—Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don’t see anything.
—What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.
His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having
just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these
craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and
on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s. A long look
from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the
church’s looms. Ay.
Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
My father gave me seeds to sow.
Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.
—Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
—Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.
—Half day, sir. Thursday.
—Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.
They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all
gabbling gaily:
—A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.
—O, ask me, sir.
—A hard one, sir.
—This is the riddle, Stephen said:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
’Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.
What is that?
—What, sir?
—Again, sir. We didn’t hear.
Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said:
—What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered:
—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.
A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:
—Hockey!
They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and
clamour of their boots and tongues.
Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open
copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness
and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his
cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent
and damp as a snail’s bed.
He held out his copybook. The word _Sums_ was written on the headline.
Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with
blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.
—Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them
to you, sir.
Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.
—Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
—Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.
—Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.
—No, sir.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a
snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in
her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him
underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery
blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in
life? His mother’s prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal
bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in
the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from
being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor
soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red
reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the
earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by
algebra that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent
peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the
lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of
their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the
world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not
comprehend.
—Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
—Yes, sir.
In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint
hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. _Amor matris:_ subjective
and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had
fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
The sum was done.
—It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.
—Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.
He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
copybook back to his bench.
—You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said
as he followed towards the door the boy’s graceless form.
—Yes, sir.
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
—Sargent!
—Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy
field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and
Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet.
When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to
him. He turned his angry white moustache.
—What is it now? he cried continually without listening.
—Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.
—Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore
order here.
And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man’s voice
cried sternly:
—What is the matter? What is it now?
Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms
closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his
illdyed head.
Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded
leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here.
As it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart
coins, base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their
spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached
to all the gentiles: world without end.
A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.
—First, our little financial settlement, he said.
He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and
laid them carefully on the table.
—Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.
And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen’s embarrassed hand moved
over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money
cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir’s turban, and
this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim’s hoard, dead
treasure, hollow shells.
A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.
—Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.
These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is
for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
—Three twelve, he said. I think you’ll find that’s right.
—Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
—No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too
of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed
and misery.
—Don’t carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You’ll pull it out somewhere
and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You’ll find them very
handy.
Answer something.
—Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.
The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times
now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant
if I will.
—Because you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t
know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as
I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare
say? _Put but money in thy purse._
—Iago, Stephen murmured.
He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man’s stare.
—He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but
an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you
know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s
mouth?
The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems
history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.
—That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
—Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
—I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid
my way._
Good man, good man.
_—I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel
that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.
Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob
Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five
weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless.
—For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.
—I knew you couldn’t, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.
We are a generous people but we must also be just.
—I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the
shapely bulk of a man in tartan fillibegs: Albert Edward, prince of
Wales.
—You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.
I saw three generations since O’Connell’s time. I remember the famine
in ’46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the
union twenty years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your
communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.
Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the
splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the
planters’ covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie
down.
Stephen sketched a brief gesture.
—I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But
I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are
all Irish, all kings’ sons.
—Alas, Stephen said.
—_Per vias rectas_, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for
it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to
do so.
Lal the ral the ra
The rocky road to Dublin.
A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John!
Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling on
to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.
—That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.
Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.
He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read
off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.
—Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of
common sense._ Just a moment.
He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow
and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly,
sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.
Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed
around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek
heads poised in air: lord Hastings’ _Repulse_, the duke of
Westminster’s _Shotover_, the duke of Beaufort’s _Ceylon_, _prix de
Paris_, 1866. Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their
speeds, backing king’s colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished
crowds.
—Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. _But prompt ventilation of this
allimportant question..._
Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the
mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek
of the canteen, over the motley slush. Even money _Fair Rebel._ Ten to
one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers we hurried by after the hoofs,
the vying caps and jackets and past the meatfaced woman, a butcher’s
dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.
Shouts rang shrill from the boys’ playfield and a whirring whistle.
Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a
medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother’s darling
who seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock
by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of
the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.
—Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.
He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.
—I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the
foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two
opinions on the matter.
May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of _laissez faire_
which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the
channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who
was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
—I don’t mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.
Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch’s preparation. Serum and virus.
Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor’s horses at Mürzsteg,
lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous
offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In
every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for
the hospitality of your columns.
