(In court dress.) Can give best references. Messrs Callan, Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J.P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr. V.B. Dillon, ex-lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest ... Queens of Dublin Society. (Carelessly.) I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal, at the levee. Sir Bob, I said ...
[441]mrs yelverton barry
(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brick quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair.) Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.
mrs bellingham
(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the model farm.
mrs yelverton barry
Shame on him!
(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward.)
the sluts and ragamuffins
(Screaming.) Stop thief! Hurrah there, Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!
second watch
(Produces handcuffs.)  He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit and eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up. He urged me, stating that he felt it his mission in life to urge me, to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.
the honourable mrs mervyn talboys
(In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly.) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phœnix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature) practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.
mrs bellingham
Me too.
mrs yelverton barry
Me too.
(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.)
[443]the honourable mrs mervyn talboys
(Stamps her jingling spurs in a sudden paroxysm of sudden fury.) I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.
bloom
(His eyes closing, quails expectantly.) Here? (He squirms.) Again! (He pants cringing.) I love the danger.
the honourable mrs mervyn talboys
Very much so! I'll make it hot for you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
mrs bellingham
Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and stripes on it!
mrs yeluerton barry
Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married man!
bloom
All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
the honourable mrs mervyn talboys
(Laughs derisively.) O, did you, my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.
mrs bellingham
(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o'-nine tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
bloom
(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands with hangdog mien.) O cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. (He offers the other cheek.)
[444]mrs yelverton barry
(Severely.) Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!
the honourable mrs mervyn talboys
(Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently.) I'll do no such thing. Pig dog and always was ever since he was pupped! To dare address me! I'll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I'll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. (She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air.) Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick! Ready?
bloom
(Trembling, beginning to obey.) The weather has been so warm.
(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)
davy stephens
Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day Supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin.
(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.)
the timepiece
(Unportalling.)
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)
the quoits
Jigjag, Jigajiga. Jigjag.
(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of a Nameless One.)
[445]the nameless one
Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised her.
the jurors
(All their heads turned to his voice.) Really?
the nameless one
(Snarls.) Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.
the jurors
(All their heads lowered in assent.) Most of us thought as much.
first watch
He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted: Jack the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
second watch
(Awed, whispers.) And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
the crier
(Loudly.) Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most honourable ...
(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.)
the recorder
I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! (He dons the black cap.) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the neck until he [446] is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. (A black skullcap descends upon his head.)
(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.)
long john fanning
(Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance.) Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?
(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block.  He rubs grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)
rumbold
(To the recorder with sinister familiarity.) Hanging Harry, your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or nothing.
(The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
the bells
Heigho! Heigho!
bloom
(Desperately.) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzees. (Breathlessly.) Pelvic basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. (Overcome with emotion.) I left the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing.) Hynes, may I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you want a little more ...
hynes
(Coldly.) You are a perfect stranger.
second watch
(Points to the corner.) The bomb is here.
first watch
Infernal machine with a time fuse.
[447]bloom
No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral.
first watch
(Draws his truncheon.) Liar!
(The beagle lift his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)
paddy dignam
(In a hollow voice.) It is true. it was my funeral. Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.
(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)
bloom
(In triumph.) You hear?
paddy dignam
Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!
bloom
The voice is the voice of Esau.
second watch
(Blesses himself.) How is that possible?
first watch
It is not in the penny catechism.
paddy dignam
By metempsychosis. Spooks.
a voice
O rocks.
[448]paddy dignam
(Earnestly.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that bottle of sherry. (He looks round him.) A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.
(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies.)
father coffey
(Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak.) Namine. Jacobs Vobiscuits. Amen.
john o'connell
(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.) Dignam, Patrick T, deceased.
paddy dignam
(With pricked up ears, winces.) Overtones. (He wriggles forward, places an ear to the ground.) My master's voice!
john o'connell
Burial docket letter number U.P. Eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys, Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail stiffpointed, his ears cocked.)
paddy dignam
Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned machine.)
[449]tom rochford
(A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble eyes of nought. All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)
the kisses
(Warbling.) Leo! (Twittering.) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo! (Cooing.) Coo coocoo! Yummyumm Womwom! (Warbling.) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (Twittering.) Leeolee! (Warbling.) O Leo!
 Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
 He's inside with his friend.
bloom
Is this Mrs Mack's?
zoe
No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly.) She's on the job herself tonight with the vet, her tipster, that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today. (Suspiciously.)  Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach.  Curiously they are on the right. Heavier I suppose. One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
zoe
(In sudden alarm.) You've a hard chancre.
bloom
Not likely.
zoe
I feel it.
(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato.  Heirloom.
zoe
For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket, then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)
zoe
You'll know me the next time.
[451]bloom
(Forlornly.) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to ...
(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)
zoe
(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.)
Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.
bloom
(Fascinated.) I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
zoe
And you know what thought did?
 The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)
bloom
(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat awkward hand.) Are you a Dublin girl?
zoe
(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil.)  I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?
bloom
(As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.
[452]zoe
Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
bloom
(In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say, he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!
(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)
the chimes
Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!
bloom
(In alderman's gown and chain.) Electors of Arran Quay, Inns Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock better run a tramline, I say, from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future. That's my programme. Cui bono? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance ...
an elector
Three times three for our future chief magistrate!
(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)
the torchbearers
Hooray!
(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. They nod vigorously in agreement.)
[453]late lord mayor harrington
(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large white silk scarf.) That alderman, sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth designated Boulevard Bloom.
councillor lorcan sherlock
Carried unanimously.
bloom
(Impassionedly.) These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev ...
