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(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.)
Because she was jolly,
The leg of the duck
The leg of the duck.
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(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.)
To stick in her belly
The leg of the duck
The leg of the duck.
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,(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.)
Wherever she put it
The leg of the duck.
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;(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appeals in the disc of the soapsun.)
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky.
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(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)
There's someone in the house, I know,
There's someone in the house with Dina
Playing on the old banjo.
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.(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault. The dog approaches, his tongue outlolling, panting.)
And free our native land.
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,BLOOM (Bravely.) Overdrawn.
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
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,(He is howled down.)
Blingee pigfoot evly night.
Payee two shilly...
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 Ph 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.)
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
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, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova
Hibernia of the future.
(Thirtytwo workmen wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland,
under the guidance of Derwan the builder construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a
colossal edifice, with crystal roof built in the shape of a huge pork kidney,
containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its extension several
buildings and monuments are demolished. Government offices are temporarily
transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses are razed to the ground. The
inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters:
L. B. Several paupers fall from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded
with loyal sightseers, collapses.)
THE SIGHTSEERS (Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die.)
(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trap-door. He points an
elongated finger at Bloom.)
THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH Don't you believe a word he Says. That man is
Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
BLOOM Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh!
(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his sceptre
strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies,
graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported.
Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money, commemoration medals, loaves and
fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup,
rubber preservatives, in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch,
pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits,
porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40
days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes,
season tickets available for all tram lines, coupons of the royal and privileged
Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World's Twelve
Worst Books: Froggy and Fritz (politic), Care of the Baby (infantilic), So Meals
for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth? (historic), Expel that Pain (medic),
Infant's Compendium of the Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric),
Canvasser's Vade Mecum (journalic), love-letters of Mother Assistant (erotic),
Who's Who in Space (astric), Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's
Way to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward to
touch the hem of Bloom's robe. The lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the
throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation.
A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Babes and sucklings are held
up.)
THE WOMEN Little father! Little father!
THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS
BABY BOARDMAN (Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth.)
Hajajaja.
BLOOM (Shaking hands with a blind stripling.) My more than Brother!
(Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple.) Dear old
friends! (He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls.) Peep!
Bopeep! (He wheels twins in a perambulator.) Ticktacktwo
wouldyousetashoe? (He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his mouth.) Roygbiv.
32 feet per second. (He consoles a widow.) Absence makes the heart grow
younger. (He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics.) Leg it, ye
devils! (He kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran.) Honourable wounds!
(He trips up a fat policeman.) U.p.: up. U.p.: up. (He whispers in the
ear of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly.) Ah, naughty, naughty!
(He eats a raw turnip offered him by Maurice Butterly, farmer.) Fine!
Splendid! (He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes,
journalist.) My dear fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a
beggar.) Please accept. (He takes part in a stomach race with elderly
male and female cripples.) Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!
THE CITIZEN (Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald
muffler.) May the good God bless him!
(The rams' horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)
BLOOM (Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and reads
solemnly.) Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur
Hanukah Ros chaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith.
(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town
clerk.)
JIMMY HENRY The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic Majesty
will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal advice, solution of
doubles and other problems. All cordially invited. Given at this our loyal city
of Dublin in the year I of the Paradisiacal Era.
PADDY LEONARD What am I to do about my rates and taxes?
BLOOM Pay them, my friend.
PADDY LEONARD Thank you.
NOSEY FLYNN Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?
BLOOM (Obdurately.) Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are
bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five pounds.
J.J. O'MOLLY A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O'Brien!
NOSEY FLYNN Where do I draw the five pounds?
PISSER BURKE For bladder trouble?
BLOOM
BLOOM Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.
JOE HYNES Why aren't you in uniform?
BLOOM When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the Austrian
despot in a dank prison where was yours?
BEN DOLLARD Pansies?
BLOOM Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.
BEN DOLLARD When twins arrive?
BLOOM Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.
LARRY O'ROURKE An eight day licence for my new premises. You remember me, sir
Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the
missus.
BLOOM (Coldly.) You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no
presents.
CROFTON This is indeed a festivity.
BLOOM (Solemnly.) You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
ALEXANDER KEYES When will we have our own house of keys?
BLOOM I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten
commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three
acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory
manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric
dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General
amnesty, weekly carnival, with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the
universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical
impostors. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.
O'MADDEN BURKE Free fox in a free henroost.
DAVY BYRNE (Yawning.) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!
BLOOM Mixed races and mixed marriage.
LENEHAN What about mixed bathing?
(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All
agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears, dragging a
lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus
Callipyge, Venus Pandemos Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked,
representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor Publicity,
Manufacture, liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene,
Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the
People.)
FATHER FARLEY He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an any thingarian seeking
to overthrow our holy faith.
MRS RIORDAN (Tears up her will.) I'm disappointed in you! You bad man!
MOTHER GROGAN (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You
abominable person!
NOSEY FLYNN Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.
BLOOM (With rollicking humour.)
PADDY LEONARD Stage Irishman!
BLOOM What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of
Casteele. (Laughter.)
LENEHAN Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!
THE VEILED SIBYL (Enthusiastically.) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it.
I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on
earth.
BLOOM (Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she's a bonny lassie.
THEODORE PUREFOY (In fishing cap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a
mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
THE VEILED SIBYL (Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)
(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by
stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their
veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of
Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating
themselves by placing their heads in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish
garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)
ALEXANDER J. DOWIE (Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites,
the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A
fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave
precocious signs of infantile debauchery recalling the cities of the plain, with
a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white
bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is
the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling
oil are for him. Caliban!
THE MOB Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!
(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper
and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value,
hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheeps' tails,
odd pieces of fat.)
BLOOM (Excitedly.) This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.
By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is
my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the viper, has
wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan
capall. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist to give
medical testimony on my behalf.
DR MULLIGAN (In motor jerkin, green motoroggles on his brow.) Dr Bloom
is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's private asylum
for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the
consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered
among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism.
Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely
idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence
of a family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be
more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal examination and,
after application of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic
hairs, I declare him to be virgo intacta.
(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)
DR MADDEN Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming generations I
suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the
national teratological museum.
DR CROTTHERS I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid.
Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.
DR PUNCH COSTELLO The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.
DR DIXON (Reads a bill of health.) Professor Bloom is a finished
example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many
have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the
whole, coy though not feeble-minded in the medical sense. He has written a
really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the
Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He is
practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter
and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt
winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at
one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report
states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of
the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is
about to have a baby.
(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a
street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, bank cheques, banknotes,
jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U.s, wedding rings'
watch-chains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)
BLOOM O, I so want to be a mother.
MRS THORNTON (In nursetender's gown.) Embrace me tight, dear. You'll
be soon over it. Tight, dear.
(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white
children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants.
All are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed
and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in
various arts and sciences. Each has his name printed in legible letters on his
shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindorée, Silversmile,
Silberselber Vifargent, Panargros. They are immediately appointed to positions
of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of
banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies,
vice chairmen of hotel syndicates.)
A VOICE Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?
BLOOM (Darkly.) You have said it.
BROTHER BUZZ Then perform a miracle.
BANTAM LYONS Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.
(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes
through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the the ledge by his
eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers
from kings evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical
personages, lord Beaconsfield, lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses
Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Rossuth, Jean
Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes,
Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide
turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)
BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO (In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as
breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and
brown paper mitre.) Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah
begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat Guggenheim and
Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and Netaim begat Le Hirsch
and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat MacKay and MacKay begat
Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss
begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli began Aranjuez and
Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor
begat O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum
begat Ben Maimun and Ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat
Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and
Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and
Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat
Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.
A DEADHAND (Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod. A CRAB (In bush
ranger's kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?
A FEMALE INFANT (Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge?
A HOLLYBUSH And in the devil's glen?
BLOOM (Blushes furiously all over from front to nates, three tears falling
from his left eye.) Spare my past.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook
fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him!
(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,
his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane
orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate Mission,
joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)
THE ARTANE ORPHANS
(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide
travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and
Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards at
Bloom.)
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah!
Abulafia!
(George S. Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his
arm, presenting a bill.)
MESIAS To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM (Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom!
(Reuben J. Dodd, black bearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his
shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)
REUBEN J. (Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for
the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
THE FIRE BRIGADE Pflaap!
BROTHER BUZZ (Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted
flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and
hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire
to Bloom. Lamentations.)
THE CITIZEN Thank heaven!
BLOOM (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid phoenix
flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of Erin,
in black garments with lace prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands,
kneel down and pray.)
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN Kidney of Bloom, pray for us. Flower of the Bath, pray
for us. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us.
Charitable Mason, pray for us. Wandering Soap, pray for us. Sweets of Sin, pray
for us. Music without Words, pray for us. Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us.
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us. Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us. Potato
Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O'Brien, sings the
Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute,
shrunken, carbonised.)
ZOE Talk away till you're black in the face.
BLOOM (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak pig by a
sugaun, with a smile in his eye.) Let me be going now, woman of the house,
for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and mother of a
bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for
the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life's dream is o'er.
End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away mournfully.) I am
ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to
rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.
ZOE (Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next
time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came
too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.
BLOOM (Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
ZOE (In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a
bleeding whore a chance.
BLOOM (Repentantly.) I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
Where are you from? London?
ZOE (Glibly.) Hog's Norton where the pigs play the organs. I'm
Yorkshire born. (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I
say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short
time? Ten shillings?
BLOOM (Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more.
ZOE And more's mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.)
Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel
off.
BLOOM (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment
of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody
would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster.
(Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
ZOE (Flattered.) What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
(She pats him.) Come.
BLOOM Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
ZOE Babby!
BLOOM (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,
fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby
finger, his moist tongue tolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo
tlone.
THE BUCKLES Love me. Love me not. Love me.
ZOE Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his
hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the pass touch of secret monitor, luring
him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the
steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes,
the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the
male brutes that have possessed her.)
THE MALE BRUTES (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their
loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They
examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty
bow. He trips awkwardly.)
ZOE (Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don't fall
upstairs.
BLOOM The just man falls seven times. (He stands aside at the
threshold.) After you is good manners.
ZOE Ladies first, gentlemen after.
(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out her
hands, draws him over. He hops. On the an tiered rack of the hall hang a man's
hat and waterproof Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns, then smiles,
preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open. A man in purple shirt
and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an apes gait, his bald head and
goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar his twotailed black braces
dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the
halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing,
follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of
the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The floor is
covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids.
Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe
to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a
scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are tapes-tried with a paper of yewfronds
and clear glades. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch
squats crosslegged on the hearth rug of matted hair, his cap back to the front.
