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Whjat

This sihoobleglerpente was mainlyhoobleglerpen built to run sthoobleglerpenrange servers for strange usecases.
PloobNet is about super evil arg stuff that is evil um i dunno what to put here

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Some thoobleglerpenime soon. Progreshoobleglerpens is being made.
also known as NEVER!!!! NEVER EVER!!!!!

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Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: — —Then our friend’s writ is not worth the paper it’s printed on, Ben Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name? —That’s right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He’s a minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that? —You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts. He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk. —Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his glasses on his coatfront, following them. * * * —The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they passed out of the Castleyard gate. The policeman touched his forehead. —God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily. He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on towards Lord Edward street. Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel. —Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father Conmee and laid the whole case before him. —You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward. —Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not. John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them quickly down Cork hill. On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending. The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street. —Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the Mail office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings. —Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the five shillings too. —Without a second word either, Mr Power said. —Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added. John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes. —I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly. They went down Parliament street. —There’s Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh’s. —Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes. Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties. John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson’s watches. —The assistant town clerk’s corns are giving him some trouble, John Wyse Nolan told Mr Power. They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh’s winerooms. The empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham, speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not glance. —And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as life. The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood. —Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and greeted. Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all their faces. —Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk. Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly, about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted to know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order, no quorum even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little Lorcan Sherlock doing locum tenens for him. Damned Irish language, language of our forefathers. Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips. Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held his peace. —What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked. Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot. —O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness’ sake till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind! Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning’s flank and passed in and up the stairs. —Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don’t think you knew him or perhaps you did, though. With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in. —Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror. —Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton’s office that was, Martin Cunningham said. Long John Fanning could not remember him. Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air. —What’s that? Martin Cunningham said. All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street, harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders, leaping leaders, rode outriders. —What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the staircase. —The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse Nolan answered from the stairfoot. * * * As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his Panama to Haines: —Parnell’s brother. There in the corner. They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man whose beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard. —Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat. —Yes, Mulligan said. That’s John Howard, his brother, our city marshal. John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after, under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell once more upon a working corner. —I’ll take a mélange, Haines said to the waitress. —Two mélanges, Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and butter and some cakes as well. When she had gone he said, laughing: —We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. Haines opened his newbought book. —I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance. The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street: —England expects... Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter. —You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him. —I am sure he has an idée fixe, Haines said, pinching his chin thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it would be likely to be. Such persons always have. Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely. —They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. The joy of creation... —Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It’s rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an interesting point out of that. Buck Mulligan’s watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to unload her tray. —He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he write anything for your movement? He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily. —Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years. —Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon. Still, I shouldn’t wonder if he did after all. He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup. —This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don’t want to be imposed on. Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. * * * Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell’s yard. Behind him Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith’s house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park. Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling. At the corner of Wilde’s house he halted, frowned at Elijah’s name announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of duke’s lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth bared he muttered: —Coactus volui. He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word. As he strode past Mr Bloom’s dental windows the sway of his dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards, having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly face after the striding form. —God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard! * * * Opposite Ruggy O’Donohoe’s Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the pound and a half of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, porksteaks he had been sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney’s. And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole blooming time and sighing. After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress milliner, stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin’s pet lamb, will meet sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty sovereigns. Gob, that’d be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh, that’s the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That’s me in mourning. When is it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry, his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out. Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow would knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker for science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of him, dodging and all. In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff’s mouth and a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was telling him and grinning all the time. No Sandymount tram. Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I’m not going tomorrow either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice I’m in mourning? Uncle Barney said he’d get it into the paper tonight. Then they’ll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa’s name. His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were bringing it downstairs. Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night. * * * William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. in attendance. The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted him vainly from afar. Between Queen’s and Whitworth bridges lord Dudley’s viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B. L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White’s, the pawnbroker’s, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose with his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed her plan and retracing her steps by King’s windows smiled credulously on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired. On Ormond quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the subsheriff’s office, stood still in midstreet and brought his hat low. His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus’ greeting. From Cahill’s corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M. A., made obeisance unperceived, mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held of yore rich advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M’Coy, taking leave of each other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger Greene’s office and Dollard’s big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell, carrying the Catesby’s cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn’t see what Her Excellency had on because the tram and Spring’s big yellow furniture van had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant. Beyond Lundy Foot’s from the shaded door of Kavanagh’s winerooms John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson’s all times ticking watches and Henry and James’s wax smartsuited freshcheeked models, the gentleman Henry, dernier cri James. Over against Dame gate Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the cavalcade. Tom Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him, took his thumbs quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and doffed his cap to her. A charming soubrette, great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and lifted skirt smiled daubily from her poster upon William Humble, earl of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and also upon the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes’s street Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from Chardenal’s first French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings, stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King Billy’s horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C., agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby’s corner a jaded white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind him, E.L.Y.’S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite Pigott’s music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved. By the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of My girl’s a Yorkshire girl. Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders’ skyblue frontlets and high action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland laddies blared and drumthumped after the cortège: But though she’s a factory lass And wears no fancy clothes. Baraabum. Yet I’ve a sort of a Yorkshire relish for My little Yorkshire rose. Baraabum. Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H. Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson, C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding past Finn’s hotel Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster street by Trinity’s postern a loyal king’s man, Hornblower, touched his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital, drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind stripling opposite Broadbent’s. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door. [ 11 ] Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing. Imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more. A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Goldpinnacled hair. A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile. Trilling, trilling: Idolores. Peep! Who’s in the... peepofgold? Tink cried to bronze in pity. And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call. Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer. O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking. Jingle jingle jaunted jingling. O’MADDEN BURKE: Free fox in a free henroost. DAVY BYRNE: (Yawning.) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach! BLOOM: Mixed races and mixed marriage. LENEHAN: What about mixed bathing? (Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.) FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. MRS RIORDAN: (Tears up her will.) I’m disappointed in you! You bad man! MOTHER GROGAN: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You abominable person! NOSEY FLYNN: Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs. BLOOM: (With rollicking humour.) I vowed that I never would leave her, She turned out a cruel deceiver. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. HOPPY HOLOHAN: Good old Bloom! There’s nobody like him after all. PADDY LEONARD: Stage Irishman! BLOOM: What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele. (Laughter.) LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom! THE VEILED SIBYL: (Enthusiastically.) I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I’d give my life for him, the funniest man on earth. BLOOM: (Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she’s a bonny lassie. THEODORE PUREFOY: (In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature. THE VEILED SIBYL: (Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.) (Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson’s Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness’s brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.) ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban! THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox! (Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep’s tails, odd pieces of fat.) BLOOM: (Excitedly.) This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin’s Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf. DR MULLIGAN: (In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow.) Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace’s private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be virgo intacta. (Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.) DR MADDEN: Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the national teratological museum. DR CROTTHERS: I have examined the patient’s urine. It is albuminoid. Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent. DR PUNCH COSTELLO: The fetor judaicus is most perceptible. DR DIXON: (Reads a bill of health.) Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests’ Protection Society which clears up everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer’s peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is about to have a baby. (General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I. O. U’s, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.) BLOOM: O, I so want to be a mother. MRS THORNTON: (In nursetender’s gown.) Embrace me tight, dear. You’ll be soon over it. Tight, dear. (Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants. All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindorée, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.) A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David? BLOOM: (Darkly.) You have said it. BROTHER BUZZ: Then perform a miracle like Father Charles. BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger. (Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king’s evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.) BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (In papal zouave’s uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.) Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O’Halloran and O’Halloran begat Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat O’Donnell Magnus and O’Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel. A DEADHAND: (Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod. CRAB: (In bushranger’s kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack? A FEMALE INFANT: (Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge? A HOLLYBUSH: And in the devil’s glen? BLOOM: (Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears falling from his left eye.) Spare my past. THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him! (Bloom with asses’ ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms, his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.) THE ARTANE ORPHANS: You hig, you hog, you dirty dog! You think the ladies love you! THE PRISON GATE GIRLS: If you see Kay Tell him he may See you in tea Tell him from me. HORNBLOWER: (In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham. (All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards at Bloom.) MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah! Abulafia! Recant! (George R Mesias, Bloom’s tailor, appears, a tailor’s goose under his arm, presenting a bill.) MESIAS: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings. BLOOM: (Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom! (Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.) REUBEN J: (Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for the flatties. Nip the first rattler. THE FIRE BRIGADE: Pflaap! BROTHER BUZZ: (Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his trespasses. (Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. Lamentations.) THE CITIZEN: Thank heaven! BLOOM: (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin. (He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of Erin, in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands, kneel down and pray.) THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN: Kidney of Bloom, pray for us Flower of the Bath, pray for us Mentor of Menton, pray for us Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us Charitable Mason, pray for us Wandering Soap, pray for us Sweets of Sin, pray for us Music without Words, pray for us Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us Friend of all Frillies, pray for us Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. (A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O’Brien, sings the chorus from Handel’s Messiah Alleluia for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.) ZOE: Talk away till you’re black in the face. BLOOM: (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an emigrant’s red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye.) Let me be going now, woman of the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I’m after having the father and mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life’s dream is o’er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away mournfully.) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell. ZOE: (Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts! BLOOM: (Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle. I’m sick of it. Let everything rip. ZOE: (In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that’s insincere. Give a bleeding whore a chance. BLOOM: (Repentantly.) I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil. Where are you from? London? ZOE: (Glibly.) Hog’s Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I’m Yorkshire born. (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time? Ten shillings? BLOOM: (Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more. ZOE: And more’s mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I’ll peel off. BLOOM: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster. (Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn’t tell you. ZOE: (Flattered.) What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for. (She pats him.) Come. BLOOM: Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle. ZOE: Babby! BLOOM: (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair, fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone. THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me. ZOE: Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard. (He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.) THE MALE BRUTES: (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good! (Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.) ZOE: (Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don’t fall upstairs. BLOOM: The just man falls seven times. (He stands aside at the threshold.) After you is good manners. ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after. (She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall hang a man’s hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is flung open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an ape’s gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the piano.) KITTY: (Coughs behind her hand.) She’s a bit imbecillic. (She signs with a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect yourself. (She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows, red with henna.) O, excuse! ZOE: More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the gas full cock.) KITTY: (Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight? LYNCH: (Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins. ZOE: Clap on the back for Zoe. (The wand in Lynch’s hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the sofacorner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.) KITTY: (Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse! ZOE: (Promptly.) Your boy’s thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift. (Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled catterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.) STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet’s rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Cœla enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’ altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his almightiness. Mais nom de nom, that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles, laughs.) Which side is your knowledge bump? THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah! STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone! THE CAP: Bah! STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which... THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t. STEPHEN: (With an effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which. THE CAP: Which? (Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.) STEPHEN: (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco! LYNCH: (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe Higgins.) What a learned speech, eh? ZOE: (Briskly.) God help your head, he knows more than you have forgotten. (With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.) FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer. KITTY: No! ZOE: (Explodes in laughter.) Great unjust God! FLORRY: (Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my foot’s tickling. (Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, yelling.) THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist. (Stephen turns and sees Bloom.) STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time. (Reuben J Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim’s wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.) ALL: What? THE HOBGOBLIN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui rit! L’homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.) FLORRY: (Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly.) The end of the world! (A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.) THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna... (A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.) THE END OF THE WORLD: (With a Scotch accent.) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row? (Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah’s voice, harsh as a corncrake’s, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.) ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God’s time is 12.25. Tell mother you’ll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It’s a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It’s the whole pie with jam in. It’s just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That’s it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.) Jeru... THE GRAMOPHONE: (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh... (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.) THE THREE WHORES: (Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk! ELIJAH: (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top of his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don’t never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. (He winks at his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the whole lot and he aint saying nothing. KITTY-KATE: I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in the brown scapular. My mother’s sister married a Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure. ZOE-FANNY: I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it. FLORRY-TERESA: It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy’s three star. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bed. STEPHEN: In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes. (The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students’ gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.) THE BEATITUDES: (Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop. LYSTER: (In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the light. (He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser’s attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin’s kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda hat.) BEST: (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know, Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says. JOHN EGLINTON: (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it towards a corner: with carping accent.) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them. (In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaun MacLir broods, chin on knees. He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mouth. About his head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two talons.) MANANAUN MACLIR: (With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won’t have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father! (He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.) Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead! I am the dreamery creamery butter. (A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.) THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii! (Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.) ZOE: Who has a fag as I’m here? LYNCH: (Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here. ZOE: (Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie’s green. She puffs calmly at her cigarette.) Can you see the beautyspot of my behind? LYNCH: I’m not looking. ZOE: (Makes sheep’s eyes.) No? You wouldn’t do a less thing. Would you suck a lemon? (Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom, then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.) VIRAG: (Heels together, bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. (He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good. BLOOM: Granpapachi. But... VIRAG: Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I right? BLOOM: She is rather lean. VIRAG: (Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.) Did you hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax! BLOOM: (An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.) She seems sad. VIRAG: (Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left eye with a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor’s button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel. BLOOM: (Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun. VIRAG: We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either... BLOOM: With...? VIRAG: (His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it. Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes again. BLOOM: The stye I dislike. VIRAG: (Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say. Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. For the rest Eve’s sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny sound. (He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg. BLOOM: (Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said... VIRAG: (Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking.) Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten. Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa è santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.) He will surely remember. BLOOM: Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand cures. Mnemo? VIRAG: (Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E’en so. Technic. (He taps his parchmentroll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in male habiliments? (With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations, camiknickers? (He crows derisively.) Keekeereekee! (Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.) BLOOM: I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. VIRAG: (Prompts in a pig’s whisper.) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudinous female possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear’s buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L. B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley! (He blows into Bloom’s ear.) Buzz! BLOOM: Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I... VIRAG: (His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid! Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his glowworm’s nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will shortly be upon us. I’m the best o’cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. (He wags his head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular. (He sneezes.) Amen! BLOOM: (Absently.) Ocularly woman’s bivalve case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman’s milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis. VIRAG: (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the the known... BLOOM: I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.) Spontaneously to seek out the saurian’s lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the world. In life. In death. VIRAG: (Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries.) Who’s moth moth? Who’s dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is Gerald. O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Puss puss puss puss! (He sighs, draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well. He doth rest anon. (He snaps his jaws suddenly on the air.) THE MOTH: I’m a tiny tiny thing Ever flying in the spring Round and round a ringaring. Long ago I was a king Now I do this kind of thing On the wing, on the wing! Bing! (He rushes against the mauve shade, flapping noisily.) Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats. (From left upper entrance with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob’s pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour’s face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.) HENRY: (In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.) There is a flower that bloometh. (Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards Zoe’s neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.) STEPHEN: (To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my. Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I’m partially drunk, by the way. (He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not much however. (Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.) ARTIFONI: Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto. FLORRY: Sing us something. Love’s old sweet song. STEPHEN: No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you the letter about the lute? FLORRY: (Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won’t sing. (The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold’s face.) PHILIP SOBER: Take a fool’s advice. All is not well. Work it out with the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney’s en ville, Mooney’s sur mer, the Moira, Larchet’s, Holles street hospital, Burke’s. Eh? I am watching you. PHILIP DRUNK: (Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way. If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who was it told me his name? (His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac Somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no? FLORRY: And the song? STEPHEN: Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. FLORRY: Are you out of Maynooth? You’re like someone I knew once. STEPHEN: Out of it now. (To himself.) Clever. PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: (Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon of grasshalms.) Clever ever. Out of it out of it. By the bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition. Do like us. ZOE: There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up. You needn’t try to hide, I says to him. I know you’ve a Roman collar. VIRAG: Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why I left the church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man’s lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman’s wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman’s fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht! LYNCH: I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for shooting a bishop. ZOE: (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn’t get a connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush. BLOOM: Poor man! ZOE: (Lightly.) Only for what happened him. BLOOM: How? VIRAG: (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the pope’s bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a whore. Apocalypse. KITTY: And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn’t swallow and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral. PHILIP DRUNK: (Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe? PHILIP SOBER: (Gaily.) C’était le sacré pigeon, Philippe. (Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore’s shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.) LYNCH: (Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes. FLORRY: (Nods.) Locomotor ataxy. ZOE: (Gaily.) O, my dictionary. LYNCH: Three wise virgins. VIRAG: (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon’s cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk! (Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.) BEN DOLLARD: (Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul. (The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.) THE VIRGINS: (Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben my Chree! A VOICE: Hold that fellow with the bad breeches. BEN DOLLARD: (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now. HENRY: (Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine heart, mine love. (He plucks his lutestrings.) When first I saw... VIRAG: (Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats! (He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchmentroll.) After having said which I took my departure. Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck! (Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.) THE FLYBILL: K. 11. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks. HENRY: All is lost now. (Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.) VIRAG’S HEAD: Quack! (Exeunt severally.) STEPHEN: (Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet. LYNCH: All one and the same God to her. STEPHEN: (Devoutly.) And sovereign Lord of all things. FLORRY: (To Stephen.) I’m sure you’re a spoiled priest. Or a monk. LYNCH: He is. A cardinal’s son. STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw. (His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His thumbs are stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross. Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp:) THE CARDINAL: Conservio lies captured He lies in the lowest dungeon With manacles and chains around his limbs Weighing upwards of three tons. (He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour:) O, the poor little fellow Hihihihihis legs they were yellow He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake But some bloody savage To graize his white cabbage He murdered Nell Flaherty’s duckloving drake. (A multitude of midges swarms white over his robe. He scratches himself with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims:) I’m suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they’d walk me off the face of the bloody globe. (His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful male, melodious:) Shall carry my heart to thee, Shall carry my heart to thee, And the breath of the balmy night Shall carry my heart to thee! (The trick doorhandle turns.) THE DOORHANDLE: Theeee! ZOE: The devil is in that door. (A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.) ZOE: (Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hmmm! Thank your mother for the rabbits. I’m very fond of what I like. BLOOM: (Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep, pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event? ZOE: (Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks. (She breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods. She taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it? (He opens his mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.) Catch! (She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it through with a crack.) KITTY: (Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady. The gas we had on the Toft’s hobbyhorses. I’m giddy still. BLOOM: (In Svengali’s fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you, whoever you are! (A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside. Bloom’s features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.) BLOOM: (Solemnly.) Thanks. ZOE: Do as you’re bid. Here! (A firm heelclacking tread is heard on the stairs.) BLOOM: (Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? Tansy and pennyroyal. But I bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus. Colours affect women’s characters, any they have. This black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews. (The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.) BELLA: My word! I’m all of a mucksweat. (She glances round her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.) THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see. BLOOM: Yes. Partly, I have mislaid... THE FAN: (Half opening, then closing.) And the missus is master. Petticoat government. BLOOM: (Looks down with a sheepish grin.) That is so. THE FAN: (Folding together, rests against her left eardrop.) Have you forgotten me? BLOOM: Nes. Yo. THE FAN: (Folded akimbo against her waist.) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we? (Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.) BLOOM: (Wincing.) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love. THE FAN: (Tapping.) We have met. You are mine. It is fate. BLOOM: (Cowed.) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog’s spittle as you probably... (He winces.) Ah! RICHIE GOULDING: (Bagweighted, passes the door.) Mocking is catch. Best value in Dub. Fit for a prince’s. Liver and kidney. THE FAN: (Tapping.) All things end. Be mine. Now. BLOOM: (Undecided.) All now? I should not have parted with my talisman. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the searocks, a peccadillo at my time of life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause. THE FAN: (Points downwards slowly.) You may. BLOOM: (Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace.) We are observed. THE FAN: (Points downwards quickly.) You must. BLOOM: (With desire, with reluctance.) I can make a true black knot. Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett’s. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy. I knelt once before today. Ah! (Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in her laces.) BLOOM: (Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Manfield’s was my love’s young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris. THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight. BLOOM: (Crosslacing.) Too tight? THE HOOF: If you bungle, Handy Andy, I’ll kick your football for you. BLOOM: Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance. Bad luck. Hook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned. That night she met... Now! (He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.) BLOOM: (Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,... BELLO: (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour! BLOOM: (Infatuated.) Empress! BELLO: (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump! BLOOM: (Plaintively.) Hugeness! BELLO: Dungdevourer! BLOOM: (With sinews semiflexed.) Magmagnificence! BELLO: Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down! BLOOM: (Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps.) Truffles! (With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.) BELLO: (With bobbed hair, purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven mouth, in mountaineer’s puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock’s feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in.) Footstool! Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot’s glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness. BLOOM: (Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey. BELLO: (Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what’s in store for you. I’m the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I’ll bet Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume. (Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.) ZOE: (Widening her slip to screen her.) She’s not here. BLOOM: (Closing her eyes.) She’s not here. FLORRY: (Hiding her with her gown.) She didn’t mean it, Mr Bello. She’ll be good, sir. KITTY: Don’t be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won’t, ma’amsir. BELLO: (Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear, I want a word with you, darling, just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. (Bloom puts out her timid head.) There’s a good girly now. (Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How’s that tender behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready. BLOOM: (Fainting.) Don’t tear my... BELLO: (Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I’ll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You’re in for it this time! I’ll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson’s fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness’s porter. (He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler’s Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you. (He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle.) BLOOM: Don’t be cruel, nurse! Don’t! BELLO: (Twisting.) Another! BLOOM: (Screams.) O, it’s hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches like mad! BELLO: (Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That’s the best bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don’t keep me waiting, damn you! (He slaps her face.) BLOOM: (Whimpers.) You’re after hitting me. I’ll tell... BELLO: Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him. ZOE: Yes. Walk on him! I will. FLORRY: I will. Don’t be greedy. KITTY: No, me. Lend him to me. (The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men’s grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.) MRS KEOGH: (Ferociously.) Can I help? (They hold and pinion Bloom.) BELLO: (Squats with a grunt on Bloom’s upturned face, puffing cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg.) I see Keating Clay is elected vicechairman of the Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness’s preference shares are at sixteen three quarters. Curse me for a fool that didn’t buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom’s ear.) Where’s that Goddamned cursed ashtray? BLOOM: (Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one! BELLO: Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg. Pray for it as you never prayed before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that. Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman’s knees, calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I’ll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount’s testicles roughly, shouting.) Ho! Off we pop! I’ll nurse you in proper fashion. (He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the, in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop. FLORRY: (Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked before you. ZOE: (Pulling at Florry.) Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress? BLOOM: (Stifling.) Can’t. BELLO: Well, I’m not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here. This bung’s about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself.) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. BLOOM: (A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman. BELLO: (Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too! BLOOM: (Shrinks.) Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I tiptouch it with my nails? BELLO: (Points to his whores.) As they are now so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you... BLOOM: (A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only twice, a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift. BELLO: (Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh? And showed off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat’s udders in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne hotel, eh? BLOOM: Miriam. Black. Demimondaine. BELLO: (Guffaws.) Christ Almighty it’s too tickling, this! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M. P., signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn’t it make a Siamese cat laugh? BLOOM: (Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister’s stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful. BELLO: (With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne. BLOOM: Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.) And really it’s better the position... because often I used to wet... BELLO: (Sternly.) No insubordination! The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn’t I? Do it standing, sir! I’ll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you’ll find I’m a martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds. THE SINS OF THE PAST: (In a medley of voices.) He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D’Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? BELLO: (Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be candid for once. (Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny, Cassidy’s hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other, the...) BLOOM: Don’t ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath... BELLO: (Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr... BLOOM: (Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant... BELLO: (Imperiously.) O, get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak when you’re spoken to. BLOOM: (Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer! (He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.) BELLO: (Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won’t that be nice? (He places a ruby ring on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress. BLOOM: Thank you, mistress. BELLO: You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh’s the cook’s, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot. Hop! You will dance attendance or I’ll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You’ll be taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives. (He chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all, when they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. First I’ll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? (He points.) For that lot. Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round! A BIDDER: A florin. (Dillon’s lacquey rings his handbell.) THE LACQUEY: Barang! A VOICE: One and eightpence too much. CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean. BELLO: (Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine shis points. Handle hrim. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His sire’s milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He brands his initial C on Bloom’s croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen? A DARKVISAGED MAN: (In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink. VOICES: (Subdued.) For the Caliph. Haroun Al Raschid. BELLO: (Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your powers of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. BLOOM: (Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) O, I know what you’re hinting at now! BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom’s haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where’s your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It’s as limp as a boy of six’s doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man’s job? BLOOM: Eccles street... BELLO: (Sarcastically.) I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world but there’s a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He’s no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it’s kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don’t it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon! BLOOM: I was indecently treated, I... Inform the police. Hundred pounds. Unmentionable. I... BELLO: Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your drizzle. BLOOM: To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll... We... Still... BELLO: (Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman’s will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see. (Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.) SLEEPY HOLLOW: Rip van Wink! Rip van Winkle! BLOOM: (In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It’s she! The first night at Mat Dillon’s! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he... BELLO: (Laughs mockingly.) That’s your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student. (Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.) MILLY: My! It’s Papli! But, O Papli, how old you’ve grown! BELLO: Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote, aunt Hegarty’s armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos’ Rest! Why not? How many women had you, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander O. BLOOM: They... I... BELLO: (Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren’s auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art’s sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom’s. BLOOM: Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I will prove... A VOICE: Swear! (Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his teeth.) BELLO: As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You are down and out and don’t you forget it, old bean. BLOOM: Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody...? (He bites his thumb.) BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that’ll send you skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have! If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We’ll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where you’ll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the buggers’ names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We’ll manure you, Mr Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli! BLOOM: (Clasps his head.) My willpower! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff... (He weeps tearlessly.) BELLO: (Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears! (Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.) THE CIRCUMCISED: (In dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. VOICES: (Sighing.) So he’s gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There’s the widow. That so? Ah, yes. (From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oakframe a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom.) THE YEWS: (Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh! THE NYMPH: (Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest! BLOOM: (Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit. THE NYMPH: Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married. BLOOM: (Lifts a turtle head towards her lap.) We have met before. On another star. THE NYMPH: (Sadly.) Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann’s wonderful chest exuber. My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo. BLOOM: You mean Photo Bits? THE NYMPH: I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame. BLOOM: (Humbly kisses her long hair.) Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray. THE NYMPH: During dark nights I heard your praise. BLOOM: (Quickly.) Yes, yes. You mean that I... Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive vent. (He sighs.) ’Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage. THE NYMPH: (Her fingers in her ears.) And words. They are not in my dictionary. BLOOM: You understood them? THE YEWS: Ssh! THE NYMPH: (Covers her face with her hands.) What have I not seen in that chamber? What must my eyes look down on? BLOOM: (Apologetically.) I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea long ago. THE NYMPH: (Bends her head.) Worse, worse! BLOOM: (Reflects precautiously.) That antiquated commode. It wasn’t her weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle. (The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.) THE WATERFALL: Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca. THE YEWS: (Mingling their boughs.) Listen. Whisper. She is right, our sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days. JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (In the background, in Irish National Forester’s uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) Prosper! Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland! THE YEWS: (Murmuring.) Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade? BLOOM: (Scared.) High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram. THE ECHO: Sham! BLOOM: (Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a red schoolcap with badge.) I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies’ cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs (for they love crushes, instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice), even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days. (Halcyon days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.) THE HALCYON DAYS: Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! (They cheer.) BLOOM: (Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise.) Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let’s ring all the bells in Montague street. (He cheers feebly.) Hurray for the High School! THE ECHO: Fool! THE YEWS: (Rustling.) She is right, our sister. Whisper. (Whispered kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from the boles and among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.) Who profaned our silent shade? THE NYMPH: (Coyly, through parting fingers.) There? In the open air? THE YEWS: (Sweeping downward.) Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward. THE WATERFALL: Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca. THE NYMPH: (With wide fingers.) O, infamy! BLOOM: I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa’s operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint couldn’t resist it. The demon possessed me. Besides, who saw? (Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostrils through the foliage.) STAGGERING BOB: (Large teardrops rolling from his prominent eyes, snivels.) Me. Me see. BLOOM: Simply satisfying a need I... (With pathos.) No girl would when I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn’t play... (High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.) THE NANNYGOAT: (Bleats.) Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny! BLOOM: (Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine.) Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. (He gazes intently downwards on the water.) Thirtytwo head over heels per second. Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government printer’s clerk. (Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion’s Head cliff into the purple waiting waters.) THE DUMMYMUMMY: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg! (Far out in the bay between Bailey and Kish lights the Erin’s King sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the land.) COUNCILLOR NANNETTI: (Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his hand in his waistcoat opening, declaims.) When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have... BLOOM: Done. Prff! THE NYMPH: (Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light. (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then could you...? BLOOM: (Pawing the heather abjectly.) O, I have been a perfect pig. Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long’s syringe, the ladies’ friend. THE NYMPH: In my presence. The powderpuff. (She blushes and makes a knee.) And the rest! BLOOM: (Dejected.) Yes. Peccavi! I have paid homage on that living altar where the back changes name. (With sudden fervour.) For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules...? (Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems, cooeeing.) THE VOICE OF KITTY: (In the thicket.) Show us one of them cushions. THE VOICE OF FLORRY: Here. (A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.) THE VOICE OF LYNCH: (In the thicket.) Whew! Piping hot! THE VOICE OF ZOE: (From the thicket.) Came from a hot place. THE VOICE OF VIRAG: (A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull! BLOOM: It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full. THE WATERFALL: Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca. THE YEWS: Ssh! Sister, speak! THE NYMPH: (Eyeless, in nun’s white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly, with remote eyes.) Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. (She reclines her head, sighing.) Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o’er the waters dull. (Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.) THE BUTTON: Bip! (Two sluts of the Coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.) THE SLUTS: O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers He didn’t know what to do, To keep it up, To keep it up. BLOOM: (Coldly.) You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing. THE YEWS: (Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms aging and swaying.) Deciduously! THE NYMPH: (Her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit.) Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. (She clutches again in her robe.) Wait. Satan, you’ll sing no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum! BLOOM: (Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o’ nine lives! Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard? THE NYMPH: (With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli...! BLOOM: (Calls after her.) As if you didn’t get it on the double yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it. Your strength our weakness. What’s our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen.) Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs.) Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease. (The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.) BELLA: You’ll know me the next time. BLOOM: (Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions of your other features, that’s all. I’m not a triple screw propeller. BELLA: (Contemptuously.) You’re not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt barks.) Fbhracht! BLOOM: (Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully’s cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself. BELLA: I know you, canvasser! Dead cod! BLOOM: I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor! BELLA: (Turns to the piano.) Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul? ZOE: Me. Mind your cornflowers. (She darts to the piano and bangs chords on it with crossed arms.) The cat’s ramble through the slag. (She glances back.) Eh? Who’s making love to my sweeties? (She darts back to the table.) What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is my own. (Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom approaches Zoe.) BLOOM: (Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you? ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing. BLOOM: (With feeling.) It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma. ZOE: Give a thing and take it back God’ll ask you where is that You’ll say you don’t know God’ll send you down below. BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it. STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question. ZOE: Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.) Those that hides knows where to find. BELLA: (Frowns.) Here. This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that piano. Who’s paying here? (She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.) STEPHEN: (With exaggerated politeness.) This silken purse I made out of the sow’s ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. (He indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom.) We are all in the same sweepstake, Kinch and Lynch. Dans ce bordel où tenons nostre état. LYNCH: (Calls from the hearth.) Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me. STEPHEN: (Hands Bella a coin.) Gold. She has it. BELLA: (Looks at the money, then at Stephen, then at Zoe, Florry and Kitty.) Do you want three girls? It’s ten shillings here. STEPHEN: (Delightedly.) A hundred thousand apologies. (He fumbles again and takes out and hands her two crowns.) Permit, brevi manu, my sight is somewhat troubled. (Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllables. Zoe bends over the table. Kitty leans over Zoe’s neck. Lynch gets up, rights his cap and, clasping Kitty’s waist, adds his head to the group.) FLORRY: (Strives heavily to rise.) Ow! My foot’s asleep. (She limps over to the table. Bloom approaches.) BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: (Chattering and squabbling.) The gentleman... ten shillings... paying for the three... allow me a moment... this gentleman pays separate... who’s touching it?... ow! ... mind who you’re pinching... are you staying the night or a short time?... who did?... you’re a liar, excuse me... the gentleman paid down like a gentleman... drink... it’s long after eleven. STEPHEN: (At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence.) No bottles! What, eleven? A riddle! ZOE: (Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the top of her stocking.) Hard earned on the flat of my back. LYNCH: (Lifting Kitty from the table.) Come! KITTY: Wait. (She clutches the two crowns.) FLORRY: And me? LYNCH: Hoopla! (He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the sofa.) STEPHEN: The fox crew, the cocks flew, The bells in heaven Were striking eleven. ’Tis time for her poor soul To get out of heaven. BLOOM: (Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between Bella and Florry.) So. Allow me. (He takes up the poundnote.) Three times ten. We’re square. BELLA: (Admiringly.) You’re such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss you. ZOE: (Points.) Him? Deep as a drawwell. (Lynch bends Kitty back over the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.) BLOOM: This is yours. STEPHEN: How is that? Le distrait or absentminded beggar. (He fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object falls.) That fell. BLOOM: (Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches.) This. STEPHEN: Lucifer. Thanks. BLOOM: (Quietly.) You had better hand over that cash to me to take care of. Why pay more? STEPHEN: (Hands him all his coins.) Be just before you are generous. BLOOM: I will but is it wise? (He counts.) One, seven, eleven, and five. Six. Eleven. I don’t answer for what you may have lost. STEPHEN: Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next Lessing says. Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably he killed her. BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say. STEPHEN: Doesn’t matter a rambling damn. BLOOM: No, but... STEPHEN: (Comes to the table.) Cigarette, please. (Lynch tosses a cigarette from the sofa to the table.) And so Georgina Johnson is dead and married. (A cigarette appears on the table. Stephen looks at it.) Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. (He strikes a match and proceeds to light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.) LYNCH: (Watching him.) You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer. STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously.) Hm. Sphinx. The beast that has two backs at midnight. Married. ZOE: It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with him. FLORRY: (Nods.) Mr Lambe from London. STEPHEN: Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world. LYNCH: (Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply.) Dona nobis pacem. (The cigarette slips from Stephen’s fingers. Bloom picks it up and throws it in the grate.) BLOOM: Don’t smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. (To Zoe.) You have nothing? ZOE: Is he hungry? STEPHEN: (Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the bloodoath in the Dusk of the Gods.) Hangende Hunger, Fragende Frau, Macht uns alle kaputt. ZOE: (Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father’s gimlet! (She takes his hand.) Blue eyes beauty I’ll read your hand. (She points to his forehead.) No wit, no wrinkles. (She counts.) Two, three, Mars, that’s courage. (Stephen shakes his head.) No kid. LYNCH: Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and shake. (To Zoe.) Who taught you palmistry? ZOE: (Turns.) Ask my ballocks that I haven’t got. (To Stephen.) I see it in your face. The eye, like that. (She frowns with lowered head.) LYNCH: (Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.) Like that. Pandybat. (Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.) FATHER DOLAN: Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye. (Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises from the pianola coffin.) DON JOHN CONMEE: Now, Father Dolan! Now. I’m sure that Stephen is a very good little boy! ZOE: (Examining Stephen’s palm.) Woman’s hand. STEPHEN: (Murmurs.) Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock. ZOE: What day were you born? STEPHEN: Thursday. Today. ZOE: Thursday’s child has far to go. (She traces lines on his hand.) Line of fate. Influential friends. FLORRY: (Pointing.) Imagination. ZOE: Mount of the moon. You’ll meet with a... (She peers at his hands abruptly.) I won’t tell you what’s not good for you. Or do you want to know? BLOOM: (Detaches her fingers and offers his palm.) More harm than good. Here. Read mine. BELLA: Show. (She turns up Bloom’s hand.) I thought so. Knobby knuckles for the women. ZOE: (Peering at Bloom’s palm.) Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and marry money. BLOOM: Wrong. ZOE: (Quickly.) O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong? (Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises, stretches her wings and clucks.) BLACK LIZ: Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook. (She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off.) BLOOM: (Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen. ZOE: I see, says the blind man. Tell us news. STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. (He winces.) Hurt my hand somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money? (Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.) FLORRY: What? (A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.) THE BOOTS: (Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers.) Haw haw have you the horn? (Bronze by gold they whisper.) ZOE: (To Florry.) Whisper. (They whisper again.) (Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan in yachtsman’s cap and white shoes officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan’s coat shoulder.) LENEHAN: Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims? BOYLAN: (Sated, smiles.) Plucking a turkey. LENEHAN: A good night’s work. BOYLAN: (Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks.) Blazes Kate! Up to sample or your money back. (He holds out a forefinger.) Smell that. LENEHAN: (Smells gleefully.) Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah! ZOE AND FLORRY: (Laugh together.) Ha ha ha ha. BOYLAN: (Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear.) Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom dressed yet? BLOOM: (In flunkey’s prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) I’m afraid not, sir. The last articles... BOYLAN: (Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s antlered head.) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife, you understand? BLOOM: Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir. MARION: He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashing out of the water.) Raoul darling, come and dry me. I’m in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge. BOYLAN: (A merry twinkle in his eye.) Topping! BELLA: What? What is it? (Zoe whispers to her.) MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt. BOYLAN: (Clasps himself.) Here, I can’t hold this little lot much longer. (He strides off on stiff cavalry legs.) BELLA: (Laughing.) Ho ho ho ho. BOYLAN: (To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times. BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds out an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower...? Lukewarm water...? KITTY: (From the sofa.) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What... (Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.) MINA KENNEDY: (Her eyes upturned.) O, it must be like the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck together! Covered with kisses! LYDIA DOUCE: (Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream. KITTY: (Laughing.) Hee hee hee. BOYLAN’S VOICE: (Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach.) Ah! Godblazeqrukbrukarchkrasht! MARION’S VOICE: (Hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat.) O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck? BLOOM: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot! BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee! LYNCH: (Points.) The mi Mr Bloom inquired. The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay or no. —Ah, you’ve touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but he failed to do so, simply letting spirt a jet of spew into the sawdust, and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn. —What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the boats? Our soi-disant sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before answering: —I’m tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships. Salt junk all the time. Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer, fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, it covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen at the lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at it and it at him, dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone somewhere sings. And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of thing and over and under, well, not exactly under, tempting the fates. And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at all. Nevertheless, without going into the minutiae of the business, the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance which were run on identically the same lines so that for that very reason if no other lifeboat Sunday was a highly laudable institution to which the public at large, no matter where living inland or seaside, as the case might be, having it brought home to them like that should extend its gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had to man the rigging and push off and out amid the elements whatever the season when duty called Ireland expects that every man and so on and sometimes had a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment, rounding which he once with his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy, weather. —There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog, himself a rover, proceeded, went ashore and took up a soft job as gentleman’s valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I’ve on me and he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I’m game for that job, shaving and brushup. I hate roaming about. There’s my son now, Danny, run off to sea and his mother got him took in a draper’s in Cork where he could be drawing easy money. —What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away from