George Gissing - "Veranilda"

William Shakespeare - "All's Well That Ends Well"

A. B. Paterson - "Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses"

John George Bourinot - "The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People"

Ulysses

J >> James Joyce >> Ulysses




Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick
rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his
fingers and cried:

--A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

--Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

--We'll owe twopence, he said.

--Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning,
sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender
chant:


--HEART OF MY HEART, WERE IT MORE,
MORE WOULD BE LAID AT YOUR FEET.


He turned to Stephen and said:

--Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects
that every man this day will do his duty.

--That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.

--Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

--Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

--The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

--All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about
the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

--I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here's a spot.

--That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with
warmth of tone:

--Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

--Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

--Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
the hammock, said:

--I don't know, I'm sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen
and said with coarse vigour:

--You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

--Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.

--I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

--I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.

--From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

--To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let
us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown,
saying resignedly:

--Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

--There's your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God, we'll
simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots.
Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict
myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking
hands.

--And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
doorway:

--Are you coming, you fellows?

--I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with
grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

--And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked
it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

--Did you bring the key?

--I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

--Down, sir! How dare you, sir!

Haines asked:

--Do you pay rent for this tower?

--Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

--To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

--Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

--Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
the sea. But ours is the omphalos.

--What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

--No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas
Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till
I have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of
his primrose waistcoat:

--You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

--It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

--You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?

--Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.

--What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending
in loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:

--O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

--We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower
and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. THAT BEETLES O'ER HIS
BASE INTO THE SEA, ISN'T IT?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly. for an instant towards Stephen but
did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in
cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

--It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail tacking
by the Muglins.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He
looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he
had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He
moved a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and
began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:


--I'M THE QUEEREST YOUNG FELLOW THAT EVER YOU HEARD.
MY MOTHER'S A JEW, MY FATHER'S A BIRD.
WITH JOSEPH THE JOINER I CANNOT AGREE.
SO HERE'S TO DISCIPLES AND CALVARY.


He held up a forefinger of warning.


--IF ANYONE THINKS THAT I AMN'T DIVINE
HE'LL GET NO FREE DRINKS WHEN I'M MAKING THE WINE
BUT HAVE TO DRINK WATER AND WISH IT WERE PLAIN
THAT I MAKE WHEN THE WINE BECOMES WATER AGAIN.


He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running
forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins
or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:


--GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE! WRITE DOWN ALL I SAID
AND TELL TOM, DIEK AND HARRY I ROSE FROM THE DEAD.
WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE CANNOT FAIL ME TO FLY
AND OLIVET'S BREEZY ... GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE!


He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering
his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh
wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen
and said:

--We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it
somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

--O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

--Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

--You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the
narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.

--There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

--Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it
open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards
Stephen in the shell of his hands.

--Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or
you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal
God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?

--You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My
familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the
path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that
key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the
key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.

--After all, Haines began ...

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him
was not all unkind.

--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.

--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

--Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
spoke.

--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph
of their brazen bells: ET UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM ET APOSTOLICAM
ECCLESIAM: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare
thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for
pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and
behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and
menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry:
Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius,
warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the
Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle
African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own
Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger.
Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a
menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the
church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with
their lances and their shields.

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. ZUT! NOM DE DIEU!

--Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I
don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman,
boatman.

--She's making for Bullock harbour.

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

--There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way
when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay
waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face,
saltwhite. Here I am.

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan
stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his
shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly
frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

--Is the brother with you, Malachi?

--Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.

--Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.

--Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up
near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,
water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water
rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black
sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at
Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow
and lips and breastbone.

--Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of
rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.

--Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.

--Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?

--Yes.

--Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
money.

--Is she up the pole?

--Better ask Seymour that.

--Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.


He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
tritely:

--Redheaded women buck like goats.

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

--My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the ubermench. Toothless Kinch
and I, the supermen.

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
clothes lay.

--Are you going in here, Malachi?

--Yes. Make room in the bed.

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and
reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down
on a stone, smoking.

--Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.

--Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.

Stephen turned away.

--I'm going, Mulligan, he said.

--Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.

Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
clothes.

--And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing.
Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:

--He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
Zarathustra.

His plump body plunged.

--We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path
and smiling at wild Irish.

Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.

--The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.

--Good, Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.


LILIATA RUTILANTIUM.
TURMA CIRCUMDET.
IUBILANTIUM TE VIRGINUM.


The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.


A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea.
Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head,
a seal's, far out on the water, round.

Usurper.


* * * * * * *


--You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

--Tarentum, sir.

--Very good. Well?

--There was a battle, sir.

--Very good. Where?

The boy's blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not
as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings
of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?

--I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.

--Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred
book.

--Yes, sir. And he said: ANOTHER VICTORY LIKE THAT AND WE ARE DONE FOR.

That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind.
From a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,
leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.

--You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?

--End of Pyrrhus, sir?

--I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.

--Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?

A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them
between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to
the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud
that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, Dalkey.

--Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.

All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked
round at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will
laugh more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas
pay.

--Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,
what is a pier.

--A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a
bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.

Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back
bench whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been
innocent. All. With envy he watched their faces: Edith, Ethel, Gerty,
Lily. Their likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their
bracelets tittering in the struggle.

--Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

The words troubled their gaze.

--How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.

For Haines's chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid
wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A
jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a
clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for
the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too
often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar
not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has
branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave,
weaver of the wind.

--Tell us a story, sir.

--O, do, sir. A ghoststory.

--Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.

--WEEP NO MORE, Comyn said.

--Go on then, Talbot.

--And the story, sir?

--After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.

A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the
breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at
the text:


--WEEP NO MORE, WOFUL SHEPHERDS, WEEP NO MORE
FOR LYCIDAS, YOUR SORROW, IS NOT DEAD,
SUNK THOUGH HE BE BENEATH THE WATERY FLOOR ...


It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out
into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had
read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a
delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains
about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in
my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of
brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of
thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the
soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of
forms.

Talbot repeated:


--THROUGH THE DEAR MIGHT OF HIM THAT WALKED THE WAVES,
THROUGH THE DEAR MIGHT ...


--Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.

--What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.

His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again,
having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over
these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips
and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look
from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's
looms. Ay.


RIDDLE ME, RIDDLE ME, RANDY RO.
MY FATHER GAVE ME SEEDS TO SOW.


Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.

--Have I heard all? Stephen asked.

--Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.

--Half day, sir. Thursday.

--Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling
gaily:

--A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.

--O, ask me, sir.

--A hard one, sir.

--This is the riddle, Stephen said:


THE COCK CREW,
THE SKY WAS BLUE:
THE BELLS IN HEAVEN
WERE STRIKING ELEVEN.
'TIS TIME FOR THIS POOR SOUL
TO GO TO HEAVEN.


What is that?

--What, sir?

--Again, sir. We didn't hear.

Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said:

--What is it, sir? We give it up.

Stephen, his throat itching, answered:

--The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.

He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.

A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:

--Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them.
Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks
and clamour of their boots and tongues.

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an
open copybook. His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of
unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.
On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped,
recent and damp as a snail's bed.

He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the
headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature
with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.

--Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to
you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

--Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

--Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.

--Can you do them. yourself? Stephen asked.

--No, sir.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's
bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a
squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from
her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's
prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no
more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of
rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled
underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven:
and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur,
with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the
earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by
algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered
askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the
lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery
of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the
world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not
comprehend.

--Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?

--Yes, sir.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue
of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and
objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him
and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

The sum was done.

--It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.

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