With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy
costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her
hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at
herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of her corset lace hangs
slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the
piano.)
KITTY (Coughs behind her hand.) She's a bit imbecilic. (She signs
with a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and
white petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect
yourself. (She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her
hair glows, red with henna.) O, excuse!
ZOE More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the gas
full cock.)
KITTY (Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight?
LYNCH (Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE Clap on the back for Zoe.
(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the
pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once
more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in
a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the sofa
corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A heavy stye
droops over her sleepy eyelid.)
KITTY (Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse!
ZOE (Promptly.) Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her
shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on
his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances behind at the squatted
figure with its cap back to the front.)
STEPHEN As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello
found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an old hymn to
Demeter or also illustrate C THE CAP (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life.
Bah!
STEPHEN You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How
long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
THE CAP Bah!
STEPHEN Here's another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the
fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval
which .
THE CAP Which? Finish. You can't.
STEPHEN (With on effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP Which? (Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to
traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having
itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a
second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself was
ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
LYNCH (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
Higgins.) What a learned speech, eh?
ZOE (Briskly.) God help your head, he knows more than you have
forgotten.
(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)
FLORRY They say the last day is coming this summer.
KITTY No!
ZOE (Explodes in laughter.) Great unjust God!
FLORRY (Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Anti christ. O, my
foot's tickling.
(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patterpast,
yelling.)
THE NEWSBOYS Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)
STEPHEN A time, times and half a time.
(Reuben J. Antichrist, wanderingjew, a clutching hand open on his spine,
stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrims wallet from which protrude
promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long
boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved
from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the
image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with
receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the
gathering darkness.)
ALL What?
THE HOBGOBLIN (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes,
squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once
thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C'est moi!
L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round and round with dervish
howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette
planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux son! faits! (The planets rush together,
uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien n'va plus. (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail
swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)
FLORRY (Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of the
world!
(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies
space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and
feetshuffling.)
THE GRAMOPHONE Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna...
(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it,
proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an
infinite invisible tight-rope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a
two headed octopus in gillies kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through
the murk, head over heels, in the fob of the Three Lugs of Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD (With a Scotch accent.) Wha'll dance the keel
row, the keel row, the keel row?
(Over the passing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh as
a corncrakes, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel
sleeves he is seen, vergefaced above a rostrum about which the banner of old
glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)
ELIJAH No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dave
Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am
operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is 12.25. Tell mother
you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here!
Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you
a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready?
Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch
Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the
cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something
within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an
Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that,
congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me?
It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with
jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous.
It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and
getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have
you got that? O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You
call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He
shouts.) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore!
(He sings.) Jeru...
THE GRAMOPHONE (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyour highhohhhh.
(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
THE THREE' WHORES (Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk!
ELIJAH (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top of
his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear
what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe strong in you,
Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and Miss Ricketts got
religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser
scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you.
Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. (He winks at
his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the whole lot and he ain't saying
nothing.
KITTY-KATE I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on
Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother's sister married a
Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.
ZOE-FANNY I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
FLORRY-TERESA It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
Hennessy's three stars I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bed.
STEPHEN In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end.
Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,
Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,
goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.)
THE BEATITUDES (Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum
barnum buggerum bishop.
LYSTER (In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says
discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
light.
(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered, his
locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin's kimono of
Nankeen yellow, lizard-lettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
BEST (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of
which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just
beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know. Yeats says,
or I mean, Keats says. (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it
towards a corner; with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the
boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the
facts and means to get them.
(In the cone of the search light behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed,
the bearded figure of Mananaan MacLir broods, chin on knees. He rises slowly. A
cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head writhe eels and elvers.
He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. His
left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two talons.)
MANANAAN MACLIR (With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!
Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a
voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg
pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a
cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with
his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its co-operative dial glow
the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.)
Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery
butter.
(A skeleton judas hand strangles the light. The green light wanes to
mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)
THE GASJET Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!
(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the
mantle.)
ZOE Who has a fag as I'm here?
LYNCH (Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here.
ZOE (Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand
the pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the
flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with
his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh
appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly at her
cigarette.) Can you see the beauty spot of my behind?
LYNCH I'm not looking.
ZOE (Makes sheep's eyes.) No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
suck a lemon?
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom, then
twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue fluid again
flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs.
Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and gazing in the
mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly
down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink
stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under
which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of
Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an
Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.)
VIRAG (Heels together bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
(He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in
evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she
is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular
devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.
BLOOM Granpapachi. But...
VIRAG Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse
white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood, is in
walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should opine. Backbone in
front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed
by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its
exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I right?
BLOOM She is rather lean.
VIRAG (Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier
pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been
mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention to
details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today.
Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go
snap? Pollysyllabax!
BLOOM (An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.)
She seems sad.
VIRAG (Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left eye
with a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus
mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus
Colombus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well
then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of
her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on
her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and
deep in keel.
BLOOM (Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun.
VIRAG We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your money, take
your choice. How happy could you be with either...
BLOOM With?...
VIRAG (His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She is
coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of
bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of
very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate, while on
her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent
rectum and tumescent for palpation which leave nothing to be desired save
compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When
coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with
fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them
during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber.
That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it.
Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes again.
BLOOM The stye I dislike.
VIRAG (Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say.
Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the
consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyo saurus. For the rest Eve's sovereign
remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny
sound.
(He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume
you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head? Wheatenmeal
with honey and nutmeg.
BLOOM (Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said .
VIRAG (Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking.) Stop
twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa è santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.)
He will surely remember.
BLOOM Rosemary also did I understand you to say or will power over parasitic
tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand cures. Mnemo?
VIRAG (Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. (He taps
his parchmentroll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all
descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy
of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about amputation. Our
old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with horsehair under the
denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and the Basque, have you
made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in male habiliments?
(With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire year to the study
of the religious problem and the summer months of 1882 to square the circle and
win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.
Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gusseted knickers, closed? Or, put we the
case, those complicated combinations, camiknickers? (He crows
derisively.) Keekeereekee!
(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores, then gazes at the veiled
mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)
BLOOM I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this.
But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then
tomorrow as now was be past yester.
VIRAG (Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper.) Insects of the day
spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the
inferiorly pulchritudinous female possessing extendified pudendal verve in
dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They
had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five hundred
and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more
than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers
bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we
others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a
scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An
illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty
points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love
Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to
example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his
appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!
BLOOM Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self then
me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...
VIRAG (His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid!
Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gobbles
gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we?
Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his
glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay,
good friend. I bring thee thy answer Redbank oysters will shortly be upon us.
I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the truffles of
Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in
cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. (He
wags head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular.
BLOOM (Absently.) Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and the
serpent contradict. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea. Serpents
too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous
forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons
one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
VIRAG (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly
closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those
distended udders that they have been the known...
BLOOM I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.)
Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to
his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the
world. In life. In death.
VIRAG (Head askew, arches his back and hunched wing- shoulders, peers at
the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a homing claw and cries.) Who's
Ger Ger? Who's dear Gerald? O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will
some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of
firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Luss puss puss puss! (He sighs,
draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well. He
doth rest anon.
(From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes
forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed
sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo
Jacobs pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose
and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's face with flowing locks,
thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the
tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens
his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.)
HENRY (In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.)
There is a flower that bloometh.
(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards
Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendent dewlap to the piano.)
STEPHEN (To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my. Expect
this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy or
telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep impression.
Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially drunk, by the way.
(He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not much
however.
(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous
moustachework.)
ARTIFONI Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto.
FLORRY Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
STEPHEN No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you the
letter about the lute?
FLORRY (Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won't sing.
(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober two Oxford dons with
lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew
Arnold's face.)
PHILIP SOBER Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with the
buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you got, two
notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney's en ville, Mooney's
sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's. Eh? I am
watching you.
PHILIP DRUNK (Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.
If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who was it
told me his name?
(His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo.
Have a notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have
somewhere? Mac somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on, Swinburne,
was it, no?
FLORRY And the song?
STEPHEN Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
FLORRY Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
STEPHEN Out of it now. (To himself.) Clever.
PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER (Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon of
grasshalms.) Clever ever. Out of it. Out of it. By the by have you the book,
the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in
condition. Do like us.
ZOE There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business
with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to him. I know you've
a Roman collar.
VIRAG Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his
pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the
Virag who disclosed the sex secrets of monks and maidens. Why I left the Church
of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty
Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of
rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man
presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself
with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one.
(He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man
grasps woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry,
strikes woman's fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He
stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
LYNCH I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for shooting a
bishop.
ZOE (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn't get a
connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
BLOOM Poor man!
ZOE (Lightly.) Only for what happened him.
BLOOM How?
VIRAG (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,
cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)
Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God!
He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchias, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's
bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye
agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a
whore. Apocalypse.
KITTY And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy
Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and was
smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for the
funeral.
PHILIP DRUNK (Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,
Philippe?
PHILIP SOBER (Gaily.) C'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe.
(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.
And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whores
shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)
LYNCH (Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
anthropoid apes.
FLORRY (Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.
ZOE (Gaily.) O, my dictionary.
LYNCH Three wise virgins.
VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic
lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman
centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering
phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her
tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical
spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded,
cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and
genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.)
BEN POLLARD (Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels
jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(The virgins, Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley, burst through the
ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)
THE VIRGINS (Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben MacChree!
A VOICE Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
BEN DOLLARD (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now.
HENRY (Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine
heart, mine love. (He plucks his lutestrings.) When first I saw.
VIRAG (Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats!
(He yawns; showing a coalblack throat and closes his jaws by an upward push
of his parchment roll.) After having said which I took my departure.
Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and
gives a cows lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door his
wild had slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his
tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting
it with his head.)
THE FLYBILL K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG'S HEAD Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
STEPHEN (Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the
fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the
dog sage, and the last end of Anus Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet.
LYNCH All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN (Devoutly.) And Sovereign Lord of all things.
FLORRY (To Stephen.) I'm sure you are a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
LYNCH He is. A Cardinal's son.
STEPHEN Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
(His Eminence, Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,
appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven dwarf
simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it.
He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His thumbs are stuck in his
armpits and his palms outspread. Round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending
on his breast in a corkscrew cross. Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from
on high with lace wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp.)
THE CARDINAL
(A multitude of midges swarms over his robe. He scratches himself with
crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims.) I'm suffering the agony
of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps
are not unanimous. If they were they'd walk me off the face of the bloody globe.
