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Ulysses

by James Joyce · English · Gutenberg #4300 · 1,538,960 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ulysses

Author: James Joyce


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4300]
                Most recently updated: November 27, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300

Credits: EBook produced by Col Choat.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***

[Illustration]




Ulysses


by James Joyce


Contents

 — I —

 [  1 ]
 [  2 ]
 [  3 ]

 — II —

 [  4 ]
 [  5 ]
 [  6 ]
 [  7 ]
 [  8 ]
 [  9 ]
 [ 10 ]
 [ 11 ]
 [ 12 ]
 [ 13 ]
 [ 14 ]
 [ 15 ]

 — III —

 [ 16 ]
 [ 17 ]
 [ 18 ]




— I —


[ 1 ]

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow
dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild
morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—_Introibo ad altare Dei_.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat
and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned
his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the
bowl smartly.

—Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone:

—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul
and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One
moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused
awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and
there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles
answered through the calm.

—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off
the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and
sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.
A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

—The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,
laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily
halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as
he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and
lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.

—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn’t it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We
must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out
twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

—Will he come? The jejune jesuit!

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

—Yes, my love?

—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

—God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money
and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you
have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you
is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
his guncase?

—A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark
with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If
he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down
from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

—Scutter! he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper
pocket, said:

—Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a
dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.
Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

—The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.
You can almost taste it, can’t you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
oakpale hair stirring slightly.

—God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet
mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. _Epi oinopa
ponton_. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them
in the original. _Thalatta! Thalatta!_ She is our great sweet mother.
Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked
down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of
Kingstown.

—Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s
face.

—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t
let me have anything to do with you.

—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother
asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean as much as you. But to
think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and
pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you....

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.

—But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently,
in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within
its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood,
her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of
wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a
great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and
skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had
stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had
torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

—Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt
and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

—They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

—The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God
knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair
stripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You
look damn well when you’re dressed.

—Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.

—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey
trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the
smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its
smokeblue mobile eyes.

—That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan,
says you have g. p. i. He’s up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman.
General paralysis of the insane!

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings
abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips
laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized
all his strong wellknit trunk.

—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by
a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this
face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her
all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi.
Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.

—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
Wilde were only alive to see you!

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him
round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he
had thrust them.

—It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly.
God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
cold steel pen.

—Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap
downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and
thinks you’re not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling
jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and
I could only work together we might do something for the island.
Hellenise it.

Cranly’s arm. His arm.

—And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I’m the only one
that knows what you are. Why don’t you trust me more? What have you up
your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I’ll
bring down Seymour and we’ll give him a ragging worse than they gave
Clive Kempthorpe.

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe’s rooms. Palefaces:
they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall
expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit
ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the
table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the
tailor’s shears. A scared calf’s face gilded with marmalade. I don’t
want to be debagged! Don’t you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower
on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.

—Let him stay, Stephen said. There’s nothing wrong with him except at
night.

—Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I’m
quite frank with you. What have you against me now?

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on
the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm
quietly.

—Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.

—Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don’t remember anything.

He looked in Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of
anxiety in his eyes.

Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:

—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s
death?

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:

—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and
sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?

—You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to get
more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the
drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.

—Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.

—You said, Stephen answered, _O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is
beastly dead._

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck
Mulligan’s cheek.

—Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

—And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? You saw
only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and
Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It’s a beastly
thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel
down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why?
Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected
the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes
are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks
buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it’s over. You crossed her
last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don’t whinge like
some hired mute from Lalouette’s. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I
didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother.

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping
wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:

—I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

—Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.

—Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

—O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,
gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now
grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he
felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

—Are you up there, Mulligan?

—I’m coming, Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

—Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,
Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level
with the roof:

—Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I’m inconsequent. Give up the
moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of
the stairhead:

     And no more turn aside and brood
     Upon love’s bitter mystery
     For Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the
dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the
harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words
shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in
deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’
song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords.
Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and
pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For
those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk,
a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the
sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing
in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he
sang:

     I am the boy
     That can enjoy
     Invisibility.

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

     And no more turn aside and brood.


Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,
roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely
fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s
shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On
me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the
tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all
prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata
rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum
chorus excipiat._

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

—Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry,
heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

—Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right.

—I’m coming, Stephen said, turning.

—Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.

His head disappeared and reappeared.

—I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it’s very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

—I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

—The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

—If you want it, Stephen said.

—Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We’ll have
a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent
sovereigns.

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent:

     O, won’t we have a merry time,
     Drinking whisky, beer and wine!
     On coronation,
     Coronation day!
     O, won’t we have a merry time
     On coronation day!

Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it
there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.
So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now
and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan’s gowned form
moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its
yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor
from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of
coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

—We’ll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open
the inner doors.

—Have you the key? a voice asked.

—Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I’m choked!

He howled, without looking up from the fire:

—Kinch!

—It’s in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the
doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and
sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside
him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set
them down heavily and sighed with relief.

—I’m melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But, hush! Not a
word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey.
Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy
gifts. Where’s the sugar? O, jay, there’s no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

—What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

—We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There’s a lemon in the
locker.

—O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

—That woman is coming up with the milk.

—The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here,
I can’t go fumbling at the damned eggs.

He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three
plates, saying:

—_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

—I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don’t you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old
woman’s wheedling voice:

—When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
makes water I makes water.

—By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

—_So I do, Mrs Cahill,_ says she. _Begob, ma’am,_ says Mrs Cahill, _God
send you don’t make them in the one pot._

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.

—That’s folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines
of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
brows:

—Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan’s tea and water pot spoken
of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?

—I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

—Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

—I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.

Buck Mulligan’s face smiled with delight.

—Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth
and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:

_—For old Mary Ann

She doesn’t care a damn.

But, hising up her petticoats..._

He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

—The milk, sir!

—Come in, ma’am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen’s elbow.

—That’s a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

—To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

—The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
the collector of prepuces.

—How much, sir? asked the old woman.

—A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a
tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a
messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.
Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on
her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They
lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and
poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly
form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their
common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to
upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

—It is indeed, ma’am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

—Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

—If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten
guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved
with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits.

—Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.

—I am, ma’am, Buck Mulligan answered.

—Look at that now, she said.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she
slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there
is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in
God’s likeness, the serpent’s prey. And to the loud voice that now bids
her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

—Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

—Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

—Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

—I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the
west, sir?

—I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

—He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak
Irish in Ireland.

—Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak
the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.

—Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma’am?

—No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

—Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn’t we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

—Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at
twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a
shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.

Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search
his trouser pockets.

—Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the
thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in
his fingers and cried:

—A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

—Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

—We’ll owe twopence, he said.

—Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good
morning, sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan’s tender chant:

_—Heart of my heart, were it more,

More would be laid at your feet._

He turned to Stephen and said:

—Seriously, Dedalus. I’m stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland
expects that every man this day will do his duty.

—That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.

—Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

—Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

—The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

—All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

—I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.

—That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen’s foot under the table and said with
warmth of tone:

—Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

—Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

—Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
the hammock, said:

—I don’t know, I’m sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen
and said with coarse vigour:

—You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

—Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It’s a toss up, I think.

—I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

—I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen’s arm.

—From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

—To tell you the God’s truth I think you’re right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don’t you play them as I do? To hell with them all.
Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
resignedly:

—Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

—There’s your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,
we’ll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green
boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of
his talking hands.

—And there’s your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
doorway:

—Are you coming, you fellows?

—I’m ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out
with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

—And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and
locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

—Did you bring the key?

—I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

—Down, sir! How dare you, sir!

Haines asked:

—Do you pay rent for this tower?

—Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

—To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

—Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

—Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
the sea. But ours is the _omphalos_.

—What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

—No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas
and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I
have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
primrose waistcoat:

—You couldn’t manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

—It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

—You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?

—Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is
Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.

—What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
loose laughter, said to Stephen’s ear:

—O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

—We’re always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

—The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

—I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this
tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. _That
beetles o’er his base into the sea,_ isn’t it?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did
not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in
cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

—It’s a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail
tacking by the Muglins.

—I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked
at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved
a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and
began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

_—I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
So here’s to disciples and Calvary._

He held up a forefinger of warning.

_—If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine
He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again._

He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running
forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like
fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

_—Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet’s breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye!_

He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh
wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said:

—We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of
it somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

—The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

—O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

—Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

—You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.

—There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

—Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang
it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk
towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

—Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or
you don’t, isn’t it? Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a
personal God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?

—You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels.
My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line
along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark.
He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt
bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his
eyes.

—After all, Haines began...

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was
not all unkind.

—After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.

—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an
Italian.

—Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

—And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

—Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

—The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
spoke.

—I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you
rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of
their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam
ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own
rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass
for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in
affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church
militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies
fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom
Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the
consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning
Christ’s terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who
held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken
a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void
awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a
worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael’s host, who
defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their
shields.

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. _Zut! Nom de Dieu!_

—Of course I’m a Britisher, Haines’s voice said, and I feel as one. I
don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman,
boatman.

—She’s making for Bullock harbour.

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

—There’s five fathoms out there, he said. It’ll be swept up that way
when the tide comes in about one. It’s nine days today.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting
for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face,
saltwhite. Here I am.

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood
on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his
shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly
frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

—Is the brother with you, Malachi?

—Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.

—Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.

—Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near
the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,
water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water
rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black
sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines
and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and
lips and breastbone.

—Seymour’s back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of
rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.

—Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.

—Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?

—Yes.

—Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
money.

—Is she up the pole?

—Better ask Seymour that.

—Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.

He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
tritely:

—Redheaded women buck like goats.

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I’m the _Übermensch._ Toothless
Kinch and I, the supermen.

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
clothes lay.

—Are you going in here, Malachi?

—Yes. Make room in the bed.

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the
middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a
stone, smoking.

—Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.

—Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.

Stephen turned away.

—I’m going, Mulligan, he said.

—Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.

Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
clothes.

—And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck
Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:

—He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
Zarathustra.

His plump body plunged.

—We’ll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the
path and smiling at wild Irish.

Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.

—The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.

—Good, Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.

     Liliata rutilantium.
     Turma circumdet.
     Iubilantium te virginum.

The priest’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning
the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a
seal’s, far out on the water, round.

Usurper.




[ 2 ]


—You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

—Tarentum, sir.

—Very good. Well?

—There was a battle, sir.

—Very good. Where?

The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as
memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings
of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?

—I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.

—Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the
gorescarred book.

—Yes, sir. And he said: _Another victory like that and we are done
for._

That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From a
hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,
leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.

—You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?

—End of Pyrrhus, sir?

—I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.

—Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?

A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong’s satchel. He curled them
between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered
to the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy’s breath. Welloff people,
proud that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico Road, Dalkey.

—Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.

All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round
at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh
more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.

—Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy’s shoulder with the book,
what is a pier.

—A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a
bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.

Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench
whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent.
All. With envy he watched their faces: Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their
likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets
tittering in the struggle.

—Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

The words troubled their gaze.

—How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.

For Haines’s chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild
drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A
jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a
clement master’s praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly
for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other
too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded
them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?
Weave, weaver of the wind.

—Tell us a story, sir.

—O, do, sir. A ghoststory.

—Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.

—_Weep no more,_ Comyn said.

—Go on then, Talbot.

—And the story, sir?

—After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.

A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork
of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:

_—Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor..._

It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated
out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where
he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his
elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding
brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating
feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld,
reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought
is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner
all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast,
candescent: form of forms.

Talbot repeated:

_—Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,

Through the dear might..._

—Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don’t see anything.

—What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.

His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having
just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these
craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and
on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s. A long look
from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the
church’s looms. Ay.

     Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
     My father gave me seeds to sow.

Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.

—Have I heard all? Stephen asked.

—Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.

—Half day, sir. Thursday.

—Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all
gabbling gaily:

—A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.

—O, ask me, sir.

—A hard one, sir.

—This is the riddle, Stephen said:

     The cock crew,
     The sky was blue:
     The bells in heaven
     Were striking eleven.
     ’Tis time for this poor soul
     To go to heaven.

What is that?

—What, sir?

—Again, sir. We didn’t hear.

Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said:

—What is it, sir? We give it up.

Stephen, his throat itching, answered:

—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.

He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.

A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:

—Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and
clamour of their boots and tongues.

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open
copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness
and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his
cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent
and damp as a snail’s bed.

He held out his copybook. The word _Sums_ was written on the headline.
Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with
blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.

—Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them
to you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

—Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

—Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.

—Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.

—No, sir.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a
snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in
her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him
underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery
blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in
life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal
bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in
the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from
being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor
soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red
reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the
earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by
algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent
peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the
lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of
their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the
world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not
comprehend.

—Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?

—Yes, sir.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint
hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. _Amor matris:_ subjective
and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had
fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

The sum was done.

—It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.

—Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.

He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
copybook back to his bench.

—You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said
as he followed towards the door the boy’s graceless form.

—Yes, sir.

In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.

—Sargent!

—Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy
field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and
Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet.
When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to
him. He turned his angry white moustache.

—What is it now? he cried continually without listening.

—Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.

—Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore
order here.

And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man’s voice
cried sternly:

—What is the matter? What is it now?

Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms
closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his
illdyed head.

Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded
leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here.
As it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart
coins, base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their
spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached
to all the gentiles: world without end.

A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.

—First, our little financial settlement, he said.

He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and
laid them carefully on the table.

—Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.

And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen’s embarrassed hand moved
over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money
cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir’s turban, and
this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim’s hoard, dead
treasure, hollow shells.

A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.

—Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.
These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is
for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.

—Three twelve, he said. I think you’ll find that’s right.

—Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.

—No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.

Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too
of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed
and misery.

—Don’t carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You’ll pull it out somewhere
and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You’ll find them very
handy.

Answer something.

—Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.

The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times
now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant
if I will.

—Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t
know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as
I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare
say? _Put but money in thy purse._

—Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.

—He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but
an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you
know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s
mouth?

The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems
history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

—That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

—Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

—I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid
my way._

Good man, good man.

_—I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel
that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.
Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob
Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five
weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless.

—For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

—I knew you couldn’t, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.
We are a generous people but we must also be just.

—I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the
shapely bulk of a man in tartan fillibegs: Albert Edward, prince of
Wales.

—You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.
I saw three generations since O’Connell’s time. I remember the famine
in ’46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the
union twenty years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your
communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.

Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the
splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the
planters’ covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie
down.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

—I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But
I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are
all Irish, all kings’ sons.

—Alas, Stephen said.

—_Per vias rectas_, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for
it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to
do so.

     Lal the ral the ra
     The rocky road to Dublin.

A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John!
Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling on
to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.

—That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.
Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.

He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read
off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.

—Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of
common sense._ Just a moment.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow
and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly,
sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed
around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek
heads poised in air: lord Hastings’ _Repulse_, the duke of
Westminster’s _Shotover_, the duke of Beaufort’s _Ceylon_, _prix de
Paris_, 1866. Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their
speeds, backing king’s colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished
crowds.

—Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. _But prompt ventilation of this
allimportant question..._

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the
mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek
of the canteen, over the motley slush. Even money _Fair Rebel._ Ten to
one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs,
the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher’s
dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.

Shouts rang shrill from the boys’ playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a
medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother’s darling
who seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock
by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of
the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.

—Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.

He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.

—I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the
foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two
opinions on the matter.

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of _laissez faire_
which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the
channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who
was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.

—I don’t mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.

Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch’s preparation. Serum and virus.
Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor’s horses at Mürzsteg,
lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous
offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In
every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for
the hospitality of your columns.

—I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the
next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be
cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is
regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They
offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the
department. Now I’m going to try publicity. I am surrounded by
difficulties, by... intrigues by... backstairs influence by...

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

—Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are
the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the
nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as
we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of
destruction. Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

—Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.

     The harlot’s cry from street to street
     Shall weave old England’s windingsheet.

His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which
he halted.

—A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
gentile, is he not?

—They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see
the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting
prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,
uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit
silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures.
Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and
unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their
zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would
scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on.
Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the
dishonours of their flesh.

—Who has not? Stephen said.

—What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from
me.

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

—What? Mr Deasy asked.

—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked
between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.

—I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and
many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten
years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the
strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman,
O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many
errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the
end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.

     For Ulster will fight
     And Ulster will be right.

Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.

—Well, sir, he began.

—I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at
this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am
wrong.

—A learner rather, Stephen said.

And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.

—Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
teacher.

Stephen rustled the sheets again.

—As regards these, he began.

—Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
published at once.

_ Telegraph. Irish Homestead._

—I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two
editors slightly.

—That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders’ association today at the
City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You
see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?

_—The Evening Telegraph..._

—That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
answer that letter from my cousin.

—Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
Thank you.

—Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I
like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

—Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,
hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The
lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:
toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will
dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

—Mr Dedalus!

Running after me. No more letters, I hope.

—Just one moment.

—Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

—I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know
that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,
his lifted arms waving to the air.

—She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
spangles, dancing coins.




[ 3 ]


Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn
and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,
rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By
knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a
millionaire, _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in.
Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through
it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a
time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.
Five, six: the _nacheinander_. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable
modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a
cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the _nebeneinander_
ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at
my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends
of his legs, _nebeneinander_. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los
Demiurgos_. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush,
crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.

     Won’t you come to Sandymount,
     Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs
marching. No, agallop: _deline the mare_.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. _Basta!_ I will see if I
can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently,
_Frauenzimmer_: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed
feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our
mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag, the other’s
gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs
Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of
Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life.
Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a
trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back,
strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you
be as gods? Gaze in your _omphalos_. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to
Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.
Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no,
whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
everlasting. Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man
with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before the ages
He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A _lex eterna_ stays
about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are
consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring
his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred
heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: _euthanasia_.
With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of
a widowed see, with upstiffed _omophorion_, with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.
The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
Mananaan.

I mustn’t forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.
Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not? My
consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your artist
brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace
with his aunt Sally? Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And
and and and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the
things I married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little
costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable
gondoliers! And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes,
sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!

I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

—It’s Stephen, sir.

—Let him in. Let Stephen in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

—We thought you were someone else.

In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over
the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed
the upper moiety.

—Morrow, nephew.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the
eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his
bald head: Wilde’s _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle
brings Walter back.

—Yes, sir?

—Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

—Bathing Crissie, sir.

Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love.

—No, uncle Richie...

—Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!

—Uncle Richie, really...

—Sit down or by the law Harry I’ll knock you down.

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

—He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

—He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the
better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.

_All’erta!_

He drones bars of Ferrando’s _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the
air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This wind is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s
library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For
whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his
kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the
moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father,
furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! _Descende,
calve, ut ne nimium decalveris_. A garland of grey hair on his
comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace
(_descende!_), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down,
baldpoll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the
altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their
albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of
wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled
his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his
second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,
rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang
in diphthong.

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you
might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue
that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from
the wet street. _O si, certo!_ Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags
pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth
tram alone crying to the rain: _Naked women! Naked women!_ What about
that, eh?

What about what? What else were they invented for?

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one
saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for
titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is
wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval
leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great
libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them
there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della
Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange
pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who
once...

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a
damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a
midden of man’s ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle
stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:
isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze
of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the
higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams
of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s. Am I not going there?
Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer
sand towards the Pigeonhouse.

_—Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_

_—C’est le pigeon, Joseph._

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar
MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father’s a
bird, he lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump
bunny’s face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About
the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de
Jésus_ by M. Léo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.

_—C’est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
en l’existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire à mon père._

_—Il croit?_

_—Mon père, oui._

_Schluss_. He laps.

My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other
devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et
naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots
of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
tone: when I was in Paris; _boul’ Mich’_, I used to. Yes, used to carry
punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder
somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904
the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.
Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c’est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed
yourself.

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging
door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger
toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Fermé_. Hired
dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not
hurt? O, that’s all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O,
that’s all right. Shake a shake. O, that’s all only all right.

You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt
from their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge!_ Pretending to
speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence,
across the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought
back; _Le Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte
Rouge_; a blue French telegram, curiosity to show:

—Mother dying come home father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That’s why she won’t.

     Then here’s a health to Mulligan’s aunt
     And I’ll tell you the reason why.
     She always kept things decent in
     The Hannigan famileye.

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the
air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the
kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In
Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering
with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the
_pus_ of _flan bréton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased
pleasers, curled conquistadores.

Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi
sétier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves
me at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux
irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a
cheese _hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word?
Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer
fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: _slainte!_ Around the
slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His
breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang
thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes,
conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of
men. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re
your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt,
sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M.
Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen
Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_ with the
_dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M. Millevoye,
Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, _bonne à
tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. _Moi
faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I said.
Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my
brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I
see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.

The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got
away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil,
orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost
leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not
here.

Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you. I’ll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her
love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under
the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl
them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay
Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his
day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the
Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or,
damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless,
wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in
rue Gît-le-Cœur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra
skirt, frisky as a young thing’s. Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat
you saw me, won’t you? I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time. _Mon
fils_, soldier of France. I taught him to sing _The boys of Kilkenny
are stout roaring blades_. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that.
Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow’s castle on the Nore. Goes like
this. _O, O_. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.

     O, O the boys of
     Kilkenny...

Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.
Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of
seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,
am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the
quaking soil. Turn back.

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in
new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the
barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet
are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk,
nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait,
their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned
platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when
this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind
bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted
his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take
all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s
midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing
Elsinore’s tempting flood.

The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge
and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a
grike.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. _Un coche ensablé_ Louis Veuillot
called Gautier’s prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind
have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren
of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and
stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout’s toys. Mind you don’t get one bang
on the ear. I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well
boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz
odz an Iridzman.

A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be
master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From
farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures,
two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.
Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings,
torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the
collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon,
spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework
city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives,
running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague
and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved
among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the
spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.

The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I
just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. _Terribilia meditans_. A
primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you
pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The
Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck,
York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a
day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion
crowned. All kings’ sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved
men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping. But the courtiers
who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of...
We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what
he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. _Natürlich_, put there for
you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago
off Maiden’s rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it
out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water
cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t
see! Who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing
quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly,
shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still
to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me
out of horror of his death. I... With him together down... I could not
save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.

A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on
all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made
off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He
turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a
field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of
the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout
lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented
towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth,
breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them
as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting
from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped
off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped,
sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it,
sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell.
Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah,
poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

—Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He
slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me. Along by the edge of the mole he
lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed
against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed
quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His
hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand
again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in
spousebreach, vulturing the dead.

