by James Joyce
Payee two shilly...
(He is howled down.)
J. J. O’MOLLOY: (Hotly to the populace) This is a lonehand fight. By Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically, without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter. (Bloom takes J. J. O’Molloy’s hand and raises it to his lips.) I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. (To Bloom) I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.
BLOOM: A penny in the pound.
(The image of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino, in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an orange citron and a pork kidney.)
DLUGACZ: (Hoarsely) Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13.
(J. J. O’Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F. Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood.)
J.J.O’MOLLOY: (Almost voicelessly) Excuse me. I am suffering from a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words. (He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe.) When the angel’s book comes to be opened if aught that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar the sacred benefit of the doubt. (A paper with something written on it is handed into court.)
BLOOM: (In court dress) Can give best references. Messrs Callan, Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest... Queens of Dublin society. (Carelessly) I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said...
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair) Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.
MRS BELLINGHAM: (In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff) Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker’s one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Shame on him!
(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward)
THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: (Screaming) Stop thief! Hurrah there, Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!
SECOND WATCH: (Produces handcuffs) Here are the darbies.
MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a buck’s head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He urged me (stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me) to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.
MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.
(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.)
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Stamps her jingling spurs in a sudden paroxysm of fury) I will, by the God above me. I’ll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I’ll flay him alive.
BLOOM: (His eyes closing, quails expectantly) Here? (He squirms) Again! (He pants cringing) I love the danger.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I’ll make it hot for you. I’ll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and stripes on it!
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There’s no excuse for him! A married man!
BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Laughs derisively) O, did you, my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you’ll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.
MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
BLOOM: (Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the other cheek)
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Severely) Don’t do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently) I’ll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! T
o dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air) Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?
BLOOM: (Trembling, beginning to obey) The weather has been so warm.
(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)
DAVY STEPHENS: Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick’s Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin.
(The very reverend Canon O’Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.)
THE TIMEPIECE: (Unportalling)
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)
THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.
(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M’Coy and the featureless face of a Nameless One.)
THE NAMELESS ONE: Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised her.
THE JURORS: (All their heads turned to his voice) Really?
THE NAMELESS ONE: (Snarls) Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.
THE JURORS: (All their heads lowered in assent) Most of us thought as much.
FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man. Another girl’s plait cut. Wanted: Jack the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
SECOND WATCH: (Awed, whispers) And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
THE CRIER: (Loudly) Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most honourable...
(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.)
THE RECORDER: I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! (He dons the black cap) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty’s pleasure and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. (A black skullcap descends upon his head.)
(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.)
LONG JOHN FANNING: (Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance) Who’ll hang Judas Iscariot?
(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner’s apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)
RUMBOLD: (To the recorder with sinister familiarity) Hanging Harry, your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or nothing.
(The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!
BLOOM: (Desperately) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. (Breathlessly) Pelvic basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. (Overcome with emotion) I left the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing) Hynes, may I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you want a little more...
HYNES: (Coldly) You are a perfect stranger.
SECOND WATCH: (Points to the corner) The bomb is here.
FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.
BLOOM: No, no. Pig’s feet. I was at a funeral.
FIRST WATCH: (Draws his truncheon) Liar!
(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)
PADDY DIGNAM: (In a hollow voice) It is true. It was my funeral. Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.
(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)
BLOOM: (In triumph) You hear?
PADDY DIGNAM: Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam’s spirit. List, list, O list!
BLOOM: The voice is the voice of Esau.
SECOND WATCH: (Blesses himself) How is that possible?
FIRST WATCH: It is not in the penny catechism.
PADDY DIGNAM: By metempsychosis. Spooks.
A VOICE: O rocks.
PADDY DIGNAM: (Earnestly) Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor’s Walk. Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that bottle of sherry. (He looks round him) A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That buttermilk didn’t agree with me.
(The portly figure of John O’Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.)
FATHER COFFEY: (Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak) Namine. Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.
JOHN O’CONNELL: (Foghorns stormily through his megaphone) Dignam, Patrick T, deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM: (With pricked up ears, winces) Overtones. (He wriggles forward and places an ear to the ground) My master’s voice!
JOHN O’CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail stiffpointcd, his ears cocked.)
PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam’s voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground: Dignam’s dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned machine.)
TOM ROCHFORD: (A hand to his breastbone, bows) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog a piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)
THE KISSES: (Warbling) Leo! (Twittering) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! (Cooing) Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! (Warbling) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering) Leeolee! (Warbling) O Leo!
(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)
BLOOM: A man’s touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.)
ZOE: Are you looking for someone? He’s inside with his friend.
BLOOM: Is this Mrs Mack’s?
ZOE: No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen’s. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly) She’s on the job herself tonight with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck’s turned today. (Suspiciously) You’re not his father, are you?
BLOOM: Not I!
ZOE: You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
>
(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand glides over his left thigh.)
ZOE: How’s the nuts?
BLOOM: Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier, I suppose. One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
ZOE: (In sudden alarm) You’ve a hard chancre.
BLOOM: Not likely.
ZOE: I feel it.
(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)
BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom.
ZOE: For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)
ZOE: You’ll know me the next time.
BLOOM: (Forlornly) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to...
(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)
ZOE: (Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.
BLOOM: (Fascinated) I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
ZOE: And you know what thought did?
(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)
BLOOM: (Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat awkward hand) Are you a Dublin girl?
ZOE: (Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil) No bloody fear. I’m English. Have you a swaggerroot?
BLOOM: (As before) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.