(His head aslant, he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, imparts
the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from side to
side, shrinking quickly to the size of his train bearers. The dwarf acolytes,
giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice
is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious.) Shall carry my heart
to thee, Shall carry my heart to thee, And the breath of the balmy night Shall
carry my heart to thee.
(The trick doorhandle turns.)
THE DOORHANDLE Theeee.
ZOE The devil is in that door.
(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the
waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half
closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it
nervously to Zoe.)
ZOE (Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hum. Thank your mother for the rabbits.
I'm very fond of what I like.
BLOOM (Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,
pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event?
ZOE (Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks.
(She breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then
turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods.
She taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it? (He opens his
mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows.
She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.) Catch.
(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it
through with a crack.)
KITTY (Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have
lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady.
The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
BLOOM (In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic
forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards
the door. Then, rigid, with left foot advanced, he makes a swift pass with
impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing his right arm
downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you, whoever you
are.
(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside. Blooms
features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe offers him
chocolate.)
BLOOM (Solemnly.) Thanks.
ZOE Do as you're bid. Here.
(A firm heelclacking is heard on the stairs.)
BLOOM (Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I thought it. Vanilla
calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus. Colours
affect women's characters, any they have. This black makes me sad. Eat and be
merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it is so
long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late than never.
Try truffles at Andrews.
(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is
dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled
selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in
Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply
carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly
sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has lace pendant beryl
eardrops.)
BELLA My word! I'm all of a mucksweat.
(She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with
hard insistence. Her lace fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and
embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)
THE FAN (Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.
BLOOM Yes... Partly, I have mislaid .
THE FAN (Half opening, then closing.) And the missus is master.
Petticoat government.
BLOOM (Looks down with a sheepish grin.) That is so.
THE FAN (Folding together, rests against her eardrop.) Have you
forgotten me?
BLOOM Yes. No.
THE FAN (Folded akimbo against her waist.) Is me her was you dreamed
before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?
(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)
BLOOM (Wincing.) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which
women love.
THE FAN (Tapping.) We have met. You are mine. It is fate.
BLOOM (Cowed.) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your
domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with
an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of
the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle
cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling
bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle.
It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from
it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near
the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos,
faithful after death. A dog's spittle, as you probably... (He winces.)
Ah!
RICHIE GOULDING (Bagweighted, passes the door.) Mocking is catch. Best
value in Dub. Fit for a prince's liver and kidney.
THE FAN (Tapping.) All things end. Be mine. Now.
BLOOM (Undecided.) All now? I should not have parted with my talisman.
Rain, exposure at dewfall on the sea rocks, a peccadillo at my time of life.
Every phenomenon has a natural cause.
THE FAN (Points downwards slowly.) You may.
BLOOM (Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace. ) We are
observed.
THE FAN (Points downwards quickly.) You must.
BLOOM (With desire, with reluctance.) I can make a true black knot.
Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellet's.
Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy. I knelt once
before today. Ah!
(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge
of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom,
stifflegged ageing, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in
her laces.)
BLOOM (Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield's was my
love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up
crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly
small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to
admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris.
THE HOOF Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.
BLOOM (Crosslacing.) Too tight?
THE HOOF If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.
BLOOM Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance.
Bad luck. Nook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned. That night she
met... Now!
(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his
head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in mid-brow. His eyes grow dull,
darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)
BLOOM (Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen.
BELLO (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of
dishonour!
BLOOM (Infatuated.) Empress!
BELLO (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
BLOOM (Plaintively.) Hugeness!
BELLO Dungdevourer!
BLOOM (With sinews semiflexed.) Magnificence.
BELLO Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet
forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the
hands down!
BLOOM (Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.)
Truffles!
(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting,
snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight,
trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent
master.)
BELLO (With bobbed hair purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven
mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and
alpine hat with moor cock's feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches
pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in.) Feel my entire
weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious heels, so
glistening in their proud erectness.
BLOOM (Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey.
BELLO (Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for
you. I'm the tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet
Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare
you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym
costume.
(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.
ZOE (Widening her slip to screen her.) She's not here.
BLOOM (Closing her eyes.) She's not here.
FLORRY (Hiding her with her gown.) She didn't mean it, Mr Bello.
She'll be good, sir.
KITTY Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.
BELLO (Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear. I want a word with you, darling,
just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety.
(Bloom puts out her timid head.) There's a good girly now. (Bello
grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you
for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender behind? O, ever so
gently, pet. Begin to get ready.
BLOOM (Fainting.) Don't tear my.
BELLO (Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging
hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave
of old. You're in for it this time. I'll make you remember me for the balance of
your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I
shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good
breakfast of Matterson's fat ham rashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter.
(He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read
the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you
slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice Of you with crisp
crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and
lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you.
(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)
BLOOM Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!
BELLO (Twisting.) Another!
BLOOM (Screams.) O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches
like mad!
BELLO (Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best
bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn you.
(He slaps her face.)
BLOOM (Whimpers.) You're after hitting me. I'll tell...
BELLO Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.
ZOE Yes. Walk on him! I will.
FLORRY I will. Don't be greedy.
KITTY No, me. Lend him to me.
(The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib,
men's grey and green socks and brogues, flour-smeared, a rollingpin stuck with
raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)
MRS KEOCH (Ferociously.) Can I help? (They hold and pinion
Bloom.)
BELLO (Squats, with a grunt, on Bloom's upturned face, puffing
cigar-smoke, nursing a fat leg.) I see Keating Clay is elected chairman of
the Richmond Asylum and bytheby Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen
three quarters. Curse me for a fool that I didn't buy that lot Craig and Gardner
told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider
Throwaway at twenty to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's
ear.) Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray?
BLOOM (Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!
BELLO Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg, pray for it as you never prayed
before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that.
Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman's knees,
calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I'll ride him
for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles
roughly, shouting.) Ho! off we pop! I'll nurse you in proper fashion. (He
horserides cockhorse, leaping in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace
and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a
gallop a gallop.
FLORRY (Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked
before you.
ZOE (Pulling at Florry.) Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet,
suckeress?
BLOOM (Stifling.) Can't.
BELLO Well, I'm not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here.
This bung's about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his
features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself) Yes, by
Jingo, sixteen three quarters.
BLOOM (A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.)
Woman.
BELLO (Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has
come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the
yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you
understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and
shoulders and quickly too.
BLOOM (Shrinks.) Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I
tip-touch it with my nails?
BELLO (Points to his whores.) As they are now, so will you be, wigged,
singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape
measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force
into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille, with whalebone busk, to the diamond
trimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when
at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and
fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely
lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull.
Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing
but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you...
BLOOM (A chafing soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and lace male
hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only once, a small
prank, in Holles street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry
bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.
BELLO (Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh! and showed
off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind close-drawn blinds your
unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho!
I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunk leg
naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade
sold you from the Shelbourne Hotel, eh?
BLOOM Miriam, Black. Demimondaine.
BELLO (Guffaws.) Christ Almighty, it's too tickling, this! You were a
nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in
the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Lieutenant
Smythe Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M.P., Signor Laci Daremo, the
robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame,
Sheridan, the quadroon Cr&Aelig;sus, the varsity wetbob eight from old
Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of
Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat
laugh?
BLOOM (Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to
be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play
Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's
stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of
the beautiful.
BELLO (With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took
your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn
throne.
BLOOM Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.)
And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet.
BELLO (Sternly.) No insubordination. The sawdust is there in the
corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir!
I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles.
Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The sins of your past
are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.
THE SINS OF THE PAST (In a medley of voices.) He went through a form
of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black
Church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address
in d'Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the
callbox. By word and deed he encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal
and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five
public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to
all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he
not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how
much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a
nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot,
stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?
BELLO (Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of
obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out. Be candid
for once.
(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering,
Eooloohoom. Poldy Hock, Bootlaces a penny, cassidy's hag, blind stripling, Larry
Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other the... )
BLOOM Don't ask me. Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the
half of the... I swear on my sacred oath...
BELLO (Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing.
Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good-ghoststory or a line of
poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you
just three seconds. One! Two! Thr... !
BLOOM (Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant...
BELLO (Imperiously.) O get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak
when you're spoken to.
BLOOM (Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer!
(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)
BELLO (Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes,
also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up
and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be nice? (He places a ruby ring
on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you,
mistress.
BLOOM Thank you, mistress.
BELLO You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the
different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one. Ay, and
rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping
hot. Hop! you will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss
Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You'll be
taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceleted hands will
wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented
fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives. (He
chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the
colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle
my new attraction in gilded heels. First, I'll have a go at you myself. A man I
know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and
another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for
a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders.
What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and
carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's
vulva.) There's fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon?
(He shoves his arm in a bidder's face.) Here, wet the deck and wipe it
round!
A BIDDER A florin!
(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)
A VOICE One and eightpence too much.
THE LACQUEY Barang!
CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.
BELLO (Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and
cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points. Handle
him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my
gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure
stock getter, due to lay within the hour. His sire's milk record was a thousand
gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He
brands his initial Con Bloom's croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on
two bob, gentlemen?
A DARKVISAGED MAN (In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink.
VOICES (Subdued.) For the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid.
BELLO (Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short
skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent
weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam
trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé
man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the
Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing.
Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan
vices.
BLOOM (Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger
in mouth.) O, I know what you're hinting at now.
BELLO What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops
and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suetfolds of Bloom's
haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot
gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a
boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump.
(Loudly.) Can you do a man's job?
BLOOM Eccles Street.
BELLO (Sarcastically.) I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but
there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young
fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if
you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his
bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to
breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind
like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and
coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches
the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon!
BLOOM I was indecently treated, I... inform the police. Hundred pounds.
Unmentionable. I.
BELLO Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want, not your drizzle.
BLOOM To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll!... We... Still...
BELLO (Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will
since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return
and see.
(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)
SLEEPY HOLLOW Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!
BLOOM (In tattered moccasins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tip toeing,
fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes,
cries out.) I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's! But that
dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he.
BELLO (Laughs mockingly.) That's your daughter, you owl, with a
Mullingar student.
(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her bluescab in the
seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young
eyes wonderwide.)
MILLY My! It's Papli! But. O Papli, how old you've grown!
BELLO Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writing table where we never wrote, Aunt
Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his men
friends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos' Rest! Why not? How many
women had you, say? Following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by
your smothered grunts. What, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels
of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander, O.
BLOOM They... I
BELLO (Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet
you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the
buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in
the rain for art for art's sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom
drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them
pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton
Leedom's.
BLOOM Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I
will prove...