After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.
Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That
man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against
my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come.
Red carpet spread. You will see who.

Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet
out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler
strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the
ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand
and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair
trailed. Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When
night hides her body’s flaws calling under her brown shawl from an
archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal
Dublins in O’Loughlin’s of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues’ rum
lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend’s whiteness under her
rancid rags. Fumbally’s lane that night: the tanyard smells.

     White thy fambles, red thy gan
     And thy quarrons dainty is.
     Couch a hogshead with me then.
     In the darkmans clip and kiss.

Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.
Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: _thy quarrons
dainty is_. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads
jabber on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their
pockets.

Passing now.

A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I
am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s
flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges,
schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering,
moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not
mine, _oinopa ponton_, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon.
In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed,
childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. He
comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying
the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.
No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb.
Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy’s
letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.
Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and
scribbled words. That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library
counter.

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness
shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there
with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid
sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth
stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it
back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here?
Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white
field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of
Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space
with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a
flat: yes, that’s right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far,
flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in
stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is
in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our
sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the
more.

She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality
of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at
Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet
books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through
the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a
grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else,
Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders
and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple
dumplings, _piuttosto_. Where are your wits?

Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
Sad too. Touch, touch me.

He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the
scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his
eyes. That is Kevin Egan’s movement I made, nodding for his nap,
sabbath sleep. _Et vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona_. Alo! _Bonjour_.
Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through
peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning
scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants,
milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is
far.

     And no more turn aside and brood.

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs,
_nebeneinander_. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein
another’s foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in
tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s
shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. _Tiens, quel petit pied!_
Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its
name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I
am. As I am. All or not at all.

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the
low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a
fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it
slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech
ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower
unfurling.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and
sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water
swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night:
lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to,
they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,
awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias
patiens ingemiscit_. To no end gathered; vainly then released,
forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of
lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws
a toil of waters.

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he
said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a
loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse
rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise
landward. There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath
the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God
becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed
mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a
urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes
upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to
the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
known to man. Old Father Ocean. _Prix de Paris_: beware of imitations.
Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?
Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
_Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum_. No. My cockle hat and staff and
hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.

He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying
still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make
their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest day.
Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn
Tennyson, gentleman poet. _Già_. For the old hag with the yellow teeth.
And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. _Già_. My teeth are very
bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to
a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch,
the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?

His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn’t. Better buy one.

He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
carefully. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the
air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the
crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.




— II —


[ 4 ]

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he
liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting
her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the
kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him
feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off
the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,
its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked
stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!

—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch
my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.

—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder
what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively
and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to
the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him,
poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped
three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they
can’t mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or
kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with
this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for
a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper.
Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s. While the kettle is boiling. She
lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so
rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced
round him. No.

On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by
the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter
she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.

He said softly in the bare hall:

—I’m going round the corner. Be back in a minute.

And when he had heard his voice say it he added:

—You don’t want anything for breakfast?

A sleepy soft grunt answered:

—Mn.

No. She didn’t want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer,
as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.
Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar.
Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for
it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor’s auction.
Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At
Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I’m proud of it. Still
he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was
farseeing.

His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat
and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback
pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.
The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto’s
high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White
slip of paper. Quite safe.

On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there.
In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky
wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He
pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf
dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right
till I come back anyhow.

He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number
seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a
warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black
conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in
that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as
he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our
daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.
Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at
dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him.
Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a
strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker
too, old Tweedy’s big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear.
Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of
carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking
a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented
with fennel, sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two.
Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among
the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees,
signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches
me from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark
language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet,
colour of Molly’s new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of
those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.

Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track
of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself.
What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the _Freeman_
leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway
behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch
that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.

He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up the
flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out
whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the
end of the city traffic. For instance M’Auley’s down there: n. g. as
position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular
from the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.

Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an
ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my
bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching
the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him
off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I’m going to
tell you? What’s that, Mr O’Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians,
they’d only be an eight o’clock breakfast for the Japanese.

Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor
Dignam, Mr O’Rourke.

Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the
doorway:

—Good day, Mr O’Rourke.

—Good day to you.

—Lovely weather, sir.

—’Tis all that.

Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the
county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and
behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think
of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin
without passing a pub. Save it they can’t. Off the drunks perhaps. Put
down three and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs
and drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with
the town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we’ll split the
job, see?

How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels
of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint
Joseph’s National school. Brats’ clamour. Windows open. Fresh air helps
memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee
doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At
their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.

He halted before Dlugacz’s window, staring at the hanks of sausages,
polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened
in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links,
packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the
lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs’ blood.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He
stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too,
calling the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a
pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous
hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New
blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on
the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked
skirt swings at each whack.

The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with
blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer.

He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at
Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round
it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting:
read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page
rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the
beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the
breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a
palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there’s a prime one, unpeeled
switches in their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his
senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt
swinging, whack by whack by whack.

The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
sausages and made a red grimace.

—Now, my miss, he said.

She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.

—Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,
please?

Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went
slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the
morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood
outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He
sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted
toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The
sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For
another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles’ Lane. They like
them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the
wood.

—Threepence, please.

His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.
Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers’ pocket and laid them
on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid,
disc by disc, into the till.

—Thank you, sir. Another time.

A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze
after an instant. No: better not: another time.

—Good morning, he said, moving away.

—Good morning, sir.

No sign. Gone. What matter?

He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim:
planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish
government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel
and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.
You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with
olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need
artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your
name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten
down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34,
Berlin, W. 15.

Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.

He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered
olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in
jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out.
Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates.
Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin’s parade. And
Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in
Citron’s basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand,
lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet,
wild perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high
prices too, Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant
old times. Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain,
Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside
at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them
barefoot in soiled dungarees. There’s whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do
you? Doesn’t see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back
is like that Norwegian captain’s. Wonder if I’ll meet him today.
Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift
those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called
it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All
dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore
the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s,
clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far
away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying,
being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more.
Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he
turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his
veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I
am here now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong
side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the
hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why
is that? Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North,
MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore
eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling
butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
girl with gold hair on the wind.

Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.
Mrs Marion.

—Poldy!

Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm
yellow twilight towards her tousled head.

—Who are the letters for?

He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.

—A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And
a letter for you.

He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of
her knees.

—Do you want the blind up?

Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her
glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.

—That do? he asked, turning.

She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.

—She got the things, she said.

He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back
slowly with a snug sigh.

—Hurry up with that tea, she said. I’m parched.

—The kettle is boiling, he said.

But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled
linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.

As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:

—Poldy!

—What?

—Scald the teapot.

On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded
and rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting
the kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took
off the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the
lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat
mewed hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won’t mouse. Say
they won’t eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall
to her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper.
He sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.

Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks:
new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan’s
seaside girls.

The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown Derby,
smiling. Silly Milly’s birthday gift. Only five she was then. No, wait:
four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces of
folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.

     O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
     You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
     I’d rather have you without a farthing
     Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.

Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous
old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And
the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into the
parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin’s hat! All we
laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.

He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the
teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on it?
Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it
upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.

Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it
on the chair by the bedhead.

—What a time you were! she said.

She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on
the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large
soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The
warmth of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance
of the tea she poured.

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the
act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

—Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

—O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme.

—What are you singing?

—_Là ci darem_ with J. C. Doyle, she said, and _Love’s Old Sweet Song_.

Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves
next day. Like foul flowerwater.

—Would you like the window open a little?

She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:

—What time is the funeral?

—Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn’t see the paper.

Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled
drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a
stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.

—No: that book.

Other stocking. Her petticoat.

—It must have fell down, she said.

He felt here and there. _Voglio e non vorrei_. Wonder if she pronounces
that right: _voglio_. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped
and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of
the orangekeyed chamberpot.

—Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There’s a word I wanted to
ask you.

She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and,
having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the
text with the hairpin till she reached the word.

—Met him what? he asked.

—Here, she said. What does that mean?

He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.

—Metempsychosis?

—Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?

—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That
means the transmigration of souls.

—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes.
The first night after the charades. Dolphin’s Barn. He turned over the
smudged pages. _Ruby: the Pride of the Ring_. Hello. Illustration.
Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the
floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. _The monster Maffei desisted and flung
his victim from him with an oath_. Cruelty behind it all. Doped
animals. Trapeze at Hengler’s. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping.
Break your neck and we’ll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them
young so they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That
a man’s soul after he dies. Dignam’s soul...

—Did you finish it? he asked.

—Yes, she said. There’s nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the
first fellow all the time?

—Never read it. Do you want another?

—Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock’s. Nice name he has.

She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.

Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they’ll write to
Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that’s the word.

—Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body
after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we
all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other
planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their
past lives.

The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Better
remind her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An
example?

The _Bath of the Nymph_ over the bed. Given away with the Easter number
of _Photo Bits_: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you
put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six
I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked
nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.

He turned the pages back.

—Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They
used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for
instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,
inhaling through her arched nostrils.

—There’s a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?

—The kidney! he cried suddenly.

He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes
against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping
hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs. Pungent smoke
shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of
the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its
back. Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and
let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it.

Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He
shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a
forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant
meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of
bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that
about some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his
side, reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in
the gravy and raising it to his mouth.


Dearest Papli

Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me
splendid. Everyone says I am quite the belle in my new tam. I got
mummy’s lovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am
getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of
me and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair
day and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel
on Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to
mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano
downstairs. There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday.
There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his
cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan’s (I was on the
pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls. Tell
him silly Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest
love

                    Your fond daughter
                        Milly

P. S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby.

                        M.


Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first
birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she
was born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly
old woman. Lot of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew
from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live. Well, God is good, sir.
She knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.

His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript. Excuse bad writing.
Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the
XL Café about the bracelet. Wouldn’t eat her cakes or speak or look.
Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece
after piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she
might do worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of
cooler tea to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again: twice.

O, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has
happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild
piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny.
Ripening now. Vain: very.

He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught
her in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a
little. Was given milk too long. On the _Erin’s King_ that day round
the Kish. Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue
scarf loose in the wind with her hair.

     All dimpled cheeks and curls,
     Your head it simply swirls.

Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets,
jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.
Pier with lamps, summer evening, band.

     Those girls, those girls,
     Those lovely seaside girls.

Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion.
Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling,
braiding.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will
happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can’t move. Girl’s sweet light lips.
Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to
move now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman’s lips.

Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass
the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two
and six return. Six weeks off, however. Might work a press pass. Or
through M’Coy.

The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper,
nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing.
Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her
wait. Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her
ear with her back to the fire too.

He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood
up, undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.

—Miaow! he said in answer. Wait till I’m ready.

Heaviness: hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the
landing.

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as
I’m.

In the tabledrawer he found an old number of _Titbits_. He folded it
under his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in
soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.

Listening, he heard her voice:

—Come, come, pussy. Come.

He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen
towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry.
The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall.
Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to
manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur.
All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this
that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top
dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are
fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies’ kid
gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in
that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still
gardens have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.

He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the
peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don’t remember that. Hallstand
too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters.
Drago’s shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown
brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder
have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox
there got away James Stephens, they say. O’Brien.

Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.
Enthusiast.

He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to
get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head
under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy
limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he
peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his
countinghouse. Nobody.

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over
on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a
bit. Our prize titbit: _Matcham’s Masterstroke_. Written by Mr Philip
Beaufoy, Playgoers’ Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a
column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds
three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding
but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding,
he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading
still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope
it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive.
One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or
touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now.
Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat
certainly. _Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won
the laughing witch who now_. Begins and ends morally. _Hand in hand_.
Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his
water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and
received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.

Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for
some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what
she said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving.
Biting her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her.
9.15. Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23.
What possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I’m swelled after that
cabbage. A speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.

Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning
after the bazaar dance when May’s band played Ponchielli’s dance of the
hours. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then
night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head
dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money.
Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use
humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The
mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen
vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes.
It wouldn’t pan out somehow.

Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with
daggers and eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then grey, then
black. Still, true to life also. Day: then the night.

He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.
Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled
back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom
into the air.

In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully
his black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What
time is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.

A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George’s
church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.

     Heigho! Heigho!
     Heigho! Heigho!
     Heigho! Heigho!

Quarter to. There again: the overtone following through the air. A
third.

Poor Dignam!




[ 5 ]


By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past
Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph
office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home.
He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through
Lime street. By Brady’s cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket
of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of
eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered
caskhoop. Tell him if he smokes he won’t grow. O let him! His life
isn’t such a bed of roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come
home to ma, da. Slack hour: won’t be many there. He crossed Townsend
street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph,
Beth. And past Nichols’ the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough.
Daresay Corny Kelleher bagged the job for O’Neill’s. Singing with his
eyes shut. Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark.
Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom
tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a
whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.

In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental
Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend,
finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom
Kernan. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still
read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent
his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm
morning. Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the
leather headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand
came down into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card
behind the headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.

So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and
hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice
blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it
must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,
cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like
that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in _dolce far niente_,
not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too
hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of
idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens.
Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness
in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and
cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in
the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open.
Couldn’t sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of
the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the
weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It’s a
law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his
fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum.
What is weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per
second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They
all fall to the ground. The earth. It’s the force of gravity of the
earth is the weight.

He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her
sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded
_Freeman_ from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a
baton and tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg.
Careless air: just drop in to see. Per second per second. Per second
for every second it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance
through the door of the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. No-one.
In.

He handed the card through the brass grill.

—Are there any letters for me? he asked.

While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting
poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his
baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer
probably. Went too far last time.

The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a
letter. He thanked her and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.

Henry Flower Esq,
c/o P. O. Westland Row,
            City.


Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket,
reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where’s old Tweedy’s regiment?
Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he’s a
grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers.
Redcoats. Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform.
Easier to enlist and drill. Maud Gonne’s letter about taking them off
O’Connell street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith’s
paper is on the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease:
overseas or halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like.
Eyes front. Mark time. Table: able. Bed: ed. The King’s own. Never see
him dressed up as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.

He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if
that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger
felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks.
Women will pay a lot of heed, I don’t think. His fingers drew forth the
letter the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something
pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No.

M’Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when
you.

—Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?

—Hello, M’Coy. Nowhere in particular.

—How’s the body?

—Fine. How are you?

—Just keeping alive, M’Coy said.

His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect:

—Is there any... no trouble I hope? I see you’re...

—O, no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.

—To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?

A photo it isn’t. A badge maybe.

—E...eleven, Mr Bloom answered.

—I must try to get out there, M’Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard
it last night. Who was telling me? Holohan. You know Hoppy?

—I know.

Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door
of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She
stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her,
searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll
collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless
stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty
creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the
spot. Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The
honourable Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take
the starch out of her.

—I was with Bob Doran, he’s on one of his periodical bends, and what do
you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway’s we were.

Doran Lyons in Conway’s. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came
Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath
his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the
braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight
perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady’s hand. Which side will
she get up?