—I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the
next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be
cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is
regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They
offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the
department. Now I’m going to try publicity. I am surrounded by
difficulties, by... intrigues by... backstairs influence by...
He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.
—Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are
the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the
nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as
we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of
destruction. Old England is dying.
He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.
—Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s windingsheet.
His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which
he halted.
—A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
gentile, is he not?
—They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see
the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
earth to this day.
On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting
prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,
uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit
silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures.
Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and
unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their
zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would
scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on.
Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the
dishonours of their flesh.
—Who has not? Stephen said.
—What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from
me.
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked
between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.
—I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and
many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten
years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the
strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman,
O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many
errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the
end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.
For Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right.
Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.
—Well, sir, he began.
—I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at
this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am
wrong.
—A learner rather, Stephen said.
And here what will you learn more?
Mr Deasy shook his head.
—Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
teacher.
Stephen rustled the sheets again.
—As regards these, he began.
—Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
published at once.
_ Telegraph. Irish Homestead._
—I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two
editors slightly.
—That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders’ association today at the
City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You
see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?
_—The Evening Telegraph..._
—That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
answer that letter from my cousin.
—Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
Thank you.
—Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I
like to break a lance with you, old as I am.
—Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.
He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,
hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The
lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:
toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will
dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.
—Mr Dedalus!
Running after me. No more letters, I hope.
—Just one moment.
—Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.
Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.
—I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know
that? No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,
his lifted arms waving to the air.
—She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.
On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
spangles, dancing coins.
[ 3 ]
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn
and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,
rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By
knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a
millionaire, _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in.
Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through
it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a
time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.
Five, six: the _nacheinander_. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable
modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a
cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the _nebeneinander_
ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at
my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends
of his legs, _nebeneinander_. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los
Demiurgos_. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush,
crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.
Won’t you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs
marching. No, agallop: _deline the mare_.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. _Basta!_ I will see if I
can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
without end.
They came down the steps from Leahy’s terrace prudently,
_Frauenzimmer_: and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed
feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our
mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife’s bag, the other’s
gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs
Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of
Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life.
Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a
trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back,
strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you
be as gods? Gaze in your _omphalos_. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to
Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.
Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no,
whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
everlasting. Womb of sin.
Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man
with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before the ages
He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A _lex eterna_ stays
about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are
consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring
his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred
heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: _euthanasia_.
With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of
a widowed see, with upstiffed _omophorion_, with clotted hinderparts.
Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.
The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
Mananaan.
I mustn’t forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.
Yes, I must.
His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not? My
consubstantial father’s voice. Did you see anything of your artist
brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he’s not down in Strasburg terrace
with his aunt Sally? Couldn’t he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And
and and and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the
things I married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little
costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable
gondoliers! And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes,
sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
—It’s Stephen, sir.
—Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
—We thought you were someone else.
In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over
the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed
the upper moiety.
—Morrow, nephew.
He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the
eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his
bald head: Wilde’s _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle
brings Walter back.
—Yes, sir?
—Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
—Bathing Crissie, sir.
Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love.
—No, uncle Richie...
—Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!
—Uncle Richie, really...
—Sit down or by the law Harry I’ll knock you down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
—He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
—He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the
better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.
_All’erta!_
He drones bars of Ferrando’s _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the
air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
This wind is sweeter.
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s
library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For
whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his
kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the
moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father,
furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff! _Descende,
calve, ut ne nimium decalveris_. A garland of grey hair on his
comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace
(_descende!_), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down,
baldpoll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the
altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their
albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of
wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled
his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his
second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,
rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang
in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you
might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue
that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from
the wet street. _O si, certo!_ Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags
pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Howth
tram alone crying to the rain: _Naked women! Naked women!_ What about
that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one
saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for
titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is
wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval
leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great
libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them
there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della
Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange
pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who
once...
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a
damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a
midden of man’s ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle
stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:
isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze
of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the
higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams
of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara’s. Am I not going there?
Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer
sand towards the Pigeonhouse.
_—Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_
_—C’est le pigeon, Joseph._
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar
MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father’s a
bird, he lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump
bunny’s face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About
the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de
Jésus_ by M. Léo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.