A VOICE Swear!
(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his
teeth.)
BELLO As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your
secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You are down
and out and don't you forget it, old bean.
BLOOM Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody... ?
(He bites his thumb.)
BELLO Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace
about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to hell and
back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn
well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where
you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the
bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other
ten or eleven husbands, what ever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one
cess pool. (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We'll manure you, Mr
Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli!
BLOOM (Clasps his head.) My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have
suff... (He weeps tearlessly.)
BELLO (Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears!
(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the
earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in
sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater
Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, 0.
Mastiansky, the Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail
in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.)
THE CIRCUMCISED (In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon
him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.
VOICES (Sighing.) So he's gone. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never
heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes.
(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of
incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oak frame a nymph with hair
unbound, lightly clad in teabrown art colours, descends from her grotto and
passing under interlacing yews, stands over Bloom.)
THE YEWS (Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh.
THE NYMPH (Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest!
BLOOM (Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with
dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit.
THE NYMPH Mortal! You found me in evil company, high kickers, coster picnic
makers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in flesh tights and the
nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century.
I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the
stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies,
truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with
testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married.
BLOOM (Lifts a turtle head towards her lap.) We have met before. On
another star.
THE NYMPH (Sadly.) Rubber goods. Neverrip. Brand as sup plied to the
aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited
testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust developed
four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.
BLOOM You mean Photo Bits?
THE NYMPH I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above
your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And
with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame.
BLOOM (Humbly kisses her long hair.) Your classic curves, beautiful
immortal. I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to
pray.
THE NYMPH During dark nights I heard your praise.
BLOOM (Quickly.) Yes, yes. You mean that I... Sleep reveals the worst
side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of my bed or
rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is
that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days ago, incorrectly
addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless inoffensive vent. (He sighs.)
'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.
THE NYMPH (Her fingers in her ears.) And words. They are not in my
dictionary.
BLOOM You understood them?
THE YEWS Ssh.
THE NYMPH (Covers her face with her hand.) What have I not seen in
that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?
BLOOM (Apologetically.) I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up
with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea, long ago.
THE NYMPH (Bends her head.) Worse! Worse!
BLOOM (Reflects precautiously.) That antiquated commode. It wasn't her
weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after weaning.
It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which
has only one handle.
(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)
THE WATERFALL
JOHN WYSE NOLAN (In the background, in Irish National For ester's uniform,
doffs his plumed hat.) Prosper! Give shade on languorous days, trees of
Ireland!
THE YEWS (Murmuring.) Who came to Poulaphouca with the high school
excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?
BLOOM (Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript juvenile
grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis shoes, bordered
stockings with turnover tops, and a red school cap with badge.) I was in my
teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours
of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old Royal
stairs, for they love crushes, instincts of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling
theatre unbridles vice. Even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat.
There were sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.
(Halcyon Days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and
shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg,
Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing of the trees and
shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)
THE HALCYON DAYS Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray!
(They cheer.)
BLOOM (Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, stunned with spent
snowballs, struggles to rise.) Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let's
ring all the bells in Montague Street. (He cheers feebly.) Hurray for the
High School!
THE ECHO Fool!
THE YEWS (Rustling.) She is right, our sister. Whisper. (Whispered
kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from the boles
and among the leaves and break blossoming into bloom.) Who profaned our
silent shade?
THE NYMPH (Coyly through parting fingers.) There! In the open air?
THE YEWS (Sweeping downward.) Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.
THE WATERFALL
BLOOM I was precocious. Youth. The fauns. I sacrificed to the god of the
forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary
attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her
night toilette through ill-closed curtains, with poor papa's operaglasses. The
wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto Bridge to tempt me with
her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint
couldn't resist it. The demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?
(Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf thrusts a ruminating head with humid
nostrils through the foliage.)
STAGGERING BOB Me. Me see.
BLOOM Simply satisfying a need. (With pathos.) No girl would when I
went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play.
(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered,
buttytailed, dropping curvants.)
THE NANNYGOAT (Bleats.) Megegaggegg! Nannannanny!
BLOOM (Hatless, flushed, covered with burn of thistledown and
gotrepine.) Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. (He gazes
intently downwards on the water.) Thirtytwo head over heels per second.
Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government printer's
clerk. (Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, rolled in a
mummy, rolls rotatingly from the Lion's Head cliff into the purple Waiting
waters.)
THE DUMMYMUMMY Bbbbblllllbbblblodschbg?
(Far out in the bay between Bailey and Kish lights the Erin's King
sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the
land.)
COUNCILLOR NANNETI (Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellow kitefaced, his
hand in his waistcoat opening, declaims.) When my country takes her place
among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then let my epitaph be
written. I have...
BLOOM Done. Prff.
THE NYMPH (Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a
place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric
light. (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger
in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then could you... ?
BLOOM (Pacing the heather abjectly.) O, I have been a perfect pig.
Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia, to which add a
tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the
ladies' friend.
THE NYMPH In my presence. The powderpuff. (She blushes and makes a
knee.) And the rest.
BLOOM (Dejected.) Yes. Peccavi! I have paid homage on that
living altar where the back changes name. (With sudden fervour.) For why
should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules... ?
(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems,
cooeeing.)
THE VOICE OF KITTY (In the thicket.) Show us one of them cushions.
THE VOICE OF FLORRY Here.
(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)
THE VOICE OF LYNCH (In the thicket.) Whew! Piping hot!
THE VOICE OF ZOE (From the thicket.) Came from a hot place.
THE VOICE OF VIRAG (A birdchief bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply
with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and
acorns.) Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!
BLOOM It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where
a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last
favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So
womanly full. It fills me full.
THE WATERFALL
THE NYMPH (Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and huge winged wimple,
softly, with remote eyes.) Tranquilia convent. Sister Agatha. Mount Carmel,
the apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. (She reclines her head,
sighing.) Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters
dull.
(Bloom half rises. His back trousers button snaps.)
THE BUTTON Bip!
(Two sluts of the Coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)
THE SLUTS
THE YEWS (Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms
ageing and swaying.) Deciduously!
THE NYMPH Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on
her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a
pure woman. (She clutches in her robe.) Wait, Satan. You'll sing no more
lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the
sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum!
BLOOM (Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat of nine lives!
Fair play, madam. No pruning knife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do we
lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her
veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless
statue of the watercarrier or good Mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard?
THE NYMPH (With a cry, flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking,
a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli... !
BLOOM (Calls after her.) As if you didn't get it on the double
yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it. Your
strength our weakness. What's our stud fee? What will you pay on the nail? You
fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a
keen.) Eh! I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. And would a
jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me.
(He sniffs.) But. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.
(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)
BELLA You'll know me the next time.
BLOOM (Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Lone in
the tooth and superfluous hairs. A raw onion the last thing at night would
benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are as vapid
as the glass eyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions of your other
features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw propeller.
BELLA (Contemptuously.) You're not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt
barks.) Fohracht!
BLOOM (Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, the
cold spunk of your bully is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay
and wipe yourself.
BELLA I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!
BLOOM I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!
BELLA (Turns to the piano.) Which of you was playing the dead march
from Saul?
ZOE Me. Mind your cornflowers. (She darts to the piano and bangs chords on
it with crossed arms.) The cat's ramble through the slag. (She glances
back.) Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? (She darts back to the
table.) What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.
(Kitty disconcerted coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom
approaches Zoe.)
BLOOM (Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you? Zoe Forfeits, a
fine thing and a superfine thing.
BLOOM (With feeling.) It is nothing, but still a relic of poor mamma.
ZOE
STEPHEN To have or not to have, that is the question.
ZOE Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh and
unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.) Those that hides knows
where to find.
BELLA (Frowns.) Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you
smash that piano. Who's paying here?
(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out a
banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)
STEPHEN (With exaggerated politeness.) This silken purse I made out of
the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. (He indicates
vaguely Lynch and Bloom.) We are all in the same sweepstake, Kinch and
Lynch. Dans ce bordel où tenons nostre état.
LYNCH (Calls from the hearth.) Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.
STEPHEN (Hands Bella a coin.) Gold. She has it.
BELLA (Looks at the money, then at Zoe, Florry and Kitty.) Do you want
three girls? It's ten shillings here.
STEPHEN (Delightedly.) A hundred thousand apologies. (He fumbles
again and takes out and hands her two crowns.) Permit, brevi manu, my
sight is somewhat troubled.
(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to himself
in monosyllables. Zoe bounds over to the table. Kitty leans over Zoe's neck.
Lynch gets up, rights his cap and, clasping Kitty's waist, adds his head to the
group.)
FLORRY (Strives heavily to rise.) Ow! My foot's asleep. (She limps
over to the table. Bloom approaches.)
BELLA, ZOE. KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM (Chattering and squabbling.)
The gentleman... ten shillings... paying for the three allow me a moment... this
gentleman pays separate who's touching it?... ow... mind who you're pinching...
are you staying the night or a short time? who did?... you're a liar, excuse
me... the gentle man paid down like a gentleman... drink... it's long after
eleven.
STEPHEN (At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence.) No bottles!
What, eleven? A riddle.
ZOE (Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the top of
her stocking.) Hard earned on the flat of my back.
LYNCH (Lifting Kitty from the table.) Come!
KITTY Wait. (She clutches the two crowns.)
FLORRY And me?
LYNCH Hoopla! (He lifts her carries her and bumps her down on the
sofa.)
STEPHEN The fox crew, the cocks flew, The bells in heaven Were striking
eleven. 'Tis time for her poor soul To get out of heaven.
BLOOM (Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between Bella and
Florry.) So. Allow me. (He takes up the pound note.) Three times ten.
We're square.
BELLA (Admiringly.) You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss
you.
ZOE (Points.) Hum? Deep as a drawwell. (Lynch bends Kitty back over
the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)
BLOOM This is yours.
STEPHEN How is that? Le distrait or absentminded beggar. (He
fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object
falls.) That fell.
BLOOM (Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches.) This.
STEPHEN Lucifer. Thanks.
BLOOM (Quietly.) You had better hand over that cash to me to take care
of. Why pay more?
STEPHEN (Hands him all his coins.) Be just before you are generous.
BLOOM I will but is it wise? (He counts.) One, seven, eleven, and
five. Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.
STEPHEN Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next Lessing
says. Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably
he killed her.
BLOOM That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.
STEPHEN Doesn't matter a rambling damn.
BLOOM No, but...
STEPHEN (Comes to the table.) Cigarette, please. (Lynch tosses a
cigarette from the sofa to the table.) And so Georgina Johnson is dead and
married. (A cigarette appears on the table. Stephen looks at it.) Wonder.
