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They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages
rustling. Crowding together they strapped and buckled
their satchels, all gabbling gaily:
—A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.
—O, ask me, sir.
—A hard one, sir.
—This is the riddle, Stephen said:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
‘Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.
What is that?
—What, sir?
—Again, sir. We didn’t hear.
Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After
a silence Cochrane said:
—What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to
which their cries echoed dismay.
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A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor
called:
—Hockey!
They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches,
leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the
lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their
boots and tongues.
Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly,
showing an open copybook. His thick hair and scraggy
neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty
glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull
and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent
and damp as a snail’s bed.
He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written
on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the
foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril
Sargent: his name and seal.
—Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he
said, and show them to you, sir.
Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.
—Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
—Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr
Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.
—Can you do them. yourself? Stephen asked.
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—No, sir.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of
ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him
in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the
world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed
boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood
drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true
thing in life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery
Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the
trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of
rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being
trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A
poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath
winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with
merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped
up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He
proves by algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s
grandfather. Sargent peered askance through his slanted
glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the
hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice,
in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of
squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner:
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so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world,
Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure
soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which
brightness could not comprehend.
—Do you understand now? Can you work the second
for yourself?
—Yes, sir.
In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting
always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the
unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind
his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective
genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had
fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this
gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for
me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his
secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark
palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny:
tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
The sum was done.
—It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.
—Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.
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He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper
and carried his copybook back to his bench.
—You had better get your stick and go out to the
others, Stephen said as he followed towards the door the
boy’s graceless form.
—Yes, sir.
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the
playfield.
—Sargent!
—Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry
towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife.
They were sorted in teams and Mr Deasy came away
stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When he
had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending
called to him. He turned his angry white moustache.
—What is it now? he cried continually without
listening.
—Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir,
Stephen said.
—Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy
said, till I restore order here.
And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old
man’s voice cried sternly:
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