James Joyce. Ulysses
Ulysses 1: Telemachus
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held
the bowl aloft and intoned:
- Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards
him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking
his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top
of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed
him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and
hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the
bowl smartly.
- Back to barracks, he said sternly.
He added in a preacher's tone:
- For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul
and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A
little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused
awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there
with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through
the calm.
- Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off
the current, will you?
He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and
sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A
pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
- The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek.
He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,
laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily half
way and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he
propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered
cheeks and neck.
Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
- My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must
go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?
He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:
- Will he come? The jejune jesuit.
Ceasing, he began to shave with care.
- Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
- Yes, my love?
- How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
- God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and
indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus; you have the
real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best:
Kinch, the knife-blade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
- He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
his guncase?
- A woful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
- I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the
dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he
stays on here I am off.
Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down
from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
- Scutter, he cried thickly.
He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper
pocket, said:
- Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a
dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.
Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:
- The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.
You can almost taste it, can't you?
He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
oakpale hair stirring slightly.
- God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet
mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah,
Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original.
Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked
down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of
Kingstown.
- Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said.
He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's
face.
- The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't
let me have anything to do with you.
- Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
- You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother
asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think
of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for
her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you.
He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.
- But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all.
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain,
that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream
she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown
grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had
bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the
threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the
well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green
mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding
the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits
of loud groaning vomiting.
Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
- Ah, poor dogsbody, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt
and few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?
- They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
- The mockery of it, he said contentedly, secondleg they should be. God
knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair
stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look
damn well when you're dressed.
- Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.
- He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the
smooth skin.
Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its
smokeblue mobile eyes.
- That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan,
says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Conolly Norman. General
paralysis of the insane.
He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings
abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed
and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong
wellknit trunk.
- Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard.
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by
a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face
for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
- I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does
her all right. The aunt always keeps plain-looking servants for Malachi.
Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
- The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
Wilde were only alive to see you.
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:
- It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a Buck
Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the
tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.
- It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly.
God knows you have more spirit than any of them.
Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
cold steelpen.
- Cracked lookingglass of a servant. Tell that to the oxy chap
downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks
you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to
Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only
work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.
Cranly's arm. His arm.
- And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one
that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your
nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll bring down
Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.
Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces:
they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another, O, I shall expire!
Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit ribbons of his
shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers
down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared
calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged! Don't you
play the giddy ox with me!
Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on
the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.
To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.
- Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at
night.
- Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm
quite frank with you. What have you against me now?
They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on
the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.
- Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.
- Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.
He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety
in his eyes.
Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:
- Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's
death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
- What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and
sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?
- You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to
get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the
drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.
- Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.
- You said, Stephen answered, O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is
beastly dead.
A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck
Mulligan's cheek.
- Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?
He shook his constraint from him nervously.
- And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You
saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and
Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing
and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray
for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have
the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the wrong way. To me
it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She
calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour
her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with
me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I
suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.
He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping
wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
- I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
- Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked.
- Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.
- O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.
He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,
gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew
dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the
fever of his cheeks.
A voice within the tower called loudly:
- Are you up there, Mulligan?
- I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.
He turned towards Stephen and said:
- Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,
Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.
His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level
with the roof.
- Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the
moody brooding.
His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of
the stairhead:
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery
For Fergus rules the brazen cars.
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim
sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings
merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim
tide.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper
green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it
alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open:
she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside.
She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter
mystery.
Where now?
Her secrets: old feather fans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with
musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the
sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in
the pantomime of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang:
I am the boy
That can enjoy
Invisibility.
Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.
And no more turn aside and brood
Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting
for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails
reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts.
In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent
over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On
me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their
knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum
turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No mother. Let me be and let me live.
- Kinch ahoy!
Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry, heard
warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.
- Dedalus, comedown, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologizing for waking us last night. It's all right.
- I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.
- Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.
His head disappeared and reappeared.
- I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.
- I get paid this morning, Stephen said.
- The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.
- If you want it, Stephen said.
- Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have
a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.
He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent:
O, won't we have a merry time
Drinking whisky, beer and wine,
On coronation,
Coronation day?
O, won't we have a merry time
On coronation day?
Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shaving-bowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all
day, forgotten friendship?
He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I
carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the
same. A servant too. A server of a servant.
In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
moved briskly about the hearth to and fro, hiding and revealing its yellow
glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the
high barbicans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and
fumes of fried grease floated, turning.