Parlour magic. Married. Hm. (He strikes a match and proceeds to light the
cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.)
LYNCH (Watching him.) You would have a better chance of lighting it if you
held the match nearer.
STEPHEN (Brings the match nearer his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses.
Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He
draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable
modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously.) Hm. Sphinx. The beast
that has two backs at midnight. Married.
ZOE It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with him.
FLORRY (Nods.) Mr Lambe from London.
STEPHEN Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.
LYNCH (Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply.) Dona nobis pacem.
(The cigarette slips from Stephens fingers. Bloom picks it up and throws it
into the grate.)
BLOOM Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. (To Zoe.) You
have nothing?
ZOE Is he hungry?
STEPHEN (Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the
bloodoath in the Dusk of the Gods.)
LYNCH Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and shake.
(To Zoe.) Who taught you palmistry?
ZOE (Turns.) Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. (To Stephen.)
I see it in your face. The eye, like that. (She frowns with lowered
head.)
LYNCH (Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.) Like that. Pandy bat.
(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open, the
bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)
FATHER DOLAN Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little
schemer. See it in your eye.
(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises
from the pianola coffin.)
DON JOHN CONMEE Now, Father Dolan! Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very good
little boy.
ZOE (Examining Stephen's palm.) Woman's hand.
STEPHEN (Murmurs.) Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read
His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.
ZOE What day were you born?
STEPHEN Thursday. Today.
ZOE Thursday's child has far to go. (She traces lines on his hand.)
Line of fate. Influential friends.
FLORRY (Pointing.) Imagination.
ZOE Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a... (She peers at his hands
abruptly.) I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to know?
BLOOM (Detaches her fingers and offers his palm.) More harm than good.
Here. Read mine.
BELLA Show. (She turns up Bloom's hand.) I thought so. Knobby
knuckles, for the women.
ZOE (Peering at Bloom's palm.) Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and
marry money.
BLOOM Wrong.
ZOE (Quickly.) O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That
wrong?
(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises, stretches
her wings and clucks.)
BLACK LIZ Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.
(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off.)
BLOOM (Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and
cut it twenty-two years ago. I was sixteen.
ZOE I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.
STEPHEN See? Moves to one great goal. I am twenty two too. Sixteen years ago
I twentytwo tumbled, twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse.
(He winces.) Hurt my hand somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?
(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and writes
idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)
FLORRY What?
(A hackneycar number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallantbuttocked
mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes
Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches
behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy
gaze.)
THE BOOTS (Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers.)
Haw, haw, have you the horn?
(Bronze by gold they whisper.)
ZOE (To Florry.) Whisper.
(They whisper again.)
(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set
sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan, in a yachtsman's cap and white
shoes, officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan s shoulder.)
LENEHAN Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few
quims?
BOYLAN (Seated, smiles.) Plucking a turkey.
LENEHAN A good night's work.
BOYLAN (Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks.) Blazes
Kate! Up to sample or your money back. (He holds out a forefinger.) Smell
that.
LENEHAN (Smells gleefully.) Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!
ZOE AND FLORRY (Laugh together.) Ha ha ha ha.
BOYLAN bumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear. )
Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom up yet?
BLOOM (In a flunkey's plum plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and
powdered wig.) I'm afraid not, sir, the last articles...
BOYLAN (Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.
(He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom's antlered head.) Show me in.
I have a little private business with your wife. You understand?
BLOOM Thank you, sir. Yes, sir, Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.
MARION He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashing out
of the water.) Raoul, darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only my new
hat and a carriage sponge.
BOYLAN (A merry twinkle in his eye.) Topping!
BELLA What? What is it?
(Zoe whispers to her.)
MARION Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I'll write to a
powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on
him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.
BELLA (Laughing.) Ho ho ho ho.
BOYLAN (To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the
keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM Thank you, sir, I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the
deed and take a snapshot? (He holds an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir?
Orangeflower?... Lukewarm water?...
KITTY (From the sofa.) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.
(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur lip-lapping loudly,
poppysmic plopslop.)
MINA KENNEDY (Her eyes upturned.) O, it must be like the scent of
geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck
together! Covered with kisses!
LYDIA DOUCE (Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round
the room doing it! Ride a cock horse. You could hear them in Paris and New York.
Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.
KITTY (Laughing.) Hee hee hee.
BOYLAN'S VOICE (Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach.) Ah!
Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!
MARION'S VOICE (Hoarsely, sweetly rising to her throat.) O!
Weeshwashtkissima, pooisthnapoohuck!
BLOOM (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself) Show! Hide! Show!
Plough her! More! Shoot!
BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY. KITTY Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!
LYNCH (Points.) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs.) Hu hu hu
hu hu hu.
(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare,
beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection
of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)
SHAKESPEARE (In dignified ventriloquy.) 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks
the vacant mind. (To Bloom.) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest
invisible. Gaze. (He crows with a black capon's laugh.) Iagogo! How my
Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!
BLOOM (Smiles yellowly at the whores.) When will I hear the joke?
ZOE Before you're twice married and once a widower.
BLOOM Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon, when measurements were
taken near the skin after his death...
(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk,
tears and Tunny's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds, her bonnet awry,
rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, a pen chivvying her brood of
cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late husband's everyday trousers and
turnedup boots, lace eights. She holds a Scottish widow's insurance policy and
lace marqueeumbrella under which her brood runs with her, Patsy hopping on one
short foot, his collar loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, Freddy whimpering,
Susy with a crying cods mouth, Alice struggling with the baby. She cuffs them
on, her streamers flaunting aloft.)
FREDDY Ah, ma, you're dragging me along!
SUSY Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!
SHAKESPEARE (With paralytic rage.) Weda seca whokilla farst.
(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeares beardless
face. The marqueeumbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the
umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown. She glides
sidling and bowing, twisting japanesily.)
MRS CUNNINGHAM (Sings.) And they call me the jewel of Asia.
MARTIN CUNNINGHAM
(Gazes on her impassive.) Immense! Most bloody awful demirep!
STEPHEN Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti. Queens lay with prize bulls.
Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgross father made the first
confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the
house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was open.
BELLA None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.
LYNCH Let him alone. He's back from Paris.
ZOE (Runs to Stephen and links him.) O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.
(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace, where he
stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile on his
face.)
LYNCH (Pommelling on the sofa.) Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrr rrrmmmmm.
STEPHEN (Gobbles, with marionette jerks. ) Thousand places of
entertainment to expenses your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and
other things perhaps her heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very
eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are
dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors
foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things
love and sensations voluptuous. Misters very selects for is pleasure must to
visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which
occur every night. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen
in universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe
and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous
troublants. (He clocks his tongue loudly.) Ho, la la! Ce pif qu'il a!
LYNCH Vive le vampire!
THE WHORES Bravo! Parleyvoo!
STEPHEN (Grimacing with head back, laughs loudly, clapping himself)
Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles big
damn ruffians. Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very
amiable cos turned. Or do you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure
turpitude of old mans? (He points about him with grotesque gestures which
Lynch and the whores reply to.) Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or
lifesize tompeeptoms virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter
gentlemen to see in mirrors every positions trapezes all that machine there
besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal
liver or omelette on the belly pièce de Shakespeare.
BELLA (Clapping her belly, sinks back on the sofa with a shout of
laughter.) An omelette on the... Ho! ho! ho! ho!... Omelette on the...
STEPHEN (Mincingly.) I love you, Sir darling. Speak you englishman
tongue for double entente cordiale. O yes, mon loup. How
much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset. (He ceases suddenly and holds up a
forefinger.)
BELLA (Laughing.) Omelette...
THE WHORES (Laughing.) Encore! Encore!
STEPHEN Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.
ZOE Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
LYNCH Across the world for a wife.
FLORRY Dreams go by contraries.
STEPHEN (Extending his arms.) It was here. Street of harlots. In
Serpentine Avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the red carpet
spread?
BLOOM (Approaching Stephen.) Look.
STEPHEN No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end.
(He cries.) Pater! Free!
BLOOM I say, look...
STEPHEN Break my spirit, will he? O merde alors! (He cries, his vulture
talons sharpened.) Hola! Hillyho!
(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)
SIMON That's all right. (He swoops uncertainly through the air, wheeling,
uttering cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard wings.) Ho, boy!
Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those halfcastes. Wouldn't let
them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep our flag flying! An eagle gules
volant in a field argent displayed. Ulster king at arms! hai hoop! (He makes
the beagle's call giving tongue.) Bulbul! Burblblbrurblbl! Hai, boy!
(The fronds and spaces of the wallpaper file rapidly across country. A
stout fox drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs
swift for the open, bright-eyed, seeking badger earth, under the leaves. The
pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground, sniffing their quarry,
beaglebaying, burblbrblng to be blooded. Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live
with them, hot for a kill. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone
follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with
stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, grey negroes
waving torches. The crowd bowls of dicers, crown and anchor players,
thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats
clamour deafeningly.)
THE CROWD
THE ORANGE LODGES (Jeering.) Get down and push, mister. Last lap!
You'll be home the night!
GARRETT DEASY (Bolt upright, his nailscraped face plastered with postage
stamps, brandishes his hockeystick, his blue eyes flashing in the prism of the
chandelier as his mount lopes by at a schooling gallop.) Per vias rectas!
(A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag, a torrent of
mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips,
potatoes.)
THE GREEN LODGES Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!
(Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows,
singing in discord.)
STEPHEN Hark! Our friend, noise in the street!
ZOE (Holds up her hand.) Stop!
PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON and CISSY CAFFREY
BLOOM Who'll.
LYNCH (Handing her coins.) Here.
STEPHEN (Cracking his fingers impatiently.) Quick! Quick! Where's my
augur's rod? (He runs to the piano and takes his ashplant, beating his foot
in tripudium.)
ZOE (Turns the drumhandle.) There.
(She drops two pennies in the slot. Glow pink and violet lights start
forth. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. Professor Goodwin, in a
bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in
two from incredible age, totters across the room, his hands fluttering. He sits
tinily on the piano stool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the
keyboard, nodding with damsels grace, his bowknot bobbing.)
ZOE (Twirls around herself heeltapping.) Dance. Anybody here for
there? Who'll dance?
