The Dead Page #12

"The Dead" is not a standalone book but is the final short story in James Joyce's collection, "Dubliners". This story follows the protagonist Gabriel Conroy through a Christmas season feast, where he grapples with issues of identity and Irish Nationalism. The narrative culminates with Gabriel's profound emotional epiphany about love, mortality and the continuity of life and death, invoked by hearing about his wife's past lover who died young.

• Children

								


He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm
swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:

“Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?”

She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:

“Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I
know?”

She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:

“O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.”

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms
across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a
moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way
of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his
broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always
puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering gilt-rimmed
eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of
her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his
voice.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked.

“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling.

“It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my
grandmother,” she said.

The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather
again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to
glow angrily in his veins.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically.

“It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, “named Michael
Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very
delicate.”

Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested
in this delicate boy.

“I can see him so plainly,” she said after a moment. “Such eyes as he
had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them—an expression!”

“O then, you were in love with him?” said Gabriel.

“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway.”

A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.

“Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?”
he said coldly.

She looked at him and asked in surprise:

“What for?”

Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

“How do I know? To see him, perhaps.”

She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in
silence.

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen.
Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the
evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he
had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of
tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind
with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him.
He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his
aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians
and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he
had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back
more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his
forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when
he spoke was humble and indifferent.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be
to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands
and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when
he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was
coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.
But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued
to caress her hand. He did not question her again for he felt that she
would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not
respond to his touch but he continued to caress it just as he had
caressed her first letter to him that spring morning.

“It was in the winter,” she said, “about the beginning of the winter
when I was going to leave my grandmother’s and come up here to the
convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and
wouldn’t be let out and his people in Oughterard were written to. He
was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew
rightly.”

She paused for a moment and sighed.

“Poor fellow,” she said. “He was very fond of me and he was such a
gentle boy. We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel,
like the way they do in the country. He was going to study singing only
for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.”

“Well; and then?” asked Gabriel.

“And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up
to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I
wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in
the summer and hoping he would be better then.”

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control and then went
on:

“Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’
Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window.
The window was so wet I couldn’t see so I ran downstairs as I was and
slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at
the end of the garden, shivering.”

“And did you not tell him to go back?” asked Gabriel.

“I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his
death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his
eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where
there was a tree.”

“And did he go home?” asked Gabriel.

“Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died
and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came from. O, the day
I heard that, that he was dead!”

She stopped, choking with sobs and, overcome by emotion, flung herself
face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand
for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her
grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

She was fast asleep.

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully
on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn
breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her
sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her

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