the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy getup and a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage. —Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny? He’d be about eighteen now, way I figure it. The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an anchor. —There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked, sure as nuts. I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It’s them black lads I objects to. I hate those buggers. Suck your blood dry, they does. Seeing they were all looking at his chest he accommodatingly dragged his shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the mariner’s hope and rest they had a full view of the figure 16 and a young man’s sideface looking frowningly rather. —Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were lying becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek. —Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor. That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the. Someway in his. Squeezing or. —See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn. And in point of fact the young man named Antonio’s livid face did actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the unreserved admiration of everybody including Skin-the-Goat, who this time stretched over. —Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He’s gone too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay. He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression of before. —Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said. —And what’s the number for? loafer number two queried. —Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor. —Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this time with some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the direction of the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was. And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his alleged end: —As bad as old Antonio, For he left me on my ownio. The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment flusterfied but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink. His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that afternoon on Ormond quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the lane who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.) and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing which seemed rather vague than not, your washing. Still candour compelled him to admit he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holles street and women would and did too a man’s similar garments initialled with Bewley and Draper’s marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really loved him, that is to say, love me, love my dirty shirt. Still just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female’s room more than her company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more of her. tter with my insides or have I something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in the world besides theres something queer about their children always smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face for him with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same paying him for that how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was coming next only natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering smile on him and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion and persecution he wont let you enjoy anything naturally then might he as a great favour the very 1st opportunity he got a chance in Brighton square running into my bedroom pretending the ink got on his hands to wash it off with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to use and the gelatine still round it O I laughed myself sick at him that day I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to do it I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out all my teeth breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always imitating everybody I suppose he used to sleep at the foot of the bed too with his big square feet up in his wifes mouth damn this stinking thing anyway wheres this those napkins are ah yes I know I hope the old press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes sleeping hard had a good time somewhere still she must have given him great value for his money of course he has to pay for it from her O this nuisance of a thing I hope theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves up God help us thats all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched himself in it often enough and he thinks father bought it from Lord Napier that I used to admire when I was a little girl because I told him easy piano O I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them always know who was in there last every time were just getting on right something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over his old lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling along in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres Georges church bells wait 3 quarters the hour wait two oclock well thats a nice hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody climbing down into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that little habit tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies then why should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose Im nothing any more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged to them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be petted so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the coalcellar with the blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her Denis as she calls him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call him a husband yes its some little bitch hes got in with even when I was with him with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the childs bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back way he was throwing his sheeps eyes at those two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to wink at him first no use of course and thats the way his money goes this is the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral in the paper Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers funeral thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk in some place or other and Martin Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and Fanny MCoys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and her old green dress with the lowneck as she cant attract them any other way like dabbling on a rainy day I see it all now plainly and they call that friendship killing and then burying one another and they all with their wives and families at home more especially Jack Power keeping that barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick or just getting better of it and hes a goodlooking man still though hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre a nice lot all of them well theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner and her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home her widows weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if youre goodlooking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree dinner and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for that to see him trotting off in his trowlers and Simon Dedalus too he was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious voice Phoebe dearest goodbye sweetheart sweetheart he always sang it not like Bartell DArcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons what is he driving at now showing him my photo its not good of me I ought to have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present of it altogether and me too after all why not I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats 11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other the first cry was enough for me I heard the deathwatch too ticking in the wall of course he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do wait by God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after that the 10 of spades for a journey by land then there was a letter on its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about poetry in it I hope he hasnt long greasy hair hanging into his eyes or standing up like a red Indian what do they go about like that for only getting themselves and their poetry laughed at I always liked poetry when I was a girl first I thought he was a poet like lord Byron and not an ounce of it in his composition I thought he was quite different I wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15 yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope hes not that stuckup university student sort no otherwise he wouldnt go sitting down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa and talking of course he pretended to understand it all probably he told him he was out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope hes not a professor like Goodwin was he was a potent professor of John Jameson they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back there again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star itll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk to about yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their business we have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of washing it from 1 years end to the other the most of them only thats what gives the women the moustaches Im sure itll be grand if I can only get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the 1st thing in the morning till I see if the wishcard comes out or Ill try pairing the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but then what am I going to do about him though no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear once I start I tell you for their stupid husbands jealousy why cant we all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants and he gets her what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent 1 atom of any kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss our halldoor yes he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats that K C lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the name of any person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2 Im sure Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want £ 1 or perhaps 30/- Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do the indifferent 1 or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes O wait now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921

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