Part 55 (1/2)

A vestal's lamp.

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.

Thoth, G.o.d of libraries, a birdG.o.d, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks._

They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

--Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

--But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't care a b.u.t.ton, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...

He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim in mo s.h.a.gart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:

--I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

Bear with me.

Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca_. Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

--As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Sh.e.l.ley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.

--Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the pa.s.sages with Ophelia are surely from the son.

Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

--That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

--If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.

--The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

--There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.

Said that.

--If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the h.e.l.l of time of _King Lear, Oth.e.l.lo, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,_ look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, s.h.i.+pwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?

Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.

--A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.

--The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quant.i.ty, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.