Ulysses
his shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the
mariner’s hope and rest they had a full view of the figure 16 and a
young man’s sideface looking frowningly rather.
—Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were lying
becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the
name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek.
—Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.
That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the.
Someway in his. Squeezing or.
—See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And
there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his
fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.
And in point of fact the young man named Antonio’s livid face did
actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the
unreserved admiration of everybody including Skin-the-Goat, who this
time stretched over.
—Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He’s gone
too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.
He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression
of before.
—Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said.
—And what’s the number for? loafer number two queried.
—Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.
—Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this time
with some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the
direction of the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was.
And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his
alleged end:
—As bad as old Antonio,
For he left me on my ownio.
The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat
peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on
her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom,
scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment
flusterfied but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink
sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had
laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though
why pink. His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round
the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that
afternoon on Ormond quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the
lane who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.)
and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing which seemed
rather vague than not, your washing. Still candour compelled him to
admit he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holles
street and women would and did too a man’s similar garments initialled
with Bewley and Draper’s marking ink (hers were, that is) if they
really loved him, that is to say, love me, love my dirty shirt. Still
just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female’s room more than
her company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a
rude sign to take herself off. Round the side of the _Evening
Telegraph_ he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side
of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was
not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of
gazers round skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more
of her.
—The gunboat, the keeper said.
—It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking,
how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with
disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober
senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of
course I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition.
Still no matter what the cause is from...
Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely
remarking:
—In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a
roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to
buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.
The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a
prude, said it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be
put a stop to _instanter_ to say that women of that stamp (quite apart
from any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil,
were not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a
thing, he could truthfully state, he, as a _paterfamilias_, was a
stalwart advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a
policy of the sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would
confer a lasting boon on everybody concerned.
—You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe
in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such,
as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I
believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men
as the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have
such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try
and concentrate and remember before he could say:
—They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and
therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for
the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I
can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other
practical jokes, _corruptio per se_ and _corruptio per accidens_ both
being excluded by court etiquette.
Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the
mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he
felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly
rejoining:
—Simple? I shouldn’t think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant
you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a
blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for
instance to invent those rays Röntgen did or the telescope like Edison,
though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean,
and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural
phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite another colour
to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
—O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several
of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial
evidence.
On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they
were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference
in their respective ages, clashed.
—Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his
original point with a smile of unbelief. I’m not so sure about that.
That’s a matter for everyman’s opinion and, without dragging in the
sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you _in toto_
there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were
genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it’s the
big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them
like _Hamlet_ and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely
better than I, of course I needn’t tell you. Can’t you drink that
coffee, by the way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It’s
like one of our skipper’s bricks disguised. Still no-one can give what
he hasn’t got. Try a bit.
—Couldn’t, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the
moment refusing to dictate further.
Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir
or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with
something approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance
(and lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond
yea or nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they
were in run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic
evenings and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the
lower orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful
recollection they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been
prominently associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration
indeed for her pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to
believe, was to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to
speak of. Sulphate of copper poison SO4 or something in some dried peas
he remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he
couldn’t remember when it was or where. Anyhow inspection, medical
inspection, of all eatables seemed to him more than ever necessary
which possibly accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble’s Vi-Cocoa on
account of the medical analysis involved.
—Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being
stirred.
Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted the heavy mug
from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and
took a sip of the offending beverage.
—Still it’s solid food, his good genius urged, I’m a stickler for solid
food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but
regular meals as the _sine qua non_ for any kind of proper work, mental
or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different
man.
—Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that
knife. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated
article, a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly
Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was
the least conspicuous point about it.
—Our mutual friend’s stories are like himself, Mr Bloom _apropos_ of
knives remarked to his _confidante sotto voce_. Do you think they are
genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and
lie like old boots. Look at him.
Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was
full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it
was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire
fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent
probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly
accurate gospel.
He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and
Sherlockholmesing him up ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a
wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness,
there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a
jail delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to
associate such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill
fraternity. He might even have done for his man supposing it was his
own case he told, as people often did about others, namely, that he
killed him himself and had served his four or five goodlooking years in
durance vile to say nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to
the dramatic personage of identical name who sprang from the pen of our
national poet) who expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above
described. On the other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable
weakness because meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like
those jarvies waiting news from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner
who sailed the ocean seas to draw the long bow about the schooner
_Hesperus_ and etcetera. And when all was said and done the lies a
fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to
the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.
—Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s all a pure invention, he resumed.
Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants,
though that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella the