Страница:
talked with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.
-- This gentleman? Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good
day, sir. Kilkenny... We have certainly...
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
-- All the leading provincial... Northern Whig, Cork Examiner
Enniscorthy Guardian, 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this
gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or please allow me... This
way... Please, sir...
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
-- The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
-- What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
He rattled on.
-- Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that has
never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her. Life of
life, thy lips enkindle.
Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
-- He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. Venus
Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! The god pursuing the maiden hid.
We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all,
as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
-- Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in
whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years
he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to
that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more
than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.
Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane,
gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested
him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays.
The gombeen woman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of
Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste
delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's
story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had
seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado
about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at
the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came
before Richard III. And the gay lakin, Mistress Fitten, mount and cry O, and
his dainty birdsnies, Lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited
for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours-la-Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux?
-- The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for every cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
-- Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
-- And Harry of six wives' daughter and other lady friends from
neighbour seats, as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind
the diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter Lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno's
eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in a
reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
-- Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
-- Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
-- As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
-- It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew
to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are
rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom
her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet Ann I take it,
was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
-- The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said, frowning. If
you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy,
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between
the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw
their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor
dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first
to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan,
her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy's
words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
>From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
-- Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
-- He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his
best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
-- It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.
-- Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.
-- Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered,
bedsmiling. Let me think.
-- Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen
sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves,
pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget Nell
Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
-- Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
-- He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish
for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
-- What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
-- Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he
thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his
hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days.
Lovely!
Catamite.
-- The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
-- The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You can not eat your
cake and have it.
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?
-- And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a
cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine
riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by
Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a
fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of
flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey's ostler and
callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes
with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's
leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet
alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch
philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in
Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide
of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a
porter's theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas
and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American
cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carroty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let
some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the
depth of the buckbasket.
I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.
-- Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
Sufflaminandus sum.
-- He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.
-- A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.
Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos.
-- Saint Thomas, Stephen began...
-- Ora pro nobis, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
-- Pogue mahone! Asushla machree! It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
-- Saint Thomas, Stephen, smiling, said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from
that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and
curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given
to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may
be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races
the most given to inter-marriage. Accusations are made in anger. The
christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the
lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel.
Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday
leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what
he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over
her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his
wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
-- Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
-- Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
-- Which Will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
-- The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.
-- Requiescat! Stephen prayed.
What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago...
-- She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as
a motor car is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes.
In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a
quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to
ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks
preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the
jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus had twisted
her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
-- History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that
only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel
that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him.
Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman to see
you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor
Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned
codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of
wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending
her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
-- A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a
necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's
death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters,
with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you
must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The
corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it
rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that
mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last
man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious
begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic
succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on
the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe
the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the
world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon
unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the
only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father
of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.
Are you condemned to do this?
-- They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly
record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters,
loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds
with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The sun unborn mars beauty: born, he
brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is
his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's
enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
-- What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut. Am I father? If
I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
-- Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin,
with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who
has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son?
When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in
the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son
merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all
his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn
grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr Magee
understands her, abhors perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But Flatter.
-- Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big
with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
-- As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King
John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The
Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot
of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another
member of his family who is recorded.
-- The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
STEPHEN He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one
time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in
Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage filled
Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in
the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN Names! What's in a name?
BEST That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
(Laughter.)
BUCK MULLIGAN (Piano, diminuendo.)
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy...
STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles' names.
Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund
lay dying in Southwark.
BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name.
(Laughter.)
QUAKERLYSTER (A tempo.) But he that filches from me my good name...
STEPHEN (Stringendo.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his
face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where
there is Will in overplus. Like John O'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as
dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled
argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest
shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves
in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a
daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens
alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in
Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his
initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon,
eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at
midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. Autontimerumenos. Bonus Stephanoumenos. Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D.: sua donna. Giю:
di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar. S. D.
-- What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
-- A star by night, Stephen said, a pillar of the cloud by day.
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
Stephanos, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
-- You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name
is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater,
ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.
Mr Best's eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
-- That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third brother
that marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
-- I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand
you to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps
I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
-- Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
-- O! Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
-- Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and
Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
-- In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock
to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
-- You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which
he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
(what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the
conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four
acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is
the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world.
Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of
Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
-- That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now
combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que
voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.
-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare,
what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment
from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two
Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain
fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of
his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis,
catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave,
when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of
adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding,
weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words
are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like
original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is
between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his
tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not
withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite
variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing,
twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure,
and in all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage. Judge Eglinton
summed up.
-- The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
is all in all.
-- He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act
five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Josи he kills the
real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly
willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
-- Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!
Dark dome received, reverbed.
-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed.
When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas pхre?) is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.
-- Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns
after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he
has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion
is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pиre and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince
at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and
betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow
for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If
you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man
rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man
taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong
curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world
within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he
will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is
to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We
walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men,
wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The
playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us
light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom
the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in
all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but
that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more
marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
-- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!
Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
desk.
-- May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
Take some slips from the counter going out.
-- Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,
shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.
-- You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your
own theory?
-- No, Stephen said promptly.
-- Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.
John Eclecticon doubly smiled.
-- Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect
payment for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is
some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper
met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the
secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present
duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It
will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or
help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.
-- You are the only contributor to Dana who asks for pieces of silver.
Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
article on economics.
Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
-- For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
gravely said, honeying malice:
-- I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra
Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie,
the coalquay whore.
He broke away.
-- Come, Kinch. Come, wandering &Aelig;ngus of the birds.
Come, Kinch, you have eaten all we left. Ay, I will serve you your orts
and offals.
Stephen rose.
Life is many days. This will end.
-- We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. Notre ami Moore says
Malachi Mulligan must be there.
Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
-- Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?
Laughing he...
Swill till eleven. Irish nights' entertainment.
Lubber...
Stephen followed a lubber...
One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After his
lub back I followed. I gall his kibe.
Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a
wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering
daylight of no thoughts.
What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
Walk like Haines now.
The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashe Boyle O'Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad?
The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
-- O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...
Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself,
selfnodding:
-- A pleased bottom.
The turnstile.
Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...
The curving balustrade; smoothsliding Mincius.
Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
John Eglinton, my jo, John.
Why won't you wed a wife?
He sputtered to the air:
O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new
art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the
public sweat of monks.
He spat blank.
Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
left the femme de trente ans. And why no other children born? And his first
child a girl?
Afterwit. Go back.
The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.
Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...
-- Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...
I hardly hear the purlieu cry
Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
Before my thoughts begin to run
On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
The same that had the wooden leg
And that filibustering fillibeg
That never dared to slake his drouth,
Magee that had the chinless mouth.
Being afraid to marry on earth
They masturbated for all they were worth.
Jest on. Know thyself.
Halted below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
-- Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
A laugh tripped over his lips.
-- Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that
old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jew jesuit! She gets you a job
on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn't you do
the Yeats touch?
He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:
-- The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.
He stopped at the stairfoot.
-- I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's
morrice with caps of indices.
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:
Everyman His own Wife
or
A Honeymoon in the Hand
(a national immorality in three orgasms)
by
Ballocky Mulligan
He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:
-- The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, marcato:
-- Characters:
TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
CRAB (a bushranger)
MEDICAL DICK
and (two birds with one stone)
MEDICAL DAVY
MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
FRESH NELLY
and
ROSALIE (the coalquay whore)
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
-- O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to
lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!
-- The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever
lifted them.
About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come
to, ineluctably.
My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.
A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
-- Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
The portico.
Here I watched the birds for augury. &Aelig;ngus of the birds. They go,
they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wandered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.
-- The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
Manner of Oxenford.
Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.
A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,
under portcullis barbs.
They followed.
Offend me still. Speak on.
Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds.
Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a
flaw of softness softly were blown.
Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline, hierophantic:
from wide earth an altar.
Laud we the gods
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
>From our bless'd altars.
THE SUPERIOR, THE VERY REVEREND JOHN CONMEE S. J, RESET HIS smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
Dignam, yes. Vere dignum et justum est. Brother Swan was the person to see.
Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical
catholic: useful at mission time.
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for aims towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,
of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending
their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words: If I had
served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my
old days. He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking leaves and towards him
came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
-- Very well, indeed, father. And you father?
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And
Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure
it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very
probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a
very great success. A wonderful man really.
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
looking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M. P. Yes,
he would certainly call.
-- Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
Father Conmee doffed his silk hat, as he took leave, at the jet beads
of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again in going. He had
cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.
Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.
-- Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?
A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his
way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish. Of
good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?
O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy
square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house: Aha. And were they
good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his name? Jack
Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man? His name was
Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.
Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to master Brunny Lynam and
pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
-- But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed.
-- O, sir.
-- Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter
to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox, Father
Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square east.
Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing, &c., in silk hat, slate
frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers,
canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most
respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of
Dignam's court.
Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?
Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the
farther footpath along which she smiled. And Father Conmee smiled and
saluted. How did she do?
A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
think that she was a pawnbroker. Well, now! Such a... what should he say?...
such a queenly mien.
Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the
shutup free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Green B. A. will (D. V.)
speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say a
few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They acted
according to their lights.
Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular
road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important
thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.
A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
Christian brother boys.
Father Conmee smelled incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females. Father Conmee
raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but occasionally they
were also badtempered.
Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
nobleman. And now it was an office or something.
Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted
by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father Conmee
saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came from
baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan's the tobacconist
against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New
York. In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people
to die like that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition.
Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the window of
which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.
Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny
Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay. A
constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted the
constable. In Youkstetter's, the pork-butcher's, Father Conmee observed
pig's puddings, white and black and red, lying neatly curled in tubes.
Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a turf
barge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw
seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It
was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator
who had made turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and bring it to
town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.
On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint Francis
Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound tram.
Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of
saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.
At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for
he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with
care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence and
five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse. Passing
the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually made his visit
when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The solemnity of the
occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive for a journey so
short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.
It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee
supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the
glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping
her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly.
Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that
the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the
seat.
Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.
At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old
woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the
bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and a
market net: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and basket
honest broadbrim.
-- This gentleman? Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good
day, sir. Kilkenny... We have certainly...
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
-- All the leading provincial... Northern Whig, Cork Examiner
Enniscorthy Guardian, 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this
gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or please allow me... This
way... Please, sir...
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
-- The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
-- What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
He rattled on.
-- Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that has
never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her. Life of
life, thy lips enkindle.
Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
-- He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. Venus
Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! The god pursuing the maiden hid.
We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all,
as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
-- Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in
whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years
he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to
that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more
than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.
Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane,
gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested
him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays.
The gombeen woman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of
Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste
delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's
story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had
seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado
about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at
the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conqueror came
before Richard III. And the gay lakin, Mistress Fitten, mount and cry O, and
his dainty birdsnies, Lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited
for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours-la-Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux?
-- The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for every cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
-- Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!
-- And Harry of six wives' daughter and other lady friends from
neighbour seats, as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind
the diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter Lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno's
eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in a
reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
-- Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
-- Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
-- As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
-- It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew
to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are
rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom
her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet Ann I take it,
was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
-- The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said, frowning. If
you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy,
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between
the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw
their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor
dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first
to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan,
her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy's
words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
That has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
>From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
-- Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.
-- He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his
best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
-- It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.
-- Separatio a mensa et a thalamo, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.
-- Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered,
bedsmiling. Let me think.
-- Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen
sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves,
pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget Nell
Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.
-- Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
-- He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish
for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
-- What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
-- Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he
thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his
hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days.
Lovely!
Catamite.
-- The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
-- The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You can not eat your
cake and have it.
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?
-- And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a
cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine
riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by
Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a
fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of
flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey's ostler and
callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes
with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's
leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet
alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch
philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in
Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide
of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a
porter's theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas
and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American
cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carroty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let
some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the
depth of the buckbasket.
I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.
-- Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
Sufflaminandus sum.
-- He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.
-- A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.
Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos.
-- Saint Thomas, Stephen began...
-- Ora pro nobis, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
-- Pogue mahone! Asushla machree! It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
-- Saint Thomas, Stephen, smiling, said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from
that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and
curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given
to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may
be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races
the most given to inter-marriage. Accusations are made in anger. The
christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the
lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel.
Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday
leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what
he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over
her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his
wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
-- Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
-- Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
-- Which Will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
-- The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.
-- Requiescat! Stephen prayed.
What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago...
-- She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as
a motor car is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes.
In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a
quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to
ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks
preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the
jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus had twisted
her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
-- History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say that
only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel
that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him.
Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman to see
you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor
Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned
codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of
wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending
her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
-- A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a
necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's
death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters,
with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you
must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The
corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it
rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that
mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last
man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious
begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic
succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on
the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe
the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the
world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon
unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the
only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father
of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.
Are you condemned to do this?
-- They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly
record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters,
loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds
with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The sun unborn mars beauty: born, he
brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is
his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's
enemy.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.
-- What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut. Am I father? If
I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
-- Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin,
with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who
has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son?
When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in
the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son
merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all
his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn
grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr Magee
understands her, abhors perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But Flatter.
-- Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big
with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
-- As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King
John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The
Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot
of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is another
member of his family who is recorded.
-- The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
STEPHEN He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one
time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in
Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage filled
Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in
the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN Names! What's in a name?
BEST That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
(Laughter.)
BUCK MULLIGAN (Piano, diminuendo.)
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy...
STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in King Lear, two bear the wicked uncles' names.
Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund
lay dying in Southwark.
BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name.
(Laughter.)
QUAKERLYSTER (A tempo.) But he that filches from me my good name...
STEPHEN (Stringendo.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his
face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where
there is Will in overplus. Like John O'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as
dear as the coat of arms he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled
argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest
shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves
in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a
daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens
alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in
Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his
initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon,
eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at
midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. Autontimerumenos. Bonus Stephanoumenos. Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D.: sua donna. Giю:
di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amar. S. D.
-- What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
-- A star by night, Stephen said, a pillar of the cloud by day.
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
Stephanos, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
-- You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name
is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater,
ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.
Mr Best's eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
-- That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third brother
that marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
-- I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand
you to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps
I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
-- Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...
-- O! Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
-- Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and
Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
-- In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock
to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
-- You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which
he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
(what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the
conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four
acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is
the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence, the angel of the world.
Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of
Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?
-- That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now
combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. Que
voulez-vous? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.
-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare,
what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment
from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two
Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain
fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of
his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis,
catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave,
when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of
adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding,
weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words
are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like
original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is
between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his
tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not
withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite
variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing,
twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure,
and in all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage. Judge Eglinton
summed up.
-- The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
is all in all.
-- He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act
five. All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Josи he kills the
real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly
willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
-- Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!
Dark dome received, reverbed.
-- And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed.
When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas pхre?) is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.
-- Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns
after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he
has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion
is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet pиre and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince
at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and
betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow
for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If
you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man
rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man
taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong
curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world
within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he
will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is
to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We
walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men,
wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The
playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us
light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom
the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in
all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but
that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more
marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
-- Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka!
Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
desk.
-- May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
Take some slips from the counter going out.
-- Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,
shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew.
-- You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your
own theory?
-- No, Stephen said promptly.
-- Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.
John Eclecticon doubly smiled.
-- Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect
payment for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is
some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper
met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the
secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present
duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It
will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or
help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.
-- You are the only contributor to Dana who asks for pieces of silver.
Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
article on economics.
Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
-- For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
gravely said, honeying malice:
-- I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra
Gentiles in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie,
the coalquay whore.
He broke away.
-- Come, Kinch. Come, wandering &Aelig;ngus of the birds.
Come, Kinch, you have eaten all we left. Ay, I will serve you your orts
and offals.
Stephen rose.
Life is many days. This will end.
-- We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. Notre ami Moore says
Malachi Mulligan must be there.
Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
-- Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?
Laughing he...
Swill till eleven. Irish nights' entertainment.
Lubber...
Stephen followed a lubber...
One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After his
lub back I followed. I gall his kibe.
Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a
wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering
daylight of no thoughts.
What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
Walk like Haines now.
The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashe Boyle O'Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad?
The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
-- O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...
Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself,
selfnodding:
-- A pleased bottom.
The turnstile.
Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...
The curving balustrade; smoothsliding Mincius.
Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
John Eglinton, my jo, John.
Why won't you wed a wife?
He sputtered to the air:
O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new
art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the
public sweat of monks.
He spat blank.
Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
left the femme de trente ans. And why no other children born? And his first
child a girl?
Afterwit. Go back.
The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.
Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...
-- Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...
I hardly hear the purlieu cry
Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
Before my thoughts begin to run
On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
The same that had the wooden leg
And that filibustering fillibeg
That never dared to slake his drouth,
Magee that had the chinless mouth.
Being afraid to marry on earth
They masturbated for all they were worth.
Jest on. Know thyself.
Halted below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
-- Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
A laugh tripped over his lips.
-- Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that
old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jew jesuit! She gets you a job
on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn't you do
the Yeats touch?
He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:
-- The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.
He stopped at the stairfoot.
-- I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's
morrice with caps of indices.
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:
Everyman His own Wife
or
A Honeymoon in the Hand
(a national immorality in three orgasms)
by
Ballocky Mulligan
He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:
-- The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, marcato:
-- Characters:
TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
CRAB (a bushranger)
MEDICAL DICK
and (two birds with one stone)
MEDICAL DAVY
MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
FRESH NELLY
and
ROSALIE (the coalquay whore)
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
-- O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to
lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!
-- The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever
lifted them.
About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come
to, ineluctably.
My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.
A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
-- Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
The portico.
Here I watched the birds for augury. &Aelig;ngus of the birds. They go,
they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wandered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.
-- The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
Manner of Oxenford.
Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.
A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,
under portcullis barbs.
They followed.
Offend me still. Speak on.
Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds.
Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a
flaw of softness softly were blown.
Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline, hierophantic:
from wide earth an altar.
Laud we the gods
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
>From our bless'd altars.
THE SUPERIOR, THE VERY REVEREND JOHN CONMEE S. J, RESET HIS smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
Dignam, yes. Vere dignum et justum est. Brother Swan was the person to see.
Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical
catholic: useful at mission time.
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for aims towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,
of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending
their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words: If I had
served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my
old days. He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking leaves and towards him
came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
-- Very well, indeed, father. And you father?
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And
Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure
it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very
probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a
very great success. A wonderful man really.
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
looking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M. P. Yes,
he would certainly call.
-- Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
Father Conmee doffed his silk hat, as he took leave, at the jet beads
of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again in going. He had
cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.
Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.
-- Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?
A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his
way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish. Of
good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?
O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy
square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house: Aha. And were they
good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his name? Jack
Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man? His name was
Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.
Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to master Brunny Lynam and
pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
-- But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed.
-- O, sir.
-- Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter
to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox, Father
Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square east.
Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing, &c., in silk hat, slate
frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers,
canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most
respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of
Dignam's court.
Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?
Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the
farther footpath along which she smiled. And Father Conmee smiled and
saluted. How did she do?
A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
think that she was a pawnbroker. Well, now! Such a... what should he say?...
such a queenly mien.
Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the
shutup free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Green B. A. will (D. V.)
speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say a
few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They acted
according to their lights.
Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular
road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important
thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.
A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
Christian brother boys.
Father Conmee smelled incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females. Father Conmee
raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but occasionally they
were also badtempered.
Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
nobleman. And now it was an office or something.
Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted
by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father Conmee
saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came from
baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan's the tobacconist
against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New
York. In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people
to die like that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition.
Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the window of
which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.
Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny
Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay. A
constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted the
constable. In Youkstetter's, the pork-butcher's, Father Conmee observed
pig's puddings, white and black and red, lying neatly curled in tubes.
Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a turf
barge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw
seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It
was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator
who had made turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and bring it to
town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.
On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint Francis
Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound tram.
Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of
saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.
At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for
he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with
care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence and
five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse. Passing
the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually made his visit
when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The solemnity of the
occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive for a journey so
short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.
It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee
supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the
glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping
her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly.
Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that
the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the
seat.
Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.
At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old
woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the
bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and a
market net: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and basket