_—C’est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
en l’existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire à mon père._
_—Il croit?_
_—Mon père, oui._
_Schluss_. He laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other
devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et
naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots
of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
tone: when I was in Paris; _boul’ Mich’_, I used to. Yes, used to carry
punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder
somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904
the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.
Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c’est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed
yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight shillings, the banging
door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger
toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Fermé_. Hired
dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not
hurt? O, that’s all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O,
that’s all right. Shake a shake. O, that’s all only all right.
You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt
from their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge!_ Pretending to
speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence,
across the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought
back; _Le Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte
Rouge_; a blue French telegram, curiosity to show:
—Mother dying come home father.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That’s why she won’t.
Then here’s a health to Mulligan’s aunt
And I’ll tell you the reason why.
She always kept things decent in
The Hannigan famileye.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the
air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the
kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In
Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering
with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the
_pus_ of _flan bréton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased
pleasers, curled conquistadores.
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi
sétier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves
me at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux
irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a
cheese _hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word?
Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer
fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: _slainte!_ Around the
slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His
breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang
thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes,
conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of
men. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re
your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt,
sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M.
Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen
Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_ with the
_dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M. Millevoye,
Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, _bonne à
tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. _Moi
faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I said.
Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my
brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I
see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got
away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil,
orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost
leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not
here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you. I’ll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her
love he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under
the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl
them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay
Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his
day’s stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the
Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d’Or,
damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless,
wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in
rue Gît-le-Cœur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra
skirt, frisky as a young thing’s. Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat
you saw me, won’t you? I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time. _Mon
fils_, soldier of France. I taught him to sing _The boys of Kilkenny
are stout roaring blades_. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that.
Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow’s castle on the Nore. Goes like
this. _O, O_. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.
O, O the boys of
Kilkenny...
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.
Remembering thee, O Sion.
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of
seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,
am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the
quaking soil. Turn back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in
new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the
barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet
are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk,
nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait,
their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned
platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when
this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind
bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted
his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take
all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon’s
midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing
Elsinore’s tempting flood.
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge
and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a
grike.
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. _Un coche ensablé_ Louis Veuillot
called Gautier’s prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind
have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren
of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and
stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout’s toys. Mind you don’t get one bang
on the ear. I’m the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well
boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz
odz an Iridzman.
A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be
master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From
farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures,
two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.
Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings,
torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the
collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon,
spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework
city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives,
running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague
and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved
among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the
spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.
The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I
just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. _Terribilia meditans_. A
primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you
pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The
Bruce’s brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck,
York’s false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a
day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion
crowned. All kings’ sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved
men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping. But the courtiers
who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of...
We don’t want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what
he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. _Natürlich_, put there for
you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago
off Maiden’s rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it
out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water
cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t
see! Who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing
quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly,
shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still
to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me
out of horror of his death. I... With him together down... I could not
save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.
A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on
all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made
off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He
turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a
field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of
the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout
lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented
towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth,
breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.
Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them
as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting
from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped
off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped,
sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it,
sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell.
Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah,
poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.
—Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He
slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me. Along by the edge of the mole he
lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed
against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed
quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His
hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand
again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in
spousebreach, vulturing the dead.
After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.
Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That
man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against
my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come.
Red carpet spread. You will see who.
Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet
out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler
strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the
ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand
and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair
trailed. Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When
night hides her body’s flaws calling under her brown shawl from an
archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal
Dublins in O’Loughlin’s of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues’ rum
lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend’s whiteness under her
rancid rags. Fumbally’s lane that night: the tanyard smells.
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Couch a hogshead with me then.
In the darkmans clip and kiss.
Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.
Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: _thy quarrons
dainty is_. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads
jabber on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their
pockets.
Passing now.
A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I
am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s
flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges,
schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering,
moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not
mine, _oinopa ponton_, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon.
In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed,
childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. He
comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying
the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.
No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb.
Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy’s
letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.
Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and
scribbled words. That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library
counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness
shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there
with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid
sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth
stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it
back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here?
Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white
field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of
Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space
with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a
flat: yes, that’s right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far,
flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in
stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is
in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our
sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the
more.
She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality
of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at
Hodges Figgis’ window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet
books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through
the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a
grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else,
Stevie: a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders
and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple
dumplings, _piuttosto_. Where are your wits?
