Ulysses
the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome, and that
vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained
by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and
constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever
efface the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the inspired
pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come.
It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted
transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions
would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter
to accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often
repeated, deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the
man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked
and explain them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some
questions which science cannot answer—at present—such as the first
problem submitted by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future
determination of sex. Must we accept the view of Empedocles of
Trinacria that the right ovary (the postmenstrual period, assert
others) is responsible for the birth of males or are the too long
neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the differentiating factors or is
it, as most embryologists incline to opine, such as Culpepper,
Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig, Leopold and Valenti, a mixture
of both? This would be tantamount to a cooperation (one of nature’s
favourite devices) between the _nisus formativus_ of the nemasperm on
the one hand and on the other a happily chosen position, _succubitus
felix_, of the passive element. The other problem raised by the same
inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant mortality. It is interesting
because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but
we all die in different ways. Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames
the sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract
adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk
in dust. These factors, he alleged, and the revolting spectacles
offered by our streets, hideous publicity posters, religious ministers
of all denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic
cardrivers, the suspended carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors
and unfructified duennas—these, he said, were accountable for any and
every fallingoff in the calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied,
would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely
good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive
pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as
Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all
these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular
condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr
J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes some of these demises to
abdominal trauma in the case of women workers subjected to heavy
labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in the home but by
far the vast majority to neglect, private or official, culminating in
the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal abortion or
in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former (we are
thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he cites of
nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity is too
rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the wonder
is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they do,
all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which
often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is that
thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and
mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal
movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general,
everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of
some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which
beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet
unascertained. Still the plain straightforward question why a child of
normally healthy parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly
looked after succumbs unaccountably in early childhood (though other
children of the same marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet’s
words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and
cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths
are due to some law of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous
germs have taken up their residence (modern science has conclusively
shown that only the plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend
to disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of development, an
arrangement which, though productive of pain to some of our feelings
(notably the maternal), is nevertheless, some of us think, in the long
run beneficial to the race in general in securing thereby the survival
of the fittest. Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be
called an interruption?) that an omnivorous being which can masticate,
deglute, digest and apparently pass through the ordinary channel with
pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous
females emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not
to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly
find gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals
as nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above
alluded to. For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately
acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this
morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher who for all his overweening
bumptiousness in things scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid
from an alkali prides himself on being, it should perhaps be stated
that staggering bob in the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed
victuallers signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly
dropped from its mother. In a recent public controversy with Mr L.
Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took place in the commons’ hall of the
National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, of which, as
is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the
able and popular master, he is reported by eyewitnesses as having
stated that once a woman has let the cat into the bag (an esthete’s
allusion, presumably, to one of the most complicated and marvellous of
all nature’s processes—the act of sexual congress) she must let it out
again or give it life, as he phrased it, to save her own. At the risk
of her own, was the telling rejoinder of his interlocutor, none the
less effective for the moderate and measured tone in which it was
delivered.
Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a
happy _accouchement._ It had been a weary weary while both for patient
and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave
woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and
now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone
before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching
scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the
motherlight in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty
sight it is to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood,
breathing a silent prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal
Husband. And as her loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one
blessing more, to have her dear Doady there with her to share her joy,
to lay in his arms that mite of God’s clay, the fruit of their lawful
embraces. He is older now (you and I may whisper it) and a trifle
stooped in the shoulders yet in the whirligig of years a grave dignity
has come to the conscientious second accountant of the Ulster bank,
College Green branch. O Doady, loved one of old, faithful lifemate now,
it may never be again, that faroff time of the roses! With the old
shake of her pretty head she recalls those days. God! How beautiful now
across the mist of years! But their children are grouped in her
imagination about the bedside, hers and his, Charley, Mary Alice,
Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy, Budgy (Victoria Frances),
Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy (called after our
famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs of Waterford and
Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a Purefoy if ever
there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful will be
christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of Mr
Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer’s office, Dublin Castle. And so
time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no
sigh break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the
ashes from your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the
curfew rings for you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light
whereby you read in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so
with a tranquil heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His
own good time. You too have fought the good fight and played loyally
your man’s part. Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful
servant!
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil
memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the
heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow
dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade
himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance
word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront
him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while
timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility
of the evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with
wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies
under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but
shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote,
reproachful.
The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
unhealthiness, a _flair,_ for the cruder things of life. A scene
disengages itself in the observer’s memory, evoked, it would seem, by a
word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present
there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space
of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at
Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game
but with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward
over the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief
alert shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at
times in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood,
Floey, Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of
arresting in her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of
them pendent from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin
so daintily against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in
linseywoolsey (blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth
when ere long the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the
urn secured by that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little
just as this young man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment
of the danger but must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother
watches from the _piazzetta_ giving upon the flowerclose with a faint
shadow of remoteness or of reproach (_alles Vergängliche_) in her glad
look.