The professor had gone to the glass cases on the side wall, from a shelf of which he took down a set of coils, blew away the dust from many points and, bearing it carefully to the table, held a finger on it while he proceeded with his lecture. He explained that the wires in modern coils were of a compound called platinoid lately discovered by F. W. Martino.
He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan whispered from behind:
— Good old Fresh Water Martin!
— Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a subject for electrocution. He can have me.
Moynihan, seeing the professor bend over the coils, rose in his bench and, clacking noiselessly the fingers of his right hand, began to call with the voice of a slobbering urchin.
— Please teacher! This boy is after saying a bad word, teacher.
— Platinoid, the professor said solemnly, is preferred to German silver because it has a lower coefficient of resistance by changes of temperature. The platinoid wire is insulated and the covering of silk that insulates it is wound on the ebonite bobbins just where my finger is. If it were wound single an extra current would be induced in the coils. The bobbins are saturated in hot paraffin wax…
A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:
— Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?
The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and applied science. A heavy-built student, wearing gold spectacles, stared with some wonder at the questioner. Moynihan murmured from behind in his natural voice:
— Isn’t MacAlister a devil for his pound of flesh?
Stephen looked coldly on the oblong Skull beneath him overgrown with tangled twine-coloured hair. The voice, the accent, the mind of the questioner offended him and he allowed the offence to carry him towards wilful unkindness, bidding his mind think that the student’s father would have done better had he sent his son to Belfast to study and have saved something on the train fare by so doing.
The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and yet the shaft came back to its bowstring; for he saw in a moment the student’s whey-pale face.
— That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. It came from the comic Irishman in the bench behind. Patience. Can you Say with certitude by whom the soul of your race was bartered and its elect betrayed — by the questioner or by the mocker? Patience. Remember Epictetus. It is probably in his character to ask such a question at such a moment in such a tone and to pronounce the word science as a monosyllable.
The droning voice of the professor continued to wind itself slowly round and round the coils it spoke of, doubling, trebling, quadrupling its somnolent energy as the coil multiplied its ohms of resistance.
Moynihan’s voice called from behind in echo to a distant bell:
— Closing time, gents!
The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. On a table near the door were two photographs in frames and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures. MacCann went briskly to and fro among the students, talking rapidly, answering rebuffs and leading one after another to the table. In the inner hall the dean of studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin gravely and nodding his head.
Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted irresolutely. From under the wide falling leaf of a soft hat Cranly’s dark eyes were watching him.
— Have you signed? Stephen asked.
Cranly closed his long thin-lipped mouth, communed with himself an instant and answered:
— Ego habeo.
— What is it for?
— Quod?
— What is it for?
Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said blandly and bitterly:
— Per pax universalis.
— Stephen pointed to the Tsar’s photograph and said:
— He has the face of a besotted Christ.
The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly’s eyes back from a calm survey of the walls of the hall.
— Are you annoyed? he asked.
— No, answered Stephen.
— Are you in bad humour?
— No.
— Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis, said Cranly, quia facies vostra monstrat ut vos in damno malo humore estis.
Moynihan, on his way to the table, said in Stephen’s ear:
— MacCann is in tiptop form. Ready to shed the last drop. Brand new world. No stimulants and votes for the bitches.
Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed, turned again to meet Cranly’s eyes.
— Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into my ear. Can you?
A dull scowl appeared on Cranly’s forehead. He stared at the table where Moynihan had bent to write his name on the roll, and then said flatly:
— A sugar!
— Quis est in malo humore, said Stephen, ego aut vos?
Cranly did not take up the taunt. He brooded sourly on his judgement and repeated with the same flat force:
— A flaming bloody sugar, that’s what he is!
It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly’s speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly by a Wicklow pulpit.
The heavy scowl faded from Cranly’s face as MacCann marched briskly towards them from the other side of the hall.
— Here you are! said MacCann cheerily.
— Here I am! said Stephen.
— Late as usual. Can you not combine the progressive tendency with a respect for punctuality?
— That question is out of order, said Stephen. Next business.
His smiling eyes were fixed on a silver-wrapped tablet of milk chocolate which peeped out of the propagandist’s breast-pocket. A little ring of listeners closed round to hear the war of wits. A lean student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth. Cranly took a small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine it closely, turning it over and over.
— Next business? said MacCann. Hom!
He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.
— The next business is to sign the testimonial.
— Will you pay me anything if I sign? asked Stephen.
— I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann.
The gipsy-like student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in an indistinct bleating voice.
— By hell, that’s a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a mercenary notion.
His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned his olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to speak again.
MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.
The gipsy student responded to the close of the period by crying:
— Three cheers for universal brotherhood!
— Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. I’ll stand you a pint after.
— I’m a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.
Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and repeated:
— Easy, easy, easy!
Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin foam:
— Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for John Anthony Collins!
A thin voice from the verge of the ring replied:
— Pip! pip!
Moynihan murmured beside Stephen’s ear:
— And what about John Anthony’s poor little sister:
Lottie Collins lost her drawers;
Won't you kindly lend her yours?Stephen laughed and Moynihan, pleased with the result, murmured again:
— We’ll have five bob each way on John Anthony Collins.
— I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly.
— The affair doesn’t interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You know that well. Why do you make a scene about it?
— Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You are a reactionary, then?
— Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?
— Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts.
Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his ground and said with hostile humour:
— Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of universal peace.
Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of a peace-offering, saying:
— Pax super totum sanguinarium globum.
Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the direction of the Tsar’s image, saying:
— Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.
— By hell, that’s a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that’s a fine expression. I like that expression immensely.
He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase and, fumbling at the