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
Sad too. Touch, touch me.
He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the
scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his
eyes. That is Kevin Egan’s movement I made, nodding for his nap,
sabbath sleep. _Et vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona_. Alo! _Bonjour_.
Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through
peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning
scene. Pan’s hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants,
milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is
far.
And no more turn aside and brood.
His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck’s castoffs,
_nebeneinander_. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein
another’s foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in
tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s
shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. _Tiens, quel petit pied!_
Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its
name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I
am. As I am. All or not at all.
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the
low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a
fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it
slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech
ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower
unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and
sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water
swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night:
lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to,
they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,
awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias
patiens ingemiscit_. To no end gathered; vainly then released,
forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of
lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws
a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he
said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a
loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse
rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise
landward. There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath
the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God
becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed
mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a
urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes
upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to
the sun.
A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
known to man. Old Father Ocean. _Prix de Paris_: beware of imitations.
Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?
Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
_Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum_. No. My cockle hat and staff and
hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying
still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make
their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest day.
Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn
Tennyson, gentleman poet. _Già_. For the old hag with the yellow teeth.
And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. _Già_. My teeth are very
bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to
a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch,
the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?
My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?
His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn’t. Better buy one.
He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
carefully. For the rest let look who will.
Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the
air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the
crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.
— II —
[ 4 ]
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he
liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting
her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the
kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him
feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off
the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,
its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked
stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
—Mkgnao!
—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch
my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder
what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively
and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to
the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him,
poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.
—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.
He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped
three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they
can’t mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or
kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.
He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with
this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for
a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper.
Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s. While the kettle is boiling. She
lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so
rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced
round him. No.
On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by
the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter
she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.
He said softly in the bare hall:
—I’m going round the corner. Be back in a minute.
And when he had heard his voice say it he added:
—You don’t want anything for breakfast?
A sleepy soft grunt answered:
—Mn.
No. She didn’t want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer,
as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.
Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar.
Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for
it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor’s auction.
Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At
Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I’m proud of it. Still
he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was
farseeing.
His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat
and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback
pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.
The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto’s
high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White
slip of paper. Quite safe.
On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there.
In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky
wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He
pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf
dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right
till I come back anyhow.
He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number
seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a
warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black
conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in
that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as
he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our
daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.
Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at
dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him.
Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a
strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker
too, old Tweedy’s big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear.
Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of
carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking
a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented
with fennel, sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two.
Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among
the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees,
signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches
me from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark
language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet,
colour of Molly’s new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of
those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.
Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track
of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself.
What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the _Freeman_
leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway
behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch
that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest.
He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up the
flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out
whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the
end of the city traffic. For instance M’Auley’s down there: n. g. as
position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular
from the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.
Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an
ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my
bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching
the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him
off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I’m going to
tell you? What’s that, Mr O’Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians,
they’d only be an eight o’clock breakfast for the Japanese.
Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor
Dignam, Mr O’Rourke.
Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the
doorway:
—Good day, Mr O’Rourke.
—Good day to you.
—Lovely weather, sir.
—’Tis all that.
Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the
county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and
behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think
of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin
without passing a pub. Save it they can’t. Off the drunks perhaps. Put
down three and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs
and drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with
the town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we’ll split the
job, see?
How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels
of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint
Joseph’s National school. Brats’ clamour. Windows open. Fresh air helps
memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee
doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At
their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.
He halted before Dlugacz’s window, staring at the hanks of sausages,
polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened
in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links,
packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the
lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs’ blood.
A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He
stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too,
calling the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a
pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous
hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New
blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on
the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked
skirt swings at each whack.
The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with
blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer.
He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at
Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round
it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting:
read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page
rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the
beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the
breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a
palm on a ripemeated hindquarter, there’s a prime one, unpeeled
switches in their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his
senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt
swinging, whack by whack by whack.
The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
sausages and made a red grimace.
—Now, my miss, he said.
She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.
—Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,
please?
Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went
slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the
morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood
outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He
sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted
toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The
sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For
another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles’ Lane. They like
them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I’m lost in the
wood.
—Threepence, please.
His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.
Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers’ pocket and laid them
on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid,
disc by disc, into the till.
—Thank you, sir. Another time.
A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze
after an instant. No: better not: another time.
—Good morning, he said, moving away.
—Good morning, sir.
No sign. Gone. What matter?
He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim:
planters’ company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish
government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel
and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.
You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with
olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need
artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your
name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten
down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34,
Berlin, W. 15.
Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.
He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered
olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in
jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out.
Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates.
Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin’s parade. And
Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in
Citron’s basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand,
lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet,
wild perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high
prices too, Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant
old times. Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain,
Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside
at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them
barefoot in soiled dungarees. There’s whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do
you? Doesn’t see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back
is like that Norwegian captain’s. Wonder if I’ll meet him today.
Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.
No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift
those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called
it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All
dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore
the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s,
clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far
away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying,
being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more.
Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.
Desolation.
Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he
turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his
veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I
am here now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong
side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the
hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why
is that? Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North,
MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore
eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling
butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.
Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
girl with gold hair on the wind.
Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.
Mrs Marion.
—Poldy!
Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm
yellow twilight towards her tousled head.
—Who are the letters for?
He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.
—A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And
a letter for you.
He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of
her knees.
—Do you want the blind up?
Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her
glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.
—That do? he asked, turning.
She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.
—She got the things, she said.
He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back
slowly with a snug sigh.
—Hurry up with that tea, she said. I’m parched.
—The kettle is boiling, he said.
But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled
linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.
As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:
—Poldy!
—What?
—Scald the teapot.
On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded
and rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting
the kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took
off the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the
lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat
mewed hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won’t mouse. Say
they won’t eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall
to her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper.
He sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.
Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks:
new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan’s
seaside girls.
The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown Derby,
smiling. Silly Milly’s birthday gift. Only five she was then. No, wait:
four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces of
folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.
O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
I’d rather have you without a farthing
Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden.
Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous
old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And
the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into the
parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin’s hat! All we
laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.
He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the
teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on it?
Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it
upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.
Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it
on the chair by the bedhead.
—What a time you were! she said.
She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on
the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large
soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder. The
warmth of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance
of the tea she poured.
A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the
act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.
—Who was the letter from? he asked.
Bold hand. Marion.
—O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme.
—What are you singing?
—_Là ci darem_ with J. C. Doyle, she said, and _Love’s Old Sweet Song_.
Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves
next day. Like foul flowerwater.
—Would you like the window open a little?
She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:
—What time is the funeral?
—Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn’t see the paper.
Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled
drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a
stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.
—No: that book.
Other stocking. Her petticoat.
—It must have fell down, she said.
He felt here and there. _Voglio e non vorrei_. Wonder if she pronounces
that right: _voglio_. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped
and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of
the orangekeyed chamberpot.
—Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There’s a word I wanted to
ask you.
She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and,
having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the
text with the hairpin till she reached the word.
—Met him what? he asked.
—Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
—Metempsychosis?
—Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That
means the transmigration of souls.
—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes.
The first night after the charades. Dolphin’s Barn. He turned over the
smudged pages. _Ruby: the Pride of the Ring_. Hello. Illustration.
Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the
floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. _The monster Maffei desisted and flung
his victim from him with an oath_. Cruelty behind it all. Doped
animals. Trapeze at Hengler’s. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping.
Break your neck and we’ll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them
young so they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That
a man’s soul after he dies. Dignam’s soul...
—Did you finish it? he asked.
—Yes, she said. There’s nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the
first fellow all the time?
—Never read it. Do you want another?
—Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock’s. Nice name he has.
She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.
Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they’ll write to
Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that’s the word.
—Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body
after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we
all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other
planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their
past lives.
The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Better
remind her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An
example?
The _Bath of the Nymph_ over the bed. Given away with the Easter number
of _Photo Bits_: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you
put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six
I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked
nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.
He turned the pages back.
—Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They
used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for
instance. What they called nymphs, for example.
Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,
inhaling through her arched nostrils.
—There’s a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?
—The kidney! he cried suddenly.
He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes
against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping
hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs. Pungent smoke
shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of
the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its
back. Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and
let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it.
Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He
shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a
forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant
meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of
bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that
about some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his
side, reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in
the gravy and raising it to his mouth.