Public Domain Tales: Ulysses: Book Three

Public Domain Tales: Ulysses: Book Three is the one-hundred-and-seventeenth book in the Public Domain Tales series.
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Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl
shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school
treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His
Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red
jujubes white.
A sombre Y. M. C. A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of
Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.
Heart to heart talks.
Bloo... Me? No.
Blood of the Lamb.
His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are
washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,
martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering,
druids’ altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of
the church in Zion is coming.
 Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!
 All heartily welcome.
Paying game. Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put
the stopper on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the
luminous crucifix. Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see
him on the wall, hanging. Pepper’s ghost idea. Iron Nails Ran In.
Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for
instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to
the pantry in the kitchen. Don’t like all the smells in it waiting to
rush out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of
Spain. Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny.
Very good for the brain.
From Butler’s monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor’s walk.
Dedalus’ daughter there still outside Dillon’s auctionrooms. Must be
selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father.
Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother
goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That’s in their
theology or the priest won’t give the poor woman the confession, the
absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat
you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on
the fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I’d like to see them
do the black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for
fear he’d collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows
if you could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting
£. s. d. out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one.
Watching his water. Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence:
mum’s the word.
Good Lord, that poor child’s dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks
too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It’s after they feel it.
Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.
As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from
the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours
it, I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see
the brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats
get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead
drunk on the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians.
Imagine drinking that! Rats: vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the
things.
Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt
quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? Reuben
J’s son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and
eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It’s the droll way he comes out with the
things. Knows how to tell a story too.
They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.
He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet
per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of
swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the
day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin’s King picked it up in the
wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.
 The hungry famished gull
 Flaps o’er the waters dull.
That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has
no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts.
Solemn.
 Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit
 Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth.
 —Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!
His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand.
Australians they must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them
up with a rag or a handkerchief.
Wait. Those poor birds.
He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes
for a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down
into the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all
from their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.
Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his
hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh they
have, all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim down
here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder
what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.
They wheeled flapping weakly. I’m not going to throw any more. Penny
quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and
mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes
like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are
not salty? How is that?
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor
on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
 Kino’s
 11/—
 Trousers
Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you
own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same,
which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All
kinds of places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used
to be stuck up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly
confidential. Dr Hy Franks. Didn’t cost him a red like Maginni the
dancing master self advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or
stick them up himself for that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen
a button. Flybynight. Just the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST 110
PILLS. Some chap with a dose burning him.
If he...?
O!
Eh?
No... No.
No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely?
No, no.
Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about
that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.
Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never
exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek:
parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her
about the transmigration. O rocks!
Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She’s
right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the
sound. She’s not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was
thinking. Still, I don’t know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base
barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you’d think he was
singing into a barrel. Now, isn’t that wit. They used to call him big
Ben. Not half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an
albatross. Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at
stowing away number one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.
A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him
along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like
that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He
read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S.
Wisdom Hely’s. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his
foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our
staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after
street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are
not Boyl: no, M’Glade’s men. Doesn’t bring in any business either. I
suggested to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls
sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I
bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the
eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she’s writing. Get twenty of
them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women
too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn’t have it of course because he
didn’t think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a
false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree’s
potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can’t lick ’em.
What? Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can’t stop,
Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser
_Kansell,_ sold by Hely’s Ltd, 85 Dame street. Well out of that ruck I
am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents.
Tranquilla convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face.
Wimple suited her small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed
in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I
disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But glad to communicate
with the outside world. Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of
Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by
the way she. If she had married she would have changed. I suppose they
really were short of money. Fried everything in the best butter all the
same. No lard for them. My heart’s broke eating dripping. They like
buttering themselves in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister?
Pat Claffey, the pawnbroker’s daughter. It was a nun they say invented
barbed wire.
He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover
cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil
Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom’s. Got
the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we married. Six years. Ten years ago:
ninetyfour he died yes that’s right the big fire at Arnott’s. Val
Dillon was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O’Reilly
emptying the port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it
for the inner alderman. Couldn’t hear what the band played. For what we
have already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then.
Molly had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored
with selfcovered buttons. She didn’t like it because I sprained my
ankle first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old
Goodwin’s tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies’ picnic too.
Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,
shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we
had that day. People looking after her.
Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper.
Dockrell’s, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly’s tubbing night. American
soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she
looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa’s
daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.
He walked along the curbstone.
Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was
always squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in
Citron’s saint Kevin’s parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is
getting. Pen ...? Of course it’s years ago. Noise of the trams
probably. Well, if he couldn’t remember the dayfather’s name that he
sees every day.
Bartell d’Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home
after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her
that song _Winds that blow from the south_.
Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting
on about those lottery tickets after Goodwin’s concert in the
supperroom or oakroom of the Mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of
her music blew out of my hand against the High school railings. Lucky
it didn’t. Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her.
Professor Goodwin linking her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old
sot. His farewell concerts. Positively last appearance on any stage.
May be for months and may be for never. Remember her laughing at the
wind, her blizzard collar up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that
gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and her boa nearly smothered old
Goodwin. She did get flushed in the wind. Remember when we got home
raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap of mutton for her
supper with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the mulled rum. Could see
her in the bedroom from the hearth unclamping the busk of her stays:
white.
Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her.
Always liked to let her self out. Sitting there after till near two
taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy.
That was the night...
—O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?
—O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?
—No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven’t seen her for
ages.
—In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily. Milly has a position down in
Mullingar, you know.
—Go away! Isn’t that grand for her?
—Yes. In a photographer’s there. Getting on like a house on fire. How
are all your charges?
—All on the baker’s list, Mrs Breen said.
How many has she? No other in sight.
—You’re in black, I see. You have no...
—No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.
Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who’s dead, when and what did he
die of? Turn up like a bad penny.
—O, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn’t any near relation.
May as well get her sympathy.
—Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly,
poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.
 Your funeral’s tomorrow
 While you’re coming through the rye.
 Diddlediddle dumdum
 Diddlediddle...
—Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen’s womaneyes said melancholily.
Now that’s quite enough about that. Just: quietly: husband.
—And your lord and master?
Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn’t lost them anyhow.
—O, don’t be talking! she said. He’s a caution to rattlesnakes. He’s in
there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me
heartscalded. Wait till I show you.
Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured
out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom’s
gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar,
or they’d taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab
stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of
hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork
chained to the table.
Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hatpin: ought to have a guard on
those things. Stick it in a chap’s eye in the tram. Rummaging. Open.
Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain.
Husband barging. Where’s the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Are
you feeding your little brother’s family? Soiled handkerchief:
medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she?...
—There must be a new moon out, she said. He’s always bad then. Do you
know what he did last night?
Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide in
alarm, yet smiling.
—What? Mr Bloom asked.
Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.
—Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.
Indiges.
—Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.
—The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.
She took a folded postcard from her handbag.
—Read that, she said. He got it this morning.
—What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U. P.?
—U. p: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It’s a great
shame for them whoever he is.
—Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.
She took back the card, sighing.
—And now he’s going round to Mr Menton’s office. He’s going to take an
action for ten thousand pounds, he says.
She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.
Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen
its best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque: three
old grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a
tasty dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than
Molly.
See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.
He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent.
Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I’m hungry too. Flakes of
pastry on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her
cheek. Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie
Powell that was. In Luke Doyle’s long ago. Dolphin’s Barn, the
charades. U. p: up.
Change the subject.
—Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy? Mr Bloom asked.
—Mina Purefoy? she said.
Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers’ Club. Matcham often thinks of
the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.
—Yes.
—I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She’s in the
lying-in hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She’s three
days bad now.
—O, Mr Bloom said. I’m sorry to hear that.
—Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It’s a very stiff
birth, the nurse told me.
—O, Mr Bloom said.
His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in
compassion. Dth! Dth!
—I’m sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That’s
terrible for her.
Mrs Breen nodded.
—She was taken bad on the Tuesday...
Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her:
—Mind! Let this man pass.
A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a
rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a
skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat,
a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.
—Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts.
Watch!
—Who is he if it’s a fair question? Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?
—His name is Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr
Bloom said smiling. Watch!
—He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these
days.
She broke off suddenly.
—There he is, she said. I must go after him. Goodbye. Remember me to
Molly, won’t you?
—I will, Mr Bloom said.
He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis
Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of
Harrison’s hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay.
Like old times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and
thrust his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he
spoke earnestly.
Meshuggah. Off his chump.
Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the
tight skullpiece, the dangling stickumbrelladustcoat. Going the two
days. Watch him! Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world.
And that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have
with him.
U. p: up. I’ll take my oath that’s Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote
it for a lark in the Scotch house I bet anything. Round to Menton’s
office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the
gods.
He passed the _Irish Times_. There might be other answers lying there.
Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their
lunch now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn’t know me. O, leave them
there to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them.
Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called
you naughty darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell
me what is the meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife.
Tell me who made the world. The way they spring those questions on you.
And the other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good
fortune to meet with the approval of the eminent poet A. E. (Mr Geo.
Russell). No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of
poetry.
Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook
and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit
counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork
shop. James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made
a big deal on Coates’s shares. Ca’ canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All
the toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the _Irish
Field_ now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement
and rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement
yesterday at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects
juices make it tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse
like a man. Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her,
not for Joe. First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood
mare some of those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss
off a glass of brandy neat while you’d say knife. That one at the
Grosvenor this morning. Up with her on the car: wishswish. Stonewall or
fivebarred gate put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it
out of spite. Who is this she was like? O yes! Mrs Miriam Dandrade that
sold me her old wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel.
