oo, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an
anchor same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his
teeth, bit ferociously.
-- Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and
the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket, which seemed
to be in its way a species of repository, and pushed it along the table. The
printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.
All focused their attention on the scene exhibited, at a group of
savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning,
sleeping, amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of
them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
-- Chews coca all day long, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs
like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more
children. See them there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver raw.
His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns
for several minutes, if not more.
-- Know how to keep them off? he inquired genially.
Nobody volunteering a statement, he winked, saying:
-- Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.
Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the
card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran as
follows: Tarjeta Postal. Seïor A. Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago, Chile.
There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice. Though not an
implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the eggsniping transaction
for that matter despite William Tell and the Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan
incident depicted in Maritana on which occasion the former's ball passed
through the latter's hat), having detected a discrepancy between his name
(assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing
under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t.
somewhere) and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him
nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides, nevertheless it reminded
him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some
Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that
he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a
born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a
landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest. Martin
Cunningham frequently said he would work a pass through Egan but some deuced
hitch or other eternally cropped up with the net result that the scheme fell
through. But even suppose it did come to planking down the needful and
breaking Boyd's heart it was not so dear, purse permitting, a few guineas at
the outside, considering the fare to Mullingar where he figured on going was
five and six there and back. The trip would benefit health on account of the
bracing ozone and be in every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a
chap whose liver was out of order, seeing the different places along the
route, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on, culminating in an
instructive tour of the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our
modern Babylon where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement tower,
abbey, wealth of Park Lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just
struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on
the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour of
summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts, Margate with
mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough,
Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar
bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative. Not, of course, with a
hole and corner scratch company or local ladies on the job, witness Mrs C.
P. M'Coy type - lend me your valise and I'll post you the ticket. No,
something top notch, an all star Irish cast, the Tweedy-Flower grand opera
company with its own legal consort as leading lady as a sort of counterblast
to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners, perfectly simple matter and he was
quite sanguine of success, providing puffs in the local papers could be
managed by some fellow with a bit of bounce who could pull the indispensable
wires and thus combine business with pleasure. But who? That was the rub.
Also, without being actually positive, it struck him a great field was
to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to keep pace with the
times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once
more on the tapis in the Circumlocution departments with the usual quantity
of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally.
A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the
travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown,
Robinson and Co.
It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no
small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the
system really needed toning up, for a matter of a couple of paltry pounds,
was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead of being
always cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me for a wife. After
all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum months of it and
merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the
summertime, for choice, when Dame Nature is at her spectacular best,
constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There were equally
excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful
sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of attractions as well as
a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque
environs, even, Poulaphouca, to which there was a steam tram, but also
farther away from the madding crowd, in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden
of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly wheelmen, so long as it
didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal, where if report spoke true,
the coup d'il was exceedingly grand, though the lastnamed locality was
not easily getatable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that
it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it, while
Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace
O'Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a
favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men, especially in the
spring when young men s fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by
falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on
their left leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run from the
pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely in
its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodation left much to be desired.
Interesting to fathom, it seemed to him, from a motive of curiosity pure and
simple, was whether it was the traffic that created the route or vice-versa
or the two sides in fact. He turned back the other side of the card picture
and passed it along to Stephen.
-- I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had
little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened, and
every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house,
another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added, the
Chinese does.
Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces, the
globetrotter went on adhering to his adventures.
-- And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his
back. Knife like that.
Whilst speaking he produced a dangerous looking clasp knife, quite in
keeping with his character, and held it in the striking position.
-- In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers.
Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. Prepare to meet
your God, says he. Chuck! It went into his back up to the butt.
His heavy glance, drowsily roaming about, kind of defied their further
questions even should they by any chance want to. That's a good bit of
steel, repeated he, examining his formidable stiletto.
After which harrowing dØnouement sufficient to appal the stoutest he
snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in his
chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.
-- They're great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite
in the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought the
park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of them
using knives.
At this remark, passed obviously in the spirit of where ignorance is
bliss, Mr Bloom and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both
instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the
strictly entre nous variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat, alias the
keeper, was drawing spurts of liquid from his boiler affair. His inscrutable
face, which was really a work of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring
description, conveyed the impression that he didn't understand one jot of
what was going on. Funny very.
There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading by fits and
starts a stained by coffee evening journal; another, the card with the
natives choza de; another, the seaman's discharge. Mr Bloom, so far as he
was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He vividly
recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well as yesterday,
some score of years previously, in the days of the land troubles when it
took the civilised world by storm, figuratively speaking, early in the
eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was just turned fifteen.
-- Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.
The request being complied with, he clawed them up with a scrape.
