<p>—Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.</p>
<p>—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?</p>
<p>—It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.</p>
<p>—<i>Separatio a mensa et a thalamo</i>, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.</p>
<p>—Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
Let me think.</p>
<p>—Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute
to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and
bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don’t forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis)
and let her live in his villa.</p>
<p>—Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...</p>
<p>—He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a
king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!</p>
<p>—What? asked Besteglinton.</p>
<p>William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people’s William. For terms
apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...</p>
<p>—Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of
the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said:
<i>All we can say is that life ran very high in those days.</i> Lovely!</p>
<p>Catamite.</p>
<p>—The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.</p>
<p>Steadfast John replied severe:</p>
<p>—The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
and have it.</p>
<p>Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?</p>
<p>—And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own
long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a
cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots.
His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle
Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for
the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for
every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick?
All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that
followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart
being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: <i>Hamlet</i> and
<i>Macbeth</i> with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a
turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in <i>Love’s Labour
Lost</i>. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of
equivocation. The <i>Sea Venture</i> comes home from Bermudas and the play
Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared
sonnets follow Sidney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the
gross virgin who inspired <i>The Merry Wives of Windsor</i>, let some meinherr
from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the
buckbasket.</p>
<p>I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. <i>Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.</i></p>
<p>—Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of
studies holds he was a holy Roman.</p>
<p><i>Sufflaminandus sum.</i></p>
<p>—He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French polisher
of Italian scandals.</p>
<p>—A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded.</p>
<p><i>Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos.</i></p>
<p>—Saint Thomas, Stephen began...</p>
<p>—<i>Ora pro nobis</i>, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.</p>
<p>There he keened a wailing rune.</p>
<p>—<i>Pogue mahone! Acushla machree!</i> It’s destroyed we are from this
day! It’s destroyed we are surely!</p>
<p>All smiled their smiles.</p>
<p>—Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from
that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and
curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to
one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be,
hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the
most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws
which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was
shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins
or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so
tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No
sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his
maidservant or his jackass.</p>
<p>—Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.</p>
<p>—Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.</p>
<p>—Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.</p>
<p>—The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s
widow, is the will to die.</p>
<p><i>—Requiescat!</i> Stephen prayed.</p>
<p class="poem">
What of all the will to do?<br/>
It has vanished long ago...</p>
<p>—She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled
queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar
is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she
takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of
sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask)
and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring
them to the <i>Merry Wives</i> and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan,
she thought over <i>Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches</i> and <i>The most
Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze</i>. Venus has twisted
her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of
exhausted whoredom groping for its god.</p>
<p>—History shows that to be true, <i>inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos</i>.
The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell
is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say that only family
poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat
knight is his supreme creation.</p>
<p>Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping with the
godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it him. Visits him
here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there’s a gentleman to see you. Me? Says
he’s your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged
rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks
bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.</p>
<p>Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.</p>
<p>Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his
hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes
that wish me well. But do not know me.</p>
<p>—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you
hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive
years of life, <i>nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita</i>, with fifty of
experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold
that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John
Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He
rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his
son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with
child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It
is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only
begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian
intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded
irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the
void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. <i>Amor matris</i>, subjective and
objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a
legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he
any son?</p>
<p>What the hell are you driving at?</p>
<p>I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.</p>
<p><i>Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.</i></p>
<p>Are you condemned to do this?</p>
<p>—They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly
record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters,
loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with
keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings
pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his
father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy.</p>
<p>In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.</p>
<p>—What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.</p>
<p>Am I a father? If I were?</p>
<p>Shrunken uncertain hand.</p>
<p>—Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with
whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not
a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When
Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the
comedy of errors wrote <i>Hamlet</i> he was not the father of his own son
merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his
race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who,
by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her,
abhors perfection.</p>
<p>Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing, a
merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.</p>
<p>Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.</p>
<p>—Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play’s
the thing! Let me parturiate!</p>
<p>He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.</p>
<p>—As for his family, Stephen said, his mother’s name lives in the forest
of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
<i>Coriolanus.</i> His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
<i>King John.</i> Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
girls in <i>The Tempest</i>, in <i>Pericles,</i> in <i>Winter’s Tale</i> are we
know. Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess.