Divorced Spanish American. Didn’t take a feather out of her my handling
them. As if I was her clotheshorse. Saw her in the viceregal party when
Stubbs the park ranger got me in with Whelan of the _Express._
Scavenging what the quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured on the
plums thinking it was custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a few
weeks after. Want to be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery work
for her, thanks.
Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun
and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Y. M. C. A. Eating
with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. And still his
muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore’s
cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy
annuals he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers
marching along bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a
marketnet. The squallers. Poor thing! Then having to give the breast
year after year all hours of the night. Selfish those t.t’s are. Dog in
the manger. Only one lump of sugar in my tea, if you please.
He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval. A sixpenny at
Rowe’s? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in
the Burton. Better. On my way.
He walked on past Bolton’s Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot
to tap Tom Kernan.
Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a
vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew!
Dreadful simply! Child’s head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her
trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me
that would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent
something to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilight sleep idea:
queen Victoria was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old woman
that lived in a shoe she had so many children. Suppose he was
consumptive. Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the
what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to
feed fools on. They could easily have big establishments whole thing
quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at
compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings
and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system encourage
people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years
want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than you think.
Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for
nothing.
Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs
Moisel. Mothers’ meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then
returns. How flat they look all of a sudden after. Peaceful eyes.
Weight off their mind. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my
babies, she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O,
that’s nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall’s son. His first
bow to the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People
knocking them up at all hours. For God’ sake, doctor. Wife in her
throes. Then keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on
your wife. No gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.
Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of
pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I
pick the fellow in black. Here goes. Here’s good luck. Must be
thrilling from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the
trees near Goose green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.
A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in Indian
file. Goosestep. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their
truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their
belts. Policeman’s lot is oft a happy one. They split up in groups and
scattered, saluting, towards their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment
to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of
others, marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings making for the
station. Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare
to receive soup.
He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put
him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for
women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. _There is not in
this wide world a vallee_. Great song of Julia Morkan’s. Kept her voice
up to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe’s, wasn’t she?
He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack
Power could a tale unfold: father a G man. If a fellow gave them
trouble being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the
bridewell. Can’t blame them after all with the job they have especially
the young hornies. That horsepoliceman the day Joe Chamberlain was
given his degree in Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did!
His horse’s hoofs clattering after us down Abbey street. Lucky I had
the presence of mind to dive into Manning’s or I was souped. He did
come a wallop, by George. Must have cracked his skull on the
cobblestones. I oughtn’t to have got myself swept along with those
medicals. And the Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for
trouble. Still I got to know that young Dixon who dressed that sting
for me in the Mater and now he’s in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy.
Wheels within wheels. Police whistle in my ears still. All skedaddled.
Why he fixed on me. Give me in charge. Right here it began.
—Up the Boers!
—Three cheers for De Wet!
—We’ll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.
Silly billies: mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill.
The Butter exchange band. Few years’ time half of them magistrates and
civil servants. War comes on: into the army helterskelter: same fellows
used to. Whether on the scaffold high.
Never know who you’re talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey Duff in
his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on
the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths on to
get in the know all the time drawing secret service pay from the
castle. Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plainclothes men are
always courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform.
Squarepushing up against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next
thing on the menu. And who is the gentleman does be visiting there? Was
the young master saying anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole.
Decoy duck. Hotblooded young student fooling round her fat arms
ironing.
—Are those yours, Mary?
—I don’t wear such things... Stop or I’ll tell the missus on you. Out
half the night.
—There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.
—Ah, gelong with your great times coming.
Barmaids too. Tobaccoshopgirls.
James Stephens’ idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that
a fellow couldn’t round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back out
you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turnkey’s
daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the
Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.
You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a
squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about
our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company’s tearoom.
Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government.
That the language question should take precedence of the economic
question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them
up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here’s a good lump of thyme
seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease
before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk
with the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap
pays best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show
us over those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day.
Homerule sun rising up in the northwest.
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,
shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing,
outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day:
squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies
mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed
groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second
somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five
minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born,
washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling
maaaaaa.
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other
coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of
pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that.
Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have
all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away
age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves
Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble,
sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan’s mushroom houses built of
breeze. Shelter, for the night.
No-one is anything.
This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate
this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.
Provost’s house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in
there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn’t live in it if they paid me.
Hope they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the
silverware opposite in Walter Sexton’s window by which John Howard
Parnell passed, unseeing.
There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that’s a
coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don’t
meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a
corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal’s
uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on his
high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
pain. Great man’s brother: his brother’s brother. He’d look nice on the
city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess
there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to
pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That’s the
fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other
sister Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright
like surgeon M’Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The
patriot’s banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said
when they put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the
grave and lead him out of the house of commons by the arm.
—Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which
the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks
with a Scotch accent. The tentacles...
They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and
bicycle. Young woman.
And there he is too. Now that’s really a coincidence: second time.
Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the
eminent poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A.
E.: what does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur
Edmund, Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the
world with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult:
symbolism. Holding forth. She’s taking it all in. Not saying a word. To
aid gentleman in literary work.
His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a
listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only
weggebobbles and fruit. Don’t eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of
that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it’s healthier.
Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as a
bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me
nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating
rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by
the tap all night.
Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless.
Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy,
symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that
kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical.
For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their
shirts you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don’t know
what poetry is even. Must be in a certain mood.
 The dreamy cloudy gull
 Waves o’er the waters dull.
He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of
Yeates and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old
Harris’s and have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow.
Probably at his lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right.
Goerz lenses six guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on
easy terms to capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in
the railway lost property office. Astonishing the things people leave
behind them in trains and cloakrooms. What do they be thinking about?
Women too. Incredible. Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up
that farmer’s daughter’s bag and hand it to her at Limerick junction.
Unclaimed money too. There’s a little watch up there on the roof of the
bank to test those glasses by.
His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can’t see it. If
you imagine it’s there you can almost see it. Can’t see it.
He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right
hand at arm’s length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes:
completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun’s disk.
Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses.
Interesting. There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we were
in Lombard street west. Looking up from the back garden. Terrific
explosions they are. There will be a total eclipse this year: autumn
some time.
Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It’s
the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there
some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to
professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do
to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected.
Nobleman proud to be descended from some king’s mistress. His
foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land.
Not go in and blurt out what you know you’re not to: what’s parallax?
Show this gentleman the door.
Ah.
His hand fell to his side again.
Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about,
crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then
solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen
rock, like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she
said. I believe there is.
He went on by la maison Claire.
Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly
there is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview
moon. She was humming. The young May moon she’s beaming, love. He other
side of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm’s la-amp is gleaming, love.
Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.
Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.
Mr Bloom, quickbreathing, slowlier walking passed Adam court.
With a keep quiet relief his eyes took note this is the street here
middle of the day of Bob Doran’s bottle shoulders. On his annual bend,
M’Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or _cherchez la
femme_. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the
rest of the year sober as a judge.
Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do him
good. Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the
Queen’s. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon
face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How time flies,
eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers, drinking,
laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More power, Pat.
Coarse red: fun for drunkards: guffaw and smoke. Take off that white
hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp
that once did starve us all.
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was.
She twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed.
Could never like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time. Like
holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning
then. Would you? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty
boy? Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the
library.
Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints,
silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in
the baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings.
Hope the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef
to the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out
of plumb.
He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers.
Cascades of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its
mouth a flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. The huguenots
brought that here. _La causa è santa!_ Tara tara. Great chorus that.
Taree tara. Must be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara: bom bom bom.
Pincushions. I’m a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all
over the place. Needles in window curtains.
He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape: nearly gone. Not today
anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps.
Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn’t
like it. Women won’t pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.
Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk
stockings.
Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.
High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home
and houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath
Netaim. Wealth of the world.
A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded.
Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he
mutely craved to adore.
Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.
He turned Combridge’s corner, still pursued. Jingling, hoofthuds.
Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer
fields, tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements,
along sofas, creaking beds.
—Jack, love!
—Darling!
—Kiss me, Reggy!
—My boy!
—Love!
His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink
gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See
the animals feed.
Men, men, men.
Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables
calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy
food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced
young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin.
New set of microbes. A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked
round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back
on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew
it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser’s
eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves
as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw.
Don’t! O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the
schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what
he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to
Christianity. Couldn’t swallow it all however.
—Roast beef and cabbage.
—One stew.
Smells of men. Spat-on sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarettesmoke, reek
of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment.
His gorge rose.
Couldn’t eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat all
before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing
the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then
on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it
off the plate, man! Get out of this.
He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of
his nose.
—Two stouts here.
—One corned and cabbage.
That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended
on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat from his
three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a
silver knife in his mouth. That’s witty, I think. Or no. Silver means
born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.
An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the head
bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard.
Well up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork
upright, elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the
foodlift across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him
something with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I
munched hum un thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?
Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said:
—Not here. Don’t see him.
Out. I hate dirty eaters.
He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne’s. Stopgap.
Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.
—Roast and mashed here.
—Pint of stout.
Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.
He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street.
Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!
Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down
with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the
street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every
mother’s son don’t talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women
and children cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From
Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans’ dwellings, north Dublin union,
lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My
plate’s empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir
Philip Crampton’s fountain. Rub off the microbes with your
handkerchief. Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O’Flynn
would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number
one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as
big as the Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of
it. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel _table d’hôte_ she
called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you’re
chewing. Then who’d wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all
feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.
After all there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from
the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp
of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw
fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe
to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering
bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers’ buckets wobbly lights. Give us that
brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed
sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling
nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don’t maul them pieces,
young one.
Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed.
Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.
Ah, I’m hungry.
He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now
and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.
What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?
—Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.
—Hello, Flynn.
—How’s things?
