emen, not to speak of jaundiced politicians and
chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric relief in an innocent collation
of staggering bob, reveals as nought else could and in a very unsavoury
light the tendency above alluded to. For the enlightenment of those who are
not so intimately acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as
this morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher who for all his overweening
bumptiousness in things scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an
alkali prides himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering
bob in the vile parlance of our lower class licensed victuallers signifies
the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In a
recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took place in
the commons' hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles
street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in Mdw., F. K. Q. C.
P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported by eyewitnesses as
having stated that once a woman has let the cat into the bag (an esthetic
allusion, presumably, to one of the most complicated and marvellous of all
nature's processes, the act of sexual congress) she must let it out again or
give it life, as he phrased it, to save her own. At the risk of her own was
the telling rejoinder of his interlocutor none the less effective for the
moderate and measured tone in which it was delivered.
Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a
happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and
doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had
manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was very
very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are happy too as
they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene. Reverently look at her as
she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes, that longing hunger for
baby fingers (a pretty sight it is to see), in the first bloom of her new
motherhood, breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the
Universal Husband. And as her loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only
one blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy,
to lay in his arms that mite of God's clay, the fruit of their lawful
embraces. He is older now (you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in
the shoulders yet in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the
conscientious second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O
Doady, loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that
faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she recalls
those days. God, how beautiful now across the mist of years! But their
children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers and his,
Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy, Budgy
(Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy
(called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs of
Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a Purefoy
if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful will be
christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of Mr Purefoy
in the Treasury Remembrancer's office, Dublin Castle. And so time wags on:
but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh break from that
bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from your pipe, the
seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you (may it be the
distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read in the Sacred Book for the
oil too has run low and so with a tranquil heart to bed, to rest. He knows
and will call in His own good time. You too have fought the good fight and
played loyally your man's part. Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good
and faithful servant!
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil
memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but
they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them
be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were
not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth
suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various
circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his
senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast
at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the
vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut
off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent,
remote, reproachful.
The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life. A scene disengages
itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by a word of so
natural a homeliness as if those days were really present there (as some
thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space of lawn one soft May
evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and white,
fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real interest in the
pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or collide and stop, one
by its fellow, with a brief alert shock. And yonder about that grey urn
where the water moves at times in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as
fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know
not what of arresting in her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely
brace of them pendent from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the
skin so daintily against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in
linseywoolsey (blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when
ere long the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured
by that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young
man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of danger but must needs
glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the piazzetta giving
upon the flower-close with a faint shadow of remoteness or of reproach
(alles VergÄnghche) in her glad look.
Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that
antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces.
Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of custody rather,
befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds and
of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long ago. But as before the
lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of
moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one
vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted
growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres
and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent,
so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon
the utterance of the Word.
Burke's! Outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and
bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor,
punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants,
bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not. A
dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse Callan taken aback
in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with
news of placentation ended, a full pound if a milligramme. They hark him on.
The door! It is open? Ha? They are out tumultuously, off for a minute's
race, all bravely legging it, Burke's of Denzille and Holles their ulterior
goal. Dixon follows, giving them sharp language but raps out an oath, he
too, and on. Bloom stays with nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy
mother and nurseling up there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too
not other now? Ward of watching in Horne's house has told its tale in that
washedout pallor. Them all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping he
whispers close in going: Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence
celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God's
air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it
deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed
and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in
this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her
lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified
with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a
very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all
their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with
butcher's bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head
up? For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See,
thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A
canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee!
He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked
kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the
innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile
cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary
pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,
bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious
attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and
trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music. Twenty years
of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and
would and wait and never do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and
didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathusthra?
Deine kuh TrÜbsal melkest Du. Nun trinkst Du die sÜsse Milch des Euters.
See! It displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother's
milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars
overhead, rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters
will quaff in their guzzlingden, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's
land. Thy cow's dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and
fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch!
Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.
Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo.
Any brollies or gumboots in the family? Where the Henry Nevil's sawbones and
ole clo? Sorra one o me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward the ribbon
counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken minister coming
out of the maternity hospal! Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius.
A make, mister. The Denzille lane boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto,
Isaacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight. Yous join us, dear sir? No
hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Allee samee this bunch. En avant, mes
enfants! Fire away number one on the gun. Burke's! Thence they advanced five
parasangs. Slattery's mounted foot where's that bleeding awfur? Parson
Steve, apostates' creed! No, no. Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead. Keep a
watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What's on you? Ma mÈre m'a
mariÉe. British Beatitudes! Ratamplan Digidi Boum Boum. Ayes have it. To be
printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf
covers of pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come
out of Ireland my time. Silentium! Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to
nearest canteen and there annex liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp the boys
are (attitudes!) parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs,
battleships, buggery and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beerbeef
trample the bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers.
Thunderation! Keep the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops' boosebox.
Halt! Heave to. Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You
hurt? Most amazingly sorry!
Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall.
Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this
week gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the übermensch. Dittoh. Five
number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby's candle.
Stimulate the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go
again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? Caramba! Have an eggnog or a
prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated
awful. Don't mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got bet
be a boomblebee whenever he was settin sleep in hes bit garten. Digs up near
the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin, I do. Full of a dure.
See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey lovekin. None of your
lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love. Two Ardilauns. Same here.
Look slippery. If you fall don't wait to get up. Five, seven, nine. Fine!
Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And her take me to rests and her
anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed. Your starving eyes and
allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O gluepot. Sir? Spud again the
rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear
thee best a gert vool. Well, doc? Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity
sagaciating OK? How's the squaws and papooses? Womanbody after going on the
straw? Stand and deliver. Password. There's hair. Ours the white death and
the ruddy birth. Hi! Spit in your own eye, boss. Mummer's wire. Cribbed out
of Meredith. Jesified orchidised polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine's writing Pa
Kinch. Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.
Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw
Hielentman's your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil!
My tipple. Merci. Here's to us. How's that? Leg before wicket. Don't stain
my brandnew sitinems. Give's a shake of pepper, you there. Catch aholt.
Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every cove to his
gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. Les petites femmes. Bold bad girl from the town
of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding Sara by the wame. On the
road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had left but the name. What do
you want for ninepence? Machree, Macruiskeen. Smutty Moll for a mattress
jig. And a pull altogether. Ex!
Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like
seeing as how no shiners is acoming, Underconstumble? He've got the chink ad
lib. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn. Us come right in
on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the oof. Two bar and a wing.
You larn that go off of they there Frenchy bilks? Won't wash here for nuts
nohow. Lil chile vely solly. Ise de cutest colour coon down our side. Gawds
teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou. We're nae tha fou. Au reservoir, Mossoo.
Tanks you.
'Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir.
Bantam, two days teetee. Mowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint,
do. Gum, I'm jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With
a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he'd like? Rose of Castille. Rows of
cast. Police! Some H2O for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam's flowers. Gemini,
he's going to holler. The colleen bawn, my colleen bawn. O, cheese it! Shut
his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner today till I tipped
him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen. Hand as give me the jady
coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire big bug Bass to the depot.
Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form hot order. Guinea to a
goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospel-true. Criminal diversion? I think that
yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the harman beck copped the
game. Madden back Madden's a maddening back. O, lust, our refuge and our
strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy. Stand by. Hide my blushes
someone. All in if he spots me. Comeahome, our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo.
Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel. Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to
pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me,
honest injun. Shiver my timbers if I had. There's a great big holy friar.
Vyfor you no me tell? Vel, I ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil
get misha mishinnah. Through yerd our lord, Amen.
You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy
drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most
extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one
expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord, landlord, have
you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, wee drap to pree. Cut and some again.
Right Boniface! Absinthe the lot. Nos omnes biberimus viridum toxicum
diabolus capiat posteriora nostra Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the
Bloom toff. I hear you say onions? Bloo? Cadges ads? Photo's papli, by all
that's gorgeous! Play low, pardner. Slide. Bonsoir la compagnie. And snares
of the poxfiend. Where's the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel,
ye maun e'en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann will
yu help, yung man hoose frend tuk bungalo kee to find plais whear to lay
crown off his hed 2 night. Crickey, I'm about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my
shins if this beent the bestest putties longbreakyet. Item, curate, couple
of cookies for this child. Cot's plood and prandypalls, none! Not a pite of
sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell and with him those other licensed
spirits. Time. Who wander through the world. Health all. A la vÔtre!
Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep
at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by
James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond?
Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity.
Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a prosperous cit. Man all
tattered and torn that married a maiden all forlorn. Slung her hook, she
did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn
in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies. Pardon? See him today at a runefal?
Chum o yourn passed in his checks? Ludamassy! Pore picanninies! Thou'll no
be telling me thot, Pold veg! Did urns blubble bigsplash crytears cos fries
Padney was took off in black bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra
best. I never see the like since I was born. Tiens, tiens, but it is well
sad, that, my faith, yes. O get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle
drives are souped. Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow.
Jappies? High angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him,
says he, nor any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone.
Forward, woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah, the Excellent One, your
soul this night ever tremendously conserve.
Your attention! We're nae thy fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The
least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable
regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my thrue love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.
Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes.
Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up. Pflaap! Tally ho. You not
come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!
Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for
Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips there shady Mary is.
Righto, any old time. Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis. You coming long?
Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned
against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to
judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Ut implerentur scripturae. Strike up a
ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy. Christicle,
who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming
washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Come on, you winefizzling ginsizzling
booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed,
hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed four flushers, false alarms and excess
baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie,
that's yanked to glory most half this planet from 'Frisco Beach to
Vladivostok. The Deity ain't no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that
he's on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the
grandest thing yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus.
You'll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle
the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch
in it for you, my friend, In his backpocket. Just you try it on.
Circe
The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an
uncobbled transiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green
will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of flimsy houses with gaping
doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice
gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are
wedged lumps of coal and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly.
Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the
murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.
THE CALLS Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.
THE ANSWERS Round behind the stable.
(A deaf mute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling,
jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children's hands
imprisons him.)
THE CHILDREN Kithoguel Salute.
THE IDIOT (Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles.) Grhahute!
THE CHILDREN Where's the great light?
THE IDIOT (Gobbing.) Ghaghahest.
(They release him. He jerks on. A pygmy woman swings on a rope slung
between the railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and
muffled by its arm and hat moves, groans, grinding growling teeth, and
snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbish tip crouches to
shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oil lamp
rams the last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew
his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair
swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a
papershuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt,
scrambles up. A drunken navvy ups with both hands the railings of an area,
lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shoulder capes, their hands
upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes; a woman screams; a
child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer
from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs
out the tatts from the hair of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice,
still young, sings shrill from a lane.)
CISSY CAFFREY
I gave it to Molly
Because she was jolly,
The leg of the duck
The leg of the duck.
(Private Cart and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters,
as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths
a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago retorts.)
THE VIRAGO Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.
CISSY CAFFREY More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet.
(She sings.)
I gave it to Nelly
To stick in her belly
The leg of the duck
The leg of the duck.
(Private Cart and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics
bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond copper
polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the
redcoats.)
PRIVATE COMPTON (Jerks his finger.) Way for the parson.
PRIVATE CARR (Turns and calls.) What ho, parson!
CISSY CAFFREY (Her voice soaring higher.)
She has it, she got it,
Wherever she put it
The leg of the duck.
(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy
the introit for paschal time. Lynch, his jockey cap low on his brow, attends
him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)
STEPHEN Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia.
(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a doorway.)
THE BAWD (Her voice whispering huskily.) Sst! Come here till I tell
you. Maidenhead inside. Sst.
STEPHEN (Altius aliqantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit acqua ista.
THE BAWD (Spits in their trail her jet of venom.) Trinity medicals.
Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.
(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with Bertha Supple, draws her shawl
across her nostrils.)
EDY BOARDMAN (Bickering.) And say the one: I seen you up Faithful place
with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his cometobed hat.
Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You never seen me in the
mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The likes of her! Stag that one
is. Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with two fellows the one time,
Kildbride the enginedriver and lancecorporal Oliphant.
STEPHEN (Triumphaliter.) Salvi facti i sunt.