—And he said: _Sad thing about our poor friend Paddy! What Paddy?_ I
said. _Poor little Paddy Dignam_, he said.

Off to the country: Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces
dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he foostering over that change for?
Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two
strings to her bow.

—_Why?_ I said. _What’s wrong with him?_ I said.

Proud: rich: silk stockings.

—Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He moved a little to the side of M’Coy’s talking head. Getting up in a
minute.

—_What’s wrong with him_? He said. _He’s dead_, he said. And, faith, he
filled up. _Is it Paddy Dignam_? I said. I couldn’t believe it when I
heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it
in the Arch. _Yes,_ he said. _He’s gone. He died on Monday, poor
fellow_.

Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!

A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.

Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and
the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace
street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering
the display of. _Esprit de corps_. Well, what are you gaping at?

—Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.

—One of the best, M’Coy said.

The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich
gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her
hat in the sun: flicker, flick.

—Wife well, I suppose? M’Coy’s changed voice said.

—O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.

He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly:

     What is home without
     Plumtree’s Potted Meat?
     Incomplete.
     With it an abode of bliss.

—My missus has just got an engagement. At least it’s not settled yet.

Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I’m off that, thanks.

Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness.

—My wife too, he said. She’s going to sing at a swagger affair in the
Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twentyfifth.

—That so? M’Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who’s getting it up?

Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread
and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens.
Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of
envelope.

     Love’s
     Old
     Sweet
     Song
     Comes lo-ove’s old...

—It’s a kind of a tour, don’t you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.
_Sweeeet song_. There’s a committee formed. Part shares and part
profits.

M’Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.

—O, well, he said. That’s good news.

He moved to go.

—Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.

—Yes, Mr Bloom said.

—Tell you what, M’Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral,
will you? I’d like to go but I mightn’t be able, you see. There’s a
drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself
would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name
if I’m not there, will you?

—I’ll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That’ll be all right.

—Right, M’Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I’d go if I possibly
could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M’Coy will do.

—That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.

Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I’d
like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped
corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him
his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings
of it from that good day to this.

Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has
just got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in
its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don’t you
know: in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would.
Can’t he hear the difference? Think he’s that way inclined a bit.
Against my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope
that smallpox up there doesn’t get worse. Suppose she wouldn’t let
herself be vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.

Wonder is he pimping after me?

Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured
hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery’s
Summer Sale. No, he’s going on straight. Hello. _Leah_ tonight. Mrs
Bandmann Palmer. Like to see her again in that. _Hamlet_ she played
last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia
committed suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in
that. Outside the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in.
Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What
is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The
scene he was always talking about where the old blind Abraham
recognises the voice and puts his fingers on his face.

Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left
his father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of
his father and left the God of his father.

Every word is so deep, Leopold.

Poor papa! Poor man! I’m glad I didn’t go into the room to look at his
face. That day! O, dear! O, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for
him.

Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the
hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn’t met
that M’Coy fellow.

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently
champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid
the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn
all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in
nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and
their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp
between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor
brutes they look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.

He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he
carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.

He passed the cabman’s shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies.
All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own.
_Voglio e non_. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a
few flying syllables as they pass. He hummed:

     Là ci darem la mano
     La la lala la la.


He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in
the lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade’s timberyard. Piled balks.
Ruins and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch
court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard
a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb.
A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to
disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her.
Open it. And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame’s
school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s. And Mr? He opened the letter
within the newspaper.

A flower. I think it’s a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not
annoyed then? What does she say?


Dear Henry

I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry
you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am
awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called
you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me
what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home
you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you.
Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the
beautiful name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you
so often you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a
man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell
me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what
I will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to
meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are
exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I
have such a bad headache. today. and write _by return_ to your longing

Martha


P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to
know.


He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell
and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it
because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then
walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and
there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your
cactus if you don’t please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear
roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha’s
perfume. Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it
back in his sidepocket.

Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did
she wrote it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like
me, respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary.
Thank you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round
corners. Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic.
Go further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course.
Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.

Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it.
Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere:
pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses
without thorns.

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in
the Coombe, linked together in the rain.

     O, Mairy lost the pin of her drawers.
     She didn’t know what to do
     To keep it up,
     To keep it up.

It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all
day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your
wife use. Now could you make out a thing like that?

     To keep it up.

Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or
faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious.
Also the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.

     To keep it up.

Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there:
quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have
been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the
supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of a well, stonecold like
the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I
go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell
her: more and more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.

Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly
in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered
away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank.

Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the
same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure
cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be
made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change
his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A
million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart,
eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of
porter. One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen
millions of barrels of porter.

What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the
same.

An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach.
Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside. The
bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing
together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy
pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the
porch he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it
again behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work
M’Coy for a pass to Mullingar.

Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S. J.
on saint Peter Claver S. J. and the African Mission. Prayers for the
conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious.
The protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the
true religion. Save China’s millions. Wonder how they explain it to the
heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for
them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy
with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo.
Crown of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock.
Chopsticks? Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguishedlooking.
Sorry I didn’t work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of
that Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn’t. They’re taught that.
He’s not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to
baptise blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing.
Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced,
listening. Still life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.

The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps,
pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.

Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place
to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow
music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the
benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch
knelt at the altarrails. The priest went along by them, murmuring,
holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a
communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it
neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her
hat sank at once. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent
down to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next
one. Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? _Corpus:_ body. Corpse.
Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They
don’t seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a
corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.

He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by
one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in
its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear.
We ought to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here
and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for
it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: it’s that
sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes
them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it’s called.
There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you
feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one
family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I’m
sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit
spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes
cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding.
Old fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind
faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time
next year.

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an
instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace
affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what
to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S.
Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have
suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with
a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here
with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the
sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen’s evidence on the
invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion
every morning. This very church. Peter Carey, yes. No, Peter Claver I
am thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six
children at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those
crawthumpers, now that’s a good name for them, there’s always something
shiftylooking about them. They’re not straight men of business either.
O, no, she’s not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up
that envelope? Yes: under the bridge.

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs
smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank
what they are used to Guinness’s porter or some temperance beverage
Wheatley’s Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane’s ginger ale
(aromatic). Doesn’t give them any of it: shew wine: only the other.
Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they’d have one
old booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer
the whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.

Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music.
Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make
that instrument talk, the _vibrato_: fifty pounds a year they say he
had in Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the _Stabat
Mater_ of Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan’s sermon first. Christ or
Pilate? Christ, but don’t keep us all night over it. Music they wanted.
Footdrill stopped. Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice
against that corner. I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the
people looking up:

_Quis est homo._

Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante: seven last words.
Mozart’s twelfth mass: _Gloria_ in that. Those old popes keen on music,
on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example
too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too, chanting,
regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse.
Still, having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick.
What kind of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own
strong basses. Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn’t feel anything after.
Kind of a placid. No worry. Fall into flesh, don’t they? Gluttons,
tall, long legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.

He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about and
bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom
glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand
up at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again
and he sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the
altar, holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered
each other in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a
card:

—O God, our refuge and our strength...

Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw them
the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass? Glorious
and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More
interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful
organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants
to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon
in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I
schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look
down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
Husband learn to his surprise. God’s little joke. Then out she comes.
Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy
Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. Salvation
army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address the meeting.
How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be in Rome: they
work the whole show. And don’t they rake in the money too? Bequests
also: to the P.P. for the time being in his absolute discretion. Masses
for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors.
Monasteries and convents. The priest in that Fermanagh will case in the
witnessbox. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything.
Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of
the church: they mapped out the whole theology of it.

