Joyce's Ulysses Concordance

14. Oxen of the Sun

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[18123][ 14 ]

[18124]

[18125]Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

[18126]

[18127]Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send

[18128]us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us

[18129]bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

[18130]

[18131]Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

[18132]

[18133]Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive

[18134]concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by

[18135]mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that

[18136]which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in

[18137]them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain

[18138]when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being

[18139]equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more

[18140]efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may

[18141]have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent

[18142]continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately

[18143]present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s

[18144]incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything of some

[18145]significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior

[18146]splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on

[18147]the contrary anyone so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that

[18148]as no nature’s boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it

[18149]behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher

[18150]of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the

[18151]nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar

[18152]excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually

[18153]traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither

[18154]of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the

[18155]hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone

[18156]be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously

[18157]command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance

[18158]or with diminution’s menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating

[18159]function ever irrevocably enjoined?

[18160]

[18161]It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians

[18162]relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature

[18163]admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured.

[18164]Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves,

[18165]their greatest doctors, the O’Shiels, the O’Hickeys, the O’Lees,

[18166]have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the

[18167]relapsed found again health whether the malady had been the trembling

[18168]withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which

[18169]in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance

[18170]commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having

[18171]preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in

[18172]being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not

[18173]up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so

[18174]far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient

[18175]in that allhardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the

[18176]copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed

[18177]scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an

[18178]inconsiderable emolument was provided.

[18179]

[18180]To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be

[18181]molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent

[18182]mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received

[18183]eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the

[18184]case was so hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying

[18185]desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be

[18186]received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in

[18187]being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that

[18188]they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly

[18189]to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!

[18190]

[18191]Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that

[18192]one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with

[18193]wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were

[18194]now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs

[18195]there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her

[18196]case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various

[18197]latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine

[18198]and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence

[18199]conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of

[18200]mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her

[18201]thereto to lie in, her term up.

[18202]

[18203]Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming.

[18204]Of Israel’s folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared.

[18205]Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.

[18206]

[18207]Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming

[18208]mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale

[18209]so God’s angel to Mary quoth. Watchers tway there walk, white sisters

[18210]in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons

[18211]thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding

[18212]wariest ward.

[18213]

[18214]In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising

[18215]with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping

[18216]lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s westward welkin. Full she drad that

[18217]God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins.

[18218]Christ’s rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe

[18219]infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in

[18220]Horne’s house.

[18221]

[18222]Loth to irk in Horne’s hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow

[18223]he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over

[18224]land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe

[18225]meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with

[18226]good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so

[18227]young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes

[18228]his word winning.

[18229]

[18230]As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared.

[18231]Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O’Hare Doctor

[18232]tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that

[18233]O’Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that

[18234]him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death

[18235]for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness

[18236]to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His

[18237]goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men’s oil

[18238]to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death

[18239]the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died

[18240]in Mona Island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas

[18241]and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his

[18242]undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood

[18243]they there both awhile in wanhope sorrowing one with other.

[18244]

[18245]Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the

[18246]dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came

[18247]naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the

[18248]last for to go as he came.

[18249]

[18250]The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and

[18251]he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed.

[18252]The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes

[18253]now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear

[18254]but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had seen

[18255]many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman’s

[18256]birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the man

[18257]that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words

[18258]for he felt with wonder women’s woe in the travail that they have of

[18259]motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for

[18260]any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine

[18261]twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

[18262]

[18263]And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed

[18264]them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came

[18265]against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon. And

[18266]the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they

[18267]had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this

[18268]learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be

[18269]healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a

[18270]horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make

[18271]a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he

[18272]said now that he should go in to that castle for to make merry with

[18273]them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go

[18274]otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtile. Also the lady

[18275]was of his avis and repreved the learningknight though she trowed well

[18276]that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But

[18277]the learningknight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have

[18278]him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous

[18279]castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him

[18280]for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers

[18281]lands and sometime venery.

[18282]

[18283]And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy

[18284]and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not

[18285]move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and

[18286]knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white

[18287]flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that there

[18288]abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of

[18289]Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he

[18290]blases in to them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on

[18291]the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was

[18292]a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange

[18293]fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible

[18294]thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie

[18295]in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness

[18296]that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress. And also it was

[18297]a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of

[18298]fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits

[18299]that they do in to it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And

[18300]they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks

[18301]out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a

[18302]brewage like to mead.

[18303]

[18304]And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp

[18305]thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe

[18306]Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat

[18307]in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and

[18308]anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and

[18309]his neighbour nist not of this wile. And he sat down in that castle with

[18310]them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.

[18311]

[18312]This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the

[18313]reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for

[18314]there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied

[18315]fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what

[18316]cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it

[18317]be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw

[18318]a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than

[18319]any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the

[18320]one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full

[18321]gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His

[18322]bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long.

[18323]And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her

[18324]next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never

[18325]none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully

[18326]delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both’s health

[18327]for he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was

[18328]the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the

[18329]meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and

[18330]that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion

[18331]service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman’s woe

[18332]with wonder pondering.

[18333]

[18334]Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be

[18335]drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either

[18336]side the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary

[18337]Merciable’s with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of

[18338]medicine, and the franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa,

[18339]one Crotthers, and young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at

[18340]head of the board and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long

[18341]of a mastery of him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young

[18342]Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and

[18343]beside the meek sir Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that

[18344]he promised to have come and such as intended to no goodness said how

[18345]he had broke his avow. And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast

[18346]friendship to sir Simon and to this his son young Stephen and for that

[18347]his languor becalmed him there after longest wanderings insomuch as they

[18348]feasted him for that time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love

[18349]led on with will to wander, loth to leave.

[18350]

[18351]For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen

[18352]other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that

[18353]put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a

[18354]matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne’s house that

[18355]now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her

[18356]death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And

[18357]they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said,

[18358]the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of

[18359]this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had

[18360]conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch

[18361]were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never

[18362]other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his

[18363]judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said

[18364]but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife

[18365]should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot

[18366]upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the

[18367]franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the

[18368]least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole

[18369]affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by

[18370]rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of

[18371]Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were

[18372]all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following:

[18373]Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now

[18374]glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire.

[18375]But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly

[18376]impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord

[18377]and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means

[18378]to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.