(He flourishes his ashplant shivering the lamp image, shattering light
over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him,
growling. Lynch scar's it with a kick.)
LYNCH So that?
STEPHEN (Looks behind.) So that gesture, not music, not odours, would
be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay
sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.
LYNCH Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!
STEPHEN We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even
the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.
LYNCH Ba!
STEPHEN Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug?
This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread and wine in Omar. Hold
my stick.
LYNCH Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?
STEPHEN Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson,
ad deam qui laetificat juventutem meam.
(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands,
his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned
in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher.)
LYNCH Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the
customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.
(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and, clasping, climbs
in spasms. From the top spur he slides down. Jacky Caffrey clasps to climb.
The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the dark. The
navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose and ejects
from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot. Shouldering the lamp he
staggers away through the crowd with his flaring cresset.
Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools,
middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south beyond
the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy staggering forward cleaves the
crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding. On the farther side under the
railway bridge Bloom appears flushed, panting, cramming bread and chocolate
into a side pocket. From Gillens hairdressers window a composite portrait
shows him gallant Nelson's image. A concave mirror at the side presents to
him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Grave Gladstone sees him level
Bloom for Bloom. He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but
in the con vex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops
of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.
At Antonio Babaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the bright
arclamps. He disappears. In a moment he reappears and hurries on.)
BLOOM Fish and taters. N. g. Ah!
(He disappears into Olhousen's, the pork butcher's, under the
downcoming rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the
shutter puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one
containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the other a cold sheep's trotter
sprinkled with wholepepper He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to one
side he presses a parcel against his rib and groans.)
BLOOM Stitch in my side. Why did I run?
(He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset
siding. The glow leaps again.)
BLOOM What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.
(He stands at Cormack's corner watching.)
BLOOM Aurora borealis or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course.
South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar's bush. We're safe.
(He hums cheerfully.) London's burning, London's burning! On fire, on fire!
(He catches sight of the navvy lurching through the crowd at the farther
side of Talbot street.) I'll miss him. Run. Quick. Better cross here.
(He darts to cross the road. Urchins shout.)
THE URCHINS Mind out, mister! (Two cyclists, with lighted paper
lanterns aswing, swim by him, grazing him, their bells rattling.)
THE BELLS Haltyaltyaltyall.
BLOOM (Halts erect stung by a spasm.) Ow.
(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Through rising fog a dragon
sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him, its huge
red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the wire. The motorman bangs
his footgong.)
THE GONG Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
(The brake cracks violently. Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved
hand, blunders stifflegged, out of the track. The motorman thrown forward,
pugnosed, on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over chains and keys.)
THE MOTORMAN Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hattrick?
BLOOM (Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a
mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand.) No thoroughfare. Close shave
that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again. On the
hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential. (He feels
his trouser pocket.) Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch in tracks or
bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at
Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick. Insolent driver. I
ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous. Might be the fellow balked
me this morning with that horsey woman. Same style of beauty. Quick of him
all the same. The stiff walk. True word spoken in jest. That awful cramp in
Lad lane. Something poisonous I ate. Emblem of luck. Why? Probably lost
cattle. Mark of the beast. (He closes his eyes an instant.) Bit light in the
head. Monthly or effect of the other. Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too
much for me now. Ow!
(A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against O'Beirnes wall, a
visage unknown, injected with dark mercury. From under a wideleaved sombrero
the figure regards him with evil eye.)
BLOOM Buenos noches, seÑorita Blanca, que calle es esta?
THE FIGURE (Impassive, raises a signal arm.) Password. Sraid Mabbot.
BLOOM Haha. Merci. Esperanto. Slan leath. (He mutters.) Gaelic league
spy, sent by that fireeater.
(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps
left, ragsackman left.)
BLOOM I beg. (He swerves, sidles, stepsaside, slips past and on.)
BLOOM Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a fingerpost planted
by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who lost
my way and contributed to the columns of the Irish Cyclist the letter
headed, In darkest Stepaside. Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and bones,
at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer makes for. Wash off
his sins of the world.
(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against Bloom.)
BLOOM O!
(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there.
Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch, fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepocket,
sweets of sin, potato soap.)
BLOOM Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch
your purse.
(The retriever approaches sniffling, nose to the ground. A sprawled
form sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of
an elder in Zion and a smoking cap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles
hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn
face.)
RUDOLPH Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with
drunken goy ever. So. You catch no money.
BLOOM (Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen,
feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.
RUDOLPH What you making down this place? Have you no soul? (With feeble
vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom) Are you not my son
Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left
the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?
BLOOM (With precaution.) I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's
left of him.
RUDOLPH (Severely.) One night they bring you home drunk as dog after
spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?
BLOOM (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips,
narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver
waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side
of him coated with stiffening mud.) Harriers, father. Only that once.
RUDOLPH Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make
you kaput, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.
BLOOM (Weakly.) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I
slipped.
RUDOLPH (With contempt) Ooim nachez. Nice spectacles for your poor
mother!
BLOOM Mamma!
ELLEN BLOOM (In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, crinoline and bustle,
widow Twankey's blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens
and cameo brooch, her hairplaited in a crisping net, appears over the
staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand and cries out in
shrill alarm.) O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling
salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped
blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid
doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all, at all?
(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in
his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)
A VOICE (Sharply.) Poldy!
BLOOM Who? (He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily.) At your service.
(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in
Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet
trousers and jacket slashed with gold. A wide yells cummerbund girdles her.
A white yashmak violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her
lace dark eyes and raven hair.)
BLOOM Molly!
MARION Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to
me. (Satirically.) Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?
BLOOM (Shifts from foot to foot.) No, no. Not the least little bit.
(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air questions,
hopes, crubeens for her supper things to tell her excuses, desire,
spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled
toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her a
camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of innumerable
rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with disgruntled
hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb wristbangles
angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)
MARION Nebrakada! Feminimum.
(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a lace mango fruit,
offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof then droops his head
and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops his back
for leapfrog.)
BLOOM I can give you... I mean as your business menagerer Mrs Marion...
if you...
