Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the _Daily News_.
BLOOM: _(Bravely.)_ Overdrawn.
BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you
rotter! _(To the court.)_ Why, look at the man’s private life! Leading
a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be
mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!
BLOOM: _(To the court.)_ And he, a bachelor, how...
FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!
_(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket
on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)_
SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?
MARY DRISCOLL: _(Indignantly.)_ I’m not a bad one. I bear a respectable
character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation,
six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave
owing to his carryings on.
FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?
MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of
myself as poor as I am.
BLOOM: _(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless
slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly.)_ I treated you white. I
gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.
Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering.
There’s a medium in all things. Play cricket.
MARY DRISCOLL: _(Excitedly.)_ As God is looking down on me this night
if ever I laid a hand to them oylsters!
FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?
MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your
honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for
a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a
result. And he interfered twict with my clothing.
BLOOM: She counterassaulted.
MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully.)_ I had more respect for the
scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he
remarked: keep it quiet.
_(General laughter.)_
GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly.)_ Order in
court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.
_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins
a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say
in his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but,
though branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to
reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and
return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths’ child, he
had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent.
There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn
over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping
post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by
the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An
acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate
of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain
refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of
loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly
rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell’s wallpaper at one
and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to
the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or
model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour
reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the
boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what
times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with
four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain
ever...._
_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that
they cannot hear.)_
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: _(Without looking up from their notebooks.)_
Loosen his boots.
PROFESSOR MACHUGH: _(From the presstable, coughs and calls.)_ Cough it
up, man. Get it out in bits.
_(The crossexamination proceeds_ re _Bloom and the bucket. A large
bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes.
Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered
untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some
spinach. Crucial moment. He did not look in the bucket. Nobody. Rather
a mess. Not completely. A_ Titbits _back number_.)
_(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with
whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of
stickingplaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)_
J. J. O’MOLLOY: _(In barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with
a voice of pained protest.)_ This is no place for indecent levity at
the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a
beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My
client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a
stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up
misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on
by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence
being quite permitted in my client’s native place, the land of the
Pharaoh. _Prima facie_, I put it to you that there was no attempt at
carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of
by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would
deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and
somnambulism in my client’s family. If the accused could speak he could
a tale unfold—one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between
the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from
cobbler’s weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian
extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.
BLOOM: _(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar’s vest and trousers,
apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about
him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches
his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes
the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.)_ Him makee velly muchee fine
night. _(He begins to lilt simply.)_
Li li poo lil chile
Blingee pigfoot evly night
Payee two shilly...
_(He is howled down.)_
J. J. O’MOLLOY: _(Hotly to the populace.)_ This is a lonehand fight. By
Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this
fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has
superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically,
without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused
was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered
with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very
own daughter. _(Bloom takes J. J. O’Molloy’s hand and raises it to his
lips.)_ I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that
the hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute
Bloom. My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the
world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object
to or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some
dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will
on her. He wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I
know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his
extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of
which will now be shown. _(To Bloom.)_ I suggest that you will do the
handsome thing.
BLOOM: A penny in the pound.
_(The image of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in
silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino,
in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an
orange citron and a pork kidney.)_
DLUGACZ: _(Hoarsely.)_ Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 13.
_(J. J. O’Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his
coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with
sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F.
Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the
galloping tide of rosepink blood.)_
J. J. O’MOLLOY: _(Almost voicelessly.)_ Excuse me. I am suffering from
a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen
words. _(He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal
eloquence of Seymour Bushe.)_ When the angel’s book comes to be opened
if aught that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and
of soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the
bar the sacred benefit of the doubt.
_(A paper with something written on it is handed into court._)
BLOOM: _(In court dress.)_ Can give best references. Messrs Callan,
Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon,
ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the
highest... Queens of Dublin society. _(Carelessly.)_ I was just
chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir
Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal, at the levee. Sir Bob, I
said...
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength
ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of
brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair.)_ Arrest him, constable.
He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband
was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed
James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless
globes as I sat in a box of the _Theatre Royal_ at a command
performance of _La Cigale_. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made
improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on
the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the
post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled _The Girl
with the Three Pairs of Stays_.
MRS BELLINGHAM: _(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose,
steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell
quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.)_
Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because
he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker’s one sleety day
during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the
wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently
he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in
my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the
information that it was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant
purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Shame on him!
_(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward.)_
THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: _(Screaming.)_ Stop thief! Hurrah there,
Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!
SECOND WATCH: _(Produces handcuffs.)_ Here are the darbies.
MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome
compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my
frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed
himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his
fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing
my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon
garnished sable, a buck’s head couped or. He lauded almost
extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose
drawn up to the limit, and eulogised glowingly my other hidden
treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He
urged me (Stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me.) to
defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible
opportunity.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(In amazon costume, hard hat,
jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets
with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she
strikes her welt constantly.)_ Also me. Because he saw me on the polo
ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of
Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger
Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob
_Centaur._ This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car
and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold
after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still.
It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as
he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit
intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me
to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He
implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise
him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most
vicious horsewhipping.
MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.
_(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters
received from Bloom.)_
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Stamps her jingling spurs in a
sudden paroxysm of fury.)_ I will, by the God above me. I’ll scourge
the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I’ll flay him
alive.
BLOOM: _(His eyes closing, quails expectantly.)_ Here? _(He squirms.)_
Again! _(He pants cringing.)_ I love the danger.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I’ll make it hot for
you. I’ll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and
stripes on it!
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There’s no excuse for him! A married
man!
BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm
tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the
circulation.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Laughs derisively.)_ O, did you,
my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you’ll get the surprise of
your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever
bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into
fury.
MRS BELLINGHAM: _(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.)_
Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within
an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
BLOOM: _(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien.)_ O
cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet.
Let me off this once. _(He offers the other cheek.)_
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(Severely.)_ Don’t do so on any account, Mrs
Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Unbuttoning her gauntlet
violently.)_ I’ll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since he
was pupped! To dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the
public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a
wellknown cuckold. _(She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air.)_
Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick!
Ready?
BLOOM: _(Trembling, beginning to obey.)_ The weather has been so warm.
_(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)_
DAVY STEPHENS: _Messenger of the Sacred Heart_ and _Evening Telegraph_
with Saint Patrick’s Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of
all the cuckolds in Dublin.
_(The very reverend Canon O’Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and
exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend
John Hughes S. J. bend low.)_