Complete Works of James Joyce (87 page)

 
— And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my opinion an action might lie.

Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our pints in peace. Gob, we won’t be let even do that much itself.

 
— Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.

 
— Good health, Ned, says J. J.

 
— -There he is again, says Joe.

 
— Where? says Alf.

And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a secondhand coffin.

 
— How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.

 
— Remanded, says J. J.

One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers saying he’d give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What? Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him, swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.

 
— Who tried the case? says Joe.

 
— Recorder, says Ned.

 
— Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.

 
— Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he’ll dissolve in tears on the bench.

 
— Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn’t clap him in the dock the other day for suing poor little Gumley that’s minding stones, for the corporation there near Butt bridge.

And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:

 
— A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children? Ten, did you say?

 
— Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.

 
— And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court immediately, sir. No, sir, I’ll make no order for payment. How dare you, sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking industrious man! I dismiss the case.

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and final testamentary disposition
in re
the real and personal estate of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone, an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there about the hour of five o’clock to administer the law of the brehons at the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do His rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge against him for he was a malefactor.

 
— Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs.

So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe, telling him he needn’t trouble about that little matter till the first but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high and holy by this and by that he’d do the devil and all.

 
— Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have repetition. That’s the whole secret.

 
— Rely on me, says Joe.

 
— Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house.

 
— O, I’m sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It’s just that Keyes, you see.

 
— Consider that done, says Joe.

 
— Very kind of you, says Bloom.

 
— The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.

 
— Decree
nisi,
says J. J.

And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider’s web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when.

 
— A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that’s what’s the cause of all our misfortunes.

 
— And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the
Police Gazette
with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.

 
— Give us a squint at her, says I.

And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.

 
— O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!

 
— There’s hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off of that one, what?

So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on him as long as a late breakfast.

 
— Well, says the citizen, what’s the latest from the scene of action? What did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide about the Irish language?

O’Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.

 
— It’s on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their
patois.

So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and their colonies and their civilisation.

 
— Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards’ ghosts.

 
— The European family, says J. J....

 
— They’re not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan of Paris. You wouldn’t see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a
cabinet d’aisance.

And says John Wyse:

 
— Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:

 
—
Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!

He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan
Lamh Dearg Abu
, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent as the deathless gods.

 
— What’s up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.

 
— Gold cup, says he.

 
— Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.

 
—
Throwaway,
says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest nowhere.

 
— And Bass’s mare? says Terry.

 
— Still running, says he. We’re all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid on my tip
Sceptre
for himself and a lady friend.

 
— I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on
Zinfandel
that Mr Flynn gave me. Lord Howard de Walden’s.

 
— Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse.
Throwaway,
says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name is
Sceptre.

So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.

 
— Not there, my child, says he.

 
— Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She’d have won the money only for the other dog.

And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom sticking in an odd word.

 
— Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own.

 
—
Raimeis
, says the citizen. There’s no-one as blind as the fellow that won’t see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won’t deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?

 
— As treeless as Portugal we’ll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was reading a report of lord Castletown’s...

 
— Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.