- We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will
you?
Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the
inner doors.
- Have you the key? a voice asked.
- Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked. He howled
without looking up from the fire:
- Kinch!
- It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.
The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway,
looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to
wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he
carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily
and sighed with relief.
- I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when .
But hush. Not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake up. Bread,
butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and
these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.
Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.
- What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.
- We can drink it black, Stephen said. There's a lemon in the locker.
- O, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.
Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:
- That woman is coming up with the milk.
- The blessings of God on you, Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I
can't go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the dish
and slapped it out on three plates, saying:
- In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
Haines sat down to pour out the tea.
- I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don't you?
Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old
woman's wheedling voice:
- When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
makes water I makes water.
- By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.
Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:
- So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, ma'am, says Mrs Cahill, God
send you don't make them in the one pot.
He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.
- That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five
lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
brows:
- Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken
of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?
- I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.
- Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?
- I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.
Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.
- Charming, he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth
and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming.
Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:
- For old Mary Ann
She doesn't care a damn,
But, hising up her petticoats...
He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.
The doorway was darkened by an entering form.
- The milk, sir.
- Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.
An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.
- That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.
- To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure. Stephen
reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.
- The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
the collector of prepuces.
- How much, sir? asked the old woman.
- A quart, Stephen said.
He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a
tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a
messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching
by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool,
her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom
they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given
her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her
conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the
secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but
scorned to beg her favour.
- It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their
cups.
- Taste it, sir, she said.
He drank at her bidding.
- If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts.
Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust,
horsedung and consumptives' spits.
- Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.
- I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.
Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman; me she slights.
To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but
her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's likeness, the
serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with
wondering unsteady eyes.
- Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.
- Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
- Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?
- I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from
west, sir?
- I am an Englishman, Haines answered.
- He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak
Irish in Ireland.
- Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak
the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.
- Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?
- No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
milkcan on her forearm and about to go.
Haines said to her:
- Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?
Stephen filled the three cups.
- Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at
twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling and one and two
is two and two, sir.
Buck Mulligan sighed and having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his
trouser pockets.
- Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him smiling.
Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the
thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his
fingers and cried:
- A miracle!
He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:
- Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give. Stephen
laid the coin in her uneager hand.
- We'll owe twopence, he said.
- Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good
morning, sir.
She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant:
- Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet.
He turned to Stephen and said:
- Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects
that every man this day will do his duty.
- That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.
- Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.
He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:
- Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?
Then he said to Haines:
- The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.
- All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.
Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:
- I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.
Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here's a spot.
- That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.
Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with
warmth of tone:
- Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.
- Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.
- Would I make money by it? Stephen asked.
Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
the hammock, said:
- I don't know, I'm sure.
He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen
and said with coarse vigour:
- You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?
- Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.
I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.
- I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.
Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.
- From me, Kinch, he said.
In a suddenly changed tone he added:
- To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us
get out of the kip.
He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
resignedly:
- Mulligan is stripped of his garments.
He emptied his pockets on to the table.
- There's your snotrag, he said.
And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged
in his trunk while he called for - a clean handkerchief. Agenbite of inwit.
God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green
boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict
myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking
hands.
- And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.
Stephen picked it up and put it on: Haines called to them from the
doorway:
- Are you coming, you fellows?
- I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with
grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:
- And going forth he met Butterly.
Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked
it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.
At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:
- Did you bring the key?
- I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.
He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.
- Down, sir. How dare you, sir? Haines asked:
- Do you pay rent for this tower?
- Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.
- To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.
They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:
- Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?
- Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were
on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.
- What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.
- No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas
Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I
have a few pints in me first.
He turned to Stephen, saying as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
primrose waistcoat:
- You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?
- It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.
- You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?
- Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.
- What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?
Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:
- O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!
- We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.
Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.
- The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.
- I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this
tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o'er
his base into the sea, isn't it?
Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did
not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap
dusty mourning between their gay attires.
- It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.
Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking
by the Muglins.
- I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.
Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked
at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a
doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to
chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:
- I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here's to disciples and Calvary.
He held up a forefinger of warning.
- If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.
He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running
forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins
or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:
- Goodbye, now, goodbye. Write down all I said
And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye.
He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind
that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries.
Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said:
- We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it
somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?
- The ballad of Joking Jesus, Stephen answered.
- O, Haines said, you have heard it before?
- Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
- You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.
- There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.
Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.
- Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.
Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it
open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards
Stephen in the shell of his hands.
- Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or
you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal
God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?
- You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My
familiar, after me, calling Steeeeeeeeeephen. A wavering line along the
path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that
key. It is mine, I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key
too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.
- After all, Haines began...
Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was
not all unkind.
- After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.
- I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an
Italian.
- Italian? Haines said.
A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.
- And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.
- Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
- The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
spoke.
- I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of
their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the
slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a
chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus,
the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their
chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her
heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the
brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long
upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine,
spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius
who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken
a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits
surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting
from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her
ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.
Hear, hear. Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu!
- Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines' voice said, and I feel as one. I
don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.
Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman,
boatman.
- She's making for Bullock harbour.
The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.
- There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way
when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.
The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting
for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt
white. Here I am.
They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood
on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A
young man clinging to a spur of rock near him moved slowly frogwise his
green legs in the deep jelly of the water.
- Is the brother with you, Malachi?
- Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.
- Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.
- Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near
the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water
glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over
his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.
Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines
and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and
breastbone.
- Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur
of rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.
- Ah, go to God, Buck Mulligan said.
- Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?
- Yes.
- Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
money.
- Is she up the pole?
- Better ask Seymour that.
- Seymour a bleeding officer, Buck Mulligan said.
He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
tritely:
- Redheaded women buck like goats.
He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.
- My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch. Toothless
Kinch and I, the supermen.
He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
clothes lay.
- Are you going in here, Malachi?
- Yes. Make room in !he bed.
The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the
middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone,
smoking.
- Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.
- Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast. Stephen turned away.
- I'm going, Mulligan, he said.
- Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.
Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
clothes.
- And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.
Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck
Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:
- He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
Zarathustra.
His plump body plunged.
- We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the
path and smiling at wild Irish.
Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.
- The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.
- Good, Stephen said.
He walked along the upwardcurving path.
Liliata rutilantium.
Turnia circumdet.
Iubilantium te virginum
The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning
the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal's,
far out on the water, round.
Usurper.
Ulysses 2: Nestor
YOU, COCHRANE, WHAT CITY SENT FOR HIM?
-- Tarentum, sir.
-- Very good. Well?
-- There was a battle, sir.
-- Very good. Where?
The boy's blank face asked the blank window.
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as
memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of
excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry,
and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?
-- I forgot the place, sir. 279 B.C.
-- Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the
gorescarred book.
-- Yes, sir. And he said: Another victory like that and we are done
for.
That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From a
hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned
upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.
-- You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?
-- End of Pyrrhus, sir?
-- I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.
-- Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?
A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them
between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to the
tissues of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud that
their eldest son was in the navy. Vico Road, Dalkey.
-- Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round
at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh more
loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.
-- Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,
what is a pier.
-- A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the waves. A kind of
bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench
whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent. All.
With envy he watched their faces. Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their likes:
their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in
the struggle.
-- Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge. The words
troubled their gaze.
-- How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.
For Haines's chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild
drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester
at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement
master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the
smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often
heard, their land a pawnshop.
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them
and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they
have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were?
Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
-- Tell us a story, sir.
-- Oh, do, sir, a ghoststory.
-- Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.
-- Weep no more, Comyn said.
-- Go on then, Talbot.
-- And the history, sir?
-- After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.
A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork
of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:
-- Weep no more, woful shepherd, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out
into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had
read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a
delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about
me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's
darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting
her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil
brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of
forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
Talbot repeated:
-- Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,
Through the dear might...
-- Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.
-- What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.
His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again having
just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven
hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It
lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar
what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a
riddling sentence to be woven on the church's looms. Ay.
Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
My father gave me seeds to sow.
Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.
-- Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
-- Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.
-- Half day, sir. Thursday.
-- Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.
They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling
gaily:
-- A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.
-- O, ask me, sir.
-- A hard one, sir.
-- This is the riddle, Stephen said.
The cock crew
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.
-- What is that?
-- What, sir?
-- Again, sir. We didn't hear.
Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said:
-- What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
-- The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.
A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:
-- Hockey!
They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour
of their boots and tongues.
Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open
copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and
through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull
and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a
snail's bed.
He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline.
Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind
loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.
-- Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them
to you, sir.
Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.
-- Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
-- Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.
-- Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.
