of tiny pinholes and there was a queer
smell of stale water there. And behind the door of one of the
closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man
in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath
was the name of the drawing:
Balbus was building a wall.
Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny
face but it was very like a man with a beard. And on the wall
of another closet there was written in backhand in beauti-
ful writing:
Julius Caesar wrote The Calico Belly.
Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a
place where some fellows wrote things for cod. But all the
same it was queer what Athy said and the way he said it. It
was not a cod because they had run away. He looked with
the others across the playground and began to feel afraid.
At last Fleming said:
—And we are all to be punished for what other fellows
did?
—I won’t come back, see if I do, Cecil Thunder said.
Three days’ silence in the refectory and sending us up for
six and eight every minute.
—Yes, said Wells. And old Barrett has a new way of twist-
ing the note so that you can’t open it and fold it again to see
how many ferulae you are to get. I won’t come back too.
—Yes, said Cecil Thunder, and the prefect of studies was

50 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man