Complete Works of James Joyce (104 page)

THE FIGURE: (
Impassive, raises a signal arm
) Password.
Sraid Mabbot.

BLOOM: Haha.
Merci.
Esperanto.
Slan leath. (He mutters)
Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.

(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps left, ragsackman left.)

BLOOM: I beg. (
He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on
.)

BLOOM: Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a signpost planted by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who lost my way and contributed to the columns of the
Irish Cyclist
the letter headed
In darkest Stepaside
. Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and bones at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.

(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against Bloom.)

BLOOM: O

(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there. Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket, sweets of sin, potato soap.)

BLOOM: Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves’ dodge. Collide. Then snatch your purse.

(The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. A sprawled form sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

RUDOLPH: Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.

BLOOM:
(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.

RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? Have you no soul?
(with feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom)
Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?

BLOOM:
(With precaution)
I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that’s left of him.

RUDOLPH:
(Severely)
One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?

BLOOM:
(In youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent’s sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud)
Harriers, father. Only that once.

RUDOLPH: Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.

BLOOM:
(Weakly)
They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.

RUDOLPH:
(With contempt) Goim nachez
! Nice spectacles for your poor mother!

BLOOM: Mamma!

ELLEN BLOOM:
(In pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand, and cries out in shrill alarm)
O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts!
(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out)
Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all?

(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)

A VOICE:
(Sharply)
Poldy!

BLOOM: Who?
(He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily)
At your service.

(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)

BLOOM: Molly!

MARION: Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me.
(Satirically)
Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?

BLOOM:
(Shifts from foot to foot)
No, no. Not the least little bit.

(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire, spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)

MARION: Nebrakada! Femininum!

(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit, offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof, then droops his head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops his back for leapfrog.)

BLOOM: I can give you... I mean as your business menagerer... Mrs Marion... if you...

MARION: So you notice some change?
(Her hands passing slowly over her trinketed stomacher, a slow friendly mockery in her eyes)
O Poldy, Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the wide world.

BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning.
(He pats divers pockets)
This moving kidney. Ah!

(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)

THE SOAP: We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.

(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)

SWENY: Three and a penny, please.

BLOOM: Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.

MARION:
(Softly)
Poldy!

BLOOM: Yes, ma’am?

MARION:
ti trema un poco il cuore?

(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from
Don Giovanni.)

BLOOM: Are you sure about that
voglio
? I mean the pronunciati...

(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)

THE BAWD: Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen. There’s no-one in it only her old father that’s dead drunk.

(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.)

BRIDIE: Hatch street. Any good in your mind?

(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)

THE BAWD:
(Her wolfeyes shining)
He’s getting his pleasure. You won’t get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don’t be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.

(Leering, Gerty Macdowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)

GERTY: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.
(She murmurs)
You did that. I hate you.

BLOOM: I? When? You’re dreaming. I never saw you.

THE BAWD: Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.

GERTY:
(To Bloom)
When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.
(She paws his sleeve, slobbering)
Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.

(She glides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man’s frieze overcoat with loose bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)

MRS BREEN: Mr...

BLOOM:
(Coughs gravely)
Madam, when we last had this pleasure by letter dated the sixteenth instant...

MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you nicely! Scamp!

BLOOM:
(Hurriedly)
Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think of me? Don’t give me away. Walls have ears. How do you do? It’s ages since I. You’re looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting quarter. Rescue of fallen women. Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary...

MRS BREEN:
(Holds up a finger)
Now, don’t tell a big fib! I know somebody won’t like that. O just wait till I see Molly!
(Slily)
Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!

BLOOM:
(Looks behind)
She often said she’d like to visit. Slumming. The exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money. Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.

(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes, leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)

TOM AND SAM:

    
There’s someone in the house with Dina

    
There’s someone in the house, I know,

    
There’s someone in the house with Dina

    
Playing on the old banjo.

(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)

BLOOM:
(With a sour tenderish smile)
A little frivol, shall we, if you are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a fraction of a second?

MRS BREEN:
(Screams gaily)
O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!

BLOOM: For old sake’ sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft corner for you.
(Gloomily)
’Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear gazelle.

MRS BREEN: Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply.
(She puts out her hand inquisitively)
What are you hiding behind your back? Tell us, there’s a dear.

BLOOM:
(Seizes her wrist with his free hand)
Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina Simpson’s housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this snuffbox?

MRS BREEN: You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the ladies.

BLOOM:
(Squire of dames, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand)
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home and beauty.

MRS BREEN: The dear dead days beyond recall. Love’s old sweet song.

BLOOM:
(Meaningfully dropping his voice)
I confess I’m teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person’s something is a little teapot at present.

MRS BREEN:
(Gushingly)
Tremendously teapot! London’s teapot and I’m simply teapot all over me!
(She rubs sides with him)
After the parlour mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.