(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up. A streamer bearing the legends Cead Mile Failte and Mah Ttob Melek Israel spans the street. All the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the royal Dublin fusiliers, the King's own Scottish borderers, the Cameron Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers, standing to attention keep back the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering. The pillar of the cloud appears. A fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the civic ﬂag. The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, [454] Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimney sweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, understakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. After them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the master of horse, the lord great chamberlain, the earl marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantletrimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff, the orb and sceptre with the dove, the curtana. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with golden headstall. Wild excitement. The ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed with essences. The men cheer. Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)
bloom's boys
The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds,
Saint Stephen's his day
Was caught in the furze.
[455]a blacksmith
(Murmurs.) For the honour of God! And is that Bloom? He scarcely looks thirtyone.
a pavior and flagger
That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest reformer. Hats off!
(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)
a millionairess
(Richly.) Isn't he simply wonderful?
a noblewoman
(Nobly.) All that man has seen!
a feminist
(Masculinely.) And done!
a bellhanger
A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.
(Bloom's weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)
the bishop of down and connor
I here present your undoubted emperor president and king chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!
all
God save Leopold the First!
bloom
(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor, with dignity.) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.
william, archbishop of armagh
(In purple stock and shovel hat.) Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
[456]bloom
(Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears.) So may the Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.
michael, archbishop of armagh
(Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's head.) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem. Leopold, Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!
(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)
the peers
I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly worship.
(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message.)
bloom
My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the splendour of night.
(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheering.)
john howard parnell
(Raises the royal standard.) Illustrious Bloom! Successor to my famous brother!
bloom
(Embraces John Howard Parnell.) We thank you from our heart, John, [457] for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our common ancestors.
(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows all that he is wearing green socks.)
tom kernan
You deserve it, your honour.
bloom
On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering thier warcry, Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.
the chapel of freeman typesetters
Hear! Hear!
john wyse nolan
There's the man that got away James Stephens.
a bluecoat schoolboy
Bravo!
an old resident
You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you are.
an applewoman
He's a man like Ireland wants.
bloom
My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.
(Thirty two workmen wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland, [458] under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a colossal edifice, with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L.B. Several paupers fall from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses.)
the sightseers
(Dying.) Morituri te salutant. (They die.)
(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated figure at Bloom.)
the man in the macintosh
Don't you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
bloom
Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh!
(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disppears. Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported. Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives, in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tram lines, coupons of the royal and prvileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy and Fritz (politic), Care of the Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth? (historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant's Compendium of the [459] Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser's Vade Mecum (journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who's Who in Space (astric), Songs that Reached 'Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's Way to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward to touch the hem of Bloom's robe. The lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Babes and sucklings are held up.)
the women
Little father! Little father
the babes and sucklings
Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.
(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)
baby boardman
(Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth.) Hajajaja.
bloom
(Shaking hands with a blind stripling.) My more than Brother! (Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple.) Dear old friends!  Peep! Bopeep! (He wheels twins in a perambulator.) Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe? (He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet silk haudherchiefs from his mouth.) Roygbiv. 32 feet per second. (He consoles a widow.) Absence makes the heart grow younger. (He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics.) Leg it, ye devils! (He kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran.) Honourable wounds!  U.p: up. U.p: up. (He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly.) Ah, naughty, naughty! (He eats a raw turnip offered him by Maurice Butterly, farmer.) Fine! Splendid! (He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes, journalist.) My dear fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a beggar.) Please accept. (He takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples.) Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!
[460]the citizen
(Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald muffler.) May the good God bless him!
(The ram's horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)
bloom
(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and reads solemnly.) Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith.
(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.)
jimmy henry
The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited. Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year 1 of the Paradisiacal Era.
paddy leonard
What am I to do about my rates and taxes?
bloom
Pay them, my friend.
paddy leonard
Thank you.
nosey flynn
Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?
bloom
(Obdurately.) Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five pounds.
j.j. o'molloy
A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O'Brien!
nosey flynn
Where do I draw the five pounds?
[461]pisser burke
For bladder trouble?
bloom
Acid. nit. hydrochlor dil, 20 minims
Tinct. mix. vom, 5 minims
Extr. taraxel. lig. 30 minims.
 K. 11.
joe hynes
Why aren't you in uniform?
bloom
When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?
ben dollard
Pansies?
bloom
Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.
ben dollard
When twins arrive?
bloom
Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.
larry o'rourke
An eight day licence for my new premises. You remember me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the missus.
[462]bloom
(Coldly.) You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no presents.
crofton
This is indeed a festivity.
bloom
(Solemnly.) You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
alexander keyes
When will we have our own house of keys?
bloom
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival, with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.
o'madden burke
Free fox in a free henroost.
davy byrne
(Yawning.) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!
bloom
Mixed races and mixed marriage.
lenehan
What about mixed bathing?
(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked [463] goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)
father farley
He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith.
mrs riordan
(Tears up her will.) I'm disappointed in you! You bad man!
mother grogan
(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You abominable person!
nosey flynn
Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.
bloom
(With rollicking humour.)

With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.
hoppy holohan
Good old Bloom! There's nobody like him after all.
paddy leonard
Stage Irishman!
bloom
What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele (Laughter.)
lenehan
Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!
[464]the veiled sibyl
(Enthusiastically.) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.
bloom
(Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she's a bonny lassie.
theodore purefoy
(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
the veiled sibyl
(Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)
(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)
alexander j. dowie
(Violently.) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban!
the mob
Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr. Fox!
(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheeps'tails, odd pieces of fat.)
[465]bloom
(Excitedly.) This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.
dr mulligan
(In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow.) Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be virgo intacta.