But there is another member of his family who is recorded.</p>
<p>—The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.</p>
<p>The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste,
quake, quack.</p>
<p>Door closed. Cell. Day.</p>
<p>They list. Three. They.</p>
<p>I you he they.</p>
<p>Come, mess.</p>
<p>STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his old
age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time
mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in Lunnon in a
wrastling play wud a man on’s back. The playhouse sausage filled Gilbert’s
soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded in the works of
sweet William.</p>
<p>MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What’s in a name?</p>
<p>BEST: That is my name, Richard, don’t you know. I hope you are going to say a
good word for Richard, don’t you know, for my sake. <i>(Laughter)</i></p>
<p>BUCKMULLIGAN: (<i>Piano, diminuendo</i>)</p>
<p class="poem">
Then outspoke medical Dick<br/>
To his comrade medical Davy...</p>
<p>STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard
Crookback, Edmund in <i>King Lear</i>, two bear the wicked uncles’ names. Nay,
that last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying
in Southwark.</p>
<p>BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don’t want Richard, my name ...</p>
<p><i>(Laughter)</i></p>
<p>QUAKERLYSTER: (<i>A tempo</i>) But he that filches from me my good name...</p>
<p>STEPHEN: <i>(Stringendo)</i> He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his
face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where
there is Will in overplus. Like John o’Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear
as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled
argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest
shakescene in the country. What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in
childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a
firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter
than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the
recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars.
His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he
walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and
from her arms.</p>
<p>Both satisfied. I too.</p>
<p>Don’t tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.</p>
<p>And from her arms.</p>
<p>Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?</p>
<p>Read the skies. <i>Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos.</i> Where’s your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: <i>sua donna. Già:
di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amare S. D.</i></p>
<p>—What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a celestial
phenomenon?</p>
<p>—A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.</p>
<p>What more’s to speak?</p>
<p>Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.</p>
<p><i>Stephanos,</i> my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.</p>
<p>—You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.</p>
<p>Me, Magee and Mulligan.</p>
<p>Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe,
steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. <i>Pater, ait.</i>
Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be.</p>
<p>Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:</p>
<p>—That’s very interesting because that brother motive, don’t you know, we
find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don’t you know, the fairytales. The third brother
that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.</p>
<p>Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.</p>
<p>The quaker librarian springhalted near.</p>
<p>—I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you to
suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps I am
anticipating?</p>
<p>He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.</p>
<p>An attendant from the doorway called:</p>
<p>—Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...</p>
<p>—O, Father Dineen! Directly.</p>
<p>Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.</p>
<p>John Eglinton touched the foil.</p>
<p>—Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.
You kept them for the last, didn’t you?</p>
<p>—In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A brother
is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.</p>
<p>Lapwing.</p>
<p>Where is your brother? Apothecaries’ hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly,
Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you.
Act. Be acted on.</p>
<p>Lapwing.</p>
<p>I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.</p>
<p>On.</p>
<p>—You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard,
a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what’s in a
name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third
brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play
hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king
unshielded by Shakespeare’s reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the
underplot of <i>King Lear</i> in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s
<i>Arcadia</i> and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?</p>
<p>—That was Will’s way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a
Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. <i>Que
voulez-vous?</i> Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.</p>
<p>—Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what
the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the
heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from <i>The Two Gentlemen
of Verona</i> onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms
in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life,
reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis,
catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his
married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and
left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords
bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin, committed by
another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last
written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are
not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it
away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in
<i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>, twice in <i>As you like It</i>, in <i>The
Tempest</i>, in <i>Hamlet,</i> in <i>Measure for Measure</i>—and in all
the other plays which I have not read.</p>
<p>He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.</p>
<p>Judge Eglinton summed up.</p>
<p>—The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is
all in all.</p>
<p>—He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In <i>Cymbeline,</i> in <i>Othello</i> he is bawd and cuckold. He
acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like José he kills the
real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing
that the moor in him shall suffer.</p>
<p>—Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!</p>
<p>Dark dome received, reverbed.</p>
<p>—And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
all is said Dumas <i>fils</i> (or is it Dumas <i>père?)</i> is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.</p>
<p>—Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a
life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always
been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he
plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended.
Gravediggers bury Hamlet <i>père</i> and Hamlet <i>fils.</i> A king and a
prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and
betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for
the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like
the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded,
Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by
poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found
in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.