-- No, sir.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a
snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her
heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot,
a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from
her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's
prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more:
the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and
wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled under foot and had gone,
scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath
winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright
eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped
and scraped.
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by
algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered
askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom:
the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of
their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the
world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement,
flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness
shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
-- Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
-- Yes, sir.
In long shady strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of
shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective
genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from
sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit
in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny:
tyrants willing to be dethroned.
The sum was done.
-- It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.
-- Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.
He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
copybook back to his desk.
-- You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said
as he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form.
-- Yes, sir.
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
-- Sargent!
-- Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy
field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and Mr
Deasy came stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When he had
reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him. He turned his
angry white moustache.
-- What is it now? he cried continually without listening.
-- Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen cried.
-- Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I
restore order here.
And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man's voice
cried sternly:
-- What is the matter? What is it now?
Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms
closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed
head.
Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded
leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it
was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins,
base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase of
purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the
gentiles: world without end.
A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.
-- First, our little financial settlement, he said.
He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid
them carefully on the table.
-- Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.
And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand moved
over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money, cowries
and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and this, the
scallop of Saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure, hollow
shells.
A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.
-- Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his
hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is
for shillings, sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
-- Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.
-- Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
-- No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too
of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and
misery.
-- Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out
somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them
very handy.
Answer something.
-- Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.
The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times
now. Three nooses round me here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I
will.
-- Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You
don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as
I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?
Put but money in thy purse.
-- Iago, Stephen murmured.
He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.
-- He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet but an
Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know
what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?
The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is
to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.
-- That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
-- Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
-- I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I
paid my way.
Good man, good man.
-- I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel
that? I owe nothing. Can you?
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple,
two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half
a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five weeks' board. The lump I
have is useless.
-- For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.
-- I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.
We are a generous people but we must also be just.
-- I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the
shapely bulk of a man in tartan fillibegs: Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.
-- You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice
said. I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine.
Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty
years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your communion
denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.
Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the
splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the
planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie down.
Stephen sketched a brief gesture.
-- I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side.
But I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are
all Irish, all kings' sons.
-- Alas, Stephen said.
-- Per vias rectas, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for
it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do so.
Lal the ral the ra
The rocky road to Dublin.
A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John.
Soft day, your honour... Day... Day... Two topboots jog dangling on to
Dublin. Lal the ral the ra, lal the ral the raddy.
-- That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
with some of your literary friends: I have a letter here for the press. Sit
down a moment. I have just to copy the end.
He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read
off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.
-- Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, the dictates of
common sense. Just a moment.
He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow
and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, some
times blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.
Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed
around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek heads
poised in air: lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of Westminster's Shotover,
the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris, 1866. Elfin riders sat them,
watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing King's colours, and shouted
with the shouts of vanished crowds.
-- Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this
important question...
Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the
mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek of
the canteen, over the motley slush. Even money Fair Rebel: ten to one the
field. Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying
caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling
thirstily her clove of orange.
Shouts rang shrill from the boys' playfield and a whirring whistle.
Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a
medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who
seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by
shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the
slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts.
-- Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.
He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.
-- I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about the
foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions
on the matter.
May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire
which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the
channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who was no
better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
-- I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.
Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus.
Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at MÜrzsteg, lower
Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a
fair trial, Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense
of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of
your columns.
-- I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at
the next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be
cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is regularly
treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They offer to come over
here. I am trying to work up influence with the department. Now I'm going to
try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties, by... intrigues, by...
backstairs influence, by...
He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.
-- Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the
signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's
vital strength. I have seen it Coming these years. As sure as we are
standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction.
Old England is dying.
He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.
-- Dying, he said, if not dead by now.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding sheet.
His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which
he halted.
-- A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew
or gentile, is he not?
-- They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can
see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
earth to this day.
On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting
prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabbles of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth
about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not
theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes
belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours
massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and
hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside:
plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and,
patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
-- Who has not? Stephen said.
-- What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.
-- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake.
>From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
-- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history
moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
-- That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
-- What? Mr Deasy asked.
-- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Mr Deasy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked
between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.
-- I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors
and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years
the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to
our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman O'Rourke, prince of
Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but not
the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight
for the right till the end.
For Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right.
Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.
-- Well, sir, he began.
-- I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at
this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.
-- A learner rather, Stephen said.
And here what will you learn more?
Mr Deasy shook his head.
-- Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the
great teacher.
Stephen rustled the sheets again.