MARION So you notice some change? (Her hands passing slowly over her
trinketed stomacher. A slow friendly mockery in her eyes.) O Poldy, Poldy,
you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the wide world.
BLOOM I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower
water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning.
(He pats divers pockets.) This moving kidney. Ah!
(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon
soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)
THE SOAP
We're a capital couple are Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky.
(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appeals in the disc of the
soapsun.)
SWENY Three and a penny, please.
BLOOM Yes. For my wife, Mrs Marion. Special recipe.
MARION (Softly.) Poldy!
BLOOM Yes, ma'am?
MARION Ti trema un poco il cuore?
(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon,
humming the duet from Don Giovanni)
BLOOM Are you sure about that Voglio? I mean the pronunciati...
(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes
his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)
THE BAWD Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched.
Fifteen. There's no-one in it only her old father that's dead drunk.
(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled Bridie
Kelly stands.)
BRIDIE Hatch street. Any good in your mind?
(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues
with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom.
Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)
THE BAWD (Her wolfeyes shining.) He's getting his pleasure. You won't
get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don't be all night before
the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.
(Leering Gerty MacDowell limps forward. She draws from behind ogling,
and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)
GERTY With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. (She murmurs.) You did
that. I hate you.
BLOOM I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you.
THE BAWD Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman
false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take the
strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.
GERTY (To Bloom.) When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.
(She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Dirty married man! I love you for doing
that to me.
(She slides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat with
loose bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes wideopen,
smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)
MRS BREEN Mr.
BLOOM (Coughs gravely.) Madam, when we last had this pleasure by letter
dated the sixteenth instant .
MRS BREEN Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you
nicely! Scamp!
BLOOM (Hurriedly.) Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think me? Don't
give me away. Walls have hears. How do you do? It's ages since I. You're
looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having this time
of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting quarter.
Rescue of fallen women Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary...
MRS BREEN (Holds up a finger.) Now don't tell a big fib! I know
somebody won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly! (Slily.) Account for
yourself this very minute or woe betide you!
BLOOM (Looks behind.) She often said she'd like to visit. Slumming. The
exotic, you see. Negro servants too in livery if she had money. Othello
black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at the Livermore
christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.
(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks,
upstarched Sambo chokers and lace scarlet asters in their buttonholes leap
out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the
twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a
breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, toe heel, heel
toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)
There's someone in the house with Dina
There's someone in the house, I know,
There's someone in the house with Dina
Playing on the old banjo.
(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling,
chortling, trumming, twanging they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)
BLOOM (With a sour tenderish smile.) A little frivol, shall we, if you
are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a
fraction of a second?
MRS BREEN (Screams gaily.) O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!
BLOOM For old sake'sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage
mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft corner
for you. (Gloomily.) 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear gazelle.
MRS BREEN Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply. (She
puts out her hand inquisitively.) What are you hiding behind your back? Tell
us, there's a dear.
BLOOM (Seizes her wrist with his free hand.) Josie Powell that was,
prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking back in
a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night Georgina Simpson's
housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin
blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this snuff box?
MRS BREEN You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic
recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the
ladies.
BLOOM (Squire of dames, in dinner jacket, with watered-silk facings,
blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a
prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand.) Ladies and gentlemen, I give
you Ireland, home and beauty.
MRS BREEN The dear dead days beyond recall. Love's old sweet song.
BLOOM (Meaningfully dropping his voice.) I confess I'm teapot with
curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot at
present.
MRS BREEN (Gushingly.) Tremendously teapot! London's tea pot and I'm
simply teapot all over me. (She rubs sides with him.) After the parlour
mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase
ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.
BLOOM (Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his
fingers and thumbs passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which
she surrenders gently.) The witching hour of night. I took the splinter out
of this hand, carefully, slowly. (Tenderly, as he slips on her finger a ruby
ring.) LÀ ci darem la mano.
MRS BREEN (In a onepiece eveningfrock executed in moonlight blue, a
tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her
moonblue satin slipper curves her palm softly, breathing quickly.) Voglio e
non. You're hot! You're scalding! The left hand nearest the heart.
BLOOM When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and the
beast. I can never forgive you for that. (His clenched fist at his brow.)
Think what it means. All you meant to me then. (Hoarsely.) Woman, it's
breaking me! (Dennis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich
board, shuffles past them in cadet slippers, his dull beard thrust out,
muttering to right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of the
ace of spaces, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)
ALF BERGAN (Points jeering at the sandwich boards.) U.p.: Up.
MRS BREEN (To Bloom.) High jinks below stairs. (She gives him the glad
eye.) Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? You wanted to.
BLOOM (Shocked.) Molly's best friend! Could you?
MRS BREEN (Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss.)
Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?
BLOOM (Off handedly.) Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without
potted meat is incomplete. I was at Leah. Mrs Bandman Palmer. Trenchant
exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the programme. Rattling
good place round there for pig's feet. Feel.
(Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head, appears
weighted to one side by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which a
skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash. He ins it and shows it
full of polonies, kippered, herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.)
RICHIE Best value in Dub.
(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands on the curbstone, folding his
napkin, waiting to wait.)
PAT (Advances with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.) Steak and
kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.
RICHIE Goodgod. Inev erate inall...
(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The navvy, lurching by,
gores him with his flaming pronghorn.)
RICHIE (With a cry of pain, his hand to his back) Ah! Bright's! Lights!
BLOOM (Points to the navvy.) A spy. Don't attract attention. I hate
stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.
MRS BREEN Humbugging and delutbering as per usual with your cock and
bull story.
BLOOM I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here.
But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular reason.
MRS BREEN (All agog.) O, not for worlds.
BLOOM Let's walk on. Shall us?
MRS BREEN Let's.
(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen. The
terrier follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.)
THE BAWD Jewman's melt!
BLOOM (In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel,
tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white
spats, fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in
bandolier and a grey billycock hat.) Do you remember a long long time, years
and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was weaned when
we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?
MRS BREEN (In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider
veil.) Leopardstown.
BLOOM I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three
year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old
fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and you
had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that Mrs
Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and eleven,
a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I'll lay you what you like
she did it on purpose...
MRS BREEN She did, of course, the cat! Don't tell me! Nice adviser!
