—See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is, cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added. The same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.
And in point of fact the young man named Antonio’s livid face did actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the unreserved admiration of everybody, including Skin-the-Goat who this time stretched over.
—Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He’s gone too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.
He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression of before.
—Neat bit of work, longshoreman one said.
—And what’s the number for? loafer number two queried.
—Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.
—Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this time, with some sort of a half smile, for a brief duration only, in the direction of the questioner about the number. A Greek he was.
And then he added, with rather gallowsbird humour, considering his alleged end:
—As bad as old Antonio,
For he left me on my ownio.
The face of a streetwalker, glazed and haggard under a black straw hat, peered askew round the door of the shelter, palpably reconnoitring on her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment, flusterfied but outwardly calm, and picking up from the table the pink sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink? His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that afternoon on Ormond Quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the lane, who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.), and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing, which seemed rather vague than not?
Your washing. Still, candour compelled him to admit that he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holies Street and women would and did too a man’s similar garments initialled with Bewley and Draper’s marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really loved him, that is to say. Love me, love my dirty shirt. Still, just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female’s room more than her company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round Skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more of her.
—The gunboat, the keeper said.
—It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking, how a wretched creature like that from the Lock Hospital, reeking with disease, can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of course, I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still no matter what the cause is from…
Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely remarking:
—In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.
The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude, said that it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a stop to instanler to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from any old-maidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, were not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing he could truthfully state he, as a paterfamilias, was a stalwart advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of that sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a lasting boon on everybody concerned.
—You, as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such, as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup? I believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try and concentrate and remember before he could say:
—They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause, Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, corruptio per se and corruptioper accidens both being excluded by court etiquette.
Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly rejoining:
—Simple? I shouldn’t think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays Rontgen did, or the telescope like Edison, though I believe it was before his time, Galileo was the man I mean. The same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
—O, that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several of the best known passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial evidence.
On this knotty point, however, the views of the pair, poles apart as they were, both in schooling and everything else, with the marked difference in their respective ages, clashed.
—Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his original point. I’m not so sure about that. That’s a matter of every man’s opinion and, without dragging in the sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you in toto there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it’s the big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them, like Hamlet and Bacon, as you who know your Shakespeare infinitely better than I, of course I needn’t tell you. Can’t you drink that coffee, by the way? Let me stir it and take a piece of that bun. It’s like one of our skipper’s bricks disguised. Still, no one can give what he hasn’t got. Try a bit.
—Couldn’t, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the moment refusing to dictate further.
Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat, Mr Bloom thought well to stir, or try to, the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or nay did a world of good. Shelters such as the present one they were in run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings, and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower orders. On the other hand, he had a distinct and painful recollection they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for her piano-playing. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak of. Sulphate of copper poison, SO4 or something in some dried peas he remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn’t remember when it was or where. Anyhow, inspection, medical inspection, of all eatables, seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibbie’s Vi-Cocoa on account of the medical analysis involved.
—Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being stirred.
Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it, Stephen lifted the heavy mug from the brown puddle—it clopped out of it when ta
ken up—by the handle and took a sip of the offending beverage.
—Still, it’s solid food, his good genius urged, I’m a stickler for solid food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but regular meals as the sine qua non for any kind of proper work, mental or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different man.
—Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But oblige me by taking away that knife. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article, a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it.
—Our mutual friend’s stories are like himself, Mr Bloom, apropos of knives, remarked to his confidente sotto voce. Do you think they are genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots. Look at him.
Yet still, though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air, life was full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel.
He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and Sherlockholmesing him up, ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness, there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. He might even have done for his man, supposing it was his own case he told, as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness, because meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting news from abroad, would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean seas to draw the long bow about the schooner Hesperus and etcetera. And when all was said and done, the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.
—Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s all a pure invention, he resumed. Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants, though, that is rather a far cry you see once in a way. Marcella, the midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged. They couldn’t straighten their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline, the sinews, or whatever you like to call them, behind the right knee, were utterly powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as gods. There’s an example again of simple souls.
However, reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who reminded him a bit of Ludwig, alias Ledwidge, when he occupied the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the management in the Flying Dutchman, a stupendous success, and his host of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually fell a bit flat as also did trains), there was nothing intrinsically incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary, that stab in the back touch was quite in keeping with those Italianos, though candidly he was none the less free to admit those ice creamers and friers in the fish way, not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth, over in little Italy there, near the Coombe, were sober thrifty hardworking fellows except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good old succulent tuck in with garlic de rigueur off him or her next day on the quiet and, he added, on the cheap.
—Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own hands and give you your quietus double quick with those poignards they carry in lie abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally. My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half, that is. Point of fact she could actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in (technically) Spain, i.e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite dark, regular brunette, black. I, for one, certainly believe climate accounts for character. That’s why I asked you if you wrote your poetry in Italian.
—The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very passionate about ten shillings. Roberto ruba roba sua.
—Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.
—Then, Stephen said, staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles triangle, Miss Portinari, he fell in love with and Leonardo and san Tommaso Mastino.
—It’s in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the blood of the sun. Coincidence, I just happened to be in the Kildare street Museum today, shortly prior to our meeting, if I can so call it, and I was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid proportions of hips, bosom. You simply don’t knock against those kind of women here. An exception here and there. Handsome, yes, pretty in a way you find, but what I’m talking about is the female form. Besides, they have so little taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a woman’s natural beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings—it may be, possibly is, a foible of mine, but still it’s a thing I simply hate to see.
Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and the others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog, collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy, of course, had his own say to say. He had doubled die Cape a few odd times and weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him, or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.
So then after that they drifted on to the wreck of Daunt’s rock, wreck of that illfated Norwegian barque— nobody could think of her name for the moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell remembered it, Palme, on Booterstown Strand, that was the talk of the town that year (Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original verse of distinctive merit on the topic for the Irish Times) breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the case of the s. s. Lady Cairns of Swansea, run into by the Mona, which was on an opposite tack, in rather muggyish weather and lost with all hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the Mona’s, said he was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it appears, in her hold.
At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him to unfurl a reef, the sailor vacated his seat.
—Let me cross your bows, mate, he said to his neighbour, who was just gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.
He made tracks heavily, slowly, with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door, stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings, Mr Bloom, who noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship’s rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it, or unscrew, and, applying its nozzle to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manoeuvre after the counterattraction in the shape of a female, who, however, had disappeared to all intents and purposes, could, by straining, just perceive him, when duly refreshed by his rum puncheon exploit, gazing up at the piers and girders of the Loop Line, rather out
of his depth, as of course it was all radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but, after a brief space of time during which silence reigned supreme, the sailor, evidently giving it a wide berth, eased himself close at hand, the noise of his bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where it apparently woke a horse of the cabrank.
A hoof scooped anyway for new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his sentrybox by the brazier of live coke, the watcher of the corporation, who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability, from dictates of humanity, knowing him before—shifted about and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in the arms of Morpheus. A truly amazing piece of hard times in its most virulent form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent home comforts all his life who came in for a cool £100 a year at one time which of course the double-barrelled ass proceeded to make general ducks and drakes of. And there he was at the end of his tether after having often painted the town tolerably pink, without a beggarly stiver. He drank, needless to be told, and it pointed only once more a moral when he might quite easily be in a large way of business if—a big if, however—he had contrived to cure himself of his particular partiality.
All, meantime, were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping, coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra Basin, the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no ships ever called.
There were wrecks and wrecks, the keeper said, who was evidently aufait.
What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only rock in Galway Bay when the Galway Harbour scheme was mooted by a MrWorthing-ton or some name like that, eh? Ask her captain, he advised them, how much palmoil the British Government gave him for that day’s work. Captain John Lever of the Lever line.