(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)
dr madden
Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.
dr crotthers
I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid. Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.
dr punch costello
The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.
dr dixon
(Reads a bill of health.) Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found [466] him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests Protection Society which clears up everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is about to have a baby.
(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)
bloom
O, I so want to be a mother.
mrs thornton
(In nursetender's gown.) Embrace me tight, dear. You'll be soon over it. Tight, dear.
(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants. All are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindorée, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vice chairmen of hotel syndicates.)
a voice
Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?
[467]bloom
(Darkly.) You have said it.
brother buzz
Then perform a miracle.
bantam lyons
Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.
(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)
brini, papal nuncio
(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.)
Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.
[468]a deadhand
(Writes on the wall.) Bloom is a cod.
crab
(In bushranger's kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?
a female infant
(Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge?
a hollybush
And in the devil's glen?
bloom
(Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears falling from his left eye.) Spare my past.
the irish evicted tenants
(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) Sjambok him!
(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms, his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans, joining hands, caper round him.
You think the ladies love you!
the prison gate girls
If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
hornblower
(In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) And he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to Lilith, the [469] nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks, They wag their beards at Bloom.)
mastiansky and citron
Belial! Laemlein of Istria! the false Messiah! Abulafia!
(George S. Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his arm, presenting a bill.)
mesias
To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
bloom
(Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom!
(Reuben J. Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)
reuben j.
(Whispers hoarsely.) The squeak is out. A split is gone for the flatties. Nip the first rattler.
the fire brigade
Pflaap!
brother buzz
(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying.) Forgive him his trespasses.
(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)
the citizen
Thank heaven!
[470]bloom
(In a seamless garment marked I.H.S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of Erin, in black garments with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands, kneel down and pray.)
the daughters of erin
Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.
Flower of the Bath, pray for us.
Mentor of Menton, pray for us.
Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us.
Charitable Mason, pray for us.
Wandering Soap, pray for us.
Sweets of Sin, pray for us.
Music without Words, pray for us.
Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us.
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us.
Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us.
Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Mr Vincent O'Brien, sings the Alleluia chorus, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn.  Let me be going now, woman of the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and mother of a bating. (With a tear in his eye.) All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be. Life's dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. (He gazes far away mournfully.) I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.
[471]zoe
(Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.) Honest? Till the next time. (She sneers.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts.
bloom
(Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
zoe
(In sudden sulks.)   I am very disagreable.  Where are you from? London?
zoe
(Glibly.) Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I'm Yorkshire born (She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time? Ten shillings?
bloom
(Smiles, nods slowly.) More, houri, more.
zoe
And more's mother? (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel off.
bloom
(Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster (Earnestly.) You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
zoe
(Flattered.) What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for (She pats him.) Come.
bloom
Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.
[472]zoe
Babby!
bloom
(In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair, fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone.
the buckles
Love me. Love me not. Love me.
zoe
Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)
the male brutes
(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)
zoe
(Her lucky hand instantly saving him.) Hoopsa! Don't fall upstairs.
bloom
The just man falls seven times (He stands aside at the threshold.) After you is good manners.
zoe
Ladies first, gentlemen after.
(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out her hands, [473] draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall hang a man's hat and waterproof, Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing them, frowns then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is thrown open.  Averting his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantlepiece. A tag of her corset lace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the piano.)
kitty
(Coughs behind her hand.) She's a bit imbecillic. (She signs with a waggling forefinger.) Blemblem. (Lynch lifts up her skirt and white petticoat with the wand. She settles them down quickly.) Respect yourself. (She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her hair glows, red with henna.) O, excuse!
zoe
More limelight, Charley. (She goes to the chandelier and turns the gas full cock.)
kitty
(Peers at the gasjet.) What ails it tonight?
[474]lynch
(Deeply.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
zoe
Clap on the back for Zoe.
(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths.  A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)
kitty
(Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot.) O, excuse!
zoe
(Promptly.) Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled catterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)
stephen
As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Cœla enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightiness of his almightiness. Mais, nom de nom, that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs.) Which side is your knowledge bump?
the cap
(With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman's reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!
[475]stephen
You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!
the cap
Bah!
stephen
Here's another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which ...
the cap
Which? Finish. You can't.
stephen
(With an effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible elipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
the cap
Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
stephen
(Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
lynch
(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe Higgins.)
 Great unjust God!
florry
(Offended.) Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my foot's tickling.
(Ragged barefoot newsboys jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, yelling.)
the newsboys
Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)
stephen
A time, times and half a time.
(Reuben J. Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters hangs from the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognatic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.)
all
What?
the hobgoblin
(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping, with outstretched clutching arms then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! [477] L'homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien n'va plus. (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)
florry
(Sinking into torpor, crosses herself secretly.) The end of the world!
(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.)
the gramophone
Jerusalem!
Open your gates and sing
Hosanna ...
(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star falls from it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)
the end of the world
(With a Scotch accent.) Wha'll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?
(Over the passing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh as a corncrake's, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)
elijah
No yapping, if you please, in this booth.  Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here! [478] Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more.  If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy have you got that? O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.) Jeru ...
the gramophone
(Drowning his voice.)
Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh ... (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
the three whores
(Covering their ears, squawk.) Ahhkkk!
elijah
(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top of his voice, his arms uplifted.) Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. (He winks at his audience.) Our Mr President, he twig the whole lot and he ain't saying nothing.
kitty-kate
I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on [479] Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop. My mother's sister married a Montmorency. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.
zoe-fanny
I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
florry-teresa
It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy's three stars. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the bed.
stephen
In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fast past in noisy marching.)
the beatitudes
(Incoherently.) Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop.
lyster
(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says discreetly.) He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the light.
(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser attire, shinily laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda hat.)
best
(Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot.) I was just beautifying him, don't you know.  Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir. I am out for truth. [480] Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.