BLOOM Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky
little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired on
you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a pity to
kill it, you cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of
a fullstop.
MRS BREEN (Squeezes his arm, simpers.) Naughty cruel I was.
BLOOM (Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.) And Molly was eating a
sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Frankly,
though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her style.
She was .
MRS BREEN Too.
BLOOM Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly
were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the
tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her
name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I ever heard
or read or knew or came across .
MRS BREEN (Eagerly.) Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on
towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her feet
apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to
a tale which their broken snouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An
armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.)
THE GAFFER (Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout.) And when Cairns
came down from the scaffolding in Beaver Street what was he after doing it
into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the shavings
for Derwan's plasterers.
THE LOITERERS (Guffaw with cleft palates.) O jays!
(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their
lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)
BLOOM Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad
daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.
THE LOITERERS Jays, that's a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the
men's porter.
(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled,
call from lanes, doors, corners.)
THE WHORES Are you going far, queer fellow? How's your middle leg? Got
a match on you? Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you.
(He plodges through their sump towards the lighted street beyond. >From
a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk. In
the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the navvy and the two redcoats.)
THE NAVVY (Belching.) Where's the bloody house?
THE SHEBEENKEEPER Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout.
Respectable woman.
THE NAVVY (Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them.) Come
on, you British army!
PRIVATE CARR (Behind his back.) He aint half balmy.
PRIVATE COMPTON (LAughs.) What ho!
PRIVATE CARR (To the navvy.) Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for
Carr. Just Carr.
THE NAVVY (Shouts.)
We are the boys. Of Wexford.
PRIVATE COMPTON Say! What price the sergeantmajor?
PRIVATE CARR Bennett? He's my pal. I love old Bennett.
THENAVVY (Shouts.)
The galling chain.
And free our native land.
(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault.
The dog approaches, his tongue outlolling, panting.)
BLOOM Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they
are gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at Westland
row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far. Train with
engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding for the night or
collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What am I following him
for? Still, he's the best of that lot. If I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy
Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. Kismet. He'll lose that
cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. What do ye
lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have lost my life too with that
mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind. Can't
always save you, though. If I had passed Truelock's window that day two
minutes later would have been shot. Absence of body. Still if bullet only
went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred pounds. What was
he? Kildare street club toff. God help his gamekeeper.
(He gazes ahead reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream
and a phallic design.)
Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. What's
that like? (Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted doorways, in window
embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The odour of the sicksweet weed
floats towards him in slow round ovalling wreaths.)
THE WREATHS Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.
BLOOM My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get
all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too much.
(The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand, wagging his
tail.) Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today. Better speak to
him first. Like women they like rencontres. Stinks like a polecat. Chacun
son goÛt. He might be mad. Fido. Uncertain in his movements. Good fellow!
Garryowen! (The wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with
begging paws, his long black tongue lolling out.) Influence of his
surroundings. Give and have done with it. Provided nobody. (Calling
encouraging words he shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by
the setter into a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to
dump the crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.) Sizeable for
threepence. But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort. Why?
Smaller from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.
(With regret he lets unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The mastiff
mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed, crunching
the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant. They murmur
together.)
THE WATCH Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.
(Each lays a hand on Blooms shoulder.)
FIRST WATCH Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.
BLOOM (Stammers.) I am doing good to others.
(A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with
Banbury cakes in their beaks.)
THE GULLS Kaw kave kankury kake.
BLOOM The friend of man. Trained by kindness.
(He points. Bob Doran, toppling from a high bars tool, sways over the
munching spaniel.)
BOB DORAN Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.
(The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pigs knuckle
between his molars through which rabid scrumspittle dribbles. Bob Doran
falls silently into an area.)
SECOND WATCH Prevention of cruelty to animals.
BLOOM (Enthusiastically.) A noble work! I scolded that tramdriver on
Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab. Bad
French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last tram. All
tales of circus life are highly demoralising.
(Signor Maffei, passion pale, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs
in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paper hoop, a curling
carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the going boarhound.)
SIGNOR MAFFEI (With a sinister smile.) Ladies and gentlemen, my
educated greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my
patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted
thong. Block tackle and a strangling pully will bring your lion to heel, no
matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater. A redhot
crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of
Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. (He glares.) I possess the Indian sign. The
glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. (With a bewitching
smile.) I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride of the ring.
FIRST WATCH Come. Name and address.
BLOOM I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes! (He takes off his high
grade hat, saluting.) Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard of
von Bloom Pasha. Umpteen mil lions. Donnerwetter! Owns half Austria. Egypt.
Cousin.
FIRST WATCH Proof.
(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.)
BLOOM (In red fez, cadi's dress coat with broad green sash, wearing a
false badge of the Legion of Honour, picks up the card hastily and offers
it.) Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors: Messrs John
Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.
FIRST WATCH (Reads.) Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Un lawfully watching
and besetting.
SECOND WATCH An alibi. You are cautioned.
BLOOM (Produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower.) This is
the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don't know his name.
(Plausibly.) You know that old joke, rose of Castille. Bloom. The change of
name Virag. (He murmurs privately and confidentially.) We are engaged you
see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. (He shoulders the second
watch gently.) Dash it all. It's a way we gallants have in the navy. Uniform
that does it. (He turns gravely to the first watch.) Still, of course, you
do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in some evening and have a glass of old
Burgundy. (To the second watch gaily.) I'll introduce you, inspector. She's
game. Do it in shake of a lamb's tail.
(A dark mercurialised face appears, leading a veiled figure.)
THE DARK MERCURY The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of
the army.
MARTHA (Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of the
Irish Times in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing.) Henry! Leopold!
Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.
FIRST WATCH (Sternly.) Come to the station.
BLOOM (Scared, hats himself steps back, then, plucking at his heart and
lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and dueguard of
fellowcraft.) No, no, worshipful master, light of love. Mistaken identity.
The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember the Childs fratricide
case. We medical men. By striking him dead with a hatchet. I am wrongfully
accused. Better one guilty escape than ninetynine wrongfully condemned.
MARTHA (Sobbing behind her veil.) Breach of promise. My real name is
Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my brother,
the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.