—Tiptop... Let me see. I’ll take a glass of burgundy and... let me see.
Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham
and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is
home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad!
Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam’s
potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too
salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of
honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch
the effect. _There was a right royal old slave. Who ate or something
the somethings of the reverend Mr MacTrigger_. With it an abode of
bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked
and minced up. Puzzle find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together.
Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of
inside. Peace and war depend on some fellow’s digestion. Religions.
Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be
merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all
but itself. Mity cheese.
—Have you a cheese sandwich?
—Yes, sir.
Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of
burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber,
Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served
me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God
made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.
—Wife well?
—Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?
—Yes, sir.
Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.
—Doing any singing those times?
Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match.
Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him.
Does no harm. Free ad.
—She’s engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard
perhaps.
—No. O, that’s the style. Who’s getting it up?
The curate served.
—How much is that?
—Seven d., sir... Thank you, sir.
Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. _Mr MacTrigger_. Easier
than the dreamy creamy stuff. _His five hundred wives. Had the time of
their lives._
—Mustard, sir?
—Thank you.
He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. _Their lives_. I have
it. _It grew bigger and bigger and bigger_.
—Getting it up? he said. Well, it’s like a company idea, you see. Part
shares and part profits.
—Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket
to scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn’t Blazes Boylan
mixed up in it?
A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom’s heart. He
raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock
five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.
His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly,
longingly.
Wine.
He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to
speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.
—Yes, he said. He’s the organiser in point of fact.
No fear: no brains.
Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.
—He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that
boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello
barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he
was telling me...
Hope that dewdrop doesn’t come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up.
—For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God
till further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is
a hairy chap.
Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves,
cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring’s blush. Whose
smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat
on the parsnips.
—And here’s himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give
us a good one for the Gold cup?
—I’m off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a
horse.
—You’re right there, Nosey Flynn said.
Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of
disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his
wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather
with the chill off.
Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like
the way it curves there.
—I wouldn’t do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined
many a man, the same horses.
Vintners’ sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits
for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.
—True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you’re in the know. There’s no
straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He’s giving
Sceptre today. Zinfandel’s the favourite, Lord Howard de Walden’s, won
at Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one
against Saint Amant a fortnight before.
—That so? Davy Byrne said...
He went towards the window and, taking up the pettycash book, scanned
its pages.
—I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. That was a rare bit of
horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm,
Rothschild’s filly, with wadding in her ears. Blue jacket and yellow
cap. Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O’Gaunt. He put me off
it. Ay.
He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the
flutes.
—Ay, he said, sighing.
Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey numbskull.
Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better let him
forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down
again. Cold nose he’d have kissing a woman. Still they might like.
Prickly beards they like. Dogs’ cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the
rumbling stomach’s Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling
him in her lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy!
Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish
cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I’m not thirsty. Bath
of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o’clock I can.
Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She...
Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off
colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins: sardines, gaudy
lobsters’ claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of
shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the
French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn
nothing in a thousand years. If you didn’t know risky putting anything
into your mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you
think good. Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so
on. Try it on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting
fruit. Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need
artificial irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters.
Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too.
Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank
oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this
morning. Was he oysters old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed
no June has no ar no oysters. But there are people like things high.
Tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs
fifty years old, blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each
dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That
archduke Leopold was it no yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs?
Or who was it used to eat the scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch
in town. Of course aristocrats, then the others copy to be in the
fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw pastry I like myself. Half
the catch of oysters they throw back in the sea to keep up the price.
Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses.
Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The _élite. Crème de
la crème_. They want special dishes to pretend they’re. Hermit with a
platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat
with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to
venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half of a cow.
Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls’ kitchen area. Whitehatted
_chef_ like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage _à la duchesse de
Parme_. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you can know
what you’ve eaten. Too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it myself.
Dosing it with Edwards’ desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for them.
Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn’t mind being a
waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I
tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do
bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat
lived in Killiney, I remember. _Du de la_ is French. Still it’s the
same fish perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out
of making money hand over fist finger in fishes’ gills can’t write his
name on a cheque think he was painting the landscape with his mouth
twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth
fifty thousand pounds.
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the
winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun’s heat it is. Seems to a secret touch
telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under
wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The
bay purple by the Lion’s head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards
Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried
cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather
scrub my hand under her nape, you’ll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft
with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not
turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her
mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and
chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle.
Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft
warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing
eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth
rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants.
Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her,
kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts
full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued
her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair.
Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
Stuck, the flies buzzed.
His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab.
Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno:
curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the
round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don’t care what
man looks. All to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like
Flynn. Suppose she did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first?
Mortal! Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods
golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled
mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it
drinking electricity: gods’ food. Lovely forms of women sculped
Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out
behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like
stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I’ll look today. Keeper
won’t see. Bend down let something fall see if she.
Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do
there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and
walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men
lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.
When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book:
—What is this he is? Isn’t he in the insurance line?
—He’s out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for
the _Freeman._
—I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?
—Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?
—I noticed he was in mourning.
—Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at
home. You’re right, by God. So he was.
—I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a
gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their
minds.
—It’s not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before
yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan’s
wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home
to his better half. She’s well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.
—And is he doing for the _Freeman?_ Davy Byrne said.
Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.
—He doesn’t buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of
that.
—How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.
Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He
winked.
—He’s in the craft, he said.
—Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.
—Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He’s
an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg
up. I was told that by a—well, I won’t say who.
—Is that a fact?
—O, it’s a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you’re
down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they’re as close
as damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.
Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:
—Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!
—There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find
out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and
swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint
Legers of Doneraile.
Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes:
—And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here
and I never once saw him—you know, over the line.
—God Almighty couldn’t make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips
off when the fun gets too hot. Didn’t you see him look at his watch?
Ah, you weren’t there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he
does he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to
God he does.
—There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He’s a safe man, I’d say.
—He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He’s been known
to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O,
Bloom has his good points. But there’s one thing he’ll never do.
His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.
—I know, Davy Byrne said.
—Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.
Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed frowning,
a plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.
—Day, Mr Byrne.
—Day, gentlemen.
They paused at the counter.
—Who’s standing? Paddy Leonard asked.
—I’m sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.
—Well, what’ll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.
—I’ll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.
—How much? Paddy Leonard cried. Since when, for God’ sake? What’s
yours, Tom?
—How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.
For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and
hiccupped.
—Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.
—Certainly, sir.
Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.
—Lord love a duck, he said. Look at what I’m standing drinks to! Cold
water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.
He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.
—Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.
Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set
before him.
—That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.
—Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.
Tom Rochford nodded and drank.
—Is it Zinfandel?
—Say nothing! Bantam Lyons winked. I’m going to plunge five bob on my
own.
—Tell us if you’re worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard
said. Who gave it to you?
Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.
—So long! Nosey Flynn said.
The others turned.
—That’s the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.
—Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we’ll take two
of your small Jamesons after that and a...
—Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.
—Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.
Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth
smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach, say. Then with
those Röntgen rays searchlight you could.
At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the
cobblestones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks
having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom
coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they
move. Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of
his? Wasting time explaining it to Flynn’s mouth. Lean people long
mouths. Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and
invent free. Course then you’d have all the cranks pestering.
He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars:
 Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
 M’invitasti.
Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap
in the blues. Dutch courage. That _Kilkenny People_ in the national
library now I must.
Bare clean closestools waiting in the window of William Miller,
plumber, turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way
down, swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour
round the body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric
juice coils of intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to
stand all the time with his insides entrails on show. Science.
—_A cenar teco._
What does that _teco_ mean? Tonight perhaps.
 Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited
 To come to supper tonight,
 The rum the rumdum.
Doesn’t go properly.
Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That’ll be two pounds ten about
two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Prescott’s dyeworks
van over there. If I get Billy Prescott’s ad: two fifteen. Five guineas
about. On the pig’s back.
Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new
garters.
Today. Today. Not think.
Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton,
Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely
seaside girls. Against John Long’s a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy
thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages.
Will eat anything.
Mr Bloom turned at Gray’s confectioner’s window of unbought tarts and
passed the reverend Thomas Connellan’s bookstore. _Why I left the
church of Rome? Birds’ Nest._ Women run him. They say they used to give
pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato
blight. Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor
jews. Same bait. Why we left the church of Rome.
A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No
tram in sight. Wants to cross.
—Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.
The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly. He
moved his head uncertainly.
—You’re in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite.
Do you want to cross? There’s nothing in the way.
The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom’s eye followed its
line and saw again the dyeworks’ van drawn up before Drago’s. Where I
saw his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in
John Long’s. Slaking his drouth.
—There’s a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it’s not moving. I’ll see you
across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?
—Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.
—Come, Mr Bloom said.
He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to
guide it forward.
Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust
what you tell them. Pass a common remark.
—The rain kept off.
No answer.
Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different
for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child’s hand, his hand. Like
Milly’s was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder if
he has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse’s legs: tired
drudge get his doze. That’s right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a
horse.
—Thanks, sir.
Knows I’m a man. Voice.
—Right now? First turn to the left.
The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing
his cane back, feeling again.
Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there?
Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense
of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark.
Wonder would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer
idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could
he walk in a beeline if he hadn’t that cane? Bloodless pious face like
a fellow going in to be a priest.
Penrose! That was that chap’s name.
Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might
say. Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets.
People ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly’s birthday.
Hates sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.
Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched
together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the
spring, the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can’t taste wines with
your eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say
get no pleasure.
And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have
them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his
mind’s eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his
fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair,
for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black.
Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of
white.
Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer’s just
here too. Wait. Think over it.
With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt
the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough.
The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick
street. Perhaps to Levenston’s dancing academy piano. Might be settling
my braces.