(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananann Mac Lir broods, chin on knees. He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its two talons.)
mhananann mac lir
(With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the Gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! (He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.) Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead, I am the dreamery creamery butter.
(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)
the gasjet
Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!
(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.)
zoe
Who has a fag as I'm here?
lynch
(Tossing a cigarette on to the table.) Here.
zoe
(Her head perched aside in mock pride.) Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady? (She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly at her cigarette.)  No? You wouldn't do a less thing.
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.)
virag
(Heels together, bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. (He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh?  The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.
bloom
Granpapachi. But ...
virag
Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a word. Hippogriff. Am I right?
bloom
She is rather lean.
[482]virag
(Not unpleasantly.) Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today Parallax! (With a nervous twitch of his head.)  Pollysyllabax!
bloom
(An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek.) She seems sad.
virag
(Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left eye wilh a finger and barks hoarsely.) Hoax! Beware of the flapper and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. (More genially.) Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.
bloom
(Regretfully.) When you come out without your gun.
virag
We can do you all brands mlld, medium and strong. Pay your money, take your choice. How happy caould you be with either ...
bloom
With? ...
virag
(His tongue upcurling.) Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. Sbe is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. [483] Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it. Lycopodium. (His throat twitches.) Slapbang! There he goes again.
bloom
The stye I dislike.
virag
(Arches his eyebrows.) Contact with a goldring, they say. Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosaurus. For the rest Eve's sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. (He twitches.) It is a funny sound. (He coughs encouragingly.) But possibly it is only a wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.
bloom
(Reflecting.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents. Wait.  Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten. Exercise your mnemotechnic. La causa è santa. Tara. Tara. (Aside.) He will surely remember.
bloom
Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand cures. Mnemo?
virag
(Excitedly.) I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. (He taps his parchment roll energetically.) This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about amputation. Our old friend caustic. [484] They must be starved. Snip off with horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in male habiliments. (With a dry snigger.) You intended to devote an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months of 1882 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate! From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations, camiknickers? (He crows derisively.) Keekeereekee!
(Bloom surveys incertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)
bloom
I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.
virag
(Prompts into his ear in a pig's whisper.) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal verve in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally.) They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand.) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley! Buzz!
bloom
Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I ...
[485]virag
(His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key.) Splendid! Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gabbles gluttonously with turkey wattles.) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! (He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he claws.) Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will shortly be upon us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. (He wags his head with cackling raillery.) Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular.
bloom
(Absently.) Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve and the serpent contradict. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
virag
(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) That the cows with their those distended udders that they have been the known ...
bloom
I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. (He repeats.) Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. (Profoundly.) Instinct rules the world. In life. In death.
virag
(Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries.) Who's Ger Ger? Who's dear Gerald? O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? (He mews.) Luss puss puss puss! (He sighs, draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw.) Well, well.
Long ago I was a king,
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing!
Bing!
(He rushes against the mauve shade flapping noisily). Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.
(From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.)
henry
(In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.) There is a flower that bloometh.
(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.)
stephen
(To himself.) Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my. Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially drunk, by the way. (He touches the keys again.) Minor chord comes now. Yes. Not much however.
(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.)
[487]artifoni
Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto.
florry
Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
stephen
No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you the letter about the lute?
florry
(Smirking.) The bird that can sing and won't sing.
(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold's face.)
philip sober
Take a fool's advice. All is not well.  Three pounds twelve you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.
philip drunk
(Impatiently.) Ah, bosh, man.  I paid my way. If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who was it told me his name? (His lawnmower begins to purr.) Aha, yes. Zoe mou sas agapo. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?
florry
And the song?
stephen
Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
florry
Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
[488]stephen
Out of it now (To himself.) Clever.
philip drunk and philip sober
(Their lawnmowers purring with a rigadoon of grasshalms). Clever ever. Out of it. Out of it. By the bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition.  You needn't try to hide, I says to him. I know you've a Roman collar.
virag
Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his pupils waxing.)  Nothing new under the sun. I am the Virag who disclosed the sex secrets of monks and maidens. Why I left the Church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks.  (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
lynch
I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for shooting a bishop.
zoe
(Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) He couldn't get a connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
bloom
Poor man!
[489]zoe
(Lightly.) Only for what happened him.
bloom
How?
virag
(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet.  (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.)  Apocalypse.
kitty
And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all suscribed for the funeral.
philip drunk
(Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe?
philip sober
(Gaily.) C'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe.
(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore's shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)
lynch
(Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.
florry
(Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.
zoe
(Gaily.) O, my dictionary.
[490]lynch
Three wise virgins.
virag
(Agueschaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
(Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.)
ben dollard
(Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(The virgins, Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)
the virgins
(Gushingly.) Big Ben! Ben Mac Chree!
a voice
Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
ben dollard
(Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) Hold him now.
henry
(Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine heart, mine love. (He pluks his lutestrings.) When first I saw ...
virag
(Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats! (He yawns, showing a coalblack throat and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchment [491] roll.) After having said which I took my departure. Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck!
 Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)
the flybill
K. 11. post no bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
henry
All is lost now.
(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
virag's head
Quack!
(Exeunt severally.)
stephen
(Over his shoulder to Zoe.) You would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet.
lynch
All one and the same God to her.
stephen
(Devoutly.) And Sovereign Lord of all things.
florry
(To Stephen.)  Or a monk.
lynch
He is. A cardinal's son.
[492]stephen
Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
(His Eminence, Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping under it.    Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp.)
the cardinal
Conservio lies captured
He lies in the lowest dungeon
With manacles and chains around his limbs
Weighing upwards of three tons.
(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour.)

(A multitude of midges swarms over his robe. He scratches himself with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims.)