The priest prayed:

—Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be our
safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil (may God
restrain him, we humbly pray!): and do thou, O prince of the heavenly
host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those
other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of
souls.

The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The women
remained behind: thanksgiving.

Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate
perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.

He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the
time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there’s a
(whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked.
Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don’t. Why didn’t you tell me
before. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn’t farther south.
He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the
main door into the light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black
marble bowl while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive
hands in the low tide of holy water. Trams: a car of Prescott’s
dyeworks: a widow in her weeds. Notice because I’m in mourning myself.
He covered himself. How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet.
Better get that lotion made up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time.
Sweny’s in Lincoln place. Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold
beaconjars too heavy to stir. Hamilton Long’s, founded in the year of
the flood. Huguenot churchyard near there. Visit some day.

He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other
trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair.
O well, poor fellow, it’s not his fault. When was it I got it made up
last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it
must have been or the second. O, he can look it up in the prescriptions
book.

The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he
seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s
stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy
then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your
character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants.
All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te
Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist’s doorbell. Doctor Whack.
He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first
fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples.
Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns
blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping
draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the
pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least
expect it. Clever of nature.

—About a fortnight ago, sir?

—Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs, the
dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling
your aches and pains.

—Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then
orangeflower water...

It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.

—And white wax also, he said.

Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to her
eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my
cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the
teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.
Skinfood. One of the old queen’s sons, duke of Albany was it? had only
one skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to
make it worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your?
_Peau d’Espagne_. That orangeflower water is so fresh. Nice smell these
soaps have. Pure curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner.
Hammam. Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a
nice girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious
longing I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time
for massage. Feel fresh then all the day. Funeral be rather glum.

—Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a
bottle?

—No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I’ll call later in the day and
I’ll take one of these soaps. How much are they?

—Fourpence, sir.

Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.

—I’ll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.

—Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you
come back.

—Good, Mr Bloom said.

He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the
coolwrappered soap in his left hand.

At his armpit Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said:

—Hello, Bloom. What’s the best news? Is that today’s? Show us a minute.

Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look
younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.

Bantam Lyons’s yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a
wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears’
soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.

—I want to see about that French horse that’s running today, Bantam
Lyons said. Where the bugger is it?

He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar.
Barber’s itch. Tight collar he’ll lose his hair. Better leave him the
paper and get shut of him.

—You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.

—Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the
second.

—I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.

Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.

—What’s that? his sharp voice said.

—I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away
that moment.

Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread
sheets back on Mr Bloom’s arms.

—I’ll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.

He sped off towards Conway’s corner. God speed scut.

Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap
in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it
lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large
tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming
embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now.
They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.

He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a
mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He
eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist
doubled up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it
round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the
hub big: college. Something to catch the eye.

There’s Hornblower standing at the porter’s lodge. Keep him on hands:
might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower?
How do you do, sir?

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather.
Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it
here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the
Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in
their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the
floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which
in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid
stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk
and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward,
lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of
his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father
of thousands, a languid floating flower.




[ 6 ]


Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking
carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in
after him, curving his height with care.

—Come on, Simon.

—After you, Mr Bloom said.

Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying:

—Yes, yes.

—Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.

Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to
after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm
through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow
at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman
peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she
was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad
to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.
Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he’d
wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming
making the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know
who will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the
nails and the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grows all the same
after. Unclean job.

All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am
sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap: in my hip pocket. Better
shift it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.

All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer:
then horses’ hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and
swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds of
the avenue passed and number nine with its craped knocker, door ajar.
At walking pace.

They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were
passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels
rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook
rattling in the doorframes.

—What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.

—Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.

Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.

—That’s a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died
out.

All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by
passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the
smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man,
clad in mourning, a wide hat.

—There’s a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.

—Who is that?

—Your son and heir.

—Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.

The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway
before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back
to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus
fell back, saying:

—Was that Mulligan cad with him? His _fidus Achates_!

—No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.

—Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding
faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa’s little lump
of dung, the wise child that knows her own father.

Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros: the
bottleworks: Dodder bridge.

Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls
the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing
in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the
landlady’s two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night.
Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife
ironing his back. Thinks he’ll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they
are. About six hundred per cent profit.

—He’s in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a
contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks
all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I’ll
make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother
or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a
gate. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.

He cried above the clatter of the wheels:

—I won’t have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper’s
son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M’Swiney’s. Not likely.

He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power’s mild
face and Martin Cunningham’s eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy
selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If
little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house.
Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange
feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that
morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs
at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning
up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us
a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins.

Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her.
I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent.
Learn German too.

—Are we late? Mr Power asked.

—Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.

Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping
Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she’s a dear girl. Soon be a
woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too.
Life, life.

The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.

—Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.

—He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn’t that squint troubling him. Do
you follow me?

He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away
crustcrumbs from under his thighs.

—What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?

—Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power
said.

All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless
leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward
and said:

—Unless I’m greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?

—It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite
clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.

Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.

—After all, he said, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

—Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak of
his beard gently.

—Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He’s behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.

—And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.

—At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.

—I met M’Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he’d try to come.

The carriage halted short.

—What’s wrong?

—We’re stopped.

—Where are we?

Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.

—The grand canal, he said.

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got
it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame
really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed
tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss
this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos,
Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave.
A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s
dogs usually are.

A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower
spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a
colander. I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.

—The weather is changing, he said quietly.

—A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.

—Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There’s the sun again coming
out.

Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun, hurled
a mute curse at the sky.

—It’s as uncertain as a child’s bottom, he said.

—We’re off again.

The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed
gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.

—Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking
him off to his face.

—O, draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear
him, Simon, on Ben Dollard’s singing of _The Croppy Boy_.

—Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. _His singing of that simple
ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the
whole course of my experience._

—Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He’s dead nuts on that. And the
retrospective arrangement.

—Did you read Dan Dawson’s speech? Martin Cunningham asked.

—I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?

—In the paper this morning.

Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must change
for her.

—No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on please.

Mr Bloom’s glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the
deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what
Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne’s? no, Sexton,
Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.
Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief
of his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness. Month’s mind:
Quinlan. On whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.

     It is now a month since dear Henry fled
     To his home up above in the sky
     While his family weeps and mourns his loss
     Hoping some day to meet him on high.

I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it
in the bath? He patted his waistcoatpocket. There all right. Dear Henry
fled. Before my patience are exhausted.

National school. Meade’s yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding.
Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round
with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their
hats.

A pointsman’s back straightened itself upright suddenly against a
tramway standard by Mr Bloom’s window. Couldn’t they invent something
automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow
would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job
making the new invention?

Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a
crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law
perhaps.

They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark’s, under the railway
bridge, past the Queen’s theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene
Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see _Leah_ tonight, I
wonder. I said I. Or the _Lily of Killarney_? Elster Grimes Opera
Company. Big powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. _Fun on
the Bristol_. Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have
to stand a drink or two. As broad as it’s long.

He’s coming in the afternoon. Her songs.

Plasto’s. Sir Philip Crampton’s memorial fountain bust. Who was he?

—How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in
salute.

—He doesn’t see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?

—Who? Mr Dedalus asked.

—Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.

Just that moment I was thinking.

Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the
white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed.

Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right
hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees?
Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes
feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am
just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body
getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes
that? I suppose the skin can’t contract quickly enough when the flesh
falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders.
Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the
cheeks behind.

He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant
glance over their faces.

Mr Power asked:

—How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?

—O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It’s a good
idea, you see...

—Are you going yourself?

—Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the
county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the
chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.

—Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.

Have you good artists?

—Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we’ll have all
topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in
fact.