Walking by Doran’s publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat
and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of
his belly. But I know it’s whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to
see.
He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.
Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would
he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being
born that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned
and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration
for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses.
Dear, dear, dear. Pity, of course: but somehow you can’t cotton on to
them someway.
Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons’ hall. Solemn as Troy.
After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking a
magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat
school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he’d turn up his nose
at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a
dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder’s court.
Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their
percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil
on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J a great strawcalling. Now he’s really
what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers
in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your
soul.
Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.
Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital. _The
Messiah_ was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out
there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a
leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.
Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved
to the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too
heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.
Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?
Didn’t see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.
No. Didn’t see me. After two. Just at the gate.
My heart!
His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir
Thomas Deane was the Greek architecture.
Look for something I.
His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded
Agendath Netaim. Where did I?
Busy looking.
He thrust back quick Agendath.
Afternoon she said.
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. _Freeman._
Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?
Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.
Safe!
[ 9 ]
Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:
—And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of _Wilhelm Meister_.
A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms
against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in
real life.
He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.
—Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant’s words: heard them: and was
gone.
Two left.
—Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.
—Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder’s gall, to write _Paradise Lost_ at your dictation? _The Sorrows
of Satan_ he calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly’s smile.
 First he tickled her
 Then he patted her
 Then he passed the female catheter
 For he was a medical
 Jolly old medi...
—I feel you would need one more for _Hamlet._ Seven is dear to the
mystic mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.
Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought
the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He
laughed low: a sizar’s laugh of Trinity: unanswered.
 Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
 Tears such as angels weep.
 Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
He holds my follies hostage.
Cranly’s eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.
And one more to hail him: _ave, rabbi_: the Tinahely twelve. In the
shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul’s youth I gave him,
night by night. God speed. Good hunting.
Mulligan has my telegram.
Folly. Persist.
—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet
though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
—All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal
to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a
work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of
Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,
the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal
wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of
schoolboys for schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!
—The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.
—And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who
suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon
the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.
Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to
see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of
light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the
plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P.
must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very
illustrious sister H.P.B.’s elemental.
O, fie! Out on’t! _Pfuiteufel!_ You naughtn’t to look, missus, so you
naughtn’t when a lady’s ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with
grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
—That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
—Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.
—Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the
street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see.
Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they
creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this
vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through
which all future plunges to the past.
Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
—Haines is gone, he said.
—Is he?
—I was showing him Jubainville’s book. He’s quite enthusiastic, don’t
you know, about Hyde’s _Lovesongs of Connacht._ I couldn’t bring him in
to hear the discussion. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy it.
 Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
 To greet the callous public.
 Writ, I ween, ’twas not my wish
 In lean unlovely English.
—The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.
—People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on
the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the
living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce
the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest
flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed
only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
—Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about
_Hamlet._ He says: _il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même_, don’t
you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in
a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
_Hamlet
ou
Le Distrait
Pièce de Shakespeare_
He repeated to John Eglinton’s newgathered frown:
—_Pièce de Shakespeare_, don’t you know. It’s so French. The French
point of view. _Hamlet ou_...
—The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
—Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
—A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
for nothing was he a butcher’s son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and
spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one.
Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot.
The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
 Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
 But we had spared...
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
—He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for
Mr Best’s behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our
flesh creep.
 List! List! O List!
My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
 If thou didst ever...
—What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_,
returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
Lifted.
—It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.
Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
—Shakespeare has left the huguenot’s house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the
pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon
has other thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
—The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is
the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare
who has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not
vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to
Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of
cerecloth, calling him by a name:
 Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit,
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises:
you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is
the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?
—Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I
mean when we read the poetry of _King Lear_ what is it to us how the
poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de
l’Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day,
the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have _King Lear_: and it is
immortal.
Mr Best’s face, appealed to, agreed.
 Flow over them with your waves and with your waters,
 Mananaan, Mananaan MacLir...
How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.
Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well... No.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.
Steady on. He’s from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies.
I, I and I. I.
A.E.I.O.U.
—Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
John Eglinton’s carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid
for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.
—She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She
bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids
closed when he lay on his deathbed.
Mother’s deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this
world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. _Liliata
rutilantium._
I wept alone.
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
—The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
out of it as quickly and as best he could.
—Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.
—A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
from Xanthippe?
—Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (_absit
nomen!_), Socratididion’s Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever
know. But neither the midwife’s lore nor the caudlelectures saved him
from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.
—But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best’s quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
His look went from brooder’s beard to carper’s skull, to remind, to
chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard,
guiltless though maligned.
—He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
_The girl I left behind me._ If the earthquake did not time it we
should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of
hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, _Venus
and Adonis_, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London. Is
Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
beautiful. Do you think the writer of _Antony and Cleopatra_, a
passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose
the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her
and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy.
Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He
was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.
By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and
twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping
to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford
wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
And my turn? When?
Come!
—Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.
He murmured then with blond delight for all:
 Between the acres of the rye
 These pretty countryfolk would lie.
Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.
A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its
cooperative watch.
—I am afraid I am due at the _Homestead._
Whither away? Exploitable ground.
—Are you going? John Eglinton’s active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you
at Moore’s tonight? Piper is coming.
—Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?
Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.
—I don’t know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get
away in time.
Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. _Isis Unveiled._ Their Pali book we
tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an
Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma.
The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship,
ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies
tend them i’the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god,
he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls,
shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled,
whirling, they bewail.
 In quintessential triviality
 For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.
—They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian
said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering
together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses. We are all looking
forward anxiously.
Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces,
lighted, shone.
See this. Remember.
Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his
ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with
two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is
that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise.
Argal, one hat is one hat.
Listen.
Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.
Longworth will give it a good puff in the _Express._ O, will he? I
liked Colum’s _Drover._ Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do
you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: _As in wild
earth a Grecian vase_. Did he? I hope you’ll be able to come tonight.
Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did
you hear Miss Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is
Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr
Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful
countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O,
yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James
Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it
seems.
Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir’s loneliest daughter.
Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.
—Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...
—O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.
—I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
God ild you. The pigs’ paper. Bullockbefriending.
Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be
read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope
you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.
Stephen sat down.
The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask
said:
—Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.
He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:
—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.
—Yes.
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women
he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices,
bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack
dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as
cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow
grave and unforgiven.
—Yes. So you think...
The door closed behind the outgoer.
Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.
A vestal’s lamp.
Here he ponders things that were not: what Cæsar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore
when he lived among women.
Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice
of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with
tilebooks._
They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.
—Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.
—But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn’t it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind
of private paper, don’t you know, of his private life. I mean, I don’t
care a button, don’t you know, who is killed or who is guilty...
He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his
defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir.
Taim in mo shagart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.
Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:
—I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I
may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that
Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.
Bear with me.
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l’uomo l’attosca_. Messer
Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.
—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the
artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast
is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of
new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father
the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of
imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which
I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to
be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit
here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
—Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
the son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
—That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
—If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug
in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan
admired so much breathe another spirit.
—The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.
—There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
sundering.
Said that.
—If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of _King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,_
look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a
man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,
prince of Tyre?
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
—A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
—The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant
quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they
lead to the town.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon’s wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good
masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the
sun, west of the moon: _Tir na n-og_. Booted the twain and staved.
 How many miles to Dublin?
 Three score and ten, sir.
 Will we be there by candlelight?
—Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.
—Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his
name is, say of it?
—Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s
child. _My dearest wife_, Pericles says, _was like this maid._ Will any
man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
—The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. _L’art d’être
grand_...
—Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all
men. _Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus
..._
—His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.
The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.
—I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of
the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr
George Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles
on Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ were surely brilliant. Oddly
enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of
the sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I
own that if the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more
in harmony with—what shall I say?—our notions of what ought not to have
been.
Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk’s egg,
prize of their fray.
He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost
love thy man?
—That may be too, Stephen said. There’s a saying of Goethe’s which Mr
Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you
will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a
_buonaroba,_ a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a
scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord
of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had
written _Romeo and Juliet_. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely
killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say)
and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play
victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will
not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of
the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew
is worsted yet there remains to her woman’s invisible weapon. There is,
I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new
passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own
understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two rages
commingle in a whirlpool.
They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.
—The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the
porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep
cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their
souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the
beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet’s ghost could not know
of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the
speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere,
backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with
him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare,
with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has
piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But,
because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished
personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he
has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind
by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard
only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son
consubstantial with the father.
—Amen! was responded from the doorway.
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
_Entr’acte_.
A ribald face, sullen as a dean’s, Buck Mulligan came forward, then
blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.
—You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he
asked of Stephen.
Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a
bauble.
They make him welcome. _Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen._
Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,
Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,
stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on
crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven
and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His
Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and
dead when all the quick shall be dead already.
[Illustration]
He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.
—Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.
Mr Mulligan, I’ll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of
Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.
He smiled on all sides equally.
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:
—Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
—To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.
Mr Best turned to him.
—Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He’ll see you after at
the D. B. C. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy Hyde’s _Lovesongs of Connacht_.
—I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
—The bard’s fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress
played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin.
Vining held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be
an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He
swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.
—The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H._ where he
proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all
hues.
—For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?
—I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the
colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out. It’s the very
essence of Wilde, don’t you know. The light touch.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
Tame essence of Wilde.
You’re darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan
Deasy’s ducats.
How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
Wit. You would give your five wits for youth’s proud livery he pranks
in. Lineaments of gratified desire.
There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool
ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.
Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in’s kiss.
—Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
They talked seriously of mocker’s seriousness.
Buck Mulligan’s again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.
—Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
—_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
immense debtorship for a thing done._ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you
launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four
quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!
Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!
O, you priestified Kinchite!
Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:
—It’s what I’m telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.
