Ulysses
that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient
city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there,
after due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken
solemn counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once
more into honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided
Gael.
—It’s on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal
Sassenachs and their _patois._
So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till
you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting
your blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to
impeach a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and
botheration and their colonies and their civilisation.
—Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with them!
The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody
thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature
worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.
Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts.
—The European family, says J. J....
—They’re not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin
Egan of Paris. You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language
anywhere in Europe except in a _cabinet d’aisance._
And says John Wyse:
—Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:
—_Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!_
He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the
medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan _Lamh
Dearg Abu_, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty
valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster
silent as the deathless gods.
—What’s up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had
lost a bob and found a tanner.
—Gold cup, says he.
—Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.
_—Throwaway,_ says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest
nowhere.
—And Bass’s mare? says Terry.
—Still running, says he. We’re all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid
on my tip _Sceptre_ for himself and a lady friend.
—I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on _Zinfandel_ that Mr Flynn
gave me. Lord Howard de Walden’s.
—Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. _Throwaway,_
says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy
name is _Sceptre._
So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was
anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his
luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.
—Not there, my child, says he.
—Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She’d have won the money only for the
other dog.
And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom
sticking in an odd word.
—Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they
can’t see the beam in their own.
—_Raimeis_, says the citizen. There’s no-one as blind as the fellow
that won’t see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost
tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!
And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax
and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our
tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our
Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk
and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite
convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are
the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the
Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian
purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and
Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble,
silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today,
the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs
duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of
Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds
of the Barrow and Shannon they won’t deepen with millions of acres of
marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?
—As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland
with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I
was reading a report of lord Castletown’s...
—Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain
elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the
trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of
Eire, O.
—Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.
The fashionable international world attended _en masse_ this afternoon
at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief
ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine
Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,
Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs
Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss
Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche
Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower,
Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel
Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall,
Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs
Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of
Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was
given away by her father, the M’Conifer of the Glands, looked
exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised
silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of
broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe,
the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn
bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce
Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same
tone, a dainty _motif_ of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a
pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form
of heron feathers of paletinted coral. Senhor Enrique Flor presided at
the organ with his wellknown ability and, in addition to the prescribed
numbers of the nuptial mass, played a new and striking arrangement of
_Woodman, spare that tree_ at the conclusion of the service. On leaving
the church of Saint Fiacre _in Horto_ after the papal blessing the
happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts,
beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries,
mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan
will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.
—And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with
Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were
pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.
—And will again, says Joe.
—And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the
citizen, clapping his thigh. Our harbours that are empty will be full
again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom
of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a
fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O’Reillys and the
O’Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when
the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own
flag to the fore, none of your Henry Tudor’s harps, no, the oldest flag
afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns
on a blue field, the three sons of Milesius.
And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like
a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody
life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled
multitude in Shanagolden where he daren’t show his nose with the Molly
Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the
holding of an evicted tenant.
—Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?
—An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.
—Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you
asleep?
—Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.
Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead
of attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying
to crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his
head down like a bull at a gate. And another one: _Black Beast Burned
in Omaha, Ga_. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing
at a Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under
him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and
crucify him to make sure of their job.
—But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at
bay?
—I’ll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.
Read the revelations that’s going on in the papers about flogging on
the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself
_Disgusted One_.
So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew of
tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the
parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad
brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend
of a gun.
—A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John
Beresford called it but the modern God’s Englishman calls it caning on
the breech.
And says John Wyse:
—’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane
and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad
till he yells meila murder.
—That’s your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the
earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary
chamber on the face of God’s earth and their land in the hands of a
dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That’s the great empire they
boast about of drudges and whipped serfs.
—On which the sun never rises, says Joe.
—And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The
unfortunate yahoos believe it.
They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was
scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day
he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend
till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be
paid.
—But, says Bloom, isn’t discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn’t
it be the same here if you put force against force?
Didn’t I tell you? As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his
last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.
—We’ll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater
Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the
black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid
low by the batteringram and the _Times_ rubbed its hands and told the
whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as
redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the