I'm suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous.
(His head aslant, he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easter- [493] kissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious.)
Shall carry my heart to thee,
Shall carry my heart to thee,
And the breath of the balmy night
Shall carry my heart to thee.
(The trick doorhandle turns.)
the doorhandle
Theeee.
zoe
The devil is in that door.
(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.)
zoe
(Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hum. Thank your mother for the rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like.
bloom
(Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep, pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event?
zoe
(Tears open the silverfoil.) Fingers was made before forks. (She breaks off and nibbles a piece, gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then turns kittenishly to Lynch.) No objection to French lozenges? (He nods. She taunts him.) Have it now or wait till you get it?  She whirls the prize in left circle. His head follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.)
Catch.
(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it through with a crack.)
[494]kitty
(Chewing.) The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady. The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
bloom
(In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door. Then, rigid, with left foot advanced, he makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master drawing his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.)
(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside. Bloom's features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.)
bloom
(Solemnly.) Thanks.
zoe
Do as you're bid. Here.
(A firm heelclacking is heard on the stairs.)
bloom
(Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.
(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge and cools herself, flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)
[495]bella
My word! I'm all of a mucksweat.
(She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)
the fan
(Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.
bloom
Yes ... Partly, I have mislaid ...
the fan
(Half opening, then closing.) And the missus is master. Petticoat government.
bloom
(Looks down with a sheepish grin.) That is so.
the fan
(Folding together, rests against her eardrop.) Have you forgotten me?
bloom
Nes. Yo.
the fan
(Folded akimbo against her waist.) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?
(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)
bloom
(Wincing.) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.
the fan
(Tapping.) We have met. You are mine. It is fate.
[496]bloom
(Cowed.) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog's spittle, as you probably ... (He winces.) Ah!
richie goulding
(Bagweighted, passes the door.) Mocking is catch. Best value in Dub. Fit for a prince's liver and kidney.
the fan
(Tapping.) All things end. Be mine. Now.
bloom
(Undecided.) All now? I should not have parted with my talisman. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the sea rocks, a peccadillo at my time of life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.
the fan
(Points downwards slowly.) You may.
bloom
(Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace.) We are observed.
the fan
(Points downwards quickly.) You must.
bloom
(With desire, with reluctance.) I can make a true black knot. Learned when [497] I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy. I knelt once before today. Ah!
(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in her laces.)
bloom
(Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield's was my love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris.
the hoof
Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.
bloom
(Crosslacing.) Too tight?
the hoof
If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.
bloom
Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance. Bad luck. Nook in wrong tache of her ... person you mentioned. That night she met ... Now!
(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head.   Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen ...
bello
(With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour!
bloom
(Infatuated.) Empress!
[498]bello
(His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
bloom
(Plaintively.) Hugeness!
bello
Dungdevourer!
bloom
(With sinews semiflexed.) Magnificence!
bello
Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!
bloom
(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.) Truffles!
 Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious heels, so glistening in their proud erectness.
bloom
(Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey.
bello
(Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for you. I'm the tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume.
(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)
[499]zoe
(Widening her slip to screen her.) She's not here.
bloom
(Closing her eyes.) She's not here.
florry
(Hiding her with her gown.) She didn't mean it, Mr Bello. She'll be good, sir.
kitty
Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.
bello
(Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear.  Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. (Bloom puts out her timid head.) There's a good girly now. (Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready.
bloom
(Fainting.) Don't tear my ...
bello
(Savagely.)  You're in for it this time. I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.)  (He belches.)   It will hurt you.
(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)
bloom
Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!
[500]bello
(Twisting.) Another!
bloom
(Screams.)  Every nerve in my body aches like mad!
bello
(Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks.  (He slaps her face.)
bloom
(Whimpers.) You're after hitting me. I'll tell ...
bello
Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.
zoe
Yes. Walk on him! I will.
florry
I will. Don't be greedy.
kitty
No, me. Lend him to me.
(The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men's grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)
mrs keogh
(Ferociously.) Can I help?  I see Keating Clay is elected chairman of the Richmond Asylum and bytheby Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen three quarters.  Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty [501] to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear.) Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray?
bloom
(Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!
bello
Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg, pray for it as you never prayed before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that. Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting.) Ho! off we pop! I'll nurse you in proper fashion. (He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the, in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.
florry
(Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked before you.
zoe
(Pulling at Florry.) Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress?
bloom
(Stifling.) Can't.
bello
Well, I'm not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here. This bung's about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself.) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters.
bloom
(A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman.
bello
(Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock.  Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I tiptouch it with my nails?
bello
(Points to his whores.) As they are now, so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille, with whalebone busk, to the diamond trimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you ...
bloom
(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only once, a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.
bello
(Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh! and showed off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho! I have to laugh!  Black. Demimondaine.
bello
(Guffaws.) Christ Almighty, it's too tickling, this! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Lieutenant [503] Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M.P., Signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Crœsus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh?
bloom
(Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.
bello
(With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne.
bloom
Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.) and really it's better the position ... because often I used to wet ...
bello
(Sternly.) No insubordination. The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir!  If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha!  The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.
the sins of the past
(In a medley of voices.) He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black Church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in d'Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and [504] how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?
bello
(Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out. Be candid for once.
(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny. Cassidy's hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other, the ...)
bloom
Don't ask me: Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the ... I swear on my sacred oath ...
bello
(Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr ...!
bloom
(Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant ...
bello
(Imperiously.)  Hold your tongue! Speak when you're spoken to.
bloom
(Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer!
(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)
bello
(Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes, also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail, Won't that be nice? (He places a ruby ring on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.
bloom
Thank you, mistress.
