 Section 1 of Ulysses. Stately plump buck mulligan came from the stair-head, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow-dressing gown ungirdled was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned. In Troybo ad Altari day, halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely, Come up, Kitch, come up, you fearful Jesuit. Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gun-rest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking, gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light-ontonsured hair, grained and hewed like a pale oak. Buck mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly. He had in a preacher's tone. For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine, body and soul and blood and owns. Slow music, please, shut your eyes, gents. One moment, a little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence all. He peered sideways up and gave a slong, slow whistle of call, and then paused a while and wrapped attention. His even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Crasostomos. Two strong, shrill whistles answered to the con. Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? He skipped off the gun-rests and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump, shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled apprelate, patron of arts in the Middle Ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips. The mockery of it, he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek. He pointed his finger in friendly jests and went over the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedle stepped up, followed him wearily halfway, and sat down on the edge of the gun-rest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl, and lathered cheeks and neck. Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on. My name is observed, too. Malachy Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid? He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried, Will he come, the jig in Jesuit? Ceasing he began to shave with care. Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly. Yes, my love. How long is Haines going to stay in this tower? Buck Mulligan showed a shave and sheik over his right shoulder. God, isn't he dreadful, he said, frankly? A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English, bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford, you know, deadless, you have the real Oxford Manor. He can't make you out. Oh, my name for you is the best. Kinch, the knife-blade. He shaved warily over his chin. He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his gun case? A woeful lunatic Mulligan said. Were you in a funk? I was, Stephen said, with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don't know, raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You save men from drowning. I'm not a hero. If he stays on here, I'm off. Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razor-blade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily. Scutter, he cried thickly. He came over to the gun-rest and, thrusting a hand to Stephen's upper pocket, said, lend us a loan of your nose-rag to wipe my razor. Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner dirty, crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razor-blade neatly. Then, gazing over his handkerchief, he said, the bard's nose-rag, a new-art color for our Irish poets, snot-green. You can almost taste it, can't you? He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin Bay, his fair oak-pail hair stirring slightly. God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what algae calls it? A great sweet mother? The snot-green sea. The scrotum-tightening sea. Epi, oinopa, ponton. Ah, deadless the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalata, thalata. She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it, he looked down on the water and on the mail-boat, clearing the harbour-mouth of Kingstown. Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly his grey-searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily. You could have knelt down, damn it, Kitch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you, but to think of your mother begging you for her last breath to kneel down and pray for her and you refused, there is something sinister in you. He broke off and lathered again lightly his father's cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips. But a lovely mummer. He mummered to himself. Kitch, the loveliest mummer of them all. He shaved even lean with care and silence seriously. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and grazed at the frayed edge of his shiny black coat sleeve. There was no pain that was not yet pain of love fred at his heart. Silently in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body with its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odor of wax and rosewood, her breath that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odor of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuff-edge she saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the waffled voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning and vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razor-blade. Ah! poor dog's body! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few nose rags. How are the second-hand breeks? They fit well enough, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip. The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Second leg they should be. God knows what poxy-bose he left them of. I have a lovely pair with a hair-stripe gray. You look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kitch. You look damn well when you're dressed. Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they're gray. He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face to them here. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother, but he can't wear green trousers. He folded his razor neatly and then with stroking pulps of fingers felt the smooth skin. Stephen turned his gaze from the sea to the plump face with its smoked blue mobile eyes. That fellow I was with in the ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have GPI. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane. He swept the mirror a half-circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter sees all his strong, well-knit trunk. Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard. Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out for him. Cleft by a crooked crack, hair on an end. And does he and others see me? Who chose this face for me? This dog's body too rid of vermin. It asks me too. I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The ant always keeps plain-looking servants from Malachi. Lead him not in temptation. And her name is Ursula. Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes. The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said, if wild were only alive to see you. Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness. It is a symbol of Irish art, the cracked-looking glass of a servant. Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him around the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? He said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them. Pair it again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen. Cracked-looking glass of a servant. Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalape to Zulu's or some bloody swindler other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenize it. Cranley's arm. His arm. And to think if you're having to beg for these swine. I'm the only one that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haynes? If he makes any noise here, I'll bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than we gave Clive Kempthorpe. Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Pale faces. They hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. Ho, I shall expire. Break the news to her gently, Aubrey. I shall die. With slit ribbons of his shirt, whipping the air, he hops and hobbles around the table with trousers at his heels. Chased by aides of Magdalene with the tailor's shears. A scarf-caft face, gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged. Don't you play the giddy ox with me? Shouts from the open window, startling even in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, apron-mass with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the somber lawn, watching narrowly the dancing moats of grass-alms. To ourselves, new paganism, omphalos. Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night. Then what is it, Blackmulgan asked impatiently? Cough it up. I'm quite frank with you. What have you against me now? They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly. Do you wish me to tell you, he asked? Yes, what is it, Buckmulgan answered? I don't remember anything. He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair, uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes. Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said, Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death? Buckmulgan frowned quietly and said, What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God? You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to get more hot water. My mother and some visitor came out of the drawing-room. She asked you who was in your room? Yes, Buckmulgan said. What did I say? I forget. You said, Stephen answered, Oh, it's only deadless whose mother is beastly dead. A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buckmulgan's cheek. Did I say that? Yes. Well, what harm is that? He shook his constraint from him nervously. And what is death, he asked? Your mother's? Or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the maitre and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting-room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on the death-bed when she asks you. Why? Because you have the cursed Jesuit strain in you. Only it's injected the wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teasel and picks butter-cups off the quilt. Humor her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you won't sulk with me because I don't winch like some hired mute from Laloettes. Absurd! I suppose I didn't say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother. He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly, I'm not thinking of the offence to my mother. What then, Buck Mulligan had asked? Of the offence to me, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan swung around on his heel. Oh, an impossible person, he exclaimed. He walked off quickly around the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Horses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever in his cheeks. A voice within the tower called loudly. Are you up there, Mulligan? I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered. He turned towards Stephen and said, Look at the sea, what does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola kitsch and come on down. The sassanac wants his morning rashes. His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, leveled with a roof. Over it all day, he said, it's inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding. His head vanished but the drone of a descending voice boomed out of the stair-head. A no more turn aside and brood upon love's bitter mystery for Fergus rules the brazen cars. Wood shadows floated silently through the morning peace from the stair-head seaward where he gazed. In shorn further out, the mirror of water whitened, spurned by light-shot herring feet. White breasted the dim sea. The twinning stresses two by two, a hand plucking the harp-strings, merging their twinning cords, wave-white wedded towards shimmering in the dim tide. A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus's song. I sang it alone in the house holding down the long dark cords. Her door was open. She wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen, love's bitter mystery. Where now? Her secrets, old feather-fans, tassled dance-cards powdered with musk, a god of amber beads in her locked drawer. A bird-cage hung in the sunny windows of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce singing in the pantomime of Turco the Terrible left with others when he sang, I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility. Phantasmal mirth folded away, musk perfumed, and no more turn aside and brood. Folded away in the memory of nature and with her toys, memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap where she had approached the sacrament, a cord apple filled with brown sugar, roasting for it the hob on the dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails redded by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts. In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body with its loose grave-clothes giving off an odor of wax and rosewood. Her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odor of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes staring out of death to shake and bend my soul. On me alone, the ghost candle to light her agony, ghostly light on a tortured face. Her horse-loud breath rattling in horror while all preyed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutalantium te confessorum turma circumdeit. Igubalantium te virginum corus excipit. Gul, chur of corpses. No, mother. Let me be and let me live. Kin chahoy! Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry, heard warm-running sunlight in the air behind his friendly words. Deadless, come down like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologizing for waking us last night. That's all right. I'm coming, Stephen said, turning. Do for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said, for my sake and for all of our sakes. His head disappeared and reappeared. I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Watch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean. I get paid this morning, Stephen said. The school kip, Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one. If you want, Stephen said. Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight, will have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns. He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out the tune with a cockney accent. Oh, won't we have a merry time drinking whiskey, beer, and wine on coronation, coronation day? Oh, won't we have a merry time on coronation day? Warm sunshine mirroring over the sea, the nickel-shaving bowl shone forgotten on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day? Forgotten friendship? He went over to it, held it in his hands a while, feeling its coolness, feeling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was struck. So I carried the boat of incense, then, at Klongos. I am another now, and yet the same, a servant, too, a servant of a servant. In the gloomy domed living-room of the tower, Buck Mulligan's gown-form moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of daylight fell across the flag-floor from the high-barbecons, and at the meaning of their rays, a cloud of coal-smoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning. Well, be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you? Stephen laid the shaving-bowl in the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway, and pulled open the inner doors. Have you the key, a voice asked? Deadless has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey, Mack, I'm choked. He howled without looking up from the fire. Kinch! It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward. The key scraped round harshly twice, and when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen hailed his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish in a large teapot over the table, set them down heavily inside with relief. Then, melting, he said, as the candle remarked, but hush, not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake me up. Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Ah, bless us, O Lord, in these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? Oh, Jane, there's no milk. Stephen fetched the loaf, and a pot of honey and the butter-cooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet. What sort of kip is this, he said? How'd it come after eight? We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. Then there's a lemon in the locker. Oh, damn you and your Paris fads, Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandy Cove milk. Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly, The woman is coming up with the milk. The blessings of God on you, Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. Sit down, pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the fish, and slapped it out in three plates, saying, In nominate, Patrice, you're feeling a spiritus sancti. Haines sat down to pour out the tea. I'm giving you two lumps each, he said, but I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don't you? Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's wheeling voice. When I makes tea, I makes tea, as the old mother Grogan said. When I makes water, I makes water. It's a joke, it's tea, Haines said. Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wielding. So I do, Mrs. Cahill, he says he. But God, ma'am, says Mrs. Cahill, God, send you don't make them in one pot. He lunged towards his messmates and turned a thick slice of bread and paled on his knife. That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk of the fish gods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind, he turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice lifting his brows. Can you recall, brother, is Mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogian, or is it in the Upanishads? I doubt it, said Stephen gravely. Do you now, Buck Mulligan said in the same tone for reasons, pray? I fancy, Stephen said, as ye ate. It did not exist in or out of the Mabinogian. Grogan was, one imagines, a kin's woman of Marianne. Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight. Charming, he said, with a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming. Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened, rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf. For old Marianne, she doesn't care a damn, but hyzing up her petticoats. He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned. End of section one. Section two of Ulysses. Ulysses by James Joyce. Part one. The doorway was darkened by an entering form. The milk, sir. Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug. An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow. That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God. To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ha-ha, to be sure. Stephen reached back and took the milk jug from the locker. The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces. How much, sir, asked the old woman. Of course, Stephen said. He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers, old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in a lush field. A witch on her toadstool. Her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They loathe about for whom they knew do silky cattle. Silk of the kind and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common Coquian, a messenger from her secret mourning. To serve or to up-raid, whether he could not tell, but scorned to beg her favor. It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups. Tasted, sir, she said. He drank at her bidding. If we could live on good food like that, he said, to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bog swamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horse-dung and consumptive spits. Are you a medical student, sir? The old woman asked. I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered. Look at that now, she said. Stephen listened in a scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly. Her bones set her, her medicine man. Me, she slights. To the voice that will strive and oil for the grave, all there is of her, but her woman's unclean loins of a man's flesh made not in God's kindness. The serpents pray. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wandering, unsteady eyes. Do you understand what she says, Stephen asked, sir? Is it French you're talking, sir, the old woman said to Haynes? Haynes spoke to her again in longer speech confidently. Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you? I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the West, sir? I'm an Englishman, Haynes answered. He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland. Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows. Grand has no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, man? No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milk can on her forearm and about to go. Haynes said to her, have you your bill? We'd better pay your Mulligan, hadn't we? Stephen filled again the three cups. Bill, sir, she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint, two pence is seven twos is a shilling, and two pence over, and these three mornings a quart of four pence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a shilling in one and two, is two and two, sir. Buck Mulligan sighed, and having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets. Pay up and look pleasant, Haynes said to him, smiling. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea coloring faintly the thick, rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a floor and twisted round his fingers and cried, a miracle. He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying, ask nothing more of me, sweet, all I can give you I give. Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand. Willow you two pence, he said. Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin, time enough. Good morning, sir. She curtsied and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant. Heart of my heart were it more, more would be laid at your feet. He turned to Stephen and said, seriously, deadless, I'm stony. Hurry out to your old school, kip, and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junk it. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty. That reminds me, Haynes said, rising that I have to visit your national library today. Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said. He turned to Stephen and asked blandly, is this the day of your monthly wash, kinch? Then to Haynes. The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month. All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream, Stephen said, as he let honey trickle with a slice of loaf. Haynes, from the corner where he was nodding easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt, spoke, I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me. Speaking to me, they wash and tub and scrub. Egg and bite and in wit, conscience, yet here's a spot. That one about the crack-looking glass servant being the symbol of Irish art is doosed good. Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth of tone, wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haynes. Well, I mean it, Haynes said. Still speaking to Stephen, I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in. Would I make any money by it, Stephen asked? Haynes laughed, and as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the hammock said, I don't know, I'm sure. He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse figure, you put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for? Well, Stephen said, the problem is to get money from whom? From the milk woman or from him? It's a toss-up, I think. I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy Jesuit jibes. I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him. Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm. For me, Kinch, he said, in a suddenly changed tone he added, to tell you the God's truth, I think you're right. Damn all else, they are good form. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip. He stood up, gravely ungirdled, and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly, Mulligan is stripped of his garments. He emptied his pockets onto the table. There's your snot-rag, he said. And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, he spoke to them, chiding them into his dangling watch-chain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God will simply have to dress the character. I want puse gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands. And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said. Steven picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway. Are you coming, you fellows? I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gaits, saying, well, my, was sorrow. And going forth he met Butterfly. Steven, taking his ash-plant from its leaning place, followed them out, and as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow-iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket. At the front of the ladder, Buck Mulligan asked, did you bring the key? I have it, Steven said, preceding them. He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bath towel, the leader shoots of ferns and grasses. Balancer, how dare you, sir? Haines asked, do you pay rent for this tower? Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. To the secretary of state for war, Steven added over his shoulders. They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last. Rather bleak in wintertime, I would say. Martello, you call it? Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omfalos. What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked, even. No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas, and my fifty-five reasons he is made out to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first. He turned to Steven, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat, you couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you? It has waited so long, Steven said listlessly. It can wait longer. You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiously. Is it some paradox? Who, Buck Mulligan said, we have grown out of wild and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather, and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. What? Haines said, beginning to point at Steven, he himself— Buck Mulligan slung his towel stole-wise round his neck, and bending in loose laughter he said in Steven's ear. Oh, shade of kinch the elder. Jaffet in search of a father. We're always tired in the morning, Steven said to Haines, and it is rather long to tell. Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands. The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of deadless, he said. I mean to say, Haines explained to Steven as they followed, this tower and these cliffs he remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles oar his base into the sea, isn't it? Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant toward Steven, but he did not speak. In the bright, silent instance, Steven saw his own image in a cheap, dusty morning between the gay attires. It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to a halt again. Eyes pale as the sea, and the wind had freshened paler, firm and prudent. The sea's ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty sea for the smoking plume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail, attacking by the mugglins. I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said, bemused. The father and the son idea, the son's driving to be atoned with the father. Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe, broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his well-shaped mouth opened happily, his eyes from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd scents, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll's head to infrow the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet, happy, foolish voice. I am the queerest young fellow that you've ever heard. My mother's a Jew, my father's a bird. With Joseph the joiner, I cannot agree. So here's to disciples and cavalry. He held up a forefinger of mourning. If anyone thinks that I ain't divine, he'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine. But have to drink water and wish it were plain that I make when the wine becomes water again. He dug swiftly at Stephen's ash-plant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air enchanted. Good-bye now, good-bye, write down all I said and tell Tom Dick and Harry I rose from the dead. What's bread and the bone cannot fail me to fly and all of it's breezy. Good-bye now, good-bye. He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his wing-like hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief bird-sweet cries. Haynes, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said, We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Still, his gait, he takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the joiner? The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered. Oh, Haynes said. You have heard it before. Three times a day after meals, Stephen said dryly. You're not a believer, are you? Haynes asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word, creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said. Haynes stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it. Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette. Haynes helped himself and snapped the case, too. He put it back in his side pocket and took from his waist pocket a nickel tinder box, sprang it open, too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen, in the shell of his hands. Yes, of course, he said, as they went out again. Either you believe or you don't, isn't it? Personally, I couldn't stomach the idea of a personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose. He beholded me, Stephen said, with grim displeasure, a horrible example of three thought. He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ash-plant by his side. His ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me calling, Stephen, a wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key, it's mine. I paid the rent, now I ate his salt bread. Give him the key, too, all. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes. After all, Haynes began, Stephen turned and saw the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind. After all, I should think you were able to free yourself. You were your own master, it seems to me. I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian. Italian, Haynes said. A crazy queen, old and jealous, kneeled down before me. And a third, Stephen said, there is, who wants me for odd jobs. Italian, Haynes said again, what do you mean? The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising in the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Haynes detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke. I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irish man must think like that, I dare say. We feeling that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame. The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory, the triumph of their brazen bells. Et unum sanctum catholicum et apostacolum ecclesium. The slow growth and the change of right and dogma like his own rare thoughts. A chemistry of stars. Symbols of the apostles in the mass for Pope Marcellus. The voices blended singing alone loud in affirmation. And behind their chant, the vigilant angel of the church, militant disarmed and menaced her heresy arcs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitre's awry, foetious in the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was won, and arias, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the son and the father and valentines burning Christ's terrain body and the subtle African heresy arc, Sebelius, who held that the father was himself his own son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery into the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind. A menace, a disarming and a worsening from those embattled angels of the church. Michael's host, who defend forever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields. Here, here, prolonged applause. Zut, known to you. Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines' voice is said, and I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of the German Jews, either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now. Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching. Businessmen, boatmen. She's making for Bollack Harbour. The boatmen nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain. There's five fathoms out there, he said. I'd be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today. The men that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay, waiting for a stolen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt-white. Here I am. They followed the winding path down the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirt sleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of a rock near him, moved slowly, frog-wise, his green legs in the deep jelly of the water. Is your brother with you, Malachi? Down in West Meath, with the bannins. Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet-gung thing down there. Photo girl, he calls her. Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure. Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock, a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his page, and on his garland of his gray hair, water reeling over his chest in punch, and spilling jets out of his black-sagging loincloth. Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past, and glancing at Haynes and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail, at brow and lips and breastbone. Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again, his spur of rock. He chucked medicine and going in for the army. Ah, go to God, Buck Mulligan said. Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily? Yes. Spooning with him last night on the pier, the father has wrought her with money. Is she up the pole? Better ask Seymour that. Seymour, a bleeding officer, Buck Mulligan said. He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely, red-headed woman, buck-like goats. He broke off an alarm, feeling his side under the flapping shirt. My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the uber-minch, toothless kinch, and I, the supermen. He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay. Are you going in there, Malachi? Yes, make room in the bed. The young man shoved himself backwards through the water and reached the middle of the creek in too long clean stroke. Haynes sat down on a stone, smoking. Are you not coming in, Buck Mulligan asked? Later on, Haynes said. Not on my breakfast. Stephen turned away. I'm going, Mulligan, he said. Give us that key, kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. And two-pence, he said, for a pint. Throw it here. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap, dressing undressing. Buck Mulligan erected with joined hands before him, said solemnly. He who steeleth from the poor lendeth to the Lord, thus spake Zeratrustra. His plump body plunged. We'll see you again, Haynes said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at Wild Irish. Horn of a bull, of a horse, smile of a Saxon. The ship, Buck Mulligan cried, half-twelve. Good Stephen said. And the upward-curving path. Liliata, Ruti Alantium, Turma of Circumdet, Ubi Alantium, T. Virginium. The priest's gray nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go. A voice, sweetened and sustained, called him from the sea. Turning the curve, he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, with seals, far out on the water, round, usurper. End of Section 2 Section 3 of Ulysses Ulysses by James Joyce, Part 1, the Tellamacade, Episode 2, Nester. You, Cochran, what city sent for him? Tarantum, sir. Very good, well. There was a battle, sir. And the ship, very good, well. There was a battle, sir. Very good, where? The boy's blank face asked the blank window, fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was, in some way, if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us, then? I forget the place, sir, 279 B.C. Ascolum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the Gorsegard book. Yes, sir. And he said, another victory like that and we are done for. That phrase the world had remembered, a dull ease of the mind. From a hill above a corp's room plained a general speaking to his officers leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers to any officers? You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus? End of Pyrrhus, sir? I know, sir, ask me, sir, Coman said. Wait. You, Armstrong, do you know anything about Pyrrhus? A bag of fig-rolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them between his palms at wiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs it here to the tissue of his lips, a sweet and boy's breath. Well off people, I'm proud that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, dalky. Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a Pyrr? All laughed. Murphless, high, malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round at his classmates, silly glee and profile. In a moment they will laugh more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and the fees their papa's pay. Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with a book. What is a Pyrr? A Pyrr, sir? Armstrong said. A thing out of the water, a kind of a bridge. Kingston, Pyrr, sir? Some laughed again, murphless but with meaning. Two in the back bench whispered, yes, they knew. Had never learned or even been innocent all, with envy he watched their faces. Edith, Ethel, Gertie, Lily, their likes, their breaths too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering the struggle. Kingston, Pyrr? Stephen said, yes. A disappointed bridge. The words troubled their gaze. How, sir, Common asked. A bridge is across a river. For Haines' chapbook. No one here to hear. Tonight, deftly amid wild drink and talk to pierce the polish mail of his mind. What then? A gesture at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a Clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part, not wholly for the smooth caress? For them too, history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land upon shop. Had pierce not fallen by Bedlam's hand in Argos or Julie Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in a room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind. Tell us a story, sir. Oh, do, sir, a ghost story. Where do you begin in this, Stephen Ass, opening another book? Weep no more, Common said. Go on then, Talbot. And the story, sir? After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot. He swore the boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with text. Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, for Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. It must be a movement, then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studio of silence in the library of St. Genevieve where they read, sheltered from the sin of Paris night by night. By his elbow a delicate sigmes conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me, under glow lamps impaled with faintly beating feelers, and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon's scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought, tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is. The soul is the form of forms. Tranquility, sudden, vast, kandescent, form of forms. Talbot repeated. Through the dear might of him that walked the waves. Through the dear might. Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything. What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward. His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having just remembered, of him that walked the waves. Here also over those craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffers' heart and lips unmind. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's looms. Aye. Riddle me, riddle me, Randy Rowe. My father gave me seeds to sow. Talbot slit his clothes book into a satchel. Have I heard all, Stephen asked? Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir. Thursday? Who can answer a riddle, Stephen asked. They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling, crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling gaily. A riddle, sir, ask me, sir. Oh, ask me, sir. A hard one, sir. This is the riddle, Stephen said. The cock crew, the sky was blue. The bells in heaven were striking eleven. It is time for the poor soul to go to heaven. What is that? What, sir? Again, sir, we didn't hear. Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence Cochran said, What is it, sir? We give up. Stephen, his throat itching, answered, the fox bearing his grandmother under a holly-bush. He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries echoed dismay. A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called, they broke a sunder sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the lumber room came the rattle of sticks and clamor their boots and tongues. Sergeant, who alone had lingered, came forward slowly, showing an open copybook. His thick hair and scraggly neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of inklay date-shaped, recent and damp as a snail's bed. He held out his copybook. The word, sums, was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sergeant, his name in seal, Mr. Deasy told me to write them out again, he said, and show them to you, sir. Stephen touched the edge of the book. Futility. Do you understand how he asked? Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sergeant answered. Mr. Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir. Can you do them yourself, Stephen asked? No, sir. Ugly and futile. Lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squash boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostate body, the fiery columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more. The trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odor of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled under foot and had gone, scarcely having been. The twinking stars of fox red reek of rapin in his fur with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. Sitting at his side, Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. The sergeant peered a scance through his slanted glasses. Hockey sticks rattled in the lumber room. The hollow knock of a ball crossed the page, the cymbals moved in grave morris, in the murmury of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner, so. Imps of fancy of the moors. Gone, too, from the world, ever rose and moses may monodies, dark men in mean and movement flashing in their mocking mirrors and obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend. Do you understand now? Can you work the second one for yourself? Yes, sir. In long, shaky strokes sergeant copied the data, waiting always for a word of help, his hand moved faithfully in unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor mattress, subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and waste-hour milk she had fed him and hid him from sight like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness, my childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly, mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts, secrets weary of their tyranny, tyrants willing to be dethroned, the sum was done. It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up. Yes, sir. Thanks," sergeant answered. He dried the page with a sheet of thin blotting paper and carried his copybook back to his bench. You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said as he followed towards the door of the boy's graceless form. Yes, sir. In the corridor his name was heard, called from the play field. Sergeant! Run on, Stephen said. Mr. Deasy is calling you. He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams, and Mr. Deasy came away, stepping over wisps of grass with gaited feet. When he had reached the schoolhouse, voices again contending called to him. He turned his angry white mustache. What is it now? He cried continually without listening. Cochran and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said. Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr. Deasy said, till I restore order here? And as he stepped fussily back across the field, his old man's voice cried sternly. What is the matter? What is it now? Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides. Their many forms closed round him, the garrison shined bleaching the honey of his ill-died head. Stale smokier hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here, as it was in the beginning, is now. On the day of Stuart Coyne's base treasure of a bog, and ever shall be, and snug in their spoon-case of purple plush faded the twelve apostles having preached to all the Gentiles world without end, a hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his rare mustache, Mr. Deasy halted at the table. First, our little financial settlement, he said, he brought out of his coat a pocket-book bound by a leathery thong. It slapped open, and he from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid them carefully on the table. Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocket-book away, and now his strong room for the gold. Stevens embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar, welks and money-cowries and leopard shells, and this whorled as an emers-turban and this the scallop of St. James, an old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure, hallowed shells. A sovereign fell bright and new on the soft pile of the tablecloth. Three, Mr. Deasy said, turning his little savings box about in his hand. These are handy things to have, see. This is for sovereigns, this is for shillings, sixpences and half-crowns, and here crowns, see. He shot from it two crowns and two shillings. Three-twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right. Thank you, sir, Stevens said, together, with shy haste in putting it all in his pocket of his trousers. No thanks at all, Mr. Deasy said. You have earned it. Stevens hand free again went back to the hollow shells. Symbols, too, of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery. Don't carry it like that, Mr. Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very handy. Answer something. Mine would be often empty, Stevens said. The same room and hour, the same wisdom, and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well, I can break them in this instant, if I will. Because you don't say, Mr. Deasy said, pointing his finger, you don't know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I have, I know. I know. I have youth but new. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse. Iago, Stephen murmured. He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare. He knew what money was, Mr. Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but an Englishman, too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? The sea's cold eyes looked on the empty bay. It seems history is to blame. On me and on my words, on hating. That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. Bah! Mr. Deasy said. That's not English. A French kelp said that. He tapped a saving box against his thumbnail. I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast? I paid my way. Good man. Good man. I paid my way. I never bored a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing, can you? Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair of brogues, ties, Curran, ten guineas, McCann, one guinea, Fred Ryan, two shillings, Temple, two lunches, Russell, one ghillie, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Miss McCurn and five weeks bored. The lump I have is useless. For the moment, no, Stephen answered. He laughed, with rich delight, putting back his saving box. I knew you couldn't, he said joyously, but one day you must feel it. We are a generous people, but we must also be just. I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy. Mr. Dizzy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the shapely bulk of a man in tartan-filibigs. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. You think me an old fogey and an old Tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine of forty-six. Do you know what the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the Union twenty years before O'Connell did, or before the prelates of your Communion denounced him as a demagogue? Euphinians forget some things. Glorious pious and immortal memory. The lodge of diamond and armagh and the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. He was massed and armed with plantar's covenant. The black north and true blue Bible. Croppies lie down. Stephen sketched a brief gesture. I have rebel blood in me, too, Mr. Dizzy said, on the spindle side, but I am descended from Sir John Blackwood who voted for the Union. We are all Irish, all King's sons. Alas! Stephen said. Pervious rectus, Mr. Dizzy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for it and put on his top boots to ride to Dublin for mards of down to do so. La la la la la la the rocky road to Dublin. A gruff squire on horseback with shiny top boots. Soft days, Sir John, soft day, your honour. Day, day. Two top boots jog dangling on to Dublin. La la la la la la la la la la la la la la. That reminds me, Mr. Dizzy said, you can do me a favour, Mr. with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press. Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end." He went to the desk near the window, pulled on his chair twice, and read off some words from the sheet in the drum of the typewriter. Sit down. "'Excuse me,' he said over his shoulder. The dictates of common sense. Just a moment." He appeared from under the shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow, and muttering began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error. Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed around the walls, images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek heads poised in air. Lord Hastings repulsed. The Duke of Westminster shot over. The Duke of Beaufort Ceylon, Prix de Paris, 1866, Elfin Ryder sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds backing King's colours and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds. "'Full stop,' Mr. Dizzy Bates keys, but prompt ventilation of this all-important question. Where cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the mud-splash-breaks, amid the balls of bookies, on their pitches and reek of the canteen over the motley slush, fair rebel, fair rebel. Even money the favourite, ten to one the field. Dicers and thimble-riggers we hurried after the hoofs, the vying-caps and jackets and past the meat-faced women, a butcher's dame nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange. Shouts rang shill from the boy's playfield in a whirring whistle. Again, a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. You mean that knock-kneed mother's darling, who seems to be slightly cross-ic? Jousts, time-shocked rebounds, shock-by-shock. Jousts slush an uproar of battles, the frozen death-spew of the slain, a shout of spear-spikes baited with men's bloody guts. Now then, Mr. Dizzy said, rising, he came to the table pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up. I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr. Dizzy said. It's about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions on this matter. May I trespass on your valuable space? That doctrine of laissez-faire, which so often in our history are cattle-trade? The way of all our old industries, Liverpool ring with jockey-the-gallway harbour scheme, European conflagration, grain supplies through the narrow waters of the Channel, the pleuter-perfect, imperturbability of the Department of Agriculture, pardoned a classical illusion, Cassandra, by a woman who was no better than she should be, to come to the point at issue. I don't mince words, do I, Mr. Dizzy asked of Stephen Redon, foot and mouth disease, known as coke's preparation, sermon virus, percentage of salted horses, runder-pess, emperor's horses at Merzeg, lower Austria, veterinary surgeons, Mr. Henry Blackwood Price, courteous offer a fair trial, dictates of common sense, all important question, in every sense of the word take the bull by the horns, thanking you for the hospitality of your columns. I want that to be printed in red, Mr. Dizzy said. You will see at the next outbreak that they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be cured. It is cured. My cousin Blackwood Price writes to me, it is regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattle doctors there. They offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the Department. Now I am going to try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties, by intrigues, by back stairs influence, by he raised his forefinger and beat the air oddly before his voice spoke. Mark my words, Mr. Deadless, he said. England is in the hands of the Jews. In all the highest places her finance her press, and they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. I am sure as we are standing here the Jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying. He stepped swiftly off and his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again. Dying, he said, if not dead by now, the harlots cry from street to street shall weave Old England's winding sheet. His eyes open wide, visions stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted. A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear. Jew or Gentile, is he not? They sinned against the light, Mr. Dizzy said gravely. You can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why there are wanderers on the earth to this day. On the steps of the peristock exchange the gold-skinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gable of geese they swarmed loud uncouth about the temple, their heads thick-plotting under the maledroit silk cats. Not there is these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full, slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending. But knew the rankers massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all, a hoard heap by the roadside, plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and patient knew the dishonours of their flesh. Who has not, Stephen said? What do you mean, Mr. Dizzy asked? He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways, open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. From the playfield the boys raised a shout, a whirring whistle. Goal! What if that nightmare gave you a back kick? The ways of the creator are not our ways, Mr. Dizzy said. All human history moves towards the one great goal, the manifestation of God. Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying, That is God. Hurray, I wee! What, Mr. Dizzy asked? A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. Mr. Dizzy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free. I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many heirs and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who is no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelius. Ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here. McMorrah's wife and her Lehman, O'Rourke, Prince of Brefney. A woman, too, brought Parnell low. Many heirs, many failures, but not the one's sin. I am a struggleer now at the end of my days, but I will fight for the right till the end. For Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right. Stephen raised the sheets in his hand. Well, sir, he began. I foresee, Mr. Dizzy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You are not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong. A learner, rather, Stephen said. And here what will you learn more? Mr. Dizzy shook his head. Who knows, he said. To learn one must be humble, but life is the great teacher. Stephen rustled his sheets again. As regards these, he began. Yes, Mr. Dizzy said, you have two copies there. If you can have them published at once. Telegraph, Irish Homestead. I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two editors slightly. That will do, Mr. Dizzy said, briskly. I wrote last night to Mr. Field, MP. There is a meeting of the Cavaltrader's Association today at the City Arms Hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You see if it can get you into your two papers. What are they? The evening Telegraph? That will do, Mr. Dizzy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to answer that letter from my cousin. Good morning, Sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket. Thank you. Not at all, Mr. Dizzy said, as he searched the papers on the desk. I'd like to break a lance with you, old as I am. Good morning, Sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back. He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and cracks of sticks from the playfield. The lions cushioned their pillars as he passed through the gate. Toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name, the Bullock befriending bard. Mr. Deadless, running after me, no more letters, I hope. Just one moment. Yes, Sir, Stephen said, turning back to the gate. Mr. Dizzy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath. I just wanted to say, he said, Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why? He frowns sternly on the bright air. Why, Sir, Stephen asked, beginning to smile. Because she's never let them in, Mr. Dizzy said solemnly. A cough-ball of laughter let from his throat dragging after the rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air. She never let them in. He cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaited feet over the gravel of the path. That's why. On his wise shoulders, through the checkerwork of leaves, the sun flung spangles, dancing coins. Ineluctable modality of the visible. At least that, if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read. Seaspawn and sea-wrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot, snot-green, blue-silver, rust, coloured signs, limits of the diaphane, but he adds in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconts against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was, and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno, limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, a diaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gait, if not a door, shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush, crackling rack and shells. You are walking through it how some ever. I am astride at a time. A very short space of time, through very short times of space. Five, six, the nachain under. Exactly, and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No, Jesus, if I fell over a cliff that beetles or his base fell through the neighbor-in-under ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash-sword hangs at my side. Tap with it. They do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs. Neighbor-in-under. Sounds solid, made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount's strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick, wild sea-money. Domine-deasy kens themore. Won't you come to Sandymount, maddling the mare? Rhythm begins, you see. I hear, our cataleptic tetrameter of I Am's marching. No, a gallop. Delign themare. Open your eyes now. I will, one moment. Has all vanished since. If I open and am forever in the black a-diaphane, Buster, I will see if I can see. See now, there all the time without you, and ever shall be, world without end. They came down the steps from Lee's terrace prudently, frownsimmer, and down the shelving shore, flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand, like me, like algae, coming down to our mighty mother. Number one swung lordily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in the beach. From the liberties out for the day Mrs. Florence McCabe, relict of the late Patrick McCabe, deeply lamented of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me, squealing into life, creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing naval cord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strand and twining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks, will you be as gods, gaze in your omphalos? Hello, kid cheer, put me on to Edenville, Aleph Alpha, naught nor one. Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon, Heather, naked Eve. She had no navel, gaze, belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum. No, white-heaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting, womb of sin. Wombed in sin, darkness I was too, made, not begotten, by them, the man with my voice and my eyes, and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages he willed me, and now may not will me away, or ever. Alexi Turner stays about him. Is that, then, the divine substance wherein father and son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the con trans magnifican dubang-tantiality, ill-starred Heureziarch. In a Greek water-closet he breathed his last euthanasia, with a beaded mitre, and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed sea, with upstift omophorion, with clotted hindaparts. Heirs romped round him, nipping and eager heirs. They are coming, waves! The white-main sea-horses, champing, bright-wind bridled, the steeds of Mananan. I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The ship, half-twelve. By the way, go easy with that money, like a good young imbecile. Yes, I must. His pace slackened. Here, am I going to answer us or not? My consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother, Stephen, lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg Terrace, with his aunt Sally. Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And tell us, Stephen, how his uncle sighed? Oh, weeping God, the things I married into. To boys up into Heloft. The drunken little cost drawer, and his brother, the cornit player. Highly respectable gondoliers, and skew-eyed Walter, sirring his father no less. Sir, yes, sir, no, sir. Jesus, wept, and no wonder by Christ. I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage and wait. They take me for a done, peer out from a coin of vantage. It's Stephen, sir. Let him in, let Stephen in. A bolt drawn back, and Walter welcomes me. We thought you were someone else. In his broad bed, Uncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Clean-chested, he has washed the upper moiety. More, O nephew! He lays aside the latboard, whereon he draughts his bills of costs, for the eyes of Master Gough and Master Shatland Tandy, filing consents and common searches, and a rate of duke's takeum. A bog oak frame over his bald head, wild's requiescat. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back. Yes, sir? Malt for Richie and Stephen. Tell mother, where is she? Bathing Chrissy, sir. Papa's little bed-pal, lump of love. No, Uncle Richie. Call me Richie. Damn your Lithia water. It lowers. Woosky! Uncle Richie, really. Sit down, or by the law, Harry, I'll knock you down. Walter squints vainly for a chair. He has nothing to sit down on, sir. He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chip and our chair. Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lordy door airs here. The rich of a rash of fried with a herring. Sure? So much the better. We have nothing in the house but back-ache pills. Alerta! He drones bars of Ferrando's Aria di Sortita, the grandest number, Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen! His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded with rushes of the air, his fists big drumming on his padded knees. The wind is sweeter. Houses of decay, mine, his, and all. You told the Klungau's gentry you had an uncle, a judge, and an uncle, a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there, nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library, where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundred-headed rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs, stars. Who in him? Horse nostrelled. The oval equine faces. Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lantern Jaws, Abbas's father, Furious Dean. What a fence laid fire to their brains. Paf! Deskende Calweris. A garland of gray hair on his culminated head. See him, me, clambering down to the foot-pace. Deskende. Clutching a monstrance. Basilis Guide. Get down, bald pole. A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of jack-priests, moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat. And at the same instance, perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. Dring, dring! And two streets off another, locking it into a picks. Dring, dring! And in a lady chapel, another, taking howsel all to his own cheek. Dring, dring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Ockham thought of that invincible doctor. A misty English morning, the hypostasis tickled his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling, he heard twine with his second bell, the first bell in the transept. He is lifting his, and rising heard. Now I am lifting. There are two bells. He is kneeling, twang in diphthong. Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Arl of saints. You were awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine Avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes, still more from the wet street. Oh, si, certo. Sell your soul for that. Do. Died rags, pinned round a score. More tell me, more still. Top of the houth tram alone, trying to the rain. Naked women! Naked women! What about that, eh? What about what? What else were they invented for? Reading two pages a piece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hooray for the goddamned idiot! Hooray! No one saw. Tell no one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his f? Oh, yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. Oh, yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep. Copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria. Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a Mahaman Vantara, Piccadela Miranda-like. I, very like a whale, when one reads these strange pages of one long gone, one feels that one is at one with one who wants. The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razor shells squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading souls, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smoldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking wearily. A porter-bottle stood up, stalled to its waist in the cakey sand dough, a sentinel, isle of dreadful thirst, broken hoops on the shore, at the land a maze of dark cunning nets farther away chalk scrawled back doors, and on the higher beach a drying line with two crucified shirts, rings end, wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners, human shells. He halted, I have passed the way to Aunt Sarah's. Am I not going there? Seems not. No one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the pigeon house. Qui vous a mis dans cette fichu position? C'est le pigeon, Joseph. Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar, McMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird. He lapped me the sweet lechaw with pink young tongue, plump bun his face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the growlough. About the nature of women, he read in Michelet. But he me sent me la vie de Jésus by Monsieur Leo Taxil, lent it to his friend. C'est donc dans, vous savez, moi je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas en l'existence de Dieu, faut pas le dire à mon père. Il croit? Mon père, oui? Schluss, he laps. My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? Paisagn, PCN, you know. Physique, chimique et naturel. Aha, eating your groats worth of more civille. Fleshpots of Egypt. Elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone, when I was in Paris. Boulmiche, I used to. Yes, used to catch punch tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the 17th of February, 1904, the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it. Other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Louis, c'est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself. Proudly walking. Whom are you trying to walk like? Forget, a dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger to seek. Au cas de minute. Look, clock, must get, fermé, hire dog. Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang, shotgun. Bits, man, spattered walls, all brass buttons. Bits all clack in place, clack back. Not hurt. Oh, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant. See. Oh, that's all right. Shake a shake. Oh, that's all. Only all right. You were going to do wonders. What? Mission me to Europe after Fary Columbanus. Fiat and Scottus on their creepy stools in heaven, spilt from their pintpots, loud Latin laughing. Elgay, Elgay. Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porta-thruppants across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? Rich booty you brought back. Le tutu. Five tattered numbers of pantalons blonds, et coulotte rouge. A blue French telegram. Curiosity to show. Mother dying. Come home, father. The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't. Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt, and I'll tell you the reason why she always kept things decent in the Hannigan family. His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls, gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses. Paris, rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of files of bread, the frog green wormwood, her matting incense, caught the air. Bellormo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife. The kerchiefed housewife is a stir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. Enrodots, Yvonne and Madeleine, new make their tumbled beauties, chattering with gold teeth, show saw of pastry. Their mouths yellowed with a pass of flambreton. Faces of Paris men go by, their well-pleased pleasers, curled conquistadoris. Noons slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his wife. Aboutus, goblers, folk spiced beans down their gullets. And demi-citier, a jet of coffee, steam from the burnished cauldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est d'Irlandais. Hollandais, non fromage. De Irlandais. Nous, Irlandes. Vous savez. Ah oui. She thought you wanted a cheese, Hollandais. Your post-prandial. Do you know that word? Post-prandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona. Queer fellow used to call it his post-prandial. Well, schlanta. Around the slabbed tables, the tangle of wine, breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our sauce-stained plates, the green fairies fang thrusting between his lips. Of Irland, the Dalcassians. Of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. A.e. Pimander, good shepherd of men. To yoke me as his yoke-fellow. Our crimes, our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt, sanguine flowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Droumont, famous journalist. Droumont, known what he called Queen Victoria, old hag with the yellow teeth, vieille eau grèce with the donjon. More gone, beautiful woman. La patrie. M. Milivois. Felix Forêt. Know how he died? Nice sensuous man. The fricken. Bonne à tout faire. Who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Uppsala. Moir faire, she said. Doulé monsieur. Not this monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother. Most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lassivious people. The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco shreds catch fire. A flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of Dayboy's hat. How the head-centre got away. Authentic version. Got up as a young bride. Man, veil, orange blossoms. Drove out the road to Malahide. Did faith. Have lost leaders. The betrayed. Wild escapes. Disguises clutched at. Gone. Not here. Spurned lover. I was a strapping young, or soon at that time, I tell you. I'll show you my likeness one day. I was. Faith. Lover. For her love he prowled with Colonel Richard Burke. A tannist of his set. Under the walls of Clarkinwell. And crouching. Saw a flame of vengeance. Hurl them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay paris he hides. Egon of Paris. Unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations. The dingy printing case. His three taverns. The Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in. Rue de la goutte d'or. Damascined with flybone faces of the gone. Loveless. Landless. Wifeless. She is quite nicely comfy. Without her outcast man. Madame in rouge jealocurle. Canary and two buck lodges. Peachy cheeks. A zebra skirt. Frisky as a young things. Spurned and undispairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to get poor Pat a job one time. Morphys, soldier of France. I taught him to sing. The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny. St. Cunny's. Strombo's castle on the North. Goes like this. Oh, oh, he takes me nappatandy by the hand. Oh, oh, the boys of Kilkenny. Weak, wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egon. Not he them. Remembering thee, old Sion. He had come nearer the edge of the sea, and wet sand slapped his boots. The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves. Wind of wild air of seeds of brightness. Here I am not walking out to the kish-light ship, am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back. Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbecons, the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushed back chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their blind bodies, the panther-sab and his pointer. Call, no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck, and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So, in the moon's midwatches, I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood. The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back, then, by the pool-beck road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and eely ore-weeds, and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash-plant in a grike. A bloated carcass of a dog lay lulled on bladder-rack, before him the gungle of a boat sunken sand. Un courche en suble, Louis-Voyure, called Gaultier's prose. These heavy sands, a language tied and wind, have silted here. And these the stone-heaps of dead builders, a warram of weasel-rats. Hide gold there, try it. You have some, sands and stones, heavy of the past. So, louts, toys. Mind you, don't get one bang on the ear. I'm the bloody-well gigant. Rolls all them bloody-well boulders, bones for my stepping-stones. Fee for thumb, I smells the bloods, odds and iridsmen. A point, live dog, grew into sight, running across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Zip tight. From farther away, walking shoreward across the crested-tide figures, to the two mares. They have tucked it safe among the bull-rushes. Big-a-boo, I see you. No, the dog. He's running back to them. Who? Gallies of the Lochlands ran here to beach in quest of prey, their blood-beaked prowls, riding low on a molten pewter-surf. Dane vikings, talks of tomahawks of glitter on their breasts, when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turl-hide wales, stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then, from the starving cage-work city, a horde of jerkin-dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives running, scaling, hacking in green, blubbery whale-meat. Famine, plague and slaughter's, their blood is in me, their lust's my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a-changely, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no one, none to me. The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back, dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bade about, terribiliar meditans. The primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders, live their lives. The Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silk and night, perk in war-back, York's full scion, in breeches of silk of white-rose ivory, wonder of a day, and lamb at Simnell, with a tale of nans and supplers, a scullion crown. All king's sons, paradise of pretenders, then and now. He saved men from drowning, and you shake, it occurs, yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Orsa and Michele were in their own house. House of, we don't want any of your medieval abstruse-iosities. Would you do what he did? The boat would be near, a life-boy. Naturally, put there for you. Would you, or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's Rock. They're waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I'm not a strong swimmer. Water-cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongow's. Can't see. Who's behind me? Out, quickly, quickly. Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, Sheating the loaves of sand, quickly, shell-coco-coloured. If I had land under my feet, I wanted his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man, his eyes screamed to me out of horror of his death. I, with him together, down, I could not save her. Waters, bitter death, lost. A man and a woman, I see her skirties pinned up, I bet. Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides, looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hair. Ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a low-skimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field-tenny, a buck, trippant, proper unattired. At the lace fringe of the tide, he halted with stiff forehoofs. Seaward pointed ears, his snout lifted, barked at the wave-noise, herds of sea-morse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, raking, plashing from far, from farther out, waves and waves. Cockle-pickers. They waded a little way in the water, and stooping, soused their bags, and lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped, running to them, reared up and poured them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute, bearish forning. Unheeded, he kept by them, as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue, red panting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them, and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog, all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dog-skull, dog-sniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dog's body, here lies poor dog's body's body. Tatars! Out of that, you mongrel! The cry brought him skulking back to his master, and a blunt, bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole, he lolliped, dawdled, smelt a rock, and from under a cocked hind leg, pissed against it. He trotted forward, and lifting again his hind leg, pissed, quick-short, at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hind paws then scattered the sand, then his forepaws dabbled and delved, something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving, and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead. After he woke me last night, same dream, or was it? Open hallway, street of harlots. Remember Haruna Rashid? I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke, I was not afraid. The melon he had held against my face, smiled, cream-fruit-smell. That was the rule said. In, come, red carpet spread. You will see who. Shouldering their bags, they trudged the red Egyptians. His blued feet out of the turned-up trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With woman's steps she followed, the ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and shell grit crusted her bare feet. About her wind-raw face, hair trailed. Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing a was to Romeville. When night hides her body's flaws, calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired, her fancy-man is treating two royal doublins in her lochlins of black pits. Busser, whopping rogues rum lingo. For, all my dimba-wapping dale, she fiends whiteness under her rancid rags. Fun ballies lain that night, the tanyard smells. White thy fambles, red thy ghan, and thy quarren's dainty is. Couch a hog's head with me then, in the dark man's clip and kiss. Moro's delectation equinous tongue-belly calls this, frate por cospino, unfallen Adam-road, and not rutted. Call away, let him, thy quarren's dainty is. Language no wit worse than his. Monkwards, Mary-beads, jabber on their girdles. Rogue words, tough nuggets, patter in their pockets. Passing now. The side-eye at my hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit, I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schleps, trains, drags, tressines her load. A tide, westering, moondrawn in her wake. Tides, myriad islanded, within her, blood not mine, oin up her ponton, a wine-dark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bride-bed, child-bed, bed of death, ghost-candled. Omnis caro ad te when yet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat-sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss. Here, put a pin in that chat, will you? My tablets, mouth to her kiss. No, must be two of them. Glue them well, mouth to her mouth's kiss. His lips lipped and mouthed, fleshless lips of air. Mouth to her moomb, oomb, all-wooming tomb. His mouth moulded, issuing breath, unspeached. O we are, roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring, way, away, away, away. Paper, the banknotes blast them, on Deezy's letter. Here, thanking you for the hospitality, tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun, he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter. His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia worlds. Me sits there with his augurs rod of ash, and borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld in violent night, walking beneath a rain of uncoothed stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, man-shape ineluctable. Call it back, endless. Would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Whoever, anywhere, will read these written words. Signs on a white field, somewhere to someone in your fluteist voice. The good Bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel-hat. Vail of space, with coloured emblems, hatched on its field. Hold hard, coloured on a flat. Yes, that's right. Flat, I see. Then think distance, near, far, flat I see. East, back. Ah, see now. Fools back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You'll find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls. Do not think flutea. Our souls, shame wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more. A woman to her lover, clinging. The more, the more. She trusts me. Her hand, gentle. The long-lashed eyes. Now, where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The Virgin at Hodges Figus's window, on Monday, looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write. Keem Glarts you gave her. Wrist through the braided jess of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson Park with a grief and kick shores. A lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie, or pick me up. Bet she wears those curse of God's stays, suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple-dumplings. Fuel tostot. Where are your wits? Touch me, soft eyes. Soft, soft, soft hand. I'm lonely here. I'll touch me soon, now. What is that word, known to all men? I'm quiet here alone. Sad, too. Touch, touch me. He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat down on his eyes. That is Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath's sleep, et weed-it-dales, et errant waldé bona. Allô, bonjour. Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacock-twittering lashes the southing sun. I'm caught in this burning scene, panzour, the faunal noon. Among gum-heavy serpent plants, milk oozing fruits, wear on the tawny waters leaves lie wide, pain is far, and no more turn aside and brood. His gaze brooded on his broad-toed boots, a buck's cast-offs, neighbor nine under. He counted the creases of wrapped leather, wherein another's foot had nested warm, the foot that beat the ground in Tripodium, foot I disloved. But you were delighted when Esther Osvald's shoe went on you, girl I knew in Paris, tiens, quel petit pied, staunch friend, a brother's soul, wild's love that dare not speak its name. His arm crammed his arm. He now will leave me, and the blame, as I am, as I am, all or not at all. In long lassoes from the cock-lake, the water flowed full, covering green-goldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ash-plant will float away, I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen, a four-worded wavespeech, sea-soul, hers, hersay, hers. Veerment breath of waters amid sea-snakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops, flop, slop, slap, bounded in barrels, and spent its speech ceases. It flows, purling, widely flowing, floating foam-pool, flower unfurling. Under the upswelling tide, he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, icing up their petticoats, in whispering waters swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day, night by night, lifted, flooded, and let fall. Lord, they are weary, and whispered to, they sigh. St. Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, awaiting, awaiting the fullness of their times. Deibus act noctibus in Euryas patiens in Gemisquit. To no end gathered, vainly then released, forth-flowing, wending back, loom of the moon. Weary too, in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters. Five fathoms out there, full fathom five thy father lies. But one, he said, found drowned, high-water a Dublin bar, driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fan shells of fishes, silly shells, a corpse rising salt-white from the undertow, bobbing a pace, a pace, a porpoise, landward. There he is, look it quick, pull, sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him, easy now, bag of corpse gas, sopping in foul brine, a quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy tip-bit, flash through the slits of his button, trouser fly. God becomes man, becomes fish, becomes barnacle-goose, becomes feather-bed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Holds stark over the gunnel, he breathes upwards the stench of his green grave, his leprous nose-hole snoring to the sun. A sea-change this, brown eyes, salt-blue, sea-death, mildest of all deaths, known to man. Old father-ocean, quida pari, beware of imitations, just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. Come, I thirst, clouding over, no black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm, all brightly falls, proud lightning of the intellect. Luki ferdico, quinescit o catum. No, my cockle-hat and staff, and his my sandal-shoon. Where? To evening-lands. Evening will find itself. He took the hilt of his ash-plant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way, next, when is it? Tuesday, will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, the rum-tum-tiddly-tum, lawn-tenison, gentleman-poet. Jah! For the old hag with the yellow teeth, and monsieur-dremont, gentleman-journalist. Jah! My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder? Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Or I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money. That one. This. Toothless kinch, the superman. Why is that, I wonder? Or does it mean something, perhaps? My handkerchief. He threw it, I remember. Did I not take it up? His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one. He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock carefully. For the rest, let look who will. Behind, perhaps, there is someone. He turned his face over a shoulder. R'er-garde-on. Moving through the air, high spars of a three-master. Her sails braided up on the cross-trees. Homing upstream. Silently moving. A silent ship. And off, section four.