Joyce's notes 6

Snow:
frost, moon, pictures, holly and ivy, currant-cake, lemonade, Emily Lyons, piano, window sill,
tears:
ship, sunshine, garden, sadness, pinafore, buttoned boots, bread and butter, a big fire.



In the first the flow of ideas is tardy. It is Christmas in Galway, a moonlit Christmas eve with snow. She is carrying picture almanacs to her grandmother's house to be ornamented with holly and ivy. The evenings are spent in the house of a friend where they give her lemonade. Lemonade and currant cake are also her grandmother's Christmas fare for her. She thumps the piano and sits with her dark-complexioned gipsy-looking girl friend Emily Lyons on the window sill.



In the second the ideas are more rapid. It is the quay of Galway harbour on a bright morning. The emigrant ship is going away and Emily, her dark friend, stands on the deck going out to America. They kiss and cry bitterly. But she believes that some day her friend will come back as she promises. She cries for the pain of separation and for the dangers of the sea that threaten the girl who is going away. The girl is older than she and has no lover. She too has no lover. Her sadness is brief. She is alone, friendless in her grandmother's garden and can see the garden, lonely now, in which the day before she played with her friend. Her grandmother consoles her, gives her a new clean pinafore to wear and buttoned boots, a present from her uncle, and nice bread and butter to eat and a big fire to sit down to.



Homesickness and regret for dead girlish days are again strongly marked. A persistent and delicate sensuality (visual: pictures, adorned with holly and ivy; gustatious: currant cake, bread and butter, lemonade; tactual: sunshine in the garden, a big fire, the kisses of her friend and grandmother) runs through both series of images. A persistent and delicate vanity also, even in her grief; her pinafore and buttoned boots. No thought of a more recent admiration, which is strong even to the point of being fetichism and has been well observed by her, crosses her mind now. The boots suggest their giver, her uncle, and she feels vaguely the forgotten cares and affection among [which] she grew up. She thinks of them kindly, not because they were kind to her but because they were kind to her girlself which is gone and because they are part of it, hidden away even from herself in her memory. The note of regret is ever present and finds utterance at last in the tears which fill her eyes as she sees her friend go. A departure. A friend, her own youth going away. A faint glimmer of lesbianism irradiates this mind. This girl too is dark, even like a gipsy, and she too, like the dark lover who sleeps in Rahoon, is going away from her, the man-killer and perhaps also the love-killer, over the dark sea which is distance, the extinction of interest and death. They have no male lovers and are moved vaguely one towards the other, the friend is older, stronger, can travel alone, braver, a prophecy of a later dark male. The passiveness of her character to all that is not vital to its existence, and yet a passiveness which is suffused with tenderness. The assassin is alone and quiet amid the mild sunlight and the mild cares and ministrations of her grandmother, happy that fire is warm, toasting her toes.



What then is this tenderness and regard to give which is death, or discontent, or distance or the extinction of interest? She has no remorse for she [knows] what she can give when she reads desire in dark eyes. Have they not need of it since they long and ask? To refuse it, her heart tells her, would be to kill more cruelly and pitilessly those whom the waves or a disease or the passing of the years will bear surely away from her life towards distance, early death and that extinction of personality which is death in life.



In the incertitude of the two female characters Bertha has the advantage of her beauty-- a fact behind which even an evil woman's character can safely hide much less a character not morally evil.