The glare in front of a cheap music-hall attracted him. He entered, mounted to the nine-penny balcony, where he stood leaning over the wooden partition, wedged among a crowd of loungers. The air was filled with the smoke of cheap tobacco and the fumes of the bar behind. A girl on the stage was singing a song in the chorus of which the thronged house roared lustily. Then came a tenor vocalist with drawing-room ballads. Joyce attended absently, hearing and seeing in a confused dream. A neighbour asking him for a light aroused him from his reverie. He wondered why he had come. To-night of all nights, when he might be at home in the joy of his heart’s desire. Yet he stayed.
A flashing family appeared riding on nondescript cycles. He watched them with half-shut eyes, caressing a quaint conceit that they were his thoughts whirling around in concrete form. The bursts of deafening applause seemed to soothe him. Presently a street-scene cloth was let down and a battered man appeared and sang a song about drink and twins and brokers. He threw such humourous gusto into the performance that Joyce laughed in spite of his preoccupation, and remained in amused anticipation of his second turn. The bell tinkled. The “comedian” came on and was greeted with vociferous applause. With music-hall realism he was dressed in prison-clothes, glengarry, woollen stockings, and black-arrowed suit all complete. He had made up his face into a startling brute. Joyce felt sick. He did not catch the first verse; only the concluding lines of the chorus,
For ’itting of my missus on the chump, chump, chump.”
But then the man began to speak, and Joyce could not help hearing. A horrible fascination held him. The ignoble figure poured out with grotesque and voluble cynicism the comic history of the prison-life; the plank-bed, the skilly, the oakum, the exercise-yard. He sketched his pals, detailed the sordid tricks for obtaining food, the mean malingering, the debasing habits. And all with a horrible fidelity. The audience shrieked with laughter. But Joyce lost sense of the mime. The man was real, one of the degraded creatures with whom he himself had once been indistinguishably mingled--a loathsome fact from the past. The smell of the prison floated over the footlights and filled his nostrils. All his overwrought nerves quivering with repulsion, he broke through the crowd hemming him in against the partition, and rushed down into the street.