(The pianola, with changing lights, plays in waltz time the prelude to
My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. Stephen throws his ashplant on the table and
seizes Zoe around the waist. Florry and Bella push the table towards the
fireplace. Stephen, aiming Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to waltz her
around the room. Her sleeve, falling from gracing arms, reveals a white
fleshflower of vaccination. Bloom stands aside. Between the curtains, Professor
Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat. With a deft
kick, he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a
slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a go-et of cream tulle, a green lowcut
waistcoat, stock collar with white kerchief tight lavender trousers, patent
pumps and canary gloves. In his buttonhole is a dahlia. He twirls in reversed
directions a clouded cane, then wedges it tight in his oxter. He places a hand
limply on his breastbone, bows and fondles his flower and buttons.)
MAGINNI The poetry of motion, art of callisthenics. No connection with Madam
Legget Byrne's or Levinstone's. Fancy dress balls arranged. Deportment. The
Katty Lanner steps. So. Watch me! My terpsichorean abilities. (He minuets
forward three paces on tripping bee's feet.) Tout le monde an avant! Révérence!
Tout le monde en place!
(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms,shrivels,
shrinks, his live cape falling about the stool. The air, in firmer waltz time,
pounds. Stephen and Zoe circle freely. The lights change, glow, fade, gold,
rose, violet.)
THE PIANOLA Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,
Sweethearts they'd left behind.
(From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slim, in girlish
blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance, twirling their
skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold. Laughing linked, high
haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting their
arms.)
MAGINNI (Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) Carré! Avant deux! Breathe
evenly! Balance!
(The morning and noon hours waltz in their places, turning, advancing to
each other, shaping their curves, bowing vis a vis. Cavaliers behind them arch
and suspend their arms, with hands descending to, touching, rising from their
shoulders.)
HOURS You may touch my.
CAVALIERS May I touch your?
HOURS O, but lightly!
CAVALIERS O, so lightly!
THE PIANOLA My little shy little lass has a waist.
(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. The twilight hours
advance, from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their cheeks
delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. They are in grey gauze with dark bat
sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.)
MAGINNI Avant! huit! Traversé! Salut! Cours de mains! Croisé!
(The eight hours steal to the last place. Morning, noon and twilight hours
retreat before them. They are masked, with daggered hair and bracelets of dull
bells. Weary, they curchycurchy under veils.)
THE BRACELETS Heigho! Heigho!
ZOE (Twisting, her hand to her brow.) O!
MAGINNI Los tiroirs! Chaîne de dames! La corbeille! Dos à dos!
(Arabesquing wearily, they weave a pattern on the floor, weaving,
unweaving, curtseying, twisting, simply swirling.)
ZOE I'm giddy.
(She frees herself droops on a chair, Stephen seizes Florry and turns with
her.)
MAGINNI Boulangère! Los ronds! Los ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!
(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands, the night hours link, each
with arching arms, in a mosaic of movements. Stephen and Florry turn
cumbrously.)
MAGINNI Dansez avec vos dames! Changes de dames! Donnes le petit bouquet a
votre dame! Remerciez!
THE PIANOLA
(She runs to Stephen. He leaves Florry brusquely and seizes Kitty. A
screaming bit tern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling Toft's
cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the room.)
THE PIANOLA My girl's a Yorkshire girl.
ZOE Yorkshire through and through. Come on all!
(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)
STEPHEN Pas seul!
(He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arm's, snatches up his ashplant from the
table and takes the floor. All wheel, whirl, waltz, twirl. Bloombella,
Kittylynch, Florryzoe, jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits in
middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh, with
clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho horn blower blue green yellow flashes. Toft's
cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels
fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.)
THE PIANOLA
TUTTI Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!
SIMON Think of your mother's people!
STEPHEN Dance of death.
(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, nag, steer piglings,
Conmee on Christass lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling
hitching stamp hornpipe' through and through, Baraabum! On nags, hogs,
bellhorses, Gadarene swine, Corny in coffin. Steel shark stone one handled
Nelson, two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram falling bawling. Gum,
he's a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev. evensong love on hackney jaunt
Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in
last wiswitchback lumbering up and down bump mash tub sort of viceroy and reine
relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)
(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes
closed, he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn
roundabout. Bright midges dance on wall. He stops dead.)
STEPHEN Ho!
(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey
with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and
noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her
bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering
a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)
THE CHOIR
BUCK MULLIGAN She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the
afflicted mother. (He upturns his eyes.) Mercurial Malachi.
THE MOTHER (With the subtle smile of death's madness.) I was once the
beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.
STEPHEN (Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogey man's trick is
this?
BUCK MULLIGAN (Shakes his curling capbell.) The mockery of it! Kinch
killed her dogsbody bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter
fall from his eyes into the scone.) Our great sweet mother! Epi oinopa
ponton.
THE MOTHER (Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted
ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world.
You too. Time will come.
STEPHEN (Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed
you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.
THE MOTHER (A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.)
You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.
STEPHEN (Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word
known to all men.
THE MOTHER Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with
Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is
all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty
days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.
STEPHEN The ghoul! Hyena!
THE MOTHER I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that
boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I loved you, O my
son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.
ZOE (Fanning herself with the grate fan.) I'm melting!
FLORRY (Points to Stephen) Look! He's white.
BLOOM (Goes to the window to open it more.) Giddy.
THE MOTHER (With smouldering eyes.) Repent! O, the fire of hell!
STEPHEN (Panting.) The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!
THE MOTHER (Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen
breath.) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm slowly
towards Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers.) Beware! God's hand!
(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in
Stephen's heart.)
STEPHEN (Strangled with rage.) Shite! (His features grow drawn and
grey and old.)
BLOOM (At the window.) What?
STEPHEN Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all
or not at all. Non serviam!
FLORRY Give him some cold water. Wait. (She rushes out.)
THE MOTHER (Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately.) O Sacred
Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O divine Sacred Heart!
STEPHEN No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you all
to heel!
THE MOTHER (In the agony of her deathrattle.) Have mercy on Stephen,
Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief
and agony on Mount Calvary.
STEPHEN Nothung!
(He hits his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier.
Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all
space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)
THE GASJET Pwfungg!
BLOOM Stop!
LYNCH (Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand.) Here! Hold on! Don't
run amok!
BELLA Police!
(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark,
beats the ground and flees from the room past the whores at the door.)
(The two whores rush to the halldoors. Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede
from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows, returns.)
THE WHORES (Jammed in the doorway, pointing.) Down there.
ZOE (Pointing.) There. There's something up.
BELLA Who pays for the lamp? (She seizes Bloom's coattail.) There. You
were with him. The lamp's broken.
BLOOM (Rushes to the hall, rushes back.) What lamp, woman?
A WHORE He tore his coat.
BELLA (Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points.) Who's to pay
for that? Ten Shillings. You're a witness.
BLOOM (Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) Me? Ten shillings? Haven't you
lifted enough off him? Didn't he...
BELLA (Loudly.) Here, none of your tall talk. This isn't a brothel. A
ten shilling house.
BLOOM (His hand under the lamp, pulls the chain. Pulling, the gasjet
lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.) Only the
chimney's broken. Here is all he...
BELLA (Shrinks back and screams.) Jesus! Don't!
BLOOM (Warding off a blow.) To show you how he hit the paper. There's
not a sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!
FLORRY (With a glass of water enters.) Where is he?
BELLA Do you want me to call the police?
BLOOM O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student. Patrons
of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. (He makes a masonic
sign.) Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor. You don't want a
scandal.
BELLA (Angrily.) Trinity! Coming down here ragging after the boat
races and paying nothing. Are you my commander here? Where is he? I'll charge
him. Disgrace him, I will. (She shouts.) Zoe! Zoe!
BLOOM (Urgently.) And if it were your own son in Oxford!
(Warningly.) I know.
BELLA (Almost speechless.) Who are you incog?
ZOE (In the doorway.) There's a row on.
BLOOM What? Where? (He throws a shilling on the table and shouts.)
That's for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air. (He hurries out through
the hall. The whores point. Florry follows, spilling water from her tilted
tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing to the
right where the fog has cleared off From the left arrives a jingling hackney
car. It slows to in front of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny
Kelleher who is about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He
averts his face. Bella from within the hall uses on her whores. They blow
ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghostly lewd smile.
The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty still point right.
Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries down
the steps with sideways face. Incog Haroun al Baschid, he flits behind the
silent lechers and hastens on by the railings with fleet step of a pard strewing
the drag behind him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his
stride. A pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a
dogwhip in tallyho cap and an old pair of grey trousers, follows from far,
picking up the scent, nearer, baying, panting, at fault, breaking away, throwing
their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his tail. He walks, runs, zigzags,
gallops, lugs laid back. He is pelted with gravel, cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes,
eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, womans slipperslappers. After him, freshfound, the
hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C 66 C night
watch, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti,
Alexander Keyes, Larry O'Rourke, Joe Cuffe, Mrs O'Dowd Pisser Burke, The
Nameless One, Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whatdoyoucallhim,
Strangeface, Fellowthatslike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwith, Chris Callinan, sir
Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bartell d'Arcy, Joe Hynes, red
Murray, editor Brayden, T.M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John Howard Parnell,
the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Breen, Denis Breen, Theodore
Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of
Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, man in the street, other man in the street, Footballboots,
pugnosed driver rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Joe
Gallaher George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father
Cowley, Crofton out of the Collector Generals, Dan Dawson, dental surgeon Bloom
with tweezers, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan,
handsomemamedwomanrubbed againstwidebehindinClonskeatram, the bookseller of
Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran
of Roebuck, the managing clerk of Drimmies colonel Hayes, Mastiansky, Citron,
Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E. Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs
Galbraith, the constable off Eccles Street corner old doctor Brady with
stethoscope, the mystery man on the beach, a retriever Mrs Miriam Dandrade and
all her lovers.
THE HUE AND CRY (Helterskelterelterwelter) He's Bloom! Stop Bloom!
Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stop him on the corner!
(At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the scaffolding Bloom panting
stops on the fringe of the noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a jot what
hi! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)
STEPHEN (With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly.) You
are my guests. The uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh of
Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.
PRIVATE CARR (To Cissy Caffrey.) Was he insulting you?
STEPHEN Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter. Ungenitive.
CISSY CAFFREY I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do - you
know and the young man ran up behind me. But I'm faithful to the man that's
treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.
STEPHEN (Catches sight of Kitty's and Lynch's heads.) Hail, Sisyphus.
(He points to himself and the others.) Poetic. Neopoetic.
VOICES She's faithfultheman.
CISSY CAFFREY Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.
PRIVATE COMPTON He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff him one,
Harry.
PRIVATE CARR (To Cissy.) Was he insulting you while me and him was
having a piss?
LORD TENNYSON (In Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded,
flowingbearded.) Their's not to reason why.
PRIVATE COMPTON Biff him, Harry.
STEPHEN (To Private Compton. ) I don't know your name but you are
quite right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their
shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.