He wailed:
—And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
Stephen laughed.
Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
—The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard
you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He’s out in pampooties to
murder you.
—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
—Murder you! he laughed.
Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of
lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. _C’est vendredi saint!_ Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’the forest.
—Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
—... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms... Yes?
What is it?
—There’s a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the _Freeman._ He wants to see the files of the
_Kilkenny People_ for last year.
—Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...
He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:
—Is he?... O, there!
Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.
—This gentleman? _Freeman’s Journal? Kilkenny People?_ To be sure. Good
day, sir. _Kilkenny_... We have certainly...
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
—All the leading provincial... _Northern Whig, Cork Examiner,
Enniscorthy Guardian,_ 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this
gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or, please allow me...
This way... Please, sir...
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
—The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
—What’s his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
He rattled on:
—Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth
that has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to
her. _Life of life, thy lips enkindle._
Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
—He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the
maiden hid_.
—We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best’s approval.
We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if
at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
—Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy
in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a
salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was
rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called
it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack,
honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons,
ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a
million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The
gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of
Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its
chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know
Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her
bed after she had seen him in _Richard III_ and how Shakespeare,
overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns
and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon’s
blankets: _William the conqueror came before Richard III_. And the gay
lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady
Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the
punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites
cochonneries. Minette? Tu veux?_
—The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford’s
mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
—Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
—And Harry of six wives’ daughter. And other lady friends from
neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
behind the diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of
Juno’s eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.
Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton’s desk sharply.
—Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
—Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
—As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
—It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for
the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he
had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a
bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost’s mind: a broken vow and the
dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband’s
brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer,
twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
—The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her
poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the
first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her
sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan’s daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy’s words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father’s shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein
he has commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow’s dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
 Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
 And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
 _Punkt._
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
—Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
—He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and
landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her
his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in
peace?
—It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.
—_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.
—Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
Let me think.
—Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don’t forget
Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
—Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
—He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
—What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people’s William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
—Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his
hands and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those
days._ Lovely!
Catamite.
—The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
—The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
and have it.
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?
—And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the
famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to
his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging
and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being
plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_
with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn
for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love’s Labour Lost_.
His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s
theory of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and
the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American
cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney’s. As for fay Elizabeth,
otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives
of Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for
deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.
I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere._
—Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
_Sufflaminandus sum._
—He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.
—A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.
_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit
amicitia inter multos._
—Saint Thomas, Stephen began...
—_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
—_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree!_ It’s destroyed we are from this day!
It’s destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
—Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in
his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that
the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues
old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so
tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will
hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls
his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his
manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
—Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
—Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
—Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
—The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s
widow, is the will to die.
_—Requiescat!_ Stephen prayed.
 What of all the will to do?
 It has vanished long ago...
—She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as
rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of
seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed
with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid
for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a
soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the
_Merry Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she
thought over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches_ and _The most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has
twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience.
It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
—History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family
man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there’s a
gentleman to see you. Me? Says he’s your father, sir. Give me my
Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in
strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with
clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters,
with thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_,
with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from
Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the
lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the
night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of
fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son.
Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with
child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to
man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only
begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which
the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is
founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro
and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.
_Amor matris_, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true
thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of
any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._
Are you condemned to do this?
—They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father’s decline, his youth
his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
—What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
—Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the
father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another
poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not
the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and
felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own
grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token,
never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors
perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
—Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play’s the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
—As for his family, Stephen said, his mother’s name lives in the forest
of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
_Coriolanus._ His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
_King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter’s Tale_ are we know.
Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may
guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.
—The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in
his old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister
Gatherer one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the
playwriter up in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on’s back. The
playhouse sausage filled Gilbert’s soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund
and a Richard are recorded in the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What’s in a name?
BEST: That is my name, Richard, don’t you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don’t you know, for my sake. _(Laughter)_
BUCKMULLIGAN: (_Piano, diminuendo_)
 Then outspoke medical Dick
 To his comrade medical Davy...
STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in _King Lear_, two bear the wicked uncles’
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his
brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.
BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don’t want Richard, my name
...
_(Laughter)_
QUAKERLYSTER: (_A tempo_) But he that filches from me my good name...
STEPHEN: _(Stringendo)_ He has hidden his own name, a fair name,
William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it
in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o’Gaunt his
name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a
bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus,
dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What’s in
a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the
name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at
his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in
the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the
recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the
stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the
bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight
returning from Shottery and from her arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don’t tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. _Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos._ Where’s your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: _sua donna.
Già: di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amare S. D._
—What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
—A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
What more’s to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
_Stephanos,_ my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
—You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
_Pater, ait._ Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing
be.
Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
—That’s very interesting because that brother motive, don’t you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three
brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don’t you know, the fairytales. The
third brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best
prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
—I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you
to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps
I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
—Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
—O, Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
—Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.
You kept them for the last, didn’t you?
—In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries’ hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
—You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
(what’s in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard
the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The
other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare’s reverence,
the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which
Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and spatchcocked on to
a Celtic legend older than history?
—That was Will’s way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine
a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que
voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and
makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.
—Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my
lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the
lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under
which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it.
Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety
everywhere in the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
twice in _As you like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure
for Measure_—and in all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.
Judge Eglinton summed up.
—The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
is all in all.
—He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Othello_ he is bawd and cuckold. He
acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he
kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago
ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
—Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!
Dark dome received, reverbed.
—And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _père?)_ is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.
—Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The
motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet _père_ and Hamlet _fils._ A
king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what
though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for,
Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom
they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it:
prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of
love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the
place where the bad slaves go. Strong curtain. He found in the world
without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck
says: _If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated
on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps
will tend._ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through
ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives,
widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright
who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light
first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom
the most Roman of catholics call _dio boia_, hangman god, is doubtless
all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and
cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet,
there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being
a wife unto himself.
_—Eureka!_ Buck Mulligan cried. _Eureka!_
Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton’s
desk.
—May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
Take some slips from the counter going out.
—Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,
shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
variorum edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._
—You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe
your own theory?
—No, Stephen said promptly.
—Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.
John Eclecticon doubly smiled.
—Well, in that case, he said, I don’t see why you should expect payment
for it since you don’t believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is
some mystery in _Hamlet_ but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man
Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes
that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to
visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor
wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he
believes his theory.
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or
help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? _Egomen._ Who to unbelieve?
Other chap.
—You are the only contributor to _Dana_ who asks for pieces of silver.
Then I don’t know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
article on economics.
Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
—For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
gravely said, honeying malice:
—I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the _Summa
contra Gentiles_ in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly
and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.
He broke away.
—Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Ængus of the birds.
Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts
and offals.
Stephen rose.
Life is many days. This will end.
—We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. _Notre ami_ Moore says
Malachi Mulligan must be there.
Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
—Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I’ll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?
Laughing, he...
Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.
Lubber...
Stephen followed a lubber...
One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His
lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.
Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a
wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering
daylight of no thought.
What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
Walk like Haines now.
The constant readers’ room. In the readers’ book Cashel Boyle O’Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet
mad? The quaker’s pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
—O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...
Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself,
selfnodding:
—A pleased bottom.
The turnstile.
Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...
The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.
Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
 John Eglinton, my jo, John,
 Why won’t you wed a wife?
He spluttered to the air:
—O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers’ hall. Our players are creating a
new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I
smell the pubic sweat of monks.
He spat blank.
Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
left the _femme de trente ans._ And why no other children born? And his
first child a girl?
Afterwit. Go back.
The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo’s toyable fair hair.
Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...
—Longworth and M’Curdy Atkinson were there...
Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:
 I hardly hear the purlieu cry
 Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
 Before my thoughts begin to run
 On F. M’Curdy Atkinson,
 The same that had the wooden leg
 And that filibustering filibeg
 That never dared to slake his drouth,
 Magee that had the chinless mouth.
 Being afraid to marry on earth
 They masturbated for all they were worth.
Jest on. Know thyself.
Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
—Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are
black.
A laugh tripped over his lips.
—Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that
old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a
job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus.
Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?
He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:
—The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.
He stopped at the stairfoot.
—I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men’s
morrice with caps of indices.
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:
_Everyman His Own Wife
or
A Honeymoon in the Hand
(a national immorality in three orgasms)
by
Ballocky Mulligan._
He turned a happy patch’s smirk to Stephen, saying:
—The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, _marcato:_
—Characters:
 TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
 CRAB (a bushranger)
 MEDICAL DICK )
 and ) (two birds with one stone)
 MEDICAL DAVY )
 MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
 FRESH NELLY
 and
 ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
—O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to lift
their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!
—The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
them.
About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must
come to, ineluctably.
My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.
A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
—Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
The portico.
Here I watched the birds for augury. Ængus of the birds. They go, they
come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.
—The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown’s awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
Manner of Oxenford.
Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.
A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,
under portcullis barbs.
They followed.
Offend me still. Speak on.
Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds.
Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in
a flaw of softness softly were blown.
Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic:
from wide earth an altar.
 Laud we the gods
 And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
 From our bless’d altars.
[ 10 ]
The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J. reset his smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five
to three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy’s name
again? Dignam. Yes. _Vere dignum et iustum est._ Brother Swan was the
person to see. Mr Cunningham’s letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible.
Good practical catholic: useful at mission time.
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,
of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs,
ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey’s words:
_If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have
abandoned me in my old days._ He walked by the treeshade of
sunnywinking leaves: and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy
M.P.
—Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear
that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still
sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful
indeed. Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would
come again to preach. O, yes: a very great success. A wonderful man
really.
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.
Iooking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M.P.
Yes, he would certainly call.
—Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as he took leave, at the
jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again,
in going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.
Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
Bernard Vaughan’s droll eyes and cockney voice.
