Complete Works of James Joyce (108 page)

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 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. A life preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. 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 chimpanzee.
(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.

BLOOM: No, no. Pig’s feet. I was at a funeral.

FIRST WATCH:
(Draws his truncheon)
Liar!

(The beagle lifts 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.

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 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 and 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 stiffpointcd, 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.)

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 through the sump. Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog a piano sounds. 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! Yummyyum, Womwom!
(Warbling)
Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold!
(Twittering)
Leeolee!
(Warbling)
O Leo!

(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

BLOOM: A man’s touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.

(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.)

ZOE: Are you looking for someone? 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)
You’re not his father, are you?

BLOOM: Not I!

ZOE: You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?

(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand glides over his left thigh.)

ZOE: How’s the nuts?

BLOOM: Off side. 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. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)

BLOOM: A talisman. 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.

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?

(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on him a cloying breath of stale garlic. 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)
No bloody fear. 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.

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 Ralegh 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.)

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, his lordship the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, 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, chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, 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 mantle trimmed 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.)