CISSY CAFFREY (To the crowd.) No, I was with the private.
STEPHEN (Amiably.) Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every
lady for example...
PRIVATE CARR (His cap awry, advancing to Stephen.) Say, how would it
be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?
STEPHEN (Looks up in the sky.) How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of
self-pretence. Personally, I detest action. (He waves his hand) Hand
hurts me slightly. Enfin, ce sont vos oignons.
(To Cissy Caffrey.) Some trouble is on here. What is it, precisely?
DOLLY GRAY (From her balcony waves her handkerchief giving the sign of the
heroine of Jericho.) Rahab. Cook's son, goodbye. Safe home to Dolly. Dream
of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.
(The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)
BLOOM (Elbowing through the crowd plucks Stephen's sleeve vigorously.)
Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.
STEPHEN (Turns.) Eh? (He disengages himself) Why should I not
speak to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange?
(He points his finger.) I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his
eye. Retaining the perpendicular.
(He staggers a pace back.)
BLOOM (Propping him.) Retain your own.
STEPHEN (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have
forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is
the law of existence but modern philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of
England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is
I must kill the priest and the king.
BIDDY THE CLAP Did you hear what the professor said? He's a professor out of
the college.
CUNTY KATE I did. I heard that.
BIDDY THE CLAP He expresses himself with much marked refinement of
phraseology.
CUNTY KATE Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy.
PRIVATE CARR (Pulls himself free and comes forward.) What's that
you're saying about my king?
(Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wears a white jersey on
which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched, with the insignia of Garter and
Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinners' and Probyns' horse,
Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of
Massachusetts. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed as a grand elect perfect and
sublime mason with trowel and apron, marked made in Germany. In his left hand he
holds a plasterers bucket on which is printed: Défense d'uriner. A roar
of welcome greets him.)
EDWARD THE SEVENTH (Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly.) Peace, perfect
peace. For identification bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. (He turns to his
subjects.) We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we
heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a back.
(He shakes hands with Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, Bloom and
Lynch. General applause. Edward the Seventh lifts the bucket graciously in
acknowledgement.)
PRIVATE CARR (To Stephen.) Say it again.
STEPHEN (Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up.) I understand your point
of view, though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of patent
medicine. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die
for your country, suppose. (He places his arm on Private Carr's sleeve.)
Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the
present it has done so. I don't want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!
EDWARD THE SEVENTH (Levitates over heaps of slain in the garb and with the
halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent face.)
PRIVATE COMPTON Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one into
Jerry.
BLOOM (To the privates, softly.) He doesn't know what he's saying.
Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I
know him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's all right.
STEPHEN (Nods, smiling and laughing.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and
judge of impostors.
PRIVATE CARR I don't give a bugger who he is. PRIVATE COMPTON We don't give a
bugger who he is.
STEPHEN I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.
(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-day boys
hat signs to Stephen.)
KEVIN EGAN H'lo. Bonjour! The vieille ogresse with the dents
jaunes.
(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbit face nibbling a quince
leaf.)
PATRICE Socialiste!
DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY (In medieval hauberk, two
wild geese volant on his helm, with noble indignation points a mailed hand
against the privates.) Were those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of
johnyellows todos covered of gravy!
BLOOM (To Stephen.) Come home. You'll get into trouble.
STEPHEN (Swaying.) I don't avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.
BIDDY THE CLAP One immediately observes that he is of patrician lineage.
THE VIRAGO Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.
THE BAWD The red's as good as the green, and better. Up the soldiers! Up King
Edward!
A ROUGH (Laughs.) Ay! Hands up to De Wet.
THE CITIZEN (With a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls.)
(He jerks the rope, the assistants leap at the victims legs and drag him
downward, grunting: the croppy boys tongue protrudes violently.)
THE CROPPY BOY Horhot ho hray ho rhother's hest.
(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of
sperm spouting through his death clothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham,
Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with
their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)
RUMBOLD I'm near it myself. (He undoes the noose.) Rope which hanged
the awful rebel. Ten shillings a time as applied to His Royal Highness. (He
plunges his head into the gaping belly of the hanged and draws out his head
again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails.) My painful duty has now
been done. God save the king!
EDWARD THE SEVENTH (Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket and sings
with soft contentment.)
STEPHEN (Throws up his hands.) O, this is too monotonous! Nothing. He
wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some brutish
empire of his. Money I haven't. (He searches his pockets vaguely.) Gave
it to someone.
PRIVATE CARR Who wants your bleeding money?
STEPHEN (Tries to move off.) Will some one tell me where I am least
likely to meet these necessary evils? ça se voit aussi à Paris. Not that
I... But by Saint Patrick!...
(The women's heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears
seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast.)
STEPHEN Aha! I know you, grammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats her
farrow!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY (Rocking to and fro.) Ireland's sweetheart, the king
of Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them! (She
keens with banshee woe.) Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! (She
wails.) You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?
STEPHEN How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where's the third person of the
Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.
CISSY CAFFREY (Shrill.) Stop them from fighting!
A ROUGH Our men retreated.
PRIVATE CARR (Tugging at his belt.) I'll wring the neck of any bugger
says a word against my fucking king.
BLOOM (Terrified.) He said nothing. Not a word. A pure
misunderstanding.
THE CITIZEN Erin go bragh!
(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals, decorations,
trophies of war wounds. Both salute with fierce hostility.)
PRIVATE COMPTON Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He's a proboer.
STEPHEN Did I? When?
BLOOM (To the redcoats.) We fought for you in South Africa, Irish
missile troops. Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our
monarch.
THE NAVVY (Staggering past.) O, yes. O, God, yes! O, make the kwawr a
krowawr! O! Bo!
(Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted spear
points. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with
hackle plume and accoutrements, with epaulette, gilt chevrons and sabretache,
his breast bright with medals, toes the line. He gives the pilgrim warrior's
sign of the knights templars.)
MAJOR TWEEDY (Growls gruffly.) Rorke's Drift! Up, guards, and at them!
Mahal shalal hashbaz.
PRIVATE CARR I'll do him in.
PRIVATE COMPTON (Waves the crowd back.) Fair play, here. Make a
bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger.
(Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the king.)
CISSY CAFFREY They're going to fight. For me!
CUNTY KATE The brave and the fair.
BIDDY THE CLAP Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.
CUNTY KATE (Blushing deeply.) Nay, Madam. The gules doublet and merry
Saint George for me!
STEPHEN The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave old Ireland's
windingsheet.
PRIVATE CARR (Loosening his belt, shouts.) I'll wring the neck of any
fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.
BLOOM (Shakes Cissy Caffrey's shoulders.) Speak, you! Are you struck
dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman, sacred
lifegiver.
CISSY CAFFREY (Alarmed seizes Private Carr's sleeve.) Amn't I with you?
Amn't I your girl? Cissy's your girl. (She cries.) Police!
STEPHEN (Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey.)
DISTANT VOICES Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!
(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns
boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands.
Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries
of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain.
Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marsh lands, swooping from
eyries, hover screaming, gannets, connorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing
woodcocks, peregrines, merlin, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses,
barnacle geese. The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of
Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black
goat-fell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless yawn.
Tom Rochford, winner in athletes singlet and breeches, arrives at the head of
the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void. He is followed by a race
of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they spring from the brink. Their
bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire
baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect
themselves. laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on
broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragon's teeth. Armed
heroes spring up from furrows. They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the
red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan,
Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt,
Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond John
O'Leary against liar O'Johnny, lord Edward Fitzgerald against lord Gerald
Fitzedward, The O'Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The Donoghue. On an
eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the field altar of Saint Barbara. Black
candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbicans of the
tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone
Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies naked, fettered, a chalice resting
on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O'Flynn, in a long petticoat and reversed
chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mash. The
Reverend Mr Hugh C. Haines love MA. in a plain cassock and mortar board, his
head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrants head an open
umbrella.)
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN Introibo ad altare diaboli.
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE To the devil which hath made glad my young days.
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN (Takes from the chalice and elevates a
blooddripping host.) Corpus Meum.
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE (Raises high behind the celebrant's
petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is
stuck.) My body.
THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rot, Aiulella!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Dooooooooooog!
THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Goooooooooood!
(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of mange and Green factions
sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)
PRIVATE CARR (With ferocious articulation.) I'll do him in, so help me
fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking
windpipe!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY (Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand.) Remove
him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free.
(She prays.) O good God, take him!
BLOOM (Runs to Lynch.) Can't you get him away?
LYNCH He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! (To Bloom.)
Get him away, you. He won't listen to me. (He drags Kitty away.)
STEPHEN (Points.) Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit.
BLOOM (Runs to Stephen.) Come along with me now before worse happens.
Here's your stick.
STEPHEN Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.
CISSY CAFFREY (Pulling Private Carr.) Come on, you're boosed. He
insulted me but I forgive him. (Shouting in his ear.) I forgive him for
insulting me.
BLOOM (Over Stephen's shoulder.) Yes, go. You see he's incapable.
PRIVATE CARR (Breaks loose.) I'll insult him.
(He rushes towards Stephen, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the
face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls stunned. He lies prone, his face to the
sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it up.)
MAJOR TWEEDY (Loudly.) Carbine in bucket! cease fire! Salute!
THE RETRIEVER (Barking furiously.) Ute ute ute ute ute ute uteute.
THE CROWD Let him up! Don't strike him when he's down! Air! Who? The soldier
hit him. He's a professor. Is he hurted? Don't manhandle him! He's fainted!
(The retriever, nosing on the fringe of the crowd, barks noisily.)
What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under the influence?
Let them go and fight the Boers!
THE BAWD Listen to who's talking! Hasn't the soldier a right to go with his
girl? He gave him the coward's blow.
(They grab at each other's hair, claw at each other and spit.)
THE RETRIEVER (Barking.) Wow wow wow.
BLOOM (Shoves them back, loudly.) Get back, stand back!
PRIVATE COMPTON (Tugging his comrade.) Here bugger off, Harry. There's
the cops!
(Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the group)
FIRST WATCH What's wrong here?
PRIVATE COMPTON We were with this lady and he insulted us and assaulted my
chum. (The retriever barks.) Who owns the bleeding tyke?
CISSY CAFFREY (With expectation.) Is he bleeding?
A MAN (Rising from his knees.) No. Gone off. He'll come to all right.
BLOOM (Glances sharply at the man.) Leave him to me. I can easily...
SECOND WATCH Who are you? Do you know him?
PRIVATE CARR (Lurches towards the watch.) He insulted my lady friend.
BLOOM (Angrily.) You hit him without provocation. I'm a witness.