[18379]Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had

[18380]overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he

[18381]would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if

[18382]it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat

[18383]Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi’s praise of that beast the

[18384]unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all

[18385]this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice

[18386]him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that

[18387]he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat

[18388]laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which

[18389]never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would

[18390]not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might

[18391]be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church

[18392]that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith,

[18393]patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness

[18394]or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the

[18395]influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she

[18396]lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, effectu secuto, or

[18397]peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses

[18398]Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human

[18399]soul was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for

[18400]God’s greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam

[18401]to bear beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the

[18402]fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy

[18403]church for all ages founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir

[18404]Leopold would he in like case so jeopard her person as risk life to save

[18405]life. A wariness of mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand

[18406]to jaw, he said dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed

[18407]him, who had ever loved the art of physic as might a layman, and

[18408]agreeing also with his experience of so seldomseen an accident it was

[18409]good for that mother Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence

[18410]and in such sort deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth,

[18411]pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young

[18412]Stephen was a marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth

[18413]from the poor lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he

[18414]was drunken and that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.

[18415]

[18416]But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had

[18417]pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour

[18418]and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only

[18419]manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art

[18420]could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart

[18421]for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of

[18422]lamb’s wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and

[18423]lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now sir

[18424]Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his

[18425]friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness

[18426]and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for

[18427]all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure

[18428]for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and

[18429]murdered his goods with whores.

[18430]

[18431]About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty

[18432]so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed

[18433]their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for

[18434]the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the

[18435]vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we,

[18436]quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel

[18437]of my body but my soul’s bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them

[18438]that live by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this

[18439]will comfort more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed

[18440]them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of

[18441]two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he

[18442]writ. They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of

[18443]money as was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth: Know

[18444]all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means

[18445]this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from

[18446]a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In

[18447]woman’s womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all

[18448]flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is

[18449]the postcreation. Omnis caro ad te veniet. No question but her name is

[18450]puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd,

[18451]our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly

[18452]that She hath an omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem, that is to wit, an

[18453]almightiness of petition because she is the second Eve and she won

[18454]us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are

[18455]linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all,

[18456]seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin. But here is the matter

[18457]now. Or she knew him, that second I say, and was but creature of her

[18458]creature, vergine madre, figlia di tuo figlio, or she knew him not and

[18459]then stands she in the one denial or ignorancy with Peter Piscator who

[18460]lives in the house that Jack built and with Joseph the joiner patron of

[18461]the happy demise of all unhappy marriages, parceque M. Léo Taxil nous

[18462]a dit que qui l’avait mise dans cette fichue position c’était

[18463]le sacré pigeon, ventre de Dieu! Entweder transubstantiality oder

[18464]consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality. And all cried out

[18465]upon it for a very scurvy word. A pregnancy without joy, he said, a

[18466]birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness.

[18467]Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we

[18468]withstand, withsay.

[18469]

[18470]Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would

[18471]sing a bawdy catch Staboo Stabella about a wench that was put in pod of

[18472]a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack:

[18473]The first three months she was not well, Staboo, when here nurse Quigley

[18474]from the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor was it

[18475]not meet as she remembered them being her mind was to have all orderly

[18476]against lord Andrew came for because she was jealous that no gasteful

[18477]turmoil might shorten the honour of her guard. It was an ancient and

[18478]a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun

[18479]beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her hortative want of

[18480]it effect for incontinently Punch Costello was of them all embraided and

[18481]they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and shaked him with

[18482]menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode with him, a murrain

[18483]seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou

[18484]got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel,

[18485]thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out

[18486]of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his

[18487]cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the

[18488]time’s occasion as most sacred and most worthy to be most sacred. In

[18489]Horne’s house rest should reign.

[18490]

[18491]To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in

[18492]Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he

[18493]had not cided to take friar’s vows and he answered him obedience in

[18494]the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days.

[18495]Master Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious

[18496]deeds and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily

[18497]virtue of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all

[18498]intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting to his fathership. But he

[18499]said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was

[18500]the eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and

[18501]they rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and

[18502]deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she

[18503]to be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with

[18504]burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and

[18505]the anthem Ut novetur sexus omnis corporis mysterium till she was

[18506]there unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those

[18507]delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is

[18508]in their Maid’s Tragedy that was writ for a like twining of lovers: To

[18509]bed, to bed was the burden of it to be played with accompanable concent

[18510]upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative

[18511]suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the

[18512]paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial

[18513]communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed, but, harkee,

[18514]young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher for, by my

[18515]troth, of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said indeed to

[18516]his best remembrance they had but the one doxy between them and she of

[18517]the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran very high

[18518]in those days and the custom of the country approved with it. Greater

[18519]love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for

[18520]his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect,

[18521]saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the

[18522]university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom mankind

[18523]was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will go hard but

[18524]thou wilt have the secondbest bed. Orate, fratres, pro memetipso. And

[18525]all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy generations and

[18526]thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by my word and

[18527]broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication in my

[18528]sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou

[18529]sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of

[18530]servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why

[18531]hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for

[18532]a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of

[18533]dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now,

[18534]my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and

[18535]from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk

[18536]and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my

[18537]sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever

[18538]in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou

[18539]kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say,

[18540]hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as

[18541]mentioned for the Orient from on high which brake hell’s gates visited

[18542]a darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as

[18543]Tully saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the

[18544]prince no blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an

[18545]Egypt’s plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is

[18546]their most proper ubi and quomodo. And as the ends and ultimates of

[18547]all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and

[18548]originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth

[18549]from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing

[18550]and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it

[18551]with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail,

[18552]batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they

[18553]bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed

[18554]of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted

[18555]sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. And as

[18556]no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall

[18557]thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way

[18558]is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness

[18559]the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.

[18560]

[18561]Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly Etienne chanson but he loudly

[18562]bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic

[18563]longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie

[18564]order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

[18565]

[18566] Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack

[18567] See the malt stored in many a refluent sack,

[18568] In the proud cirque of Jackjohn’s bivouac.

[18569]A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on

[18570]left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm

[18571]that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and

[18572]witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And

[18573]he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all

[18574]mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift

[18575]was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the

[18576]cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some

[18577]mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which

[18578]Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and

[18579]a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an

[18580]old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would

[18581]not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as

[18582]cowed he crouched in Horne’s hall. He drank indeed at one draught to

[18583]pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all

[18584]the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked

[18585]him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the

[18586]braggart’s side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear,

[18587]advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard,

[18588]the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken

[18589]place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.

[18590]

[18591]But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for

[18592]he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be

[18593]done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the

[18594]other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But

[18595]could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the

[18596]bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed no for Grace was not

[18597]there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the

[18598]god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard?

[18599]Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube

[18600]Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that

[18601]he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die

[18602]as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to

[18603]die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must nor

[18604]would he make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon

[18605]has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that

[18606]other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise

[18607]which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there

[18608]is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall

[18609]come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and

[18610]Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he

[18611]fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she

[18612]said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true

[18613]path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn

[18614]aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so

[18615]flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush

[18616]or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.

