‘Jehovah, Sabaoth, Elohim, Eloi, Helion, Jodhevah, Shaddai! May God give us to die in our own way! I haunt the pissoirs as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the Dee—and by the Hobs of Hell, I’ve seen the same thing work in a girl. But I’ll bring that up later! I’ve given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety per cent of everybody else—for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse? And that I can never hang my muffler, mittens and Bannybrook umbrella on anything better than a bit of tin boarding as high as my eyes, having to be brave, no matter what, to keep the mascara from running away? And do you think that those circular cottages have not brought me to great argument? Have you ever glanced at one when the night was well down, and seen it and what it looked like and resembled most, with its one coping and a hundred legs? A centipede. And you look down and choose your feet, and, ten to one, you find a bird with a light wing, or an old duck with a wooden knee, or something that has been mournful for years. What? I’ve held argument with others at long tables all night through about the particular merits of one district over another for such things, of one cottage over another for such things. And do you suppose I was agreed with, and had any one any other one’s ideas? There was as much disagreement as there might have been, had we all been selecting a new order of government. Jed would say North, and Jod would say South, and me sitting between them going mad because I am a doctor and a collector and a talker of Latin, and a sort of petropus of the twilight and a physiognomist that can’t be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face, and I said that the best port was at the Place de la Bastille. Whereupon I was torn into parts by a hundred voices—each of them pitched in a different arrondissement, until I began clapping like the good woman in the shoe, and screaming for silence; and for witchery I banged the table with a formidable, and yelled out loud: “Do any of you know anything about atmosphere and sea level? Well,” I says, “sea level, and atmospheric pressure and topography make all the difference in the world!” My voice cracked on the word “difference", soaring up divinely, and I said: “If you think that certain things do not show from what district they come, yea, even to an arrondissement, then you are not out gunning for particular game, but simply any catch, and I’ll have nothing to do with you! I do not discuss weighty matters with water wits!” And at that I ordered another and sat with my chin up. “But", said one fellow, “it’s the face that you tell by.” “Faces is it!” I screamed, “the face is for fools! If you fish by the face you fish out trouble, but there’s always other fish when you deal with the sea. The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is the night!"’
Nora turned away—‘What am I to do?’
‘Ah, mighty uncertainty!’ said the doctor. ‘Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse meat, that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears? Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.’
Tears began to run down Nora’s face.
‘And do I know my Sodomites?’ the doctor said unhappily, ‘and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms. God’s last round, shadow-boxing, that the heart may be murdered and swept into that still quiet place where it can sit and say: “Once I was, now I can rest."
‘Well, that’s only part of it,’ he said, trying to stop her crying, ‘and though your normal fellow will say all are alike in the dark, negro or white, I say you can tell them, and where they came from, and what quarter they frequent, by the size and excellence—and at the Bastille (and may I be believed) they come as handsome as mortadellas slung on a table.
‘Your gourmet knows for instance from what water his fish was snatched, he knows from what district and to what year he blesses his wine, he knows one truffle from another and whether it be Brittany root or if it came down from the North, but you gentlemen sit here and tell me that the district makes no difference—is there no one who knows anything but myself? And, must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
‘Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it’s the same with girls,’ he said, ‘those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. They acquire an “unwilling” set of features: they become old without reward, the widower bird sitting sighing at the turnstile of heaven, “Hallelujah! I am sticked! Skoll! Skoll! I am dying!"
‘Or walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no stain of her could ache upon the wood, or snatched back to nothing without aim—going backward through the target, taking with her the spot where she made one—’
‘Yes!’ Nora said.
‘Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:
‘"May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man’s meat? I’m an angel on all fours, with a child’s feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!"