BLOOM (Behind his hand.) She's drunk. The woman is inebriated. (He
murmurs vaguely the past of Ephraim.) Shitbroleeth.
SECOND WATCH (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.) You ought to be thoroughly
well ashamed of yourself.
BLOOM Gentleman of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare's nest. I am a
man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable
married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My
wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant
upstanding gentleman, who do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of
Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his majority for
the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.
FIRST WATCH Regiment.
BLOOM (Turns to the gallery.) The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the
earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms up
there among you. The R. D. F. With our own Metropolitan police, guardians of
our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as physique, in
the service of our sovereign.
A VOICE Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
BLOOM (His hand on the shoulder of the first watch.) My old dad too was
a J.P. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the colours
for king and country in the absentminded war under General Gough in the park
and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches.
I did all a white man could. (With quiet feeling.) Jim Bludso. Hold her
nozzle again the bank.
FIRST WATCH Profession or trade.
BLOOM Well, I follow a literary occupation. Author-journalist. In fact
we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the
inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected with
the British and Irish press. If you ring up...
(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His
scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles a hank
of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a telephone
receiver nozzle to his ear.)
MYLES CRAWFORD (His cock's wattles wagging.) Hello, seventyseven
eightfour. Hello. Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arse wiper here. Paralyse
Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?
(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate
morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased
lavender trousers and patent boots. He cames a lace portfolio labelled
Matcham's Masterstrokes.)
BEAUFOY (Drawls.) No, you aren't, not by a long shot if I know it. I
don't see it, that's all. No born gentleman, no one with the most
rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly
loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak
masquerading as a literateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most
inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling books, really
gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath
suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions with which your
lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the kingdom.
BLOOM (Murmurs with hangdog meekness.) That bit about the laughing
witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may... ?
BEAUFOY (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court.) You
funny ass, you! You're too beastly awfully weird for words! I don't think
you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. My
literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we
shall receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? We are considerably out
of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has
not even been to a university.
BLOOM (Indistinctly.) University of life. Bad art.
BEAUFOY (Shouts.) It's a damnably foul lie showing the moral rottenness
of the man! (He extends his portfolio.) We have here damning evidence, the
corpus delicti, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work disfigured by the
hallmark of the beast.
A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY
Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
BLOOM (Bravely.) Overdrawn.
BEAUFOY You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you
rotter! (To the court.) Why, look at the man's private life! Leading a
quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned
in mixed society. The arch conspirator of the age.
BLOOM (To the court.) And he, a bachelor, how.
FIRST WATCH The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
THE CRIER Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!
(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket
on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)
SECOND WATCH Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?
MARY DRISCOLL (Indignantly.) I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable
character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation, six
pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out, and I had to leave owing to
his carryings on.
FIRST WATCH What do you tax him with?
MARY DRISCOLL He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself
as poor as I am.
BLOOM (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless
slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled softly.) I treated you white. I gave
you mementoes, smart emerald garters far above your station. Incautiously I
took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There's a medium in all
things. Play cricket.
MARY DRISCOLL (Excitedly.) As God is looking down on me this night if
ever I laid a hand to them oysters!
FIRST WATCH The offence complained of? Did something happen?
MARY DRISCOLL He surprised me in the rere of the premises, your honour,
when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety
pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he
interfered twice with my clothing.
BLOOM She counterassaulted.
MARY DRISCOLL (Scornfully.) I had more respect for the scouringbrush,
so I had. I remonstrated with him, your lord, and he remarked: Keep it
quiet!
(General laughter.)
GEORGES FOTTRELL (Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly.) Order in
court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.
(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a
long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in his
stirring address to the grand-jury. He was down and out but, though branded
as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the
memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely
domestic animal. A seven months' child, he had been carefully brought up and
nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an
erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long
last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of
his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of
the family. An acclimatised Britisher he had seen that summer eve from the
footplate of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain
refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of loveful
households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of
happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence
a dozen, innocent British born bairns lisping prayers to the Sacred Infant,
youthful scholars grappling with their pensums, model young ladies playing
on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round
the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with
their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon
Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a
sacrifice, greatest bargain ever... )
(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that
they cannot hear.)
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND (Without looking up from their notebooks.)
Loosen his boots.
PROFESSOR MACHUGH (From the presstable, coughs and calls.) Cough it up,
man. Get it out in bits.
(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A lace bucket.
Bloom himself Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A
plasterers bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly
agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He
did not look in the bucket. Nobody. Rather a mess. Not completely. A Titbits
back number.)
(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom, in a torn frockcoat stained with
whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of sticking-plaster
across his nose, talks inaudibly.)
J. J. O'MOLLOY (In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a
voice of pained protest.) This is no place for indecent levity at the
expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden
nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an
infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is
now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a
momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such
familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my
client's native place, the land of the Pharaoh. Prima facie, I put it to you
that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and
the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was
not repeated. I would deal inespecial with atavism. There have been cases of
shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak
he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated
between the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from
cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction
and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.
BLOOM (Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers,
apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about him
dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches his belt
sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court,
pointing one thumb heavenward.) Him makee velly muchee fine night. (He
begins to lilt simply.)
Li li poo lil chile,
Blingee pigfoot evly night.
Payee two shilly...
(He is howled down.)
J. J. O'MOLLOY (Hotly to the populace.) This is a lonehand fight. By
Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this
fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has
superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically without
wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused was not
accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered with. The
young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter.
(Bloom takes J. J. O'Molloy's hand and raises it to his lips.) I shall call
rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at
its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client, an innately bashful
man, would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which
injured modesty could object to or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong
turning when some dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own
sweet will on her. He wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man
I know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his
extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which
will now be shown. (To Bloom.) I suggest that you will do the handsome
thing.
BLOOM A penny in the pound.
(The mirage of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in
silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino, in
blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an orange
citron and a pork kidney.)
DLUGACZ (Hoarsely.) Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 13.
(J. J. O'Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his
coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with sunken
eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F. Taylor. He
applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of
rosepink blood.)
J. J. O'MOLLOY (Almost voicelessly.) Excuse me, I am suffering from a
severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words. (He
assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour
Bushe.) When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught that the pensive
bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves
to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar the sacred benefit of the
doubt. (A paper with something written on it is handed into court.)