[18617]

[18618]This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse

[18619]of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore

[18620]Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a

[18621]wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and

[18622]know her. For regarding Believe-on-Me they said it was nought else

[18623]but notion and they could conceive no thought of it for, first,

[18624]Two-in-the-Bush whither she ticed them was the very goodliest grot and

[18625]in it were four pillows on which were four tickets with these words

[18626]printed on them, Pickaback and Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by

[18627]Jowl and, second, for that foul plague Allpox and the monsters they

[18628]cared not for them for Preservative had given them a stout shield of

[18629]oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt neither from Offspring

[18630]that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was

[18631]named Killchild. So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr

[18632]Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon,

[18633]Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer. Wherein, O wretched company,

[18634]were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a

[18635]very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm up and

[18636]spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them

[18637]contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth.

[18638]

[18639]So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and

[18640]after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water

[18641]a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout,

[18642]fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts

[18643]too. Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without

[18644]sprinkle this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The

[18645]rosy buds all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought

[18646]but dry flag and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world

[18647]saying, for aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that

[18648]did havoc the land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness.

[18649]But by and by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in

[18650]the west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and

[18651]the weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and

[18652]after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and

[18653]in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking

[18654]shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or

[18655]kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the

[18656]pour came. In Ely place, Baggot street, Duke’s lawn, thence through

[18657]Merrion green up to Holles street a swash of water flowing that was

[18658]before bonedry and not one chair or coach or fiacre seen about but

[18659]no more crack after that first. Over against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice

[18660]Fitzgibbon’s door (that is to sit with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the

[18661]college lands) Mal. Mulligan a gentleman’s gentleman that had but come

[18662]from Mr Moore’s the writer’s (that was a papish but is now, folk

[18663]say, a good Williamite) chanced against Alec. Bannon in a cut bob (which

[18664]are now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town

[18665]from Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M’s brother will

[18666]stay a month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does

[18667]there, he bound home and he to Andrew Horne’s being stayed for to

[18668]crush a cup of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish

[18669]heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel, and all this while poured

[18670]with rain and so both together on to Horne’s. There Leop. Bloom of

[18671]Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling

[18672]fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy’s, Vin. Lynch,

[18673]a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he

[18674]fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a languor he had but was

[18675]now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy of his dame Mrs

[18676]Moll with red slippers on in a pair of Turkey trunks which is thought by

[18677]those in ken to be for a change and Mistress Purefoy there, that got in

[18678]through pleading her belly, and now on the stools, poor body, two days

[18679]past her term, the midwives sore put to it and can’t deliver, she

[18680]queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a shrewd drier up of the insides

[18681]and her breath very heavy more than good and should be a bullyboy from

[18682]the knocks, they say, but God give her soon issue. ’Tis her ninth

[18683]chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off her last chick’s nails

[18684]that was then a twelvemonth and with other three all breastfed that died

[18685]written out in a fair hand in the king’s bible. Her hub fifty odd and

[18686]a methodist but takes the sacrament and is to be seen any fair sabbath

[18687]with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour dapping on the sound with a

[18688]heavybraked reel or in a punt he has trailing for flounder and pollock

[18689]and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum an infinite great fall of rain

[18690]and all refreshed and will much increase the harvest yet those in

[18691]ken say after wind and water fire shall come for a prognostication of

[18692]Malachi’s almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell has done a prophetical

[18693]charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish for his farmer’s

[18694]gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere fetch without

[18695]bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes they are found

[18696]in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

[18697]

[18698]With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter

[18699]was in that night’s gazette and he made a show to find it about him

[18700](for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on

[18701]Stephen’s persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit

[18702]near by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman

[18703]that went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women,

[18704]horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean

[18705]in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses

[18706]and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners,

[18707]flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the

[18708]game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights

[18709]till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose

[18710]gossip. He took his ordinary at a boilingcook’s and if he had but

[18711]gotten into him a mess of broken victuals or a platter of tripes with

[18712]a bare tester in his purse he could always bring himself off with

[18713]his tongue, some randy quip he had from a punk or whatnot that every

[18714]mother’s son of them would burst their sides. The other, Costello that

[18715]is, hearing this talk asked was it poetry or a tale. Faith, no, he says,

[18716]Frank (that was his name), ’tis all about Kerry cows that are to be

[18717]butchered along of the plague. But they can go hang, says he with a

[18718]wink, for me with their bully beef, a pox on it. There’s as good fish

[18719]in this tin as ever came out of it and very friendly he offered to

[18720]take of some salty sprats that stood by which he had eyed wishly in the

[18721]meantime and found the place which was indeed the chief design of his

[18722]embassy as he was sharpset. Mort aux vaches, says Frank then in the

[18723]French language that had been indentured to a brandyshipper that has a

[18724]winelodge in Bordeaux and he spoke French like a gentleman too. From a

[18725]child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a headborough,

[18726]who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and the use of

[18727]the globes, matriculated at the university to study the mechanics but

[18728]he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar

[18729]with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his volumes. One

[18730]time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher, then nought

[18731]would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he was

[18732]for the ocean sea or to hoof it on the roads with the romany folk,

[18733]kidnapping a squire’s heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids’

[18734]linen or choking chicken behind a hedge. He had been off as many times

[18735]as a cat has lives and back again with naked pockets as many more to his

[18736]father the headborough who shed a pint of tears as often as he saw him.

[18737]What, says Mr Leopold with his hands across, that was earnest to know

[18738]the drift of it, will they slaughter all? I protest I saw them but this

[18739]day morning going to the Liverpool boats, says he. I can scarce believe

[18740]’tis so bad, says he. And he had experience of the like brood beasts

[18741]and of springers, greasy hoggets and wether wool, having been some years

[18742]before actuary for Mr Joseph Cuffe, a worthy salesmaster that drove his

[18743]trade for live stock and meadow auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low’s yard

[18744]in Prussia street. I question with you there, says he. More like ’tis

[18745]the hoose or the timber tongue. Mr Stephen, a little moved but very

[18746]handsomely told him no such matter and that he had dispatches from the

[18747]emperor’s chief tailtickler thanking him for the hospitality, that

[18748]was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the bestquoted cowcatcher in all

[18749]Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to take the bull by the horns.

[18750]Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing. He’ll find himself on the

[18751]horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a bull that’s Irish, says he.