Maeterlinck says: <i>If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage
seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will
tend.</i> Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the
folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two
days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics
call <i>dio boia</i>, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler
and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of
heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an
androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.</p>
<p><i>—Eureka!</i> Buck Mulligan cried. <i>Eureka!</i></p>
<p>Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton’s desk.</p>
<p>—May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.</p>
<p>He began to scribble on a slip of paper.</p>
<p>Take some slips from the counter going out.</p>
<p>—Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall
live. The rest shall keep as they are.</p>
<p>He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.</p>
<p>Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum
edition of <i>The Taming of the Shrew.</i></p>
<p>—You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own
theory?</p>
<p>—No, Stephen said promptly.</p>
<p>—Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.</p>
<p>John Eclecticon doubly smiled.</p>
<p>—Well, in that case, he said, I don’t see why you should expect payment
for it since you don’t believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some
mystery in <i>Hamlet</i> but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper
met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret
is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke,
Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as
a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.</p>
<p>I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to
unbelieve? Who helps to believe? <i>Egomen.</i> Who to unbelieve? Other chap.</p>
<p>—You are the only contributor to <i>Dana</i> who asks for pieces of
silver. Then I don’t know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
article on economics.</p>
<p>Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.</p>
<p>—For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.</p>
<p>Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then gravely
said, honeying malice:</p>
<p>—I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the <i>Summa contra
Gentiles</i> in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie,
the coalquay whore.</p>
<p>He broke away.</p>
<p>—Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Ængus of the birds.</p>
<p>Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts and
offals.</p>
<p>Stephen rose.</p>
<p>Life is many days. This will end.</p>
<p>—We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. <i>Notre ami</i> Moore
says Malachi Mulligan must be there.</p>
<p>Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.</p>
<p>—Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I’ll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?</p>
<p>Laughing, he...</p>
<p>Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.</p>
<p>Lubber...</p>
<p>Stephen followed a lubber...</p>
<p>One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His lub
back: I followed. I gall his kibe.</p>
<p>Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head,
newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thought.</p>
<p>What have I learned? Of them? Of me?</p>
<p>Walk like Haines now.</p>
<p>The constant readers’ room. In the readers’ book Cashel Boyle O’Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad?
The quaker’s pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.</p>
<p>—O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...</p>
<p>Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:</p>
<p>—A pleased bottom.</p>
<p>The turnstile.</p>
<p>Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...</p>
<p>The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.</p>
<p>Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:</p>
<p class="poem">
John Eglinton, my jo, John,<br/>
Why won’t you wed a wife?</p>
<p>He spluttered to the air:</p>
<p>—O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers’ hall. Our players are creating a new art
for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I smell the pubic
sweat of monks.</p>
<p>He spat blank.</p>
<p>Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And left the
<i>femme de trente ans.</i> And why no other children born? And his first child
a girl?</p>
<p>Afterwit. Go back.</p>
<p>The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling, minion
of pleasure, Phedo’s toyable fair hair.</p>
<p>Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...</p>
<p>—Longworth and M’Curdy Atkinson were there...</p>
<p>Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:</p>
<p class="poem">
I hardly hear the purlieu cry<br/>
Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by<br/>
Before my thoughts begin to run<br/>
On F. M’Curdy Atkinson,<br/>
The same that had the wooden leg<br/>
And that filibustering filibeg<br/>
That never dared to slake his drouth,<br/>
Magee that had the chinless mouth.<br/>
Being afraid to marry on earth<br/>
They masturbated for all they were worth.</p>
<p>Jest on. Know thyself.</p>
<p>Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.</p>
<p>—Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing black
to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.</p>
<p>A laugh tripped over his lips.</p>
<p>—Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old
hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a job on the
paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn’t you do the Yeats
touch?</p>
<p>He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:</p>
<p>—The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One
thinks of Homer.</p>
<p>He stopped at the stairfoot.</p>
<p>—I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.</p>
<p>The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men’s morrice with
caps of indices.</p>
<p>In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:</p>
<p class="center">
<i>Everyman His Own Wife<br/>
or<br/>
A Honeymoon in the Hand<br/>
(a national immorality in three orgasms)<br/>
by<br/>
Ballocky Mulligan.</i></p>
<p>He turned a happy patch’s smirk to Stephen, saying:</p>
<p>—The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.</p>
<p>He read, <i>marcato:</i></p>
<p>—Characters:</p>
<p>TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)<br/>
CRAB (a bushranger)<br/>
MEDICAL DICK )<br/>
and ) (two birds with one stone)<br/>
MEDICAL DAVY )<br/>
MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)<br/>
FRESH NELLY<br/>
and<br/>
ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).<br/></p>
<p>He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen: and
mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:</p>
<p>—O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to lift
their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!</p>
<p>—The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
them.</p>
<p>About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.</p>
<p>Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today, if
Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to,
ineluctably.</p>
<p>My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.</p>
<p>A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.</p>
<p>—Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.</p>
<p>The portico.</p>
<p>Here I watched the birds for augury. Ængus of the birds. They go, they come.
Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots after. A
creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.</p>
<p>—The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown’s awe. Did you see
his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient mariner. O,
Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.</p>
<p>Manner of Oxenford.</p>
<p>Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.</p>
<p>A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under
portcullis barbs.</p>
<p>They followed.</p>
<p>Offend me still. Speak on.</p>
<p>Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail from
the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness
softly were blown.</p>
<p>Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic: from
wide earth an altar.</p>
<p class="poem">
Laud we the gods<br/>
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
<br/>From our bless’d altars.</p>
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