—Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering—he said then.—Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if…or would you?—
—If I could—Stephen said—that would cost me very little.—
—Then do so—Cranly said.—Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set her mind at rest.—
He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:
—Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.—
Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:
—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.—
—Pascal was a pig—said Cranly.
—Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind—Stephen said.
—And he was another pig then—said Cranly.
—The church calls him a saint—Stephen objected.
—I don't care a flaming damn what anyone calls him
[285]