[505]bello
You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot. Hop! you will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives (He chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. First, I'll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva.) There's fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder's face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!
a bidder
A florin.
(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)
a voice
One and eightpence too much.
the lacquey
Barang!
charles alberta marsh.
Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.
bello
(Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine shis points. Handle hrim. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure [506] stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He brands his initial C on Bloom's croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?
a darkvisaged man
(In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink.
voices
(Subdued.) For the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid.
bello
(Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantelette, is a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.
bloom
(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) O, I know what you're hinting at now.
bello
What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom's haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man's job?
bloom
Eccles Street ...
bello
(Sarcastically.) I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there.  He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his [507] bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad!  That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon!
bloom
I was indecently treated, I ... inform the police. Hundred pounds. Unmentionable. I ...
bello
Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your drizzle.
bloom
To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll! ... We ... Still ...
bello
(Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see.
(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)
sleepy hollow
Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!
bloom
(In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he ...
bella
(Laughs mockingly.) That's your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student.
(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)
milly
My! It's Papli! But, O Papli, how old you've grown!
[508]bello
Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writing table where we never wrote, Aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos' Rest! Why not? How many women had you, say? Following them up dark streets,, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts. What, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander, O.
bloom
They ... I ...
bello
(Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.
bloom
Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I will prove ...
a voice
Swear!
(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his teeth.)
bello
As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written.  All Ireland versus one! Has nobody ...?
(He bites his thumb.)
bello
Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace [509] about you.  Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it!  (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We'll manure you, Mr Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby. Papli!
bloom
(Clasps his head.) My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff ...
(He weeps tearlessly.)
bello
(Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears!
(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, O. Mastiansky, the Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.)
the circumcised
(In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.
voices
(Sighing.) So he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes.
(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oak frame a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown art colours, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews, stands over Bloom.)
the yews
(Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh.
[510]the nymph
(Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest!
bloom
(Crawls jellily forward under the bought, streaked by sunlight, with dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit.
the nymph
Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnic makers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in flesh tights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, adsf or transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married.
bloom
(Lifts a turtle head towards her lap.) We have met before. On another star.
the nymph
(Sadly.) Rubber goods. Neverrip. Brand as supplied to the aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.
bloom
You mean Photo Bits?
the nymph
I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.  Your classic curves, beautiful immortal. I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray.
the nymph
During dark nights I heard your praise.
[511]bloom
(Quickly.) Yes, yes. You mean that I ... Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of my bed or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless inoffensive vent. (He sighs.) 'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.
the nymph
(Her fingers in her ears.) And words. They are not in my dictionary.
bloom
You understood them?
the yews
Ssh.
the nymph
(Covers her face with her hand.) What have I not seen in that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?
bloom
(Apologetically.) I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea, long ago.
the nymph
(Bends her head.) Worse! Worse!
bloom
(Reflects precautiously.) That antiquated commode. It wasn't her weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.
(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)
the waterfall
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.
the yews
(Mingling their boughs.) Listen. Whisper. She is right, our sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days.
[512]john wyse nolan
(In the background, in Irish National Forester's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) Prosper! Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!
the yews
(Murmuring.) Who came to Poulaphouca with the high school excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?
bloom
(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops, and a red school cap with badge.) I was in my tens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs for they love crushes, instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. Even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.
(Halcyon Days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)
the halcyon days
Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! (They cheer.)
bloom
(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, stunned with spent snowballs, struggles to rise.) Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let's ring all the bells in Montague Street (He cheers feebly.) Hurray for the High School!
the echo
Fool!
the yews
(Rustling.) She is right, our sister. Whisper. (Whispered kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from the boles and among the leaves and break blossoming into bloom.) Who profaned our silent shade?
[513]the nymph
(Coyly through parting fingers.) There! In the open air?
the yews
(Sweeping downward.) Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.
the waterfall
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca
the nymph
(With wide fingers.) O! Infamy!
bloom
I was precocious. Youth. The fauns. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette trough illclosed curtains, with poor papa's operaglasses. The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto Bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree and I ... A saint couldn't resist it. The demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?
 (With pathos.) No girl would when I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play ...
(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)
the nannygoat
(Bleats.) Megegaggegg! Nannannanny!
bloom
(Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsepine.) Regularly [514] engaged. Circumstances alter cases. (He gazes intently downwards on the water.) Thirtytwo head over heels per second. Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government printer's clerk. (Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion's Head cliff into the purple waiting waters.)
the dummymummy
Bbbbblllllbbbbblblobschbg!
(Far out in the bay between Bailey and Kish lights the Erin's King sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the land.)
councillor nannetti
(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellow kitefaced, his hand in his waistcoat, opening, declaims.) When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have ...
bloom
Done. Prff!
the nymph
(Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw today have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light. (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then could you ...?
bloom
(Pacing the heather abjectly.) O, I have been a perfect pig. Enemas too, I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the ladies' friend.
the nymph
In my presence. The powderpuff. (She blushes and makes a knee.) And the rest.
bloom
(Dejected.) Yes. Peccavi! I have paid homage on that living altar where the [515] back changes name. (With sudden fervour.) For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules ...?
(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems, cooeeing.)
the voice of kitty
(In the thicket.) Show us one of them cushions.
the voice of florry
Here.
(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)
the voice of lynch
(In the thicket.) Whew! Piping hot!
the voice of zoe
(From the thicket.) Came from a hot place.
the voice of virag
(A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!
bloom
It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So womanly full. It fills me full.
the waterfall
Phillaphulla Poulaphouca
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
the yews
Ssh! Sister, speak!
the nymph
(Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and huge winged wimple, softly, with remote [516] eyes.) Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount Carmel, the apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. (She reclines her head, sighing.) Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull.
