Ulysses
He smiled on all sides equally.
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:
—Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
—To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.
Mr Best turned to him.
—Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He’ll see you after at
the D. B. C. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy Hyde’s _Lovesongs of Connacht_.
—I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
—The bard’s fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress
played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin.
Vining held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be
an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He
swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.
—The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H._ where he
proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all
hues.
—For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?
—I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the
colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out. It’s the very
essence of Wilde, don’t you know. The light touch.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
Tame essence of Wilde.
You’re darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan
Deasy’s ducats.
How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
Wit. You would give your five wits for youth’s proud livery he pranks
in. Lineaments of gratified desire.
There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool
ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.
Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in’s kiss.
—Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
They talked seriously of mocker’s seriousness.
Buck Mulligan’s again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.
—Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
—_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
immense debtorship for a thing done._ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you
launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four
quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!
Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!
O, you priestified Kinchite!
Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:
—It’s what I’m telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.
He wailed:
—And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
Stephen laughed.
Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
—The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard
you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He’s out in pampooties to
murder you.
—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
—Murder you! he laughed.
Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of
lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. _C’est vendredi saint!_ Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’the forest.
—Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
—... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms... Yes?
What is it?
—There’s a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the _Freeman._ He wants to see the files of the
_Kilkenny People_ for last year.
—Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...
He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:
—Is he?... O, there!
Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he 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 where 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
gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of
Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial 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 Fitton, 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 any 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.
But 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
Leftherhis
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 country gentleman, 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,