[18752]Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale

[18753]purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop. I conceive you,

[18754]says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was sent to our island by

[18755]farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder of them all, with an emerald

[18756]ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent cross the table, and a

[18757]bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a plumper and a portlier bull,

[18758]says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns galore, a coat of cloth

[18759]of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of his nostrils so that the

[18760]women of our island, leaving doughballs and rollingpins, followed after

[18761]him hanging his bulliness in daisychains. What for that, says Mr Dixon,

[18762]but before he came over farmer Nicholas that was a eunuch had him

[18763]properly gelded by a college of doctors who were no better off than

[18764]himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my cousin german the lord

[18765]Harry tells you and take a farmer’s blessing, and with that he slapped

[18766]his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the blessing stood him

[18767]friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him a trick worth two

[18768]of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to this day affirm

[18769]that they would rather any time of the month whisper in his ear in the

[18770]dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his long holy tongue

[18771]than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in the four fields of

[18772]all Ireland. Another then put in his word: And they dressed him, says

[18773]he, in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and girdle and ruffles

[18774]on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him all over with

[18775]spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of the road

[18776]with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market so that he

[18777]could doss and dung to his heart’s content. By this time the father of

[18778]the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that he could

[18779]scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and damsels

[18780]brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his belly was

[18781]full he would rear up on his hind quarters to show their ladyships a

[18782]mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls’ language and they all

[18783]after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he would suffer

[18784]nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself (for that was

[18785]the only colour to his mind) and there was a board put up on a hillock

[18786]in the middle of the island with a printed notice, saying: By the Lord

[18787]Harry, Green is the grass that grows on the ground. And, says Mr Dixon,

[18788]if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or the wilds of

[18789]Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much as a handful

[18790]of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he’d run amok over half the

[18791]countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all by

[18792]lord Harry’s orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says

[18793]Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks

[18794]in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house

[18795]and I’ll meddle in his matters, says he. I’ll make that animal smell

[18796]hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But

[18797]one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal

[18798]pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for

[18799]himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row

[18800]with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull

[18801]and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry

[18802]he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous

[18803]champion bull of the Romans, Bos Bovum, which is good bog Latin for boss

[18804]of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his head

[18805]into a cow’s drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers and

[18806]pulling it out again told them all his new name. Then, with the water

[18807]running off him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had belonged to

[18808]his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls’ language to study

[18809]but he could never learn a word of it except the first personal pronoun

[18810]which he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went out for

[18811]a walk he filled his pockets with chalk to write it upon what took his

[18812]fancy, the side of a rock or a teahouse table or a bale of cotton or

[18813]a corkfloat. In short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as fast

[18814]friends as an arse and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and the end

[18815]was that the men of the island seeing no help was toward, as the ungrate

[18816]women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded themselves and

[18817]their bundles of chattels on shipboard, set all masts erect, manned the

[18818]yards, sprang their luff, heaved to, spread three sheets in the wind,

[18819]put her head between wind and water, weighed anchor, ported her helm,

[18820]ran up the jolly Roger, gave three times three, let the bullgine run,

[18821]pushed off in their bumboat and put to sea to recover the main of

[18822]America. Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the composing by a

[18823]boatswain of that rollicking chanty:

[18824]

[18825] —Pope Peter’s but a pissabed.

[18826] A man’s a man for a’ that.

[18827]Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway

[18828]as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend

[18829]whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon,

[18830]who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a

[18831]cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil

[18832]enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a

[18833]project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched

[18834]on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards

[18835]which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a legend

[18836]printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator.

[18837]Lambay Island. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw

[18838]from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir

[18839]Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself

[18840]to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well,

[18841]let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it

[18842]smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. ’Tis as cheap sitting as

[18843]standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon

[18844]his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by

[18845]a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the

[18846]prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal

[18847]vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the

[18848]prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities

[18849]acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch

[18850]defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable

[18851]females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their

[18852]flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly

[18853]bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might

[18854]multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of

[18855]their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he

[18856]assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient (which

[18857]he concluded due to a suppression of latent heat), having advised with

[18858]certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had

[18859]resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay

[18860]island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of

[18861]note much in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up

[18862]there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk

[18863]hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful

[18864]yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life

[18865]soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the

[18866]functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he

[18867]take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the

[18868]opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers

[18869]were warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man.

[18870]For his nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a

[18871]diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these

[18872]latter prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both

[18873]broiled and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum

[18874]chillies. After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of

[18875]asseveration Mr Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with

[18876]which he had shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the

[18877]rain and for all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be

[18878]observed by Mr Mulligan’s smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now

[18879]somewhat piebald. His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained

[18880]by his auditors and won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of

[18881]Mary’s excepted to it, asking with a finicking air did he purpose

[18882]also to carry coals to Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the

[18883]scholarly by an apt quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt

[18884]upon his memory, seemed to him a sound and tasteful support of his

[18885]contention: Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites,

[18886]ut matresfamiliarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici

[18887]titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus

[18888]centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt, while for those of ruder wit

[18889]he drove home his point by analogies of the animal kingdom more suitable

[18890]to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest glade, the farmyard

[18891]drake and duck.

[18892]

[18893]Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper

[18894]man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with

[18895]animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics

[18896]while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had

[18897]advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a

[18898]passage that had late befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his

[18899]nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom

[18900]were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him

[18901]a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional

[18902]assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very

[18903]heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was

[18904]come there about a lady, now an inmate of Horne’s house, that was in

[18905]an interesting condition, poor body, from woman’s woe (and here he

[18906]fetched a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr

[18907]Dixon, to turn the table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether

[18908]his incipient ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an

[18909]ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due,

[18910]as with the noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach.

[18911]For answer Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote

[18912]himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll

[18913]mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though

[18914]’tis pity she’s a trollop): There’s a belly that never bore a

[18915]bastard. This was so happy a conceit that it renewed the storm of mirth

[18916]and threw the whole room into the most violent agitations of delight.

[18917]The spry rattle had run on in the same vein of mimicry but for some

[18918]larum in the antechamber.

[18919]

[18920]Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little

[18921]fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion

[18922]with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient

[18923]point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the

[18924]obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by

[18925]a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breeding had

[18926]not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but

[18927]contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever

[18928]done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. Mais bien sûr,

[18929]noble stranger, said he cheerily, et mille compliments. That you may

[18930]and very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my

[18931]felicity. But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet

[18932]and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and

[18933]find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to

[18934]the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good

[18935]things. With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a

[18936]complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his

[18937]bosom, out popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very

[18938]picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein.

[18939]Gazing upon those features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he

[18940]said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting

[18941]instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap (a gift for her

[18942]feastday as she told me prettily) in such an artless disorder, of so

[18943]melting a tenderness, ’pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been

[18944]impelled by generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of

[18945]such an enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so

[18946]touched in all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my days!

[18947]Thrice happy will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her

[18948]favours. A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having

[18949]replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again.

[18950]Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great

[18951]and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in

[18952]thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb,

[18953]the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer

[18954]years. But indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and

[18955]imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! he exclaimed in

[18956]anguish. Would to God that foresight had but remembered me to take my

[18957]cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured

[18958]seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me,

[18959]he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and,

[18960]thousand thunders, I know of a marchand de capotes, Monsieur Poyntz,

[18961]from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion

[18962]as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut, tut! cries Le Fécondateur,

[18963]tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that most accomplished traveller

[18964](I have just cracked a half bottle avec lui in a circle of the best wits

[18965]of the town), is my authority that in Cape Horn, ventre biche, they have

[18966]a rain that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A drenching

[18967]of that violence, he tells me, sans blague, has sent more than one

[18968]luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to another world. Pooh! A

[18969]livre! cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are dear at a sou. One

[18970]umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten such

[18971]stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear Kitty told me

[18972]today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in

[18973]such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and

[18974]whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy

[18975]butterflies), dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in

[18976]our hearts and it has become a household word that il y a deux choses

[18977]for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a

[18978]breach of the proprieties, is the fittest, nay, the only garment. The

[18979]first, said she (and here my pretty philosopher, as I handed her to her

[18980]tilbury, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her tongue the outer

[18981]chamber of my ear), the first is a bath... But at this point a bell

[18982]tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for

[18983]the enrichment of our store of knowledge.

[18984]

[18985]Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while

[18986]all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and,

[18987]having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with

[18988]a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a

[18989]party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and

[18990]not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of

[18991]the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of

[18992]ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled.

[18993]A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I’ll be sworn she has rendezvoused

[18994]you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad’s bud, immensely

[18995]so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater

[18996]hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O’Gargle chuck the nuns there under

[18997]the chin. As I look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been

[18998]wardmaid there any time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried

[18999]the young blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and

[19000]with immodest squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the

[19001]man! Bless me, I’m all of a wibbly wobbly. Why, you’re as bad as

[19002]dear little Father Cantekissem, that you are! May this pot of four half

[19003]choke me, cried Costello, if she aint in the family way. I knows a lady

[19004]what’s got a white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young

[19005]surgeon, however, rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as

[19006]the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward.

[19007]Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings

[19008]of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable

[19009]fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience,

[19010]said he, with those who, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct,

[19011]revile an ennobling profession which, saving the reverence due to the

[19012]Deity, is the greatest power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive

[19013]when I say that if need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the

[19014]excellence of her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword,

[19015]should be a glorious incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with

[19016]them. What? Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the

[19017]lustre of her own sex and the astonishment of ours? And at an instant

[19018]the most momentous that can befall a puny child of clay? Perish the

[19019]thought! I shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of

[19020]such malice have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered

[19021]to mother and maid in house of Horne. Having delivered himself of this

[19022]rebuke he saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door. A

[19023]murmur of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low

[19024]soaker without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor

[19025]would he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged

[19026]his transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore

[19027]a round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew

[19028]breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of

[19029]honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy

[19030]father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty

[19031]pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.

[19032]

[19033]To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of

[19034]some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits

[19035]of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not

[19036]pity. The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies

[19037]as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions

[19038]were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and

[19039]outrageous mots were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were

[19040]they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of

[19041]strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello

[19042]was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that

[19043]seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out

[19044]of wedlock and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the

[19045]world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skull lent

[19046]indeed a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that missing link of

[19047]creation’s chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was

[19048]now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had

[19049]passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a

[19050]wary ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his

[19051]heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting

[19052]them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that

[19053]plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn

[19054]and all find tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create themselves

[19055]wits at the cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of mind which he never

[19056]did hold with) to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to

[19057]herit the tradition of a proper breeding: while for such that, having

[19058]lost all forbearance, can lose no more, there remained the sharp

[19059]antidote of experience to cause their insolency to beat a precipitate

[19060]and inglorious retreat. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth

[19061]which, caring nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the

[19062]severe, is ever (as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it)

[19063]for eating of the tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit

[19064]humanity upon any condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was

[19065]about her lawful occasions. To conclude, while from the sister’s

[19066]words he had reckoned upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must

[19067]be owned, not a little alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so

[19068]auspicated after an ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the

[19069]mercy as well as to the bounty of the Supreme Being.

[19070]

[19071]Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express

[19072]his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express

[19073]one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not

[19074]to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement

[19075]since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy

[19076]young blade said it was her husband’s that put her in that expectation

[19077]or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I

[19078]must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to

[19079]evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round

[19080]again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his

[19081]nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I

[19082]bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst

[19083]anon. ’Slife, I’ll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile

[19084]potency of the old bucko that could still knock another child out of

[19085]her. All fell to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though

[19086]the same young blade held with his former view that another than her

[19087]conjugial had been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy

[19088](virtuous) or an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household.

[19089]Singular, communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal

[19090]faculty of metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal

[19091]dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such

[19092]frivolity, that the mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice

[19093]to transform in a pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary

[19094]practitioners of an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed

[19095]the noblest. But, he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup

[19096]feelings that in common oppress them for I have more than once observed

[19097]that birds of a feather laugh together.

[19098]

[19099]But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,

[19100]has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted

[19101]to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our

[19102]internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have

[19103]counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary

[19104]advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that

[19105]moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant

[19106]at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he

[19107]forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from

[19108]being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is,

[19109]if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from

[19110]candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of

[19111]a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her

[19112]virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his

[19113]interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been

[19114]too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to

[19115]listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of

[19116]the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his

[19117]piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt

[19118]illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata

[19119]of society! Nay, had the hussy’s scouringbrush not been her tutelary

[19120]angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the

[19121]question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and

[19122]in Mr Cuffe’s hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher

[19123]a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were

[19124]bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer

[19125]home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A

[19126]habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in

[19127]middle life. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums

[19128]and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of

[19129]unfledged profligates let his practice consist better with the doctrines

[19130]that now engross him. His marital breast is the repository of secrets

[19131]which decorum is reluctant to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded

[19132]beauty may console him for a consort neglected and debauched but this

[19133]new exponent of morals and healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree

[19134]which, when rooted in its native orient, throve and flourished and was

[19135]abundant in balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots

[19136]have lost their quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it

[19137]is stagnant, acid and inoperative.

[19138]

[19139]The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial

[19140]usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the

[19141]junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the

[19142]delegation that an heir had been born. When he had betaken himself to

[19143]the women’s apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the

[19144]afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic

[19145]affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous

[19146]exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and

[19147]solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would

[19148]palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and

[19149]obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of

[19150]tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring

[19151]to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the

[19152]display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among

[19153]tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively

[19154]eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean

[19155]section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form,

[19156]with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs

[19157]Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate

[19158]Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the rights

[19159]of primogeniture and king’s bounty touching twins and triplets,

[19160]miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac

[19161]foetus in foetu and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia

[19162]of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in

[19163]consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial

[19164]line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the

[19165]benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour

[19166]pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the

[19167]premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the

[19168]actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial

[19169]insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent

[19170]upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species in

[19171]the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing

[19172]manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the

[19173]recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births

[19174]conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents—in

[19175]a word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified

[19176]in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest

[19177]problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much

[19178]animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as

[19179]the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest,

[19180]by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and

[19181]the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and

[19182]ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her

[19183]person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation. The

[19184]abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro’s

[19185]inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a prima

[19186]facie and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded (the

[19187]case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired infants

[19188]occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the

[19189]Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land

[19190]he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development

[19191]at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish delegate sustained

[19192]against both these views, with such heat as almost carried conviction,

[19193]the theory of copulation between women and the males of brutes, his

[19194]authority being his own avouchment in support of fables such as that of

[19195]the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down

[19196]to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression made by his

[19197]words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had

[19198]been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of

[19199]pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect, postulating as

[19200]the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man. Contemporaneously,

[19201]a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr

[19202]Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological dilemma created

[19203]in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other, the difficulty

[19204]by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant

[19205]submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the

[19206]better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the

[19207]garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he

[19208]delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the ecclesiastical

[19209]ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has joined.

