Ulysses
the virile potency of the old bucko that could still knock another
child out of her. All fell to praising of it, each after his own
fashion, though the same young blade held with his former view that
another than her conjugial had been the man in the gap, a clerk in
orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or an itinerant vendor of articles needed
in every household. Singular, communed the guest with himself, the
wonderfully unequal faculty of metempsychosis possessed by them, that
the puerperal dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the
seminaries of such frivolity, that the mere acquisition of academic
titles should suffice to transform in a pinch of time these votaries of
levity into exemplary practitioners of an art which most men anywise
eminent have esteemed the noblest. But, he further added, it is mayhap
to relieve the pentup feelings that in common oppress them for I have
more than once observed that birds of a feather laugh together.
But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,
has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted
to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal
polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have
counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary
advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that
moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a
tenant at will while he trembled for the security of his four per
cents? Has he forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is
it that from being a deluder of others he has become at last his own
dupe as he is, if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer?
Far be it from candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady,
the daughter of a gallant major, or to cast the most distant
reflections upon her virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it
was indeed highly his interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy
woman, she has been too long and too persistently denied her legitimate
prerogative to listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than
the derision of the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very
pelican in his piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of
nature, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn
from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy’s scouringbrush
not been her tutelary angel, it had gone with her as hard as with
Hagar, the Egyptian! In the question of the grazing lands his peevish
asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe’s hearing brought upon him from
an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as
straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that
gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the
want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty is second
nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must dispense his balm
of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to
health a generation of unfledged profligates let his practice consist
better with the doctrines that now engross him. His marital breast is
the repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant to adduce. The
lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort
neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and healer of
ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native
orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm but,
transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their
quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant,
acid and inoperative.
The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial
usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the
junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the
delegation that an heir had been born. When he had betaken himself to
the women’s apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the
afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic
affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous
exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and
solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would
palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and
obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of
tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring
to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the
display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union
among tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was
successively eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers,
the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that
rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as
the Childs Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr
Advocate Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused,
the rights of primogeniture and king’s bounty touching twins and
triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the
acardiac _foetus in foetu_ and aprosopia due to a congestion, the
agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan)
in consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the
medial line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other
spoke, the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation
of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the
vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in
the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix,
artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb
consequent upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the
species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that
distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers
_Sturzgeburt,_ the recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and
monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of
consanguineous parents—in a word all the cases of human nativity which
Aristotle has classified in his masterpiece with chromolithographic
illustrations. The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine
were examined with as much animation as the most popular beliefs on the
state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step
over a countrystile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should
strangle her creature and the injunction upon her in the event of a
yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand
against that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as the
seat of castigation. The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole,
supernumerary digits, negro’s inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain
were alleged by one as a _prima facie_ and natural hypothetical
explanation of those swineheaded (the case of Madame Grissel Steevens
was not forgotten) or doghaired infants occasionally born. The
hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and
worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for,
envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some
stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish delegate sustained against
both these views, with such heat as almost carried conviction, the
theory of copulation between women and the males of brutes, his
authority being his own avouchment in support of fables such as that of
the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down
to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression made by his
words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had
been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of
pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect, postulating as
the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man. Contemporaneously,
a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr
Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological dilemma created
in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other, the difficulty
by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant
submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the
better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the
garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he
delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the
ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has
joined.
But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up
the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back
and in the recess appeared... Haines! Which of us did not feel his
flesh creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand,
in the other a phial marked _Poison._ Surprise, horror, loathing were
depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I
anticipated some such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for
which, it seems, history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the
murderer of Samuel Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no
terrors for me. This is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what
way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping
Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the
like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this
life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions,
rookshooting, the Erse language (he recited some), laudanum (he raised
the phial to his lips), camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me.
Dope is my only hope... Ah! Destruction! The black panther! With a cry
he suddenly vanished and the panel slid back. An instant later his head
appeared in the door opposite and said: Meet me at Westland Row station
at ten past eleven. He was gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the
dissipated host. The seer raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The
vendetta of Mananaun! The sage repeated: _Lex talionis_. The
sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense
debtorship for a thing done. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased.
The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real name
was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father.
He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks. The lonely
house by the graveyard is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The
spider pitches her web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from
his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground.
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the
chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the
merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as
her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing
the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a
modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is
young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror
within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure
of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from
the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel
on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a
mother’s thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in
his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a
fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook,
a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright
trinketware (alas! a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of
compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out