(Bloom half rises. His back trousers' button snaps.)
the button
Bip!
(Two sluts of the Coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)
the sluts
O Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
He didn't know what to do,
To keep it up,
To keep it up.
bloom
(Coldly.) You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices?  Deciduously!
the nymph
Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. (She clutches in her robe.) Wait, Satan. You'll sing no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum!
bloom
(Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat of nine lives! Fair play, madam. No pruning knife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do we lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier or good Mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard?
[517]the nymph
(With a cry, flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli ...!
bloom
(Calls after her.) As if you didn't get it on the double yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it. Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen.) Eh?  And would a jury give me five shillings alimony to morrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs.) But, Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.
(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)
bella
You'll know me the next time.
bloom
(Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in the tooth and superflous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill.  They have the dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw propeller.
bella
(Contemptuously.) You're not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt barks). Fohracht!
bloom
(Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, the cold spunk of your bully is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself.
bella
I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!
bloom
I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!
[518]bella
(Turns to the piano.)  (She darts to the piano and bangs chords on it with crossed arms.) The cat's ramble through the slag. (She glances back.) Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? (She darts back to the table.) What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.
(Kitty disconcerted coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom approaches Zoe.)
bloom
(Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you?
zoe
Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.
bloom
(With feeling.) It is nothing but still a relic of poor mamma.
zoe
Give a thing and take it back
God'll ask you where is that
You'll say you don't know
God'll send you down below.
bloom
There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.
stephen
To have or not to have, that is the question.
zoe
Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.) Those that hides knows where to find.
[519]bella
(Frowns.) Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you smash that piano. Who's paying here?
(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)
stephen
(With exagerated politeness.) This silken purse I made out of the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. (He indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom.) We are all in the same sweepstake, Kinch and Lynch. Dans ce bordel où tenons nostre état.
lynch
(Calls from the hearth.) Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.
stephen
(Hands Bella a coin.) Gold. She has it.
bella
(Looks at the money, then at Zoe, Florrie and Kitty.) Do you want three girls? It's ten shillings here.
stephen
(Delightedly.) A hundred thousand apologies. (He fumbles again and takes out and hands her two crowns.) Permit, brevi manu, my sight is somewhat troubled.
(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllabbes. Zoe bounds over to the table. Kitty leans over Zoe's neck, Lynch gets up, rights his cap and clasping Kitty's waist, adds his head to the group.)
florry
(Strives heavily to rise.) Ow! My foot's asleep. (She limps over to the table. Bloom approaches.)
bella, zoe, kitty, lynch, bloom
(Chattering and squabbling.)  No bottles! What, eleven? A riddle.
zoe
(Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the top of her stocking.) Hard earned on the flat of my back.
lynch
(Lifting Kitty from the table.) Come!
kitty
Wait. (She clutches the two crowns.)
florry
And me?
lynch
Hoopla!
(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the sofa.)
stephen
The fox crew, the cocks flew,
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for her poor soul
To get out of heaven.
bloom
(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between Bella and Florry.) So. Allow me. (He takes up the poundnote.) Three times ten. We're square.
bella
(Admiringly.)  I could kiss you.
[521]zoe
(Points.) Hum? Deep as a drawwell. (Lynch bends Kitty back over the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)
bloom
This is yours.
stephen
How is that? Le distrait or absentminded beggar. (He fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object falls.) That fell.
bloom
(Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches.) This.
stephen
Lucifer. Thanks.
bloom
(Quietly.) You had better hand over that cash to me to take care of. Why pay more?
stephen
(Hands him all his coins.) Be just before you are generous.
bloom
I will but is it wise? (He counts.) One, seven, eleven, and five. Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.
stephen
Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next Lessing says. Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably he killed her.
bloom
That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.
stephen
Doesn't matter a rambling damn.
bloom
No, but ...
[522]stephen
(Comes to the table.) Cigarette, please. (Lynch tosses a cigarette from the sofa to the table.) And so Georgina Johnson is dead and married. (A cigarette appears on the table Stephen looks at it.) Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. (He strikes a match and proceeds to light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.)
lynch
(Watching him.) You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.
stephen
(Brings the match nearer his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. (He frowns mysteriously.) Hm. Sphinx. The beast that has two backs at midnight. Married.
zoe
It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with him.
florry
(Nods.) Mr Lambe from London.
stephen
Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.
lynch
(Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply.) Dona nobis pacem.
(The cigarette slips from Stephen's fingers. Bloom picks it up and throws it into the gate.)
bloom
Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. (To Zoe.) You have nothing?
zoe
Is he hungry?
[523]stephen
(Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the bloodoath in the Dusk of the Gods.)
Hangende Hunger,
Fragende Frau,
Macht uns alle kaput.
zoe
(Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet! (She takes his hand.)  (She points to his forehead.) No wit, no wrinkles (She counts.) Two, three, Mars, that's courage. (Stephen shakes his head.) No kid.
lynch
Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and shake. (To Zoe.) Who taught you palmistry?
zoe
(Turns.) Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. (To Stephen.) I see it in your face. The eye, like that. (She frowns with lowered head.)
lynch
(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.) Like that. Pandy bat.
(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open, the bald tittle round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)
father dolan
Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye.
(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Connee rises from the pianola coffin.)
don john connee
Now, Father Dolan! Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very good little boy.
zoe
(Examining Stephen's palm.) Woman's hand.
[524]stephen
(Murmurs.) Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.
zoe
What day were you born?
stephen
Thursday. Today.
zoe
Thursday's child has far to go. (She traces lines on his hand.) Line of fate. Influential friends.
florry
(Pointing.) Imagination.
zoe
Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a ... (She peers at his hands abruptly.) I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to know?
bloom
(Detaches her fingers and offers his palm.) More harm than good. Here. Read mine.
bella
Show. (She turns up Bloom's hand.) I thought so. Knobby knuckles, for the women.
zoe
(Peering at Bloom's palm.) Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and marry money.
bloom
Wrong.
zoe
(Quickly.) O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong?
