by James Joyce
MARTHA: (Sobbing behind her veil) Breach of promise. My real name is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I’ll tell my brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.
BLOOM: (Behind his hand) She’s drunk. The woman is inebriated. (He murmurs vaguely the past of Ephraim) Shitbroleeth.
SECOND WATCH: (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom) You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.
BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant upstanding gentleman, who do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain’s fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift.
FIRST WATCH: Regiment.
BLOOM: (Turns to the gallery) The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms up there among you. The R. D. F. With our own Metropolitan police, guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as physique, in the service of our sovereign.
A VOICE: Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
BLOOM: (His hand on the shoulder of the first watch) My old dad too was a J. P. I’m as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under General Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. (With quiet feeling) Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.
FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.
BLOOM: Well, I follow a literary occupation. Author-journalist. In fact we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected with the British and Irish press. If you ring up …
(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)
MYLES CRAWFORD: (His cock’s wattles wagging) Hello, seventyseven eightfour. Hello. Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewiper here. Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?
(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio labelled Matcham’s Masterstrokes.)
BEAUFOY: (Drawls) No, you aren’t, not by a long shot if I know it. I don’t see it, that’s all. No born gentleman, no one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak masquerading as a literateur. It’s perfectly obvious that with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling books, really gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions with which your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the kingdom.
BLOOM: (Murmurs with hangdog meekness) That bit about the laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may …
BEAUFOY: (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court) You funny ass, you! You’re too beastly awfully weird for words! I don’t think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses’ fees, shan’t we? We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.
BLOOM: (Indistinctly) University of life. Bad art.
BEAUFOY: (Shouts) It’s a damnably foul lie showing the moral rottenness of the man! (He extends his portfolio) We have here damning evidence, the corpus delicti, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.
A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY:
Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
BLOOM: (Bravely) Overdrawn.
BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter! (To the court) Why, look at the man’s private life! Leading a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned in mixed society. The arch conspirator of the age.
BLOOM: (To the court) And he, a bachelor, how …
FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid! (Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand)
SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?
MARY DRISCOLL: (Indignantly) I’m not a bad one. I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation, six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out, and I had to leave owing to his carryings on.
FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?
MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself as poor as I am.
BLOOM: (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled softly) I treated you white. I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station. Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There’s a medium in all things. Play cricket.
MARY DRISCOLL: (Excitedly) As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters!
FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?
MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing.
BLOOM: She counterassaulted.
MARY DRISCOLL: (Scornfully) I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, your lord, and he remarked: Keep it quiet! (General laughter.)
GEORGES FOTTRELL: (Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly) Order in court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.
(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown water-lily, begins a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the grandjury. He was down and out but, though branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A seven months’ child, he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell’s wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums, model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever …) (Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that they cannot hear.)
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (Without looking up from their notebooks) Loosen his boots.
PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (From the presstable, coughs and calls) Cough it up, man. Get it out i
n bits.
(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He did not look in the bucket. Nobody. Rather a mess. Not completely. A Titbits back number.) (Uproar and catcalls. Bloom, in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of sticking-plaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)
J. J. O’MOLLOY: (In barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest) This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my client’s native place, the land of the Pharaoh. Prima facie, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client’s family. If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler’s weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.
BLOOM: (Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar’s vest and trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.) Him makee velly muchee fine night. (He begins to lilt simply)
Li li poo lil chile,
Blingee pigfoot evly night.
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 mirage 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 rose-pink 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 brick quilted 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 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 a blossom 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 Balmer 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 Phœnix 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 sudden fury) I will, by the God above me. I’ll scourge tie 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 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!