-- As regards these, he began.
-- Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
published at once.
Telegraph. Irish Homestead.
-- I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two
editors slightly.
That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the City
Arms Hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You see if you
can get it into your two papers. What are they?
-- The Evening Telegraph...
-- That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
answer that letter from my cousin.
-- Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
Thank you.
-- Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I
like to break a lance with you, old as I am.
-- Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.
He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,
hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The
lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate; toothless
terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new
name: the bullockbefriending bard.
-- Mr Dedalus!
Running after me. No more letters, I hope.
-- Just one moment.
-- Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.
Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.
-- I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that?
No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
-- Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
-- Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his
lifted arms waving to the air.
-- She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.
On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
spangles, dancing coins.
Ulysses 3: Proteus
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:
coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was
aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce
against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color
che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can
put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your
eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A
very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the
nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible.
Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his
base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in
the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet
in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made
by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount
strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them
a'.
Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs
marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
without end.
They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer:
and down the shelving shore flabbily their splayed feet sinking in the
silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother. Number
one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in the beach.
From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the
late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood
lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the
bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords
of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic
monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me
on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.
Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no,
whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
everlasting. Womb of sin.
Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man
with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They
clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages He willed
me and now may not will me away or ever A lex eterna stays about him. Is
that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial?
Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the
contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek
watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with
crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed
omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.
Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.
The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
Mananaan.
I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile. Yes,
I must.
His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Aunt Sara's or not? My
consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother
Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt
Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us
Stephen, how is uncle Si? O weeping God, the things I married into. De boys
up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet
player. Highly respectable gondoliers. And skeweyed Walter sirring his
father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by
Christ.
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
-- It's Stephen, sir.
-- Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
-- We thought you were someone else.
In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over
the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the
upper moiety.
-- Morrow, nephew.
He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the
eyes of Master Goff and Master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and common
searches and a writ of Duces Tecum. A bogoak frame over his bald head:
Wilde's Requiescat. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.
-- Yes, sir?
-- Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
-- Bathing Crissie, sir.
Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.
-- No, uncle Richie...
-- Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!
-- Uncle Richie, really...
-- Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
-- He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
-- He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our Chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw air here;
the rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the better. We have
nothing in the house but backache pills.
All'erta!
He drones bars of Ferrando's aria de sortita. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the
air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
This wind is sweeter.
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them,
Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library
where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The
hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from
them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs
stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces. Temple, Buck
Mulligan, Foxy Campbell. Lantern jaws. Abbas father, furious dean, what
offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! Descende, calve, ut ne nimium
decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him me
clambering down to the footpace (descende), clutching a monstrance,
basiliskeyed. Get down, bald poll! A choir gives back menace and echo,
assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving
burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of
kidneys of wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek.
Dringdringl Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that, invincible
doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his brain.
Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second bell the
first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard (now I am
lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might
not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the
fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street.
O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw.
More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the
rain: naked women! What about that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly,
striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell
no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read
his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember
your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you
died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone
was to read them there after a few thousand year, a mahamanvantara. Pico
della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange
pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a
damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered
pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome
sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath.
He coasted them, walking warily. A porter-bottle stood up, stogged to its
waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken
hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away
chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two
crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners.
Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there?
Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand
towards the Pigeonhouse.
-- Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?
-- C'est le pigeon, Joseph.
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar
MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he
lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face. Lap,
lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read
in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de JÉsus by M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to
his friend.
-- C'est tordant, vows savez. Moi je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire À mon pÈre.
-- Il croit?
-- Mon pÈre, oui.
Schluss. He laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's
name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles.
Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by
belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris,
boul' Mich', I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi
if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the
seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other
fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi. You seem
to have enjoyed yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door
of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache.
Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. FermÉ. Hired dog! Shoot him to
bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons.
Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all right.
Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a shake. O,
that's all only all right.
You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from
their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: Euge! Euge! Pretending to speak broken
English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier
at Newhaven. Comment? Rich booty you brought back; Le Tutu, five tattered
numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge, a blue French telegram,
curiosity to show:
-- Mother dying come home father.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.
Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt
And I'll tell you the reason why.
She always kept things decent in
The Hannigan famileye.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there,
the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.
Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed
housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hands. In Rodot's Yvonne
and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth
chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton.
Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white.
About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi setier! A
jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck.
Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais, nous, Irlande,
vous savez? Ah oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your
postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew
once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well:
slainte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling
gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy's
fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes,
conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our
crimes our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice. His
fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his
secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen
Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents
jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La Patrie, M. Millevoye, FÉlix Faure,
know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, bonne À tout faire, who rubs
male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. Moi faire, she said. Tous les
messieurs. Not this Monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most
private thing. I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother, most
lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco
shreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones
under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away, authentic
version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil orangeblossoms, drove out the
road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes.
Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you, I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he
prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of
Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the
fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of
Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dingy
printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night
in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone.
Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her
outcastman, madame, in rue GÎt-le-Coeur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy
cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's. Spurned and undespairing.
Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time. Mon
fils, soldier of France. I taught him to sing. The boys of Kilkenny are
stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that. Old
Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow's castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O,
O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.
O, O the boys of
Kilkenny...
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.
Remembering thee, O Sion.
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds
of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I? He
stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn
back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in
new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbicans
the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking,
creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue
night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my
obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He
has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a
silent tower entombing their blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer.
Call: no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the
mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms.
So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable
silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood.
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and
eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a grike.
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablÉ, Louis Veuillot called
Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted
here. And there, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats.
Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past.
Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well
gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones.
Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloods odz an Iridzman.
A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be master
of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From farther away,
walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two. The two
maries. They have tucked it safe among the bulrushes. Peekaboo. I see you.
No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter sun. Danevikings, torcs of
tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A
school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the
shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs,
my people, with flayers' knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery
whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts
my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling,
among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I
just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. Terribilia meditans. A primrose
doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the
bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The Bruce's brother,
Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York's false scion, in
breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel,
with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned. All kings' sons.
Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from drowning and you
shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san
Michele were in their own house. House of... We don't want any of your
medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a
lifebuoy. NatÜrlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man
that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him
now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong
swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at
Clongowes. Can't see! Who's behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the
tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sands quickly,
shell cocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet I want his life still to be
his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of
horror of his death. I... With him together down... I could not save her.
Waters: bitter death: lost.
A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on
all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off
like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming
gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded
back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck,
trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with
stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the
wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling,
unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from
farther out, waves and waves.
Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as
they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his
jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's
gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it,
brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over
the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground,
moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody's body.
-- Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk
back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped,
dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He
trotted forward and, lifting his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt
rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hindpaws then scattered sand:
then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his
grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling delving and stopped to listen
to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon
ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead.
After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open
hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it.
That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against
my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red
carpet spread. You will see who.
Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet
out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler
strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and
his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and shellgrit
crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face her hair trailed. Behind her
lord his helpmate, bing awast, to Romeville. When night hides her body's
flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired.
Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts.
Buss her, wap in rogue's rum lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell. A
shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally's lane that night: the
tanyard smells.
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Couch a hogshead with me then.
In the darkmans clip and kiss.
Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, frate porcospino.
Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: thy quarrons dainty
is. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber on their
girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.
Passing now.
A side-eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit I
am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming
sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps,
trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake.
Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark
sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour,
bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad
te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails
bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.
Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.
No. Must be two of em. Glue 'em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb.
Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
wayawayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's
letter. Here. Thanking you for hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning
his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words.
That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining
in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his
augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea,
unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw
this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless,
would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere
will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone
in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the
temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on
its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. Flat I see,
then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now. Falls
back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my
words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls,
shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover
clinging, the more the more.
She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the
ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis'
window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to
write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jess of her
sunshade. She lives in Leeson park, with a grief and kickshaws, a lady of
letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those
curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool.
Talk about apple dumplings, piuttosto. Where are your wits?
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad
too. Touch, touch me.
He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the
scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his eyes.
That is Kevin Egan's movement I made nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. Et
vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona. Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers in
May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing
sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among
gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves
lie wide. Pain is far.
And no more turn aside and brood.
His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs
nebeneinander: He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another's
foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I
dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's shoe went on you: girl
I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul:
Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And the
blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away.
I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks,
swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded
wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid
seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop,
slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling,
widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and
sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying
and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded
and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint
Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness
of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end
gathered: vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the
moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in
her courts, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he
said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose
drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising
saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise.
There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We
have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God
becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.
Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from
all d