(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises, stretches her wings and clucks.)
[525]black liz
Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.
(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off.)
bloom
(Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut it twenty two years age. I was sixteen.
zoe
I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.
stephen
See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo too.  Hurt my hand somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?
(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)
florry
What?
(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallant buttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)
the boots
(Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers.) Haw, haw, have you the horn?
(Bronze by gold they whisper.).
zoe
(To Florry.) Whisper.
(They whisper again.)
(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw, set sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan, in a yachtsman's cap and [526] white shoes, officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan's shoulder.)
lenehan
Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims?
boylan
(Sated, smiles.)  Blazes Kate! Up to sample or your money back. (He holds out a forefinger.) Smell that.
lenehan
(Smells gleefully.) Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!
zoe and florry
(Laugh together.) Ha ha ha ha.
boylan
(Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear.) Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom up yet?
bloom
(In a flunkey's plum plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) I'm afraid not, sir, the last articles .....
boylan
(Tosses him sixpence.) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom's autlered head.) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife. You understand?
bloom
Thank you, sir. Yes, sir, Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.
[527]marion
He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashing out of the water.) Raoul, darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.
boylan
(A merry twinkle in his eye.) Topping!
bella
What? What is it?
(Zoe whispers to her.)
marion
Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself!  Ho ho ho ho.
boylan
(To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
bloom
Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower? ... Lukewarm water? ...
kitty
(From the sofa.) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What ...
(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)
mina kennedy
(Her eyes upturned.) O, it must be like the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck together! Covered with kisses!
[528]lydia douce
(Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round the room doing it!  You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.
kitty
(Laughing.) Hee hee hee.
boylan's voice
(Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach.) Ah! Gooblazeqruk brukarchkrasht!
marion's voice
(Hoarsely, sweetly rising to her throat.) O! Weeshwashtkissimapooisth- napoohuck!
bloom
(His eyes wildy dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!
bella, zoe, florry, kitty
Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!
lynch
(Points.) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs.) Hu hu hu hu hu.
(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)
shakespeare
(In dignified ventriloquy.) 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (To Bloom.) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (He crows with a black capon's laugh.) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!
bloom
(Smiles yellowly at the whores.) When will I hear the joke?
[529]zoe
Before you're twice married and once a widower.
bloom
Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon, when measurements were taken near the skin after his death ...
(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, fears and Tunny's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds, her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds a Scottish widow's insurance policy and large marqueeumbrella under which her brood runs with her, Patsy, hopping on one short foot, his collar loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, Freddy, whimpering, Susy with a crying cods' mouth, Alice, struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on, her streamers flaunting aloft.)
freddy
Ah, ma, you're dragging me along!
susy
Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!
shakespeare
(With paralytic rage.) Weda seca whokilla farst.
(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's beardless face. The marqueeumbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twisting japanesily.)
mrs cunningham
(Sings.)
And they call me the jewel of Asia.
martin cunningham
(Gazes on her impassive.) Immense!  Queens lay with prize bulls. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was open.
bella
None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.
lynch
Let him alone. He's back from Paris.
zoe
(Runs to Stephen and links him.) O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.
(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace, where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile on his face.)
lynch
(Pommelling on the sofa.) Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmmm.
stephen
(Gabbles, with marionette jerks.) Thousand places of entertainment to expenses your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhap her heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous. Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants (He clacks his tongue loudly.) Ho, la la! Ce pif qu'il a!
lynch
Vive le vampire!
[531]the whores
Bravo!  Great success of laughing.  Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? (He points about him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to.) Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptoms virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter gentlemen to see in mirrors every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlette on the belly pièce de Shakespeare.
bella
(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa with a shout of laughter.) An omelette on the ... Ho! ho! ho! ho! ... Omelette on the ...
stephen
(Mincingly.) I love you, Sir darling. Speak you englishman tongue for double entente cordiale. O yes, mon loup. How much cost? Waterloo. Watercloset. (He ceases suddenly and holds up a forefinger.)
bella
(Laughing.) Omelette ...
the whores
(Laughing.) Encore! Encore!
stephen
Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.
zoe
Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
lynch
Across the world for a wife.
[532]florry
Dreams go by contraries.
stephen
(Extending his arms.) It was here. Street of harlots. In Serpentine Avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the red carpet spread?
bloom
(Approaching Stephen.) Look ...
stephen
No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end. (He cries.) Pater! Free!
bloom
I say, look ...
stephen
Break my spirit, will he? O merde alors! (He cries, his vulture talons sharpened.) Hola! Hillyho!
(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)
simon
That's all right. (He swoops uncertainly through the air, wheeling, uttering cries of hearkening, on strong ponderous buzzard wings.) Ho, boy! Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those halfcastes.  Head up! Keep our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed. Ulster king at arms! hai hoop! (He makes the beagle's call giving tongue.) Bulbul! Burblblbrurblbl! Hai, boy!
(The fronds and spaces of the wall paper file rapidly across country. A stout fox drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs swift, for the open brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the leaves. The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded. Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, hot for a kill. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, [533] bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, grey negroes waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.)
the crowd
Card of the races. Racing card!
Ten to one the field!
Tommy on the clay here! Tommy on the clay!
Ten to one bar one. Ten to one bar one.
Try your luck on spinning Jenny!
Ten to one bar one!
Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!
I'll give ten to one!
Ten to one bar one!