—Pilate! Wy don’t you old back that owlin mob?
A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his
way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish.
Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?
O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy
square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha. And were
they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his
name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little
man? His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.
Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam and
pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
—But mind you don’t post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed:
—O, sir.
—Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee’s letter
to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father
Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square
east.
Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate
frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender
trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave
deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady
Maxwell at the corner of Dignam’s court.
Was that not Mrs M’Guinness?
Mrs M’Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the
farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and
saluted. How did she do?
A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
think that she was a pawnbroker! Well, now! Such a... what should he
say?... such a queenly mien.
Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the
shutup free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Greene B.A. will
(D.V.) speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on
him to say a few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible
ignorance. They acted according to their lights.
Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular
road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an
important thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.
A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
Christian brother boys.
Father Conmee smelt incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
Joseph’s church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females. Father
Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but
occasionally they were also badtempered.
Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
nobleman. And now it was an office or something.
Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted
by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father
Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came
from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan’s the
Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful
catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually
happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an
act of perfect contrition.
Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin’s publichouse against the window of
which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.
Father Conmee passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny
Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay.
A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted
the constable. In Youkstetter’s, the porkbutcher’s, Father Conmee
observed pig’s puddings, white and black and red, lie neatly curled in
tubes.
Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a
turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty
straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above
him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of
the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out
and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor
people.
On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint Francis
Xavier’s church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound
tram.
Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of
saint Agatha’s church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.
At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for
he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with
care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a
sixpence and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into
his purse. Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket
inspector usually made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away
the ticket. The solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father
Conmee excessive for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked
cheerful decorum.
It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee
supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman
with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so
gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and
smiled tinily, sweetly.
Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that
the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the
seat.
Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.
At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old
woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the
bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and a
marketnet: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and
basket down: and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed
the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had
always to be told twice _bless you, my child,_ that they have been
absolved, _pray for me._ But they had so many worries in life, so many
cares, poor creatures.
From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced with thick slavelips at
Father Conmee.
Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men
and of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S. J. and the African mission
and of the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and
brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when
their last hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the
Belgian jesuit, _Le Nombre des Élus,_ seemed to Father Conmee a
reasonable plea. Those were millions of human souls created by God in
His Own likeness to whom the faith had not (D.V.) been brought. But
they were God’s souls, created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a
pity that they should all be lost, a waste, if one might say.
At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the
conductor and saluted in his turn.
The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and name.
The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide,
immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.
Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day.
Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old
times in the barony.
Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book _Old Times in the
Barony_ and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and
of Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of
Belvedere.
A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel,
Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening,
not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the
jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed
adultery fully, _eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris,_ with
her husband’s brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned
as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband’s brother.
Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however
for man’s race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our
ways.
Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and
honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at
smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit
clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble,
were impalmed by Don John Conmee.
It was a charming day.
The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages,
curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of
small white clouds going slowly down the wind. _Moutonner,_ the French
said. A just and homely word.
Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds
over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of
Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard the
cries of the boys’ lines at their play, young cries in the quiet
evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild.
Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out.
An ivory bookmark told him the page.
Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had
come.
Father Conmee read in secret _Pater_ and _Ave_ and crossed his breast.
_Deus in adiutorium._
He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till he
came to _Res_ in _Beati immaculati: Principium verborum tuorum veritas:
in eternum omnia iudicia iustitiæ tuæ._
A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a
young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised
his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care
detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.
Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his
breviary. _Sin: Principes persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis
formidavit cor meum._
* * *
Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping
eye at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect,
went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass
furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came
to the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes
and leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.
Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge.
Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat
downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.
Constable 57C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.
—That’s a fine day, Mr Kelleher.
—Ay, Corny Kelleher said.
—It’s very close, the constable said.
Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth
while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a
coin.
—What’s the best news? he asked.
—I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with
bated breath.
* * *
A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell’s corner, skirting
Rabaiotti’s icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street. Towards
Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled unamiably:
—_For England_...
He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus, halted
and growled:
—_home and beauty._
J. J. O’Molloy’s white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in
the warehouse with a visitor.
A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped it
into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced
sourly at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself
forward four strides.
He halted and growled angrily:
—_For England_...
Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him,
gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.
He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head
towards a window and bayed deeply:
—_home and beauty._
The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased.
The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card _Unfurnished
Apartments_ slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm
shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut
shiftstraps. A woman’s hand flung forth a coin over the area railings.
It fell on the path.
One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the
minstrel’s cap, saying:
—There, sir.
* * *
Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming
kitchen.
—Did you put in the books? Boody asked.
Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling suds
twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.
—They wouldn’t give anything on them, she said.
Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles
tickled by stubble.
—Where did you try? Boody asked.
—M’Guinness’s.
Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.
—Bad cess to her big face! she cried.
Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.
—What’s in the pot? she asked.
—Shirts, Maggy said.
Boody cried angrily:
—Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?
Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked:
—And what’s in this?
A heavy fume gushed in answer.
—Peasoup, Maggy said.
—Where did you get it? Katey asked.
—Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.
The lacquey rang his bell.
—Barang!
Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily:
—Give us it here.
Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey,
sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her
mouth random crumbs:
—A good job we have that much. Where’s Dilly?
—Gone to meet father, Maggy said.
Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added:
—Our father who art not in heaven.
Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey’s bowl, exclaimed:
—Boody! For shame!
A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the
Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed
around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains,
between the Customhouse old dock and George’s quay.
* * *
The blond girl in Thornton’s bedded the wicker basket with rustling
fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper
and a small jar.
—Put these in first, will you? he said.
—Yes, sir, the blond girl said. And the fruit on top.
—That’ll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.
She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe
shamefaced peaches.
Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the
fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red
tomatoes, sniffing smells.
H. E. L. Y.’S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane,
plodding towards their goal.
He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from
his fob and held it at its chain’s length.
—Can you send them by tram? Now?
A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s
cart.
—Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?
—O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.
The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.
—Will you write the address, sir?
Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.
—Send it at once, will you? he said. It’s for an invalid.
—Yes, sir. I will, sir.
Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers’ pocket.
—What’s the damage? he asked.
The blond girl’s slim fingers reckoned the fruits.
Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He
took a red carnation from the tall stemglass.
—This for me? he asked gallantly.
The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie
a bit crooked, blushing.
—Yes, sir, she said.
Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.
Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the
red flower between his smiling teeth.
—May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.
* * *
_—Ma!_ Almidano Artifoni said.
He gazed over Stephen’s shoulder at Goldsmith’s knobby poll.
Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,
gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men’s arms frankly round their
stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of
the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.
—_Anch’io ho avuto di queste idee_, Almidano Artifoni said, _quand’ ero
giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono convinto che il mondo è una bestia. È
peccato. Perchè la sua voce... sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via.
Invece, Lei si sacrifica._
—_Sacrifizio incruento,_ Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in
slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.
_—Speriamo,_ the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. _Ma, dia retta
a me. Ci rifletta_.
By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram
unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.
—_Ci rifletterò,_ Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.
—_Ma, sul serio, eh?_ Almidano Artifoni said.
His heavy hand took Stephen’s firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously
an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.
_—Eccolo,_ Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. _Venga a trovarmi
e ci pensi. Addio, caro._
—_Arrivederla, maestro,_ Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand
was freed. _E grazie._
—_Di che?_ Almidano Artifoni said. _Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose!_
Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal,
trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted,
signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling
implements of music through Trinity gates.
* * *
Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of _The Woman in White_
far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her
typewriter.
Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?
Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them:
six.
Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:
—16 June 1904.
Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny’s corner and the slab
where Wolfe Tone’s statue was not, eeled themselves turning H. E. L.
Y.’S and plodded back as they had come.
Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens
and capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She’s not
nicelooking, is she? The way she’s holding up her bit of a skirt.
Wonder will that fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that
dressmaker to make a concertina skirt like Susy Nagle’s. They kick out
grand. Shannon and all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her.
Hope to goodness he won’t keep me here till seven.
The telephone rang rudely by her ear.
—Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll ring them up after five. Only
those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can
go after six if you’re not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven
and six. I’ll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.
She scribbled three figures on an envelope.
—Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from _Sport_ was in looking for you.
Mr Lenehan, yes. He said he’ll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes,
sir. I’ll ring them up after five.
* * *
Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.
—Who’s that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?
—Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold.
—Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his
pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps
there.
The vesta in the clergyman’s uplifted hand consumed itself in a long
soft flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died: and
mouldy air closed round them.
—How interesting! a refined accent said in the gloom.
—Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic
council chamber of saint Mary’s abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed
himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin.
O’Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days.
The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and
the original jews’ temple was here too before they built their
synagogue over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were
you?
—No, Ned.
—He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my memory
serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.
—That’s right, Ned Lambert said. That’s quite right, sir.
—If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to
allow me perhaps...
—Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I’ll
get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here
or from here.
In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the
piled seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.
From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.
—I’m deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won’t trespass
on your valuable time...
—You’re welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next
week, say. Can you see?
—Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.
—Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.
He followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away
among the pillars. With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s
abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut
meal, O’Connor, Wexford.
He stood to read the card in his hand.
—The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address: Saint
Michael’s, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He’s writing a book about
the Fitzgeralds he told me. He’s well up in history, faith.
The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging
twig.
—I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O’Molloy said.
Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.
—God! he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare
after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? _I’m bloody
sorry I did it,_ says he, _but I declare to God I thought the
archbishop was inside._ He mightn’t like it, though. What? God, I’ll
tell him anyhow. That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot
members they were all of them, the Geraldines.
The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He
slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried:
—Woa, sonny!
He turned to J. J. O’Molloy and asked:
—Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an
instant, sneezed loudly.