BLOOM (In court dress.) Can give best references. Messrs Callan,
Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon,
ex-lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest .
Queens of Dublin Society. (Carelessly.) I was just chatting this afternoon
at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer
royal, at the levee. Sir Bob, I said...
MRS YELVERTON BARRY (In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength
ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brick quilted dolman, a comb of
brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair.) Arrest him constable. He
wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the
North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He
said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of
the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed
him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half
past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send
me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The
Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.
MRS BELLINGHAM (In cap and seal coneymantle, wrapped up to the nose,
steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzingglasses
which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) Also to me. Yes, I
believe it is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my carriage
door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of
February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and ballstop in my
bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss
culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a
botanical expert and elicited the information that it was a blossom of the
homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Shame on him!
(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins sues forward.)
THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS (Screaming.) Stop thief! Hurrah there,
Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!
SECOND WATCH (Produces handcuffs.) Here are the darbies.
MRS BELLINGHAM He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome
compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound
coachman Balmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of
his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my
person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial
bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck's head couped
or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves
in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and eulogised glowingly my other hidden
treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He urged
me, stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me, to defile the
marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS (In amazon costume, hard hat,
jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with
bra idea drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes
her welt constantly.) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the
Phnix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes,
I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the
Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This
plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in
double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris
boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a
partially nude senorita, frail and lovely (his wife as he solemnly assured
me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a
muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to
misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his
letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to
bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.
MRS BELLINGHAM Me too.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Me too.
(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters
received from Bloom.)
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS (Stamps her jingling spurs in a
sudden paroxysm of sudden fury.) I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge
the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.
BLOOM (His eyes closing, quails expectantly.) Here? (He squirms.)
Again! (He pants cringing.) I love the danger.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS Very much so! I'll make it hot for
you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
MRS BELLINGHAM Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and
stripes on it!
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married
man!
BLOOM All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling
glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS (Laughs derisively.) O, did you, my
fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your life
now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You
have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.
MRS BELLINGHAM (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.)
Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an
inch of his life. The cat-o' nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
BLOOM (Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands with hangdog mien.) O
cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let
me off this once. (He offers the other cheek.)
MRS YELVERTON BARRY (Severely.) Don't do so on any account, Mrs
Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently.)
I'll do no such thing. Pig dog and always was ever since he was pupped! To
dare address me! I'll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I'll
dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes
her hunting crop savagely in the air.) Take down his trousers without loss
of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?
BLOOM (Trembling, beginning to obey.) The weather has been so warm.
(Davy Stephens, ringleted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)
DAVY STEPHENS Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with
Saint Patrick's Day Supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the
cuckolds in Dublin.
(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and
exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend John
Hughes S.J. bend low.)
THE TIMEPIECE (Unportalling.)
Cuckoo
Cuckoo
Cuckoo
(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)
THE QUOITS Jigjag, Jigajiga. Jigjag.
(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox
the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman silkhatted, Jack Power Simon
Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford,
Lenehan, Paddy Leonard Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of a
Nameless One.)
THE NAMELESS ONE Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised
her.
THE JURORS (All their heads turned to his voice.) Really?
THE NAMELESS ONE (Snarls.) Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.
THE JURORS (All their heads lowered in assent.) Most of us thought as
much.
FIRST WATCH He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted: Jack
the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
SECOND WATCH (Awed, whispers.) And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
THE CRIER (Loudly.) Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a
well-known dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold ad a public
nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes
the most honourable.
(His Honour sir Frederick Falkiner recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb
of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his arms an
umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.)
THE RECORDER I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid
Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! (He dons the black cap.) Let him be
taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained in
custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged
by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the
Lord have-mercy on your soul. Remove him. (A black skullcap descends upon
his head.)
(The subsheriff long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry
Clay.)
LONG JOHN FANNING (Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance.)
Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?
(H. Rumbold, master barber in a bloodcoloured jerk in and tanner's
apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder mounts the block. A life preserver
and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his
grapping hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)
RUMBOLD (To the recorder with sinister familiarity.) Hanging Harry,
your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or nothing.
(The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
THE BELLS Heigho! Heigho!
BLOOM (Desperately.) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence.
Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzees. (Breathlessly.) Pelvic
basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. (Overcome with emotion.) I left the
precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing.) Hynes, may I
speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you want a
little more .
HYNES (Coldly.) You are a perfect stranger.
SECOND WATCH (Points to the corner.) The bomb is here. FIRST WATCH
Infernal machine with a time fuse. BLOOM No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a
funeral. FIRST WATCH (Draws his truncheon.) Liar!
(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy
Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows
to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit.
His green eyeflashes bloodshot. Half of one ear all the nose and both thumbs
are ghouleaten.)
PADDY DIGNAM (In a hollow voice.) It is true. It was my funeral. Doctor
Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from
natural causes.
(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)
BLOOM (In triumph.) You hear?
PADDY DIGNAM Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!
BLOOM The voice is the voice of Esau.
SECOND WATCH (Blesses himself.) How is that possible?
FIRST WATCH It is not in the penny catechism.
PADDY DIGNAM By metempsychosis. Spooks.
A VOICE O rocks.
PADDY DIGNAM (Earnestly.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton,
solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. Now
I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The poor wife
was awfully cut up. Dow is she bearing it? Keep her off that bottle of
sherry. (He looks round him.) A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That
buttermilk didn't agree with me.
(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker stands forth, holding a
bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain,
toad bellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding
sleepily a staff of twisted poppies.)
FATHER COFFEY (Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak.) Namine. Jacobs
Vobiscuits. Amen.
(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.) Dignam, Patrick T.,
deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM (With pricked up ears, winces.) Overtones.
(He wriggles forward, places an ear to the ground.) My masters' voice!
JOHN O'CONNELL Burial docket letter number U. P. Eightyfive thousand.
Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his
tailstiffpointed, his ears cocked.)
PADDY DIGNAM Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coal hole, his brown habit trailing its tether
over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus
turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is heard baying
under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted,
in cap and breeches, jumps from his two-columned machine.)
