1Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:

2—And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister. A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.

3He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

4A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a noiseless beck.

5—Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.

6Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door he gave his large ear all to the attendant’s words: heard them: and was gone.

7Two left.

8—Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death.

9—Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder’s gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan he calls it.

10Smile. Smile Cranly’s smile.

11First he tickled her

12Then he patted her

13Then he passed the female catheter

14For he was a medical

15Jolly old medi...

16—I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the mystic mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.

17Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low: a sizar’s laugh of Trinity: unanswered.

18Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood

19Tears such as angels weep.

20Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

21He holds my follies hostage.

22Cranly’s eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house. And one more to hail him: ave, rabbi: the Tinahely twelve. In the shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul’s youth I gave him, night by night. God speed. Good hunting.

23Mulligan has my telegram.

24Folly. Persist.

25—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

26—All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

27A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike me!

28—The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.

29—And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.

30He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

31Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

32Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H.P.B.’s elemental.

33O, fie! Out on’t! Pfuiteufel! You naughtn’t to look, missus, so you naughtn’t when a lady’s ashowing of her elemental.

34Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

35—That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet’s musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato’s.

36John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

37—Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.

38—Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?

39Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

40Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

41—Haines is gone, he said.

42—Is he?

43—I was showing him Jubainville’s book. He’s quite enthusiastic, don’t you know, about Hyde’s Lovesongs of Connacht. I couldn’t bring him in to hear the discussion. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy it.

44Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick

45To greet the callous public.

46Writ, I ween, ’twas not my wish

47In lean unlovely English.

48—The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

49We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

50—People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.

51From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

52—Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

53His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

54Hamlet

55ou

56Le Distrait

57Pièce de Shakespeare

58He repeated to John Eglinton’s newgathered frown:

59—Pièce de Shakespeare, don’t you know. It’s so French. The French point of view. Hamlet ou...

60—The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

61John Eglinton laughed.

62—Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

63Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

64—A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

65Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

66Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none

67But we had spared...

68Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

69—He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best’s behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.

70List! List! O List!

71My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

72If thou didst ever...

73—What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?

74John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

75Lifted.

76—It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.

77Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

78—Shakespeare has left the huguenot’s house in Silver street and walks by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has other thoughts.

79Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

80—The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name:

81Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit,

82bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

83Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

84—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.

85Art thou there, truepenny?

86—Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l’Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.

87Mr Best’s face, appealed to, agreed.

88Flow over them with your waves and with your waters,

89Mananaan, Mananaan MacLir...

90How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

91Marry, I wanted it.

92Take thou this noble.

93Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter. Agenbite of inwit.

94Do you intend to pay it back?

95O, yes.

96When? Now?

97Well... No.

98When, then?

99I paid my way. I paid my way.

100Steady on. He’s from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe it.

101Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.

102Buzz. Buzz.

103But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.

104I that sinned and prayed and fasted.

105A child Conmee saved from pandies.

106I, I and I. I.

107A.E.I.O.U.

108—Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries? John Eglinton’s carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

109—She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed.

110Mother’s deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata rutilantium.

111I wept alone.

112John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.

113—The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best he could.

114—Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

115Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.

116—A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn from Xanthippe?

117—Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (absit nomen!), Socratididion’s Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. But neither the midwife’s lore nor the caudlelectures saved him from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

118—But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best’s quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

119His look went from brooder’s beard to carper’s skull, to remind, to chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though maligned.

120—He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London. Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

121And my turn? When?

122Come!

123—Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly, brightly.

124He murmured then with blond delight for all:

125Between the acres of the rye

126These pretty countryfolk would lie.

127Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.

128A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its cooperative watch.

129—I am afraid I am due at the Homestead.

130Whither away? Exploitable ground.

131—Are you going? John Eglinton’s active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you at Moore’s tonight? Piper is coming.

132—Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?

133Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.

134—I don’t know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get away in time.

135Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i’the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god, he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.

136In quintessential triviality

137For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

138—They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.

139Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.

140See this. Remember.

141Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle’s experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat.

142Listen.

143Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part. Longworth will give it a good puff in the Express. O, will he? I liked Colum’s Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase. Did he? I hope you’ll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.

144Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lir’s loneliest daughter.

145Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.

146—Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...

147—O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much correspondence.

148—I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.

149God ild you. The pigs’ paper. Bullockbefriending.

150Synge has promised me an article for Dana too. Are we going to be read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.

151Stephen sat down.

152The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said:

153—Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

154He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:

155—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

156Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

157—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.

158—Yes.

159Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.

160—Yes. So you think...

161The door closed behind the outgoer.

162Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and brooding air.

163A vestal’s lamp.

164Here he ponders things that were not: what Cæsar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women.

165Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks.

166They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

167—Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

168—But Hamlet is so personal, isn’t it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of private paper, don’t you know, of his private life. I mean, I don’t care a button, don’t you know, who is killed or who is guilty...

169He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance. His private papers in the original. Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim in mo shagart. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

170Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:

171—I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

172Bear with me.

173Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l’uomo l’attosca. Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

174—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

175Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.

176—Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son.

177Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

178—That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

179John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

180—If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan admired so much breathe another spirit.

181—The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

182—There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.

183Said that.

184—If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?

185Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.

186—A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.

187—The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.

188Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon’s wild oats. Cypherjugglers going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good masters? Mummed in names: A. E. , eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of the moon: Tir na n-og. Booted the twain and staved.

189How many miles to Dublin?

190Three score and ten, sir.

191Will we be there by candlelight?

192—Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing period.

193—Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his name is, say of it?

194—Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s child. My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?

195—The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grand...

196—Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added, another image?

197Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...

198—His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.

199The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.

200—I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on Shakespeare in the Saturday Review were surely brilliant. Oddly enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own that if the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in harmony with—what shall I say? —our notions of what ought not to have been.

201Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk’s egg, prize of their fray.

202He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost love thy man?

203—That may be too, Stephen said. There’s a saying of Goethe’s which Mr Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman’s invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.

204They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.

205—The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.

206—Amen! was responded from the doorway.

207Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

208Entr’acte.

209A ribald face, sullen as a dean’s, Buck Mulligan came forward, then blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.

210—You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he asked of Stephen.

211Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.

212They make him welcome. Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.

213Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.

214He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.

215gloriainexelcisdeo

216He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells aquiring.

217—Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion. Mr Mulligan, I’ll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.

218He smiled on all sides equally.

219Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:

220—Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

221A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.

222—To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like Synge.

223Mr Best turned to him.

224—Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He’ll see you after at the D. B. C. He’s gone to Gill’s to buy Hyde’s Lovesongs of Connacht.

225—I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?

226—The bard’s fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.

227—The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said, lifting his brilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.

228—For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.

229Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H. : who am I?

230—I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it’s so typical the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know. The light touch.

231His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame essence of Wilde.

232You’re darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy’s ducats.

233How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.

234For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.

235Wit. You would give your five wits for youth’s proud livery he pranks in. Lineaments of gratified desire.

236There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime send them. Yea, turtledove her.

237Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in’s kiss.

238—Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking. The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

239They talked seriously of mocker’s seriousness.

240Buck Mulligan’s again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.

241—Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!

242He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:

243—The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram! Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer! O, you priestified Kinchite!

244Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a querulous brogue:

245—It’s what I’m telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

246He wailed:

247—And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.

248Stephen laughed.

249Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.

250—The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He’s out in pampooties to murder you.

251—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.

252Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping ceiling.

253—Murder you! he laughed.

254Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods, brandishing a winebottle. C’est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i’the forest.

255—Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.

256—... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his Diary of Master William Silence has found the hunting terms... Yes? What is it?

257—There’s a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and offering a card. From the Freeman. He wants to see the files of the Kilkenny People for last year.

258—Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman? ...

259He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked, asked, creaked, asked:

260—Is he? ... O, there!

261Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most honest broadbrim.

262—This gentleman? Freeman’s Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good day, sir. Kilkenny... We have certainly...

263A patient silhouette waited, listening.

264—All the leading provincial... Northern Whig, Cork Examiner, Enniscorthy Guardian, 1903.. . Will you please? ... Evans, conduct this gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or, please allow me.. . This way... Please, sir...

265Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing dark figure following his hasty heels.

266The door closed.

267—The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.

268He jumped up and snatched the card.

269—What’s his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.

270He rattled on:

271—Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her. Life of life, thy lips enkindle.

272Suddenly he turned to Stephen:

273—He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! The god pursuing the maiden hid.

274—We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best’s approval. We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.

275—Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham’s story of the burgher’s wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon’s blankets: William the conqueror came before Richard III. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.

276Cours la Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries. Minette? Tu veux?

277—The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford’s mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.

278Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

279—Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

280—And Harry of six wives’ daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind the diamond panes?

281Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno’s eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

282Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton’s desk sharply.

283—Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

284—Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

285Love that dare not speak its name.

286—As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.

287Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

288—It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost’s mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband’s brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.

289Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

290—The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan’s daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy’s words, wed her second, having killed her first.

291O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father’s shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity.

292He faced their silence.

293To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will.