by James Joyce
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah! Abulafia!
(George S. Mesias, Bloom’s tailor, appears, a tailor’s goose under his arm, presenting a bill)
MESIAS: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM: (Rubs his hands cheerfully) Just like old times.
Poor Bloom!
(Reuben J. Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory)
REUBEN J.: (Whispers hoarsely) The squeak is out. A split is gone for the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
THE FIRE BRIGADE: Pflaap!
BROTHER BUZZ: (Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)
THE CITIZEN: Thank heaven!
BLOOM: (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid phœnix flames) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of Erin, in black garments with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands, kneel down and pray.)
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN:
Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.
Flower of the Bath, pray for us.
Mentor of Menton, pray for us.
Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us.
Charitable Mason, pray for us.
Wandering Soap, pray for us.
Sweets of Sin, pray for us.
Music without Words, pray for us.
Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us.
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us.
Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us.
Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O’Brien, sings the Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonized.)
ZOE: Talk away till you’re black in the face.
BLOOM: (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an emigrant’s red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye) Let me be going now, woman of the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I’m after having the father and mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye) All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life’s dream is o’er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away mournfully) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.
ZOE: (Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet) Honest? Till the next time. (She sneers) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.
BLOOM: (Bitterly) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
ZOE: (In sudden sulks) I hate a rotter that’s insincere.
Give a bleeding whore a chance.
BLOOM: (Repentantly) I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil. Where are you from? London?
ZOE: (Glibly) Hog’s Norton where the pigs play the organs. I’m Yorkshire born. (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time? Ten shillings?
BLOOM: (Smiles, nods slowly) More, houri, more.
ZOE: And more’s mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws) Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I’ll peel off.
BLOOM: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster. (Earnestly)
You know how difficult it is. I needn’t tell you.
ZOE: (Flattered) What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for. (She pats him) Come.
BLOOM: Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
ZOE: Babby!
BLOOM: (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair, fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby finger, his moist tongue tolling and lisping) One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone.
THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me.
ZOE: Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)
THE MALE BRUTES: (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro) Good!
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)
ZOE: (Her lucky hand instantly saving him) Hoopsa! Don’t fall upstairs.
BLOOM: The just man falls seven times. (He stands aside at the threshold) After you is good manners.
ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.
(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall hang a man’s hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an ape’s gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of her corset lace hangs slightly below her iacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the piano.)
KITTY: (Coughs behind her hand) She’s a bit imbecillic. (She signs with a waggling forefinger) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly) Respect yourself. (She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows, red with henna) O, excuse!
ZOE: More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the gas full cock)
KITTY: (Peers at the gasjet) What ails it tonight?
LYNCH: (Deeply) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE: Clap on the back for Zoe.
(The wand in Lynch’s hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Floury Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spread-eagle in the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid)
KITTY: (Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot) O, excuse!
ZOE: (Promptly) Your boy’s t
hinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)
STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet’s rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Cœla enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests hai-hooping round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’ altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about his almightiness. Mais, nom de nom, that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles, laughs) Which side is your knowledge bump?
THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!
STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
THE CAP: Bah!
STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (He frowns) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which …
THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t.
STEPHEN: (With an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return.
The octave. Which.
THE CAP: Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City)
STEPHEN: (Abruptly) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco !
LYNCH: (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe Higgins) What a learned speech, eh?
ZOE: (Briskly) God help your head, he knows more than you have forgotten.
(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen)
FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.
KITTY: No!
ZOE: (Explodes in laughter) Great unjust God!
FLORRY (Offended) Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my foot’s tickling.
(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, yelling)
THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the rocking-horse races. Sea serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
(Stephen turns and sees Bloom)
STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time.
(Reuben J. Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim’s wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness)
ALL: What?
THE HOBGOBLIN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) Il vient! C’est moi ! L’homme qui rit! L’homme primigène I (He whirls round and round with dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien n’va plus. (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)
FLORRY: (Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly) The end of the world!
(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.)
THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem! Open your gates and sing Hosanna …
(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a two headed octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD: (With a Scotch accent) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?
(Over the passing drift and choking breatkcougks, Elijah’s voice, harsh as a corncrake’s, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, verger-faced, above a rostrum about which the banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)
ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dave Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God’s time is 12.25. Tell mother you’ll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here! Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it’s up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It’s a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It’s the whole pie with jam in. It’s just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K. Seventy-seven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That’s it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings) Jeru …
THE GRAMOPHONE: (Drowning his voice) Whorusalamin-yourhighhohhhh …(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle)
THE THREE WHORES: (Covering their ears, squawk) Ahhkkk!
ELIJAH: (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top of his voice, his arms uplifted) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don’t never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. (He winks at his audience) Our Mr President, he twig the whole lot and he ain’t saying nothing.
KITTY-KATE: I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother’s sister married a Mont-morency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.
ZOE-FANNY: I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
FLORRY-TERESA: It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy’s three stars I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bed.
STEPHEN: In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students’ gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching)
THE BEATITUDES: (Incoherently) Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop.
LYSTER: (In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed ha
t, says discreetly) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the light.
(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin’s kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
BEST: (Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot) I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.
JOHN EGLINTON: (Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it towards a corner; with carping accent) Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.
(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, kolyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaan MacLir broods, chin on knees. He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two talons.)
MANANAAN MACLIR: (With a voice of waves) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won’t have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.) Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter.
(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)