Constable, take his regimental number.
SECOND WATCH I don't want your instructions in the discharge of my duty.
PRIVATE COMPTON (Pulling his comrade.) Here, bugger off, Harry. Or
Bennett'll have you in the lockup.
PRIVATE CARR (Staggering as he is pulled away.) God fuck old Bennett!
He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him.
FIRST WATCH (Taking out his notebook.) What's his name?
BLOOM (Peering over the crowd.) I just see a car there. If you give me
a hand a second, sergeant.
FIRST WATCH Name and address.
(Corny Kelleher weepers round his hat, a death wreath in his hand, appears
among the bystanders.)
BLOOM (Quickly.) O, the very man! (He whispers.) Simon Dedalus'
son. A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.
SECOND WATCH Night, Mr Kelleher.
CORNY KELLEHER (To the watch, with drawling eye.) That's all right. I
know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. (He laughs.)
Twenty to one. Do you follow me?
FIRST WATCH (Turns to the crowd.) Here, what are you all gaping at?
Move on out of that.
(The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)
CORNY KELLEHER Leave it to me, sergeant. That'll be all right. (He laughs,
shaking his head.) We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse. What? Eh,
what?
FIRST WATCH (Laughs.) I suppose so.
CORNY KELLEHER (Nudges the second watch.) Come and wipe your name off
the slate. (He lilts, wagging his head.) With my tooraloom tooraloom
tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?
SECOND WATCH (Genially.) Ah, sure we were too.
CORNY KELLEHER (Winking.) Boys will be boys. I've a car round there.
SECOND WATCH All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.
CORNY KELLEHER I'll see to that.
BLOOM (Shakes hands with both of the watch in turn.) Thank you very
much gentlemen, thank you. (He mumbles confidentially.) We don't want any
scandal, you understand. Father is a well known, highly respected citizen. Just
a little wild oats, you understand.
FIRST WATCH O, I understand, sir.
SECOND WATCH That's all right, Sir.
FIRST WATCH It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have had to report
it at the station.
BLOOM (Nods rapidly.) Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.
SECOND WATCH It's our duty.
CORNY KELLEHER Good night, men.
THE WATCH (Saluting together.) Night, gentlemen. (They move off
with slow heavy tread.)
BLOOM (Blows.) Providential you came on the scene. You have a car?.
CORNY KELLEHER (Laughs, pointing his thumb over his right shoulder to the
car brought up against the scaffolding.) Two commercials that were standing
fizz in Jammet's. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two quid on the race.
Drowning his grief and were on for a go with the jolly girls. So I landed them
up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.
BLOOM I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to...
CORNY KELLEHER (Laughs.) Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.
No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. (He laughs
again and leers with lacklustre eye.) Thanks be to God we have it in the
house what, eh, do you follow me? Hah! hah! hah!
BLOOM (Tries to laugh.) He, he, he! Yes. Matter of fact I was just
visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don't know him (poor fellow
he's laid up for the past week) and we had a liquor together and I was just
making my way home...
(The horse neighs.)
THE HORSE Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!
CORNY KELLEHER Sure it was Behan, our jarvey there, that told me after we
left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to
see. (He laughs.) Sober hearsedrivers a specialty. Will I give him a lift
home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?
BLOOM No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.
(Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny Kelleher asquint, drawls at
the horse. Bloom in gloom, looms down.)
CORNY KELLEHER (Scratches his nape.) Sandycove! (He bends down and
calls to Stephen.) Eh! (He calls again.) Eh! He's covered with
shavings anyhow. Take care they didn't lift anything off him.
BLOOM No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.
CORNY KELLEHER Ah well, he'll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I'll shove
along. (He laughs.) I've a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the dead.
Safe home!
THE HORSE (Neighs.) Hohohohohome.
BLOOM Good night. I'll just wait and take him along in a few...
(Corny Kelleher returns to the outside car and mounts it. The horse
harness jingles.)
CORNY KELLEHER (From the car, standing.) Night.
BLOOM Night.
(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly. The car
and horse back slowly, awkwardly and turn. Corny Kelleher on the sideseat sways
his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Blooms plight. The jarvey joins in the
mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the farther seat. Bloom shakes his head
in mute mirthful reply. With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the
two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a
slow nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The
car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher
again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny
Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness
grow fainter with their tooralooloolooloo lay. Bloom, holding in his hand
Stephens hat festooned with shavings and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he
bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder.)
BLOOM Eh! Ho! (There is no answer he bends again.) Mr Dedalus!
(There is no answer.) The name if you call. Somnambulist. (He bends
again and, hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate
form.) Stephen! (There is no answer. He calls again.) Stephen!
STEPHEN (Groans.) Who? Black panther vampire. (He sighs and
stretches himself then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels.) Who...
drive... Fergus now. And pierce... wood's woven shade?...
(He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)
BLOOM Poetry. Well educated. Pity. (He bends again and undoes the buttons
of Stephen's waistcoat.) To breathe. (He brushes the wood shavings from
Stephen's clothes with light hands and fingers.) One pound seven. Not hurt
anyhow. (He listens.) What!
(Murmurs.)
BLOOM (Communes with the night.) Face reminds me of his poor mother.
In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl.
Some girl. Best thing could happen him... (He murmurs.)... swear that I
will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts...
(He murmurs.) in the rough sands of the sea. a cabletow's length from the
shore... where the tide ebbs ... and flows...
(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in
the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a
fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass
shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from
right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!
RUDY (Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling.
He has a delicate mauveface. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his
free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet howknot. A white lambkin
peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.) Cuckoo
(The brass quoits of a
bed are heard to jingle.)
Cuckoo
CuckooThe wren, the wren,
A BLACKSMITH (Murmurs.)
For the Honour of God! And is that Bloom? He scarcely looks thirtyone.
The king of all birds,
Saint Stephen's
his day,
Was caught in the furze.Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in
the stomach.)
Cakes in his pocket for
Leo alone.Acid. nit. hydrochlor dil., 20 minims,
CHRIS CALLINAN What is the parallax of the subsolar
ecliptic of Aldebaran?
Tinct. mix.
vom., 4 minims.
Extr. taraxel. lig., 30 minims.
Aq. dis.
ter in die.I vowed that I never would leave her,
HOPPY
HOLOHAN Good old Bloom! There's nobody like him after all.
She turned out a cruel
deceiver.
With my tooraloom tooraloom tooralcom tooraloom.You big, you bog, you dirty dog!
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS
You think the ladies love
you!If you see kay
HORNBLOWER (In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And
he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the
wilderness, and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile
him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him
from me.I'm a tiny tiny thing
(He rushes against the
mauve shade flapping noisily.) Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty
petticoats.
Ever flying in the spring
Round and
round a ringaring.
Long ago I was a king,
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing!
Bing!Conservio lies captured.
(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight,
his left cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to
and fro, ads akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour.) O, the poor
little fellow Hi-hi-hi-hi-his legs they were yellow He was plump, fat and heavy
and brisk as a snake But some bloody savage To graize his white cabbage He
murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.
He lies in the lowest dungeon
With manacles and chains around his limbs
Weighing upwards of three
tons.Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
THE
YEWS (Mingling their boughs.) Listen. Whisper. She is right, our sister.
We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days.
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
THE NYMPH (With wide fingers.) O! Infamy!
Phoucaphouca
Phoucaphouca.Phillaphulla Poulaphouca
THE YEWS Ssh! Sister, speak!
Poulaphouca
Poulaphouca.O Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
BLOOM (Coldly.) You have
broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you
all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing, like an ass pissing.
He didn't know what to
do,
To keep it up,
To keep it up.Give a thing and take it back
BLOOM
There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.
God'll ask you where is that
You'll say you don't know
God'll send you down below.Hangende Hunger,
ZOE (Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet!
(She takes his hand.) Blue eyed beauty, I'll read your hand. (She
points to his forehead.) No wit, no wrinkles. (She counts.) Two,
three, Mars, that's courage. (Stephen shakes his head.) No kid.
Fragende Frau,
Macht uns alle
kaput.Card of the races. Racing card!
(A dark horse, riderless, bolts like
a phantom past the winningpost, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. The
field follows, a bunch of bucking mounts. Skeleton horses: Sceptre, Maximum the
Second, Zinfandel, the Duke of Westminsters Shotover, Repulse, the Duke of
Beauforts' Ceylon, prix de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rusty armoured, leaping,
leaping in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain, on a broken-winded isabelle
nag, Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket, orange sleeves,
Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockey stick at the ready. His nag,
stumbling on whitegaitered feet, jogs along the rocky road.)
Ten to one the field!
Tommy on the clay here!
Tommy on the clay!
Ten to one bar one.
Ten to one bar one.
Try your luck on spinning Jenny!
Ten to one
bar one!
Sell the monkey, boys!
Sell the monkey!
I'll give ten to
one!
Ten to one bar one!Yet I've a sort a
ZOE That's
me. (She claps her hands.) Dance! Dance! (She runs to the
pianola.) Who has twopence?
Yorkshire relish for...Best, best of all,
KITTY (Jumps
up.) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus bazaar!
Baraabum!Though she's a factory lass
(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare
scudding they scotlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)
And wears no fancy
clothes.Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...
(From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in
particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling
bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)
Iubilantium te
virginum...
BELLA (Screams.) After him!
VOICES No, he didn't. The girl's telling lies. He was in Mrs Cohen's. What's
up? Soldiers and civilians.
My methods are new and are causing surprise.
STEPHEN Kings and unicorns! (He
falls back a pace.) Come somewhere and we'll... What was that girl
saying?...
To make the blind
see I throw dust in their eyes.May the God above
THE CROPPY BOY (The rope noose round his neck,
gripes in his issuing bowels with both hands.)
Send down a cove
With teeth as sharp as
razors
To slit the throat
Of the English dogs
That hanged our
Irish leaders.I bear no hate to a living thing,
RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER (Accompanied by two blackmasked
assistants, advances with a gladstone bag which he opens.) Ladies and gents,
cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin
dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the cellar,
the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial containing
arsenic retrieved from the body of Miss Barrow which sent Seddon to the gallows.
But love my country beyond
the king.On coronation day, on coronation day,
PRIVATE CARR Here. What
are you saying about my king?
O, Won't We have a merry
time,
Drinking whisky, beer and wine!White thy fambles, red thy gan
VOICES Police!
And thy quarrons dainty
is.... shadows... the woods
(He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his
body. Bloom holding his hat and ashplant stands erect. A dog barks in the
distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on
Stephen's face and form.)
... white breast...
dim...