TOM ROCHFORD (A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I
find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on.
Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the
coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom
plodges forward again. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The
kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling,
cooing.)
THE KISSES (Warbling.) Leo! (Twittering.) Icky licky micky sticky for
Leo! (Cooing.) Coo coocoo! Yummyumm Wom worn! (Warbling.) Big comebig!
Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering.) Leeolee! (Warbling.) O Leo!
(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddyflecks,
silvery sequins.)
BLOOM A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three
bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips
down the steps and accosts him.)
ZOE Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.
BLOOM Is this Mrs Mack's?
ZOE No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse.
Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly.) She's on the job herself tonight with
the vet, her tipster, that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in
Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today. (Suspiciously.) You're
not his father, are you?
BLOOM Not I!
ZOE You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand slides over his
left thigh.)
ZOE How's the nuts?
BLOOM Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier I suppose. One
in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
ZOE (In sudden alarm.) You've a hard chancre.
BLOOM Not likely.
ZOE I feel it.
(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard
black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)
BLOOM A talisman. Heirloom.
ZOE For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket, then links his arm,
cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note,
oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed
with kohol. His smile softens.)
ZOE You'll know me the next time.
BLOOM (Forlornly.) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to.
(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round
their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong
hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the
bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still,
cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur
of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely
murmuring.)
ZOE (Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously
smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.) Schorach ani wenowach,
benoith Hierushaloim.
BLOOM (Fascinated.) I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
ZOE And you know what thought did?
(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth sending on him
a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre
of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)
BLOOM (Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat
awkward hand.) Are you a Dublin girl?
ZOE (Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil.) No bloody
fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?
BLOOM (As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish
device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of
rank weed.
ZOE Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
BLOOM (In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating
tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought
from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence
by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will,
understanding, all. That is to say, he brought the poison a hundred years
before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies.
All our habits. Why, look at our public life!
(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)
THE CHIMES Turn again, Leopold! Lord Mayor of Dublin!
BLOOM (In alderman's gown and chain.) Electors of Arran Quay, Inns
Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say, from
the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future. That's my
programme. Cui Bono? But our buccaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom
ship of finance...
AN ELECTOR Three times three for our future chief magistrate!
(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)
THE TORCH BEARERS Hooray!
(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city
shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late thrice
Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and white silk
tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. They nod
vigorously in agreement.)
LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON (In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral
chain and lace white silk scarf) That alder man sir Leo Bloom's speech be
printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which he was
born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the thoroughfare
hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth designated
Boulevard Bloom.
COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK Carried unanimously.
BLOOM (Impassionedly.) These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they
recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines is
their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses,
supplanters, bug-bears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous
hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted
labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain
stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf
and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev...
(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring
up. A streamer bearing the legends Cead Mille Failte and Mah Ttob Melek
Israel spans the street. All the windows are thronged with sightseers,
chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the royal Dublin Fusiliers,
the Kings Own Scottish Boraerers, the Cameron Highlanders and the Welsh
Fusiliers, standing to attention, keep back the crowd. Boys from High school
are perched on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices,
gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering. The
pillar of the cloud appears. A fife and drum band is heard in the distance
playing the Kol Nidre. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted,
trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal
standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the
procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a
chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are
followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Dublin,
the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo
and Watedord, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and
maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire
Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of
precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor His Eminence Michael cardinal
Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most
reverend Dr William Alexander archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland,
the chief rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist,
anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the
society of friends. her them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with
flying colours: coopen, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers,
law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimney sweeps, lard
refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church
decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertaken, silk mercers, lapidaries,
salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners,
export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse
repository hands, bullion broken, cricket and archery outfitters,
riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing
contractors. After them march gentlemen of the bed chamber Black Rod, Deputy
Garter Gold Stick, the master of hone, the lord great chamberlain, the earl
marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's
iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.
Beefeaten reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph Bloom
appears bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing
Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the dove, the curtana. He is
seated on a milkwhite hone with long flowing crimson tail, richly
caparisoned, with golden heads tall. Wild excitement. The ladies from their
balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed with essences. The men
cheer. Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and
wrenbushes.)
BLOOM'S BOYS
The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds,
Saint Stephen's his day,
Was caught in the furze.
A BLACKSMITH (Murmurs.) For the Honour of God! And is that Bloom? He
scarcely looks thirtyone.
A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest
reformer. Hats off!
(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)
A MILLIONAIRESS (Richly.) Isn't he simply wonderful?
A NOBLEWOMAN (Nobly.) All that man has seen!
A FEMINIST (Masculinely.) And done!
A BELLHANGER A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.
(Bloom's weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)
THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR I here present your un doubted emperor
president and king chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant
ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!
ALL God save Leopold the First!
BLOOM (In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor
with dignity.) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.
WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH (In purple stock and shovel hat.) Will
you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments
in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
BLOOM (Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears.) So may the
Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.
MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH (Pours a cruse of hair oil over Bloom's
head.) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem. Leopold, Patrick,
Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!
(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He
ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on
at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ church,
Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up
from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. The peers do
homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)
THE PEERS I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly
worship.
(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor
diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless intercontinental
and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message.)
BLOOM My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix
hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our
former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the
splendour of night.
(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black
Maria. The princess Selene, in moon blue robes, a silver crescent on her
head, descends from a Sedan chair borne by two giants. An outburst of
cheering.)
JOHN HOWARD PARNELL (Raises the royal standard.) Illustrious Bloom!
Successor to my famous brother!
BLOOM (Embraces John Howard Parnell.) We thank you from our heart,
John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our
common ancestors.
(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The
keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows all
that he is wearing green socks.)
TOM KERNAN You deserve it, your honour.
BLOOM On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at
Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with
telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do we
yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the left our
light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering their warcry,
Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.
THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS Hear! Hear!
JOHN WYSE NOLAN There's the man that got away James Stephens.
A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY Bravo!
AN OLD RESIDENT You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you
are.
AN APPLEWOMAN He's a man like Ireland wants.
BLOOM My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell
you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere
long enter into the golden city which is to be