[19210]

[19211]But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up

[19212]the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back

[19213]and in the recess appeared... Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh

[19214]creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the

[19215]other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted

[19216]on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some

[19217]such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems,

[19218]history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel

[19219]Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This

[19220]is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting

[19221]at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back

[19222]with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a

[19223]bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this life. It is what

[19224]I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse

[19225]language (he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips),

[19226]camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah!

[19227]Destruction! The black panther! With a cry he suddenly vanished and the

[19228]panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite

[19229]and said: Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven. He was

[19230]gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer

[19231]raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The sage

[19232]repeated: Lex talionis. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without

[19233]incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias, overcome

[19234]by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third

[19235]brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the

[19236]ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief

[19237]much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited. No

[19238]soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude. The

[19239]nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted.

[19240]Murderer’s ground.

[19241]

[19242]What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the

[19243]chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the

[19244]merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as

[19245]her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing

[19246]the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a

[19247]modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is

[19248]young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within

[19249]a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then

[19250]is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old

[19251]house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him

[19252]bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s

[19253]thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first

[19254]hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged

[19255]traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented

[19256]handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas!

[19257]a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this

[19258]or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for

[19259]a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his

[19260]studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark

[19261]eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission

[19262]to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob’s pipe after like labours

[19263]in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating),

[19264]reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a

[19265]month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young

[19266]knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the

[19267]mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his

[19268]sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a

[19269]drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the

[19270]first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine

[19271]and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear

[19272]the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal

[19273]university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever

[19274]remember the night: first night, the bridenight. They are entwined

[19275]in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant

[19276](fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair

[19277]reader. In a breath ’twas done but—hold! Back! It must not be! In

[19278]terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of

[19279]darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe

[19280]of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful

[19281]illusion of thy strength was taken from thee—and in vain. No son of

[19282]thy loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold

[19283]was for Rudolph.

[19284]

[19285]The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the

[19286]infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions

[19287]of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight

[19288]ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her

[19289]dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with

[19290]ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms

[19291]are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely

[19292]haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They

[19293]fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of

[19294]screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And

[19295]on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion,

[19296]the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads

[19297]them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and

[19298]yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come

[19299]trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodiacal

[19300]host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the

[19301]trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter

[19302]and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning

[19303]multitude, murderers of the sun.

[19304]

[19305]Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible

[19306]gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent

[19307]grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own

[19308]magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder

[19309]of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the

[19310]daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,

[19311]Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now

[19312]arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,

[19313]shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call

[19314]it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it

[19315]streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents

[19316]of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,

[19317]writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad

[19318]metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign

[19319]upon the forehead of Taurus.

[19320]

[19321]Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at

[19322]school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades,

[19323]Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the

[19324]past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them

[19325]into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to

[19326]my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending

[19327]bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair

[19328]with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those

[19329]leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something

[19330]more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius

[19331]father. All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see

[19332]you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos. I

[19333]heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent Lenehan said, laying

[19334]a hand on the shoulder near him. Have no fear. He could not leave his

[19335]mother an orphan. The young man’s face grew dark. All could see how

[19336]hard it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent

[19337]loss. He would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices

[19338]allayed the smart. Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim

[19339]of the rider’s name: Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race.

[19340]The flag fell and, huuh! off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with

[19341]O. Madden up. She was leading the field. All hearts were beating.

[19342]Even Phyllis could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried:

[19343]Huzzah! Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were

[19344]in close order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped

[19345]her. All was lost now. Phyllis was silent: her eyes were sad anemones.

[19346]Juno, she cried, I am undone. But her lover consoled her and brought

[19347]her a bright casket of gold in which lay some oval sugarplums which she

[19348]partook. A tear fell: one only. A whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is

[19349]W. Lane. Four winners yesterday and three today. What rider is like him?

[19350]Mount him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack

[19351]canter is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy

[19352]on the luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the

[19353]filly that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another.

[19354]By gad, sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you

[19355]could have seen my queen today, Vincent said. How young she was and

[19356]radiant (Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and

[19357]frock of muslin, I do not know the right name of it. The chestnuts that

[19358]shaded us were in bloom: the air drooped with their persuasive odour and

[19359]with pollen floating by us. In the sunny patches one might easily have

[19360]cooked on a stone a batch of those buns with Corinth fruit in them that

[19361]Periplipomenes sells in his booth near the bridge. But she had nought

[19362]for her teeth but the arm with which I held her and in that she nibbled

[19363]mischievously when I pressed too close. A week ago she lay ill, four

[19364]days on the couch, but today she was free, blithe, mocked at peril.

[19365]She is more taking then. Her posies too! Mad romp that she is, she had

[19366]pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in your ear, my friend, you

[19367]will not think who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! He was

[19368]walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier book with, I doubt not,

[19369]a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page. The sweet

[19370]creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a

[19371]slight disorder in her dress: a slip of underwood clung there for the

[19372]very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely

[19373]echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going

[19374]by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had

[19375]poor luck with Bass’s mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me

[19376]more propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it

[19377]and withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label.

[19378]Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His soul is far

[19379]away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be

[19380]born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the

[19381]incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen? Theosophos

[19382]told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian

[19383]priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of the

[19384]moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha

[19385]of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these

[19386]were therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second

[19387]constellation.

[19388]

[19389]However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him

[19390]being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was

[19391]entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not

[19392]the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above

[19393]was going on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of

[19394]animation was as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody

[19395]that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty

[19396]speedily in the wrong shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts

[19397]he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled

[19398]by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent which happened to be situated

[19399]amongst a lot of others right opposite to where he was and which was

[19400]certainly calculated to attract anyone’s remark on account of its

[19401]scarlet appearance. He was simply and solely, as it subsequently

[19402]transpired for reasons best known to himself, which put quite an

[19403]altogether different complexion on the proceedings, after the moment

[19404]before’s observations about boyhood days and the turf, recollecting

[19405]two or three private transactions of his own which the other two were as

[19406]mutually innocent of as the babe unborn. Eventually, however, both

[19407]their eyes met and as soon as it began to dawn on him that the other was

[19408]endeavouring to help himself to the thing he involuntarily determined

[19409]to help him himself and so he accordingly took hold of the neck of the

[19410]mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and

[19411]made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it out with, also at the

[19412]same time, however, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order not

[19413]to upset any of the beer that was in it about the place.