—Chow! he said. Blast you!
—The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.
—No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a... cold night before... blast your
soul... night before last... and there was a hell of a lot of
draught...
He held his handkerchief ready for the coming...
—I was... Glasnevin this morning... poor little... what do you call
him... Chow!... Mother of Moses!
* * *
Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his
claret waistcoat.
—See? he said. Say it’s turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.
He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove,
wobbled a while, ceased, ogling them: six.
Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the
consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying
the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the
admiralty division of king’s bench to the court of appeal an elderly
female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of
great amplitude.
—See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here: Turns Over.
The impact. Leverage, see?
He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.
—Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late
can see what turn is on and what turns are over.
—See? Tom Rochford said.
He slid in a disk for himself: and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle,
stop: four. Turn Now On.
—I’ll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good
turn deserves another.
—Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I’m Boylan with impatience.
—Goodnight, M’Coy said abruptly. When you two begin...
Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.
—But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.
—Tooraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.
He followed M’Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.
—He’s a hero, he said simply.
—I know, M’Coy said. The drain, you mean.
—Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.
They passed Dan Lowry’s musichall where Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.
Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall
Lenehan showed M’Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes
like a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it,
half choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky’s vest
and all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope
round the poor devil and the two were hauled up.
—The act of a hero, he said.
At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past
them for Jervis street.
—This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam’s to
see Sceptre’s starting price. What’s the time by your gold watch and
chain?
M’Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses’ sombre office, then at
O’Neill’s clock.
—After three, he said. Who’s riding her?
—O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.
While he waited in Temple bar M’Coy dodged a banana peel with gentle
pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn easy
get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.
The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal
cavalcade.
—Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons in
there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn’t an
earthly. Through here.
They went up the steps and under Merchants’ arch. A darkbacked figure
scanned books on the hawker’s cart.
—There he is, Lenehan said.
—Wonder what he’s buying, M’Coy said, glancing behind.
—_Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye,_ Lenehan said.
—He’s dead nuts on sales, M’Coy said. I was with him one day and he
bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were
fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and
comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.
Lenehan laughed.
—I’ll tell you a damn good one about comets’ tails, he said. Come over
in the sun.
They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the
riverwall.
Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s,
carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.
—There was a long spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said
eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord
mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan
Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell d’Arcy sang and Benjamin
Dollard...
—I know, M’Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.
—Did she? Lenehan said.
A card _Unfurnished Apartments_ reappeared on the windowsash of number
7 Eccles street.
He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.
—But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the
catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife
were there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and
curacoa to which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After
liquids came solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies...
—I know, M’Coy said. The year the missus was there...
Lenehan linked his arm warmly.
—But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after
all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o’clock the
morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter’s
night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one
side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started
singing glees and duets: _Lo, the early beam of morning_. She was well
primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her bellyband. Every
jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s
delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time.
Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in
delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
—The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey
mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the
comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear
and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I
was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At
last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. _And what star is that,
Poldy?_ says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. _That one, is it?_
says Chris Callinan, _sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick._
By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft
laughter.
—I’m weak, he gasped.
M’Coy’s white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan
walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead
rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M’Coy.
—He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one
of your common or garden... you know... There’s a touch of the artist
about old Bloom.
* * *
Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of _The Awful Disclosures of Maria
Monk_, then of Aristotle’s _Masterpiece._ Crooked botched print.
Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of
slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the
world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every
minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.
He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: _Tales of the
Ghetto_ by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
—That I had, he said, pushing it by.
The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
—Them are two good ones, he said.
Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth.
He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his
unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.
On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay
apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.
Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. _Fair Tyrants_ by James
Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.
He opened it. Thought so.
A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: the man.
No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.
He read the other title: _Sweets of Sin_. More in her line. Let us see.
He read where his finger opened.
_—All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on
wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!_
Yes. This. Here. Try.
—_Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands
felt for the opulent curves inside her déshabillé._
Yes. Take this. The end.
—You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.
The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her
queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played
round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.
Mr Bloom read again: _The beautiful woman._
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply
amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched
themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (_for him! For Raoul!_).
Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (_her heaving embonpoint!_).
Feel! Press! Crished! Sulphur dung of lions!
Young! Young!
An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of
chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the
lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the
admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the
Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of
appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean
Accident and Guarantee Corporation.
Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy
curtains. The shopman’s uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven
reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, puked phlegm on
the floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along
it, and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.
Mr Bloom beheld it.
Mastering his troubled breath, he said:
—I’ll take this one.
The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
—_Sweets of Sin,_ he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.
* * *
The lacquey by the door of Dillon’s auctionrooms shook his handbell
twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.
Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell,
the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely
curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas.
Any advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.
The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
—Barang!
Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.
J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched
necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.
Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams’s row.
He halted near his daughter.
—It’s time for you, she said.
—Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said. Are
you trying to imitate your uncle John, the cornetplayer, head upon
shoulder? Melancholy God!
Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and
held them back.
—Stand up straight, girl, he said. You’ll get curvature of the spine.
Do you know what you look like?
He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders
and dropping his underjaw.
—Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.
Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.
—Did you get any money? Dilly asked.
—Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin
would lend me fourpence.
—You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.
—How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.
Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along
James’s street.
—I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?
—I was not, then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns
taught you to be so saucy? Here.
He handed her a shilling.
—See if you can do anything with that, he said.
—I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.
—Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You’re like the rest of
them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor
mother died. But wait awhile. You’ll all get a short shrift and a long
day from me. Low blackguardism! I’m going to get rid of you. Wouldn’t
care if I was stretched out stiff. He’s dead. The man upstairs is dead.
He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.
—Well, what is it? he said, stopping.
The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.
—Barang!
—Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.
The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell
but feebly:
—Bang!
Mr Dedalus stared at him.
—Watch him, he said. It’s instructive. I wonder will he allow us to
talk.
—You got more than that, father, Dilly said.
—I’m going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I’ll leave you
all where Jesus left the jews. Look, there’s all I have. I got two
shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the
funeral.
He drew forth a handful of copper coins, nervously.
—Can’t you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.
Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.
—I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O’Connell
street. I’ll try this one now.
—You’re very funny, Dilly said, grinning.
—Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk
for yourself and a bun or a something. I’ll be home shortly.
He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.
The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of
Parkgate.
—I’m sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.
The lacquey banged loudly.
Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing
mincing mouth gently:
—The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn’t do
anything! O, sure they wouldn’t really! Is it little sister Monica!
* * *
From the sundial towards James’s gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with
the order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James’s
street, past Shackleton’s offices. Got round him all right. How do you
do, Mr Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your
other establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping
alive. Lovely weather we’re having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country.
Those farmers are always grumbling. I’ll just take a thimbleful of your
best gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that
_General Slocum_ explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties.
And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most
brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion.
Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the
firehose all burst. What I can’t understand is how the inspectors ever
allowed a boat like that... Now, you’re talking straight, Mr Crimmins.
You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look
at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we
were bad here.
I smiled at him. _America,_ I said quietly, just like that. _What is
it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn’t that true?_
That’s a fact.
Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there’s money going there’s
always someone to pick it up.
Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy
appearance. Bowls them over.
—Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
—Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter
Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson
street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built
under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street
club toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian
bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he
remembered me.
Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road.
Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom
again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying
has it.
North wall and sir John Rogerson’s quay, with hulls and anchorchains,
sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on
the ferrywash, Elijah is coming.
Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course.
Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy
body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned
Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn
it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash
like that. Damn like him.
Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath.
Good drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to
his fat strut.
Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope.
Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant’s wife
drove by in her noddy.
Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too.
Fourbottle men.
Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan’s? Or no, there was a midnight
burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the
wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn
down here. Make a detour.
Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by the
corner of Guinness’s visitors’ waitingroom. Outside the Dublin
Distillers Company’s stores an outside car without fare or jarvey
stood, the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some
Tipperary bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway
horse.
Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John
Henry Menton’s office, led his wife over O’Connell bridge, bound for
the office of Messrs Collis and Ward.
Mr Kernan approached Island street.
Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those
reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all now
in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly’s. No
cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the
table by a dagger. Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from
major Sirr. Stables behind Moira house.
Damn good gin that was.
Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that
sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were on
the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is:
Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad
touchingly. Masterly rendition.
_At the siege of Ross did my father fall._
A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping,
leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.
Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.
His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a
pity!
* * *
Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary’s
fingers prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the
showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails.
Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on
rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights
shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of
their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest
them.
She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman,
rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed
silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her
hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned
it and held it at the point of his Moses’ beard. Grandfather ape
gloating on a stolen hoard.
And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words
of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat
standing from everlasting to everlasting.
Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through
Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella,
one with a midwife’s bag in which eleven cockles rolled.
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always
without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I
between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.
Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me
you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A
look around.
Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You
say right, sir. A Monday morning, ’twas so, indeed.
Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against
his shoulderblade. In Clohissey’s window a faded 1860 print of Heenan
boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood
round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in tight loincloths
proposed gently each to other his bulbous fists. And they are
throbbing: heroes’ hearts.
He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.
—Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.
Tattered pages. _The Irish Beekeeper. Life and Miracles of the Curé of
Ars. Pocket Guide to Killarney._
I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. _Stephano Dedalo,
alumno optimo, palmam ferenti._
Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet
of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.
Binding too good probably. What is this? Eighth and ninth book of
Moses. Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages: read
and read. Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands.
Recipe for white wine vinegar. How to win a woman’s love. For me this.
Say the following talisman three times with hands folded:
—_Se el yilo nebrakada femininum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen._
Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter
Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot’s
charms, as mumbling Joachim’s. Down, baldynoddle, or we’ll wool your
wool.