—And _Madame_, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.

Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and
clasped them. Smith O’Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there.
Woman. Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage
wheeling by Farrell’s statue united noiselessly their unresisting
knees.

Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his
mouth opening: oot.

—Four bootlaces for a penny.

Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume street.
Same house as Molly’s namesake, Tweedy, crown solicitor for Waterford.
Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too.
Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake.
O’Callaghan on his last legs.

And _Madame_. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing
her hair, humming: _voglio e non vorrei_. No: _vorrei e non_. Looking
at the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. _Mi trema un poco
il_. Beautiful on that _tre_ her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A
throstle. There is a word throstle that expresses that.

His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power’s goodlooking face. Greyish over
the ears. _Madame_: smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way.
Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the
woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it
told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played
out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her
a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s. Or the
Moira, was it?

They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator’s form.

Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.

—Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.

A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner
of Elvery’s Elephant house, showed them a curved hand open on his
spine.

—In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.

Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

—The devil break the hasp of your back!

Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as
the carriage passed Gray’s statue.

—We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.

His eyes met Mr Bloom’s eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:

—Well, nearly all of us.

Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions’ faces.

—That’s an awfully good one that’s going the rounds about Reuben J and
the son.

—About the boatman? Mr Power asked.

—Yes. Isn’t it awfully good?

—What is that? Mr Dedalus asked. I didn’t hear it.

—There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to
send him to the Isle of Man out of harm’s way but when they were
both.....

—What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?

—Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried
to drown.....

—Drown Barabbas! Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did!

Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.

—No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself.....

Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely:

—Reuben J and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on
their way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got
loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey.

—For God’s sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?

—Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! A boatman got a pole and fished
him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father
on the quay more dead than alive. Half the town was there.

—Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is.....

—And Reuben J, Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for
saving his son’s life.

A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power’s hand.

—O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.

—Isn’t it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.

—One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.

Mr Power’s choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.

Nelson’s pillar.

—Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!

—We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Dedalus sighed.

—Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn’t grudge us a laugh.
Many a good one he told himself.

—The Lord forgive me! Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his
fingers. Poor Paddy! I little thought a week ago when I saw him last
and he was in his usual health that I’d be driving after him like this.
He’s gone from us.

—As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went
very suddenly.

—Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.

He tapped his chest sadly.

Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose.
Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent
colouring it.

Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.

—He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.

—The best death, Mr Bloom said.

Their wide open eyes looked at him.

—No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.

No-one spoke.

Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents,
temperance hotel, Falconer’s railway guide, civil service college,
Gill’s, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or
wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the
late Father Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner,
galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning
coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for
a nun.

—Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.

A dwarf’s face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s
body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society
pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant
nothing. Mistake of nature. If it’s healthy it’s from the mother. If
not from the man. Better luck next time.

—Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It’s well out of it.

The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his
bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.

—In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.

—But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own
life.

Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.

—The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.

—Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We
must take a charitable view of it.

—They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.

—It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham’s
large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent.
Like Shakespeare’s face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy
on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to
drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t
broken already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the
riverbed clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of
a wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then
pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the
life of the damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday
morning. Start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have
looked a sight that night Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about
the place and capering with Martin’s umbrella.

     And they call me the jewel of Asia,
     Of Asia,
     The geisha.

He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.

That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The
room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight
through the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner’s sunlit ears, big
and hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw
like yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the
bed. Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son
Leopold.

No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.

The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.

—We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.

—God grant he doesn’t upset us on the road, Mr Power said.

—I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow
in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.

—Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.

As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent
over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has
anybody here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead March from _Saul._
He’s as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette! The
_Mater Misericordiae_. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place.
Ward for incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady’s Hospice for the
dying. Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They
look terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the
spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student
that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He’s gone over to the
lying-in hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other.

The carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.

—What’s wrong now?

A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching
by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony
croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their
fear.

—Emigrants, Mr Power said.

—Huuuh! the drover’s voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks.
Huuuh! out of that!

Thursday, of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold
them about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roastbeef for
old England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter
lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a
year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries,
soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off
the train at Clonsilla.

The carriage moved on through the drove.

—I can’t make out why the corporation doesn’t run a tramline from the
parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken
in trucks down to the boats.

—Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite
right. They ought to.

—Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought, is to have
municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line
out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage
and all. Don’t you see what I mean?

—O, that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon
diningroom.

—A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.

—Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn’t it be more decent
than galloping two abreast?

—Well, there’s something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.

—And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn’t have scenes like that when
the hearse capsized round Dunphy’s and upset the coffin on to the road.

—That was terrible, Mr Power’s shocked face said, and the corpse fell
about the road. Terrible!

—First round Dunphy’s, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.

—Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously.

Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy
Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too
large for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what’s up
now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides
decompose quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also.
With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all.

—Dunphy’s, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.

Dunphy’s corner. Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A
pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up
here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation.
Elixir of life.

But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in
the knocking about? He would and he wouldn’t, I suppose. Depends on
where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery.
It would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.

In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted
by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.

Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.

Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his dropping
barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a
slacktethered horse. Aboard of the _Bugabu._

Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on
his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of
reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar,
Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or
cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at
the auction but a lady’s. Developing waterways. James M’Cann’s hobby to
row me o’er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats.
Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without
writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down lock by
lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his
brown straw hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.

They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

—I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

—Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

—How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping, I suppose?

—Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter’s yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of
land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands,
knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence:
appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder
and sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary, the sexton’s, an old tramp sat,
grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown
yawning boot. After life’s journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.

Mr Power pointed.

—That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

—So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off.
Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

—The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.

—Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That’s the maxim of the
law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent
person to be wrongfully condemned.

They looked. Murderer’s ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered,
tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully
condemned. Murder. The murderer’s image in the eye of the murdered.
They love reading about it. Man’s head found in a garden. Her clothing
consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used.
Murderer is still at large. Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed.
Murder will out.

Cramped in this carriage. She mightn’t like me to come that way without
letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with
their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.

The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars,
rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the
trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain
gestures on the air.

The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. Martin Cunningham put
out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with
his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus followed.

Change that soap now. Mr Bloom’s hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly
and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.
He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand
still held.

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It’s all the same.
Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death.
Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and
fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead.
Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners coming out.

He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed, Hynes
walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and took
out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.

Where is that child’s funeral disappeared to?

A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread,
dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a
granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.

Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at
it with his plume skeowways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck,
pressing on a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out
here every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount
Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere
every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick.
Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.

Mourners came out through the gates: woman and a girl. Leanjawed harpy,
hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl’s face stained with dirt
and tears, holding the woman’s arm, looking up at her for a sign to
cry. Fish’s face, bloodless and livid.

The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So
much dead weight. Felt heavier myself stepping out of that bath. First
the stiff: then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the boy
followed with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the
brother-in-law.

All walked after.

Martin Cunningham whispered:

—I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.

—What? Mr Power whispered. How so?

—His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the
Queen’s hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare.
Anniversary.

—O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself?

He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed
towards the cardinal’s mausoleum. Speaking.

—Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.

—I believe so, Mr Kernan answered. But the policy was heavily
mortgaged. Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.

—How many children did he leave?

—Five. Ned Lambert says he’ll try to get one of the girls into Todd’s.

—A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.

—A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.

—Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.

Has the laugh at him now.

He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had
outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must
outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the
world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you’ll soon follow
him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who
knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on
a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in
the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of
hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the
substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back,
waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground:
and lie no more in her warm bed.

—How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven’t
seen you for a month of Sundays.

—Never better. How are all in Cork’s own town?

—I was down there for the Cork

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