[19414]

[19415]The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the

[19416]course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The

[19417]debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on

[19418]the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never

[19419]beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the

[19420]old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so

[19421]encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at

[19422]the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing

[19423]from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him,

[19424]was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity

[19425]and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to

[19426]Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose

[19427]the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant

[19428]before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in

[19429]explorer’s kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted

[19430]sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi

[19431]Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young

[19432]poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical

[19433]inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while

[19434]to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator,

[19435]fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the

[19436]dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible

[19437]dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril

[19438]or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous

[19439]loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages

[19440]yet to come.

[19441]

[19442]It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted

[19443]transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions

[19444]would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to

[19445]accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated,

[19446]deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the

[19447]street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain

[19448]them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which

[19449]science cannot answer—at present—such as the first problem submitted

[19450]by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex.

[19451]Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary

[19452](the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth

[19453]of males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the

[19454]differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to

[19455]opine, such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig,

[19456]Leopold and Valenti, a mixture of both? This would be tantamount to

[19457]a cooperation (one of nature’s favourite devices) between the nisus

[19458]formativus of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily

[19459]chosen position, succubitus felix, of the passive element. The other

[19460]problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant

[19461]mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we

[19462]are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways. Mr M.

[19463]Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which

[19464]our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by

[19465]inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleged,

[19466]and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity

[19467]posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers

[19468]and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of

[19469]dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas—these, he

[19470]said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of

[19471]the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted

[19472]and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,

[19473]light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of

[19474]the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured

[19475]photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable

[19476]ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months

[19477]in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes

[19478]some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers

[19479]subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in

[19480]the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official,

[19481]culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal

[19482]abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former

[19483](we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he

[19484]cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity

[19485]is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the

[19486]wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they

[19487]do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which

[19488]often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is

[19489]that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and

[19490]mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements,

[19491]lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in

[19492]fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote

[19493]sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify

[19494]our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.

[19495]Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy

[19496]parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs

[19497]unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same

[19498]marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet’s words, give us pause.

[19499]Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for

[19500]whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law

[19501]of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken

[19502]up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the

[19503]plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an

[19504]increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement which, though

[19505]productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is

[19506]nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the

[19507]race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S.

[19508]Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?)

[19509]that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and

[19510]apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect

[19511]imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females

[19512]emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak

[19513]of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric

[19514]relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought

[19515]else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.

[19516]For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with

[19517]the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and

[19518]embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things

[19519]scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides

[19520]himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in

[19521]the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the

[19522]cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In

[19523]a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took

[19524]place in the commons’ hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30

[19525]and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in

[19526]Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported

[19527]by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat

[19528]into the bag (an esthete’s allusion, presumably, to one of the most

[19529]complicated and marvellous of all nature’s processes—the act of

[19530]sexual congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he

[19531]phrased it, to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling

[19532]rejoinder of his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate

[19533]and measured tone in which it was delivered.

[19534]

[19535]Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a

[19536]happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and

[19537]doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman

[19538]had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she

[19539]was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before,

[19540]are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene.

[19541]Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in

[19542]her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is

[19543]to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent

[19544]prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her

[19545]loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have

[19546]her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that

[19547]mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older

[19548]now (you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet

[19549]in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious

[19550]second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady,

[19551]loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that

[19552]faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she

[19553]recalls those days. God! How beautiful now across the mist of years! But

[19554]their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers

[19555]and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy,

[19556]Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little

[19557]Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs

[19558]of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a

[19559]Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful

[19560]will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of

[19561]Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer’s office, Dublin Castle. And

[19562]so time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no

[19563]sigh break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes

[19564]from your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings

[19565]for you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read

[19566]in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil

[19567]heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You

[19568]too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man’s part.

[19569]Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!

[19570]

[19571]There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil

[19572]memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart

[19573]but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim,

[19574]let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself

[19575]that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will

[19576]call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the

[19577]most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel

[19578]and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the

[19579]evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine.

[19580]Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under

[19581]her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded

[19582]in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.

[19583]

[19584]The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of

[19585]that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied

[19586]trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an

[19587]unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life. A scene

[19588]disengages itself in the observer’s memory, evoked, it would seem, by

[19589]a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present

[19590]there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space

[19591]of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at

[19592]Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but

[19593]with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over

[19594]the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert

[19595]shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times

[19596]in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey,

[19597]Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in

[19598]her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent

[19599]from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily

[19600]against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey

[19601](blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long

[19602]the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by

[19603]that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young

[19604]man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but

[19605]must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the

[19606]piazzetta giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness

[19607]or of reproach (alles Vergängliche) in her glad look.

[19608]

[19609]Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that

[19610]antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their

[19611]faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of

[19612]custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant

[19613]watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long

[19614]ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with

[19615]preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended,

[19616]compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field

[19617]and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an

[19618]instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the

[19619]thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the

[19620]transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the

[19621]word.

[19622]

[19623]Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and

[19624]bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor,

[19625]punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear,

[19626]ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and

[19627]what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse

[19628]Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon

[19629]coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a

[19630]milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha! They are

[19631]out, tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it,

[19632]Burke’s of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows

[19633]giving them sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom

[19634]stays with nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and

[19635]nurseling up there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not

[19636]other now? Ward of watching in Horne’s house has told its tale in that

[19637]washedout pallor. Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he

[19638]whispers close in going: Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?

[19639]

[19640]The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence

[19641]celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum.

[19642]God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile

[19643]air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast

[19644]done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest

[19645]progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous

[19646]chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed

[19647]possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s

[19648]work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let

[19649]scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies,

[19650]Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher’s bills

[19651]at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every

[19652]newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece

[19653]is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay

[19654]and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is

[19655]a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked

[19656]kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod’s slaughter

[19657]of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile

[19658]cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary

[19659]pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,

[19660]bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious

[19661]attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and

[19662]trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty

[19663]years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that

[19664]will and would and wait and never—do. Thou sawest thy America, thy

[19665]lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How

[19666]saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die

[19667]süsse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink,

[19668]man, an udderful! Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk

[19669]too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour,

[19670]punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk

[19671]of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s land. Thy cow’s dug was tough,

[19672]what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop

[19673]this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam

[19674]Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!

[19675]

[19676]All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.

[19677]Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole

[19678]Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry

[19679]Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o’ me knows. Hurrah there,

[19680]Dix! Forward to the ribbon counter. Where’s Punch? All serene.

[19681]Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal!