—What are you doing here, Stephen?
Dilly’s high shoulders and shabby dress.
Shut the book quick. Don’t let see.
—What are you doing? Stephen said.
A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It
glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her
of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a
pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly’s token. _Nebrakada femininum._
—What have you there? Stephen asked.
—I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing
nervously. Is it any good?
My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring.
Shadow of my mind.
He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal’s French primer.
—What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?
She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.
Show no surprise. Quite natural.
—Here, Stephen said. It’s all right. Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you.
I suppose all my books are gone.
—Some, Dilly said. We had to.
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will
drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
We.
Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite.
Misery! Misery!
* * *
—Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
—Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter’s. Father Cowley
brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.
—What’s the best news? Mr Dedalus said.
—Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I’m barricaded up, Simon, with
two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.
—Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?
—O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.
—With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.
—The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I’m just
waiting for Ben Dollard. He’s going to say a word to long John to get
him to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.
He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in
his neck.
—I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben! He’s always
doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard!
He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.
—There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.
Ben Dollard’s loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops
crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards
them at an amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.
As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted:
—Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.
—Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.
Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben
Dollard’s figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he
muttered sneeringly:
—That’s a pretty garment, isn’t it, for a summer’s day?
—Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I
threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.
He stood beside them beaming, on them first and on his roomy clothes
from points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying:
—They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.
—Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to
God he’s not paid yet.
—And how is that _basso profondo_, Benjamin? Father Cowley asked.
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring,
glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.
Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter’s mouth, gave forth
a deep note.
—Aw! he said.
—That’s the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.
—What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?
He turned to both.
—That’ll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.
The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint
Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by
Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of
hurdles.
Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward,
his joyful fingers in the air.
—Come along with me to the subsheriff’s office, he said. I want to show
you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He’s a cross between
Lobengula and Lynchehaun. He’s well worth seeing, mind you. Come along.
I saw John Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will
cost me a fall if I don’t... Wait awhile... We’re on the right lay,
Bob, believe you me.
—For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.
Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button
of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the
heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.
—What few days? he boomed. Hasn’t your landlord distrained for rent?
—He has, Father Cowley said.
—Then our friend’s writ is not worth the paper it’s printed on, Ben
Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the
particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name?
—That’s right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He’s a
minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?
—You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that
writ where Jacko put the nuts.
He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk.
—Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his
glasses on his coatfront, following them.
* * *
—The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they
passed out of the Castleyard gate.
The policeman touched his forehead.
—God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.
He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on
towards Lord Edward street.
Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared
above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
—Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father
Conmee and laid the whole case before him.
—You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.
—Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.
John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them
quickly down Cork hill.
On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed
Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.
—Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the _Mail_
office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.
—Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the
five shillings too.
—Without a second word either, Mr Power said.
—Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.
John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.
—I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly.
They went down Parliament street.
—There’s Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh’s.
—Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.
Outside _la Maison Claire_ Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s
brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.
John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took
the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked
uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson’s watches.
—The assistant town clerk’s corns are giving him some trouble, John
Wyse Nolan told Mr Power.
They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh’s winerooms. The
empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham,
speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not
glance.
—And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as
life.
The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.
—Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and
greeted.
Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay
decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all
their faces.
—Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he
said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.
Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly,
about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted to
know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the
macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order,
no quorum even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little
Lorcan Sherlock doing _locum tenens_ for him. Damned Irish language,
language of our forefathers.
Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.
Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to
the assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held
his peace.
—What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked.
Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.
—O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness’ sake
till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind!
Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning’s flank and
passed in and up the stairs.
—Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don’t think
you knew him or perhaps you did, though.
With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.
—Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long
John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror.
—Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton’s office that was, Martin Cunningham
said.
Long John Fanning could not remember him.
Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.
—What’s that? Martin Cunningham said.
All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the
cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street,
harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went
past before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the
leaders, leaping leaders, rode outriders.
—What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the
staircase.
—The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse
Nolan answered from the stairfoot.
* * *
As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his
Panama to Haines:
—Parnell’s brother. There in the corner.
They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man
whose beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.
—Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.
—Yes, Mulligan said. That’s John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.
John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw
went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after,
under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and
fell once more upon a working corner.
—I’ll take a _mélange,_ Haines said to the waitress.
—Two _mélanges,_ Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and
butter and some cakes as well.
When she had gone he said, laughing:
—We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed
Dedalus on _Hamlet._
Haines opened his newbought book.
—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all
minds that have lost their balance.
The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:
—_England expects_...
Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.
—You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance.
Wandering Ængus I call him.
—I am sure he has an _idée fixe,_ Haines said, pinching his chin
thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it
would be likely to be. Such persons always have.
Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.
—They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never
capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white
death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet.
The joy of creation...
—Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him
this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s
rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an
interesting point out of that.
Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to
unload her tray.
—He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid
the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny,
of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea.
Does he write anything for your movement?
He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream.
Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over
its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.
—Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write
something in ten years.
—Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon.
Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all.
He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.
—This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t
want to be imposed on.
Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of
ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping
street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner _Rosevean_
from Bridgwater with bricks.
* * *
Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell’s yard. Behind
him Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with
stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith’s
house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him
a blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park.
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as Mr
Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along
Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.
At the corner of Wilde’s house he halted, frowned at Elijah’s name
announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of
duke’s lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth
bared he muttered:
—_Coactus volui._
He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.
As he strode past Mr Bloom’s dental windows the sway of his dustcoat
brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards,
having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly
face after the striding form.
—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder
nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!
* * *
Opposite Ruggy O’Donohoe’s Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the
pound and a half of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, porksteaks he had been
sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming
dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs
MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping
sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney’s.
And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole
blooming time and sighing.
After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress milliner,
stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their
pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning
Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin’s pet lamb, will
meet sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of
fifty sovereigns. Gob, that’d be a good pucking match to see. Myler
Keogh, that’s the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar
entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master
Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That’s me in mourning. When is
it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He
turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap
awry, his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he
saw the image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two
puckers. One of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer
smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found
out.
Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going
for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow
would knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker
for science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out
of him, dodging and all.
In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff’s mouth and
a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was
telling him and grinning all the time.
No Sandymount tram.
Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to his
other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The
blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming
end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I’m not going tomorrow
either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice
I’m in mourning? Uncle Barney said he’d get it into the paper tonight.
Then they’ll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa’s
name.
His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a
fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were
screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were
bringing it downstairs.
Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling
the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and
heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was
standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to
Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt.
Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He
told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he
said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor
pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because
he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.
* * *
William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by
lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the
viceregal lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs
Paget, Miss de Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. in
attendance.
The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by
obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern
quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the
metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted
him vainly from afar. Between Queen’s and Whitworth bridges lord
Dudley’s viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley
White, B. L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White’s,
the pawnbroker’s, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose
with his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough
more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot
through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the
porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding,
Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the
doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the
Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed
her plan and retracing her steps by King’s windows smiled credulously
on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall
under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of
liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by
bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired.
On Ormond quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse
for the subsheriff’s office, stood still in midstreet and brought his
hat low. His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus’ greeting. From
Cahill’s corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M. A., made obeisance
unperceived, mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held
of yore rich advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M’Coy, taking
leave of each other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger
Greene’s office and Dollard’s big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell,
carrying the Catesby’s cork lino letters for her father who was laid
up, knew by the style it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she
couldn’t see what Her Excellency had on because the tram and Spring’s
big yellow furniture van had to stop in front of her on account of its
being the lord lieutenant. Beyond Lundy Foot’s from the shaded door of
Kavanagh’s winerooms John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness
towards the lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The
Right Honourable William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed
Micky Anderson’s all times ticking watches and Henry and James’s wax
smartsuited freshcheeked models, the gentleman Henry, _dernier cri_
James. Over against Dame gate Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the
approach of the cavalcade. Tom Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley
fixed on him, took his thumbs quickly out of the pockets of his claret
waistcoat and doffed his cap to her. A charming _soubrette,_ great
Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and lifted skirt smiled daubily from
her poster upon William Humble, earl of Dudley, and upon
lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and also upon the honourable Gerald
Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck Mulligan gaily, and
Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage over the shoulders
of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the chessboard whereon
John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes’s street Dilly Dedalus,
straining her sight upward from Chardenal’s first French primer, saw
sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the glare. John Henry
Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings, stared from
winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not looked at in
his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King Billy’s
horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband back from
under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the tidings.
Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast and saluted the
second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C., agreeably
surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby’s corner a jaded white
flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind him,
E.L.Y.’S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite Pigott’s
music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, gaily
apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved. By
the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes
and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of _My girl’s a Yorkshire
girl._
Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders’ skyblue frontlets and high
action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a
suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute
but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and
the red flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His
Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of
music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen
highland laddies blared and drumthumped after the _cortège_:
 But though she’s a factory lass
 And wears no fancy clothes.
 Baraabum.
 Yet I’ve a sort of a
 Yorkshire relish for
 My little Yorkshire rose.
 Baraabum.
Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H.
Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F.
Stevenson, C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding
past Finn’s hotel Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell
stared through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr
M. E. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate.
Deep in Leinster street by Trinity’s postern a loyal king’s man,
Hornblower, touched his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by
Merrion square Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes
being given to the gent with the topper and raised also his new black
cap with fingers greased by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up.
The viceroy, on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds
for Mercer’s hospital, drove with his following towards Lower Mount
street. He passed a blind stripling opposite Broadbent’s. In Lower
Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread,
passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path. At the Royal
Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips
agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road
corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in
which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady
mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Lansdowne
roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male
walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the
house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the
Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the
salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing
door.
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