[19682]Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius. A make, mister. The

[19683]Denzille lane boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em

[19684]out of the bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in

[19685]life. Lou heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch. En avant, mes enfants!

[19686]Fire away number one on the gun. Burke’s! Burke’s! Thence they

[19687]advanced five parasangs. Slattery’s mounted foot. Where’s that

[19688]bleeding awfur? Parson Steve, apostates’ creed! No, no, Mulligan!

[19689]Abaft there! Shove ahead. Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time.

[19690]Mullee! What’s on you? Ma mère m’a mariée. British Beatitudes!

[19691]Retamplatan digidi boumboum. Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at

[19692]the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of pissedon

[19693]green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland

[19694]my time. Silentium! Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen

[19695]and there annex liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys

[19696]are (attitudes!) parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs

[19697]battleships, buggery and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer,

[19698]beef, trample the bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers.

[19699]Thunderation! Keep the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops

[19700]boosebox. Halt! Heave to. Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my

[19701]tootsies! You hurt? Most amazingly sorry!

[19702]

[19703]Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall.

[19704]Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this

[19705]week gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the Übermensch. Dittoh. Five

[19706]number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby’s caudle.

[19707]Stimulate the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go

[19708]again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? Caramba! Have an eggnog or a

[19709]prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular’s got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated

[19710]awful. Don’t mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got

[19711]bet be a boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten.

[19712]Digs up near the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do.

[19713]Full of a dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey

[19714]lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love.

[19715]Two Ardilauns. Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don’t wait to get

[19716]up. Five, seven, nine. Fine! Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And

[19717]her take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed.

[19718]Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O

[19719]gluepot. Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you’ll scuse

[19720]me saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. Well, doc?

[19721]Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity sagaciating O K? How’s the squaws

[19722]and papooses? Womanbody after going on the straw? Stand and deliver.

[19723]Password. There’s hair. Ours the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi!

[19724]Spit in your own eye, boss! Mummer’s wire. Cribbed out of Meredith.

[19725]Jesified, orchidised, polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine’s writing Pa

[19726]Kinch. Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.

[19727]

[19728]Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw

[19729]Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot

[19730]boil! My tipple. Merci. Here’s to us. How’s that? Leg before wicket.

[19731]Don’t stain my brandnew sitinems. Give’s a shake of peppe, you

[19732]there. Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of

[19733]silence. Every cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. Les petites

[19734]femmes. Bold bad girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing

[19735]at her. Hauding Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she

[19736]who seduced me had left but the name. What do you want for ninepence?

[19737]Machree, macruiskeen. Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull all

[19738]together. Ex!

[19739]

[19740]Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like,

[19741]seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He’ve got the

[19742]chink ad lib. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn. Us

[19743]come right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the oof.

[19744]Two bar and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy bilks?

[19745]Won’t wash here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de cutest

[19746]colour coon down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou.

[19747]We’re nae tha fou. Au reservoir, mossoo. Tanks you.

[19748]

[19749]’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir.

[19750]Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a

[19751]glint, do. Gum, I’m jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for

[19752]words. With a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he’d like? Rose

[19753]of Castile. Rows of cast. Police! Some H2O for a gent fainted. Look at

[19754]Bantam’s flowers. Gemini. He’s going to holler. The colleen bawn. My

[19755]colleen bawn. O, cheese it! Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand.

[19756]Had the winner today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly

[19757]the nab of Stephen Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a

[19758]telegramboy paddock wire big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and

[19759]grahamise. Mare on form hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram,

[19760]that. Gospeltrue. Criminal diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing.

[19761]Land him in chokeechokee if the harman beck copped the game. Madden

[19762]back Madden’s a maddening back. O lust our refuge and our strength.

[19763]Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy. Stand by. Hide my blushes someone.

[19764]All in if he spots me. Come ahome, our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo.

[19765]Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel. Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt?

[19766]Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her spouse. No fake, old man Leo.

[19767]S’elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers if I had. There’s a great

[19768]big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel, I ses, if that aint a sheeny

[19769]nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah. Through yerd our lord, Amen.

[19770]

[19771]You move a motion? Steve boy, you’re going it some. More bluggy

[19772]drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of

[19773]most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate

[19774]one expensive inaugurated libation? Give’s a breather. Landlord,

[19775]landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, a wee drap to pree.

[19776]Cut and come again. Right. Boniface! Absinthe the lot. Nos omnes

[19777]biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria.

[19778]Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say

[19779]onions? Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo’s papli, by all that’s gorgeous.

[19780]Play low, pardner. Slide. Bonsoir la compagnie. And snares of the

[19781]poxfiend. Where’s the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel,

[19782]ye maun e’en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann

[19783]wil yu help yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee tu find plais whear

[19784]tu lay crown of his hed 2 night. Crickey, I’m about sprung. Tarnally

[19785]dog gone my shins if this beent the bestest puttiest longbreak yet.

[19786]Item, curate, couple of cookies for this child. Cot’s plood and

[19787]prandypalls, none! Not a pite of sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell

[19788]and with him those other licensed spirits. Time, gents! Who wander

[19789]through the world. Health all! À la vôtre!

[19790]

[19791]Golly, whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep

[19792]at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril,

[19793]by James. Wants it real bad. D’ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the

[19794]Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.

[19795]Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once

[19796]a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all

[19797]forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh

[19798]of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies.

[19799]Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o’ yourn passed in his

[19800]checks? Ludamassy! Pore piccaninnies! Thou’ll no be telling me thot,

[19801]Pold veg! Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took

[19802]off in black bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never

[19803]see the like since I was born. Tiens, tiens, but it is well sad, that,

[19804]my faith, yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives

[19805]are souped. Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow.

[19806]Jappies? High angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him,

[19807]says he, nor any Rooshian. Time all. There’s eleven of them. Get ye

[19808]gone. Forward, woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah the Excellent One

[19809]your soul this night ever tremendously conserve.

[19810]

[19811]Your attention! We’re nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The

[19812]least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable

[19813]regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

[19814]

[19815]Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes.

[19816]Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not

[19817]come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

[19818]

[19819]Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o’ me. Denzille lane this way. Change here

[19820]for Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary

[19821]is. Righto, any old time. Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis. You coming

[19822]long? Whisper, who the sooty hell’s the johnny in the black duds?

[19823]Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when

[19824]he shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Ut implerentur

[19825]scripturae. Strike up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his

[19826]comrade medical Davy. Christicle, who’s this excrement yellow

[19827]gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood

[19828]of the Lamb. Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling

[19829]existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled,

[19830]peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage!

[19831]Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie,

[19832]that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from

[19833]Frisco beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow.

[19834]I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine business

[19835]proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it.

[19836]Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early,

[19837]you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not

[19838]half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend,

[19839]in his back pocket. Just you try it on.

[19840]

[19841]

[19842]

[19843]

[19844]

[19845]

Joyce's Ulysses Concordance

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14. Oxen of the Sun