-- Have you seen the Rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.
The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay,
or no.
-- Ah, you've touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking
he had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but
he failed to do so, simply letting spurt a jet of spew into the sawdust, and
shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.
-- What year would that be about? Mr Bloom interpolated. Can you recall
the boats?
Our soi-disant sailor munched heavily awhile, hungrily, before
answering.
-- I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and
ships. Salt junk all the time.
Tired, seemingly, he ceased. His questioner, perceiving that he was not
likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer, fell
to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the globe.
Suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, it covered
fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what it meant,
to rule the waves. On more than one occasion - a dozen at the lowest - near
the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a superannuated old salt,
evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly redolent sea
on the wall, staring quite obliviously at it and it at him, dreaming of
fresh woods and pastures new as someone somewhere sings. And it left him
wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret for himself,
floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of thing and over
and under - well, not exactly under, tempting the fates. And the odds were
twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at all. Nevertheless,
without going into the minutiae of the business, the eloquent fact remained
that the sea was there in all its glory and in the natural course of things
somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though
it merely went to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of
onus on to the other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and
insurance, which were run on identically the same lines so that for that
very reason, if no other, lifeboat Sunday was a very laudable institution to
which the public at large, no matter where living, inland or seaside,-is the
case might be, having it brought home to them like that, should extend its
gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had to man
the rigging and push off and out amid the elements, whatever the season,
when duty called Ireland expects that every man and so on, and sometimes had
a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the Irish lights,
Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment rounding which he once with
his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy,
weather.
-- There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog,
himself a rover, proceeded. Went ashore and took up a soft job as
gentleman's valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I've on me and
he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I'm game for that job, shaving and
brushup. I hate roaming about. There's my son now, Danny, run off to sea and
his mother got him took in a draper's in Cork where he could be drawing easy
money.
-- What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the
side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away from
the carking cares of office, unwashed, of course, and in a seedy getup and a
strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.
-- Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance. My son
Danny? He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.
The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow
shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to be
seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink, intended to represent an anchor.
-- There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked. Sure as
nuts. I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It's them black lads I objects
to. I hate those buggers. Sucks your blood dry, they does.
Seeing they were all looking at his chest, he accommodatingly dragged
his shirt more open so that, on top of the time honoured symbol of the
mariner's hope and rest, they had a full view of the figure 16 and a young
man's sideface looking frowningly rather.
-- Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were lying
becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton Fellow the name of
Antonio done that. There he is himself, a Greek.
-- Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.
That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the
someway in his. Squeezing or...
-- 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 Holles 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 instanter to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from
any oldmaidish 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 corruptio per 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 RÖntgen 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 pianoplaying. 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 Tibble'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 taken 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 the 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 the 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 dose.
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 bilge-water 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 brasier 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 au
fait.
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 Mr
Worthington 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.
-- Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor now returning after
his private potation and the rest of his exertions.
That worthy, picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words,
growled in wouldbe music, but with great vim, some Kind of chanty or other
in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom's sharp ears heard him then expectorate the
plug probably (which it was), so that he must have lodged it for the time
being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs and found
it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in he rolled after
his successful libation-cum-potation, introducing an atmosphere of drink
into the soirØe, boisterously trolling, like a veritable son of a seacook:
-- The biscuits was as hard as brass,
And the beef as salt as Lot's wife's arse.
O Johnny Lever!
Johnny Lever, O!
After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene
and, regaining his seat, he sank rather than sat heavily on the form
provided.
Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was
airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural
resources of Ireland, or something of that sort, which he described in his
lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God's
earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six
million pounds' worth of pork exported every year, ten millions between
butter and eggs, and all the riches drained out of it by England levying
taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose always, and gobbling up
the best meat in the market, and a lot more surplus steam in the same vein.
Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a
fact. You could grow any mortal thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there
was Colonel Everard down there in Cavan growing tobacco. Where would you
find anywhere the like of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated
crescendo with no uncertain voice - thoroughly monopolising all the
conversation - was in store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on
account of her crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in
history. The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he
affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was
toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which
he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero
- a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their
attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His advice to every
Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live
for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her
sons.
Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. The impervious
navigator heard these lurid tidings undismayed.
-- Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a
bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.
To which cold douche, referring to downfall and so on, the keeper
concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.
-- Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately
interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and
generals we've got? Tell me that.
-- The Irish for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial
blemishes apart.
-- That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic
peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?
While allowing him his individual opinions, as every man, the keeper
added he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no
Irishman worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few
irascible words, when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing to
the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long as they
didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.
>From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was
rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for,
pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was
fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless
they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their
strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with the quixotic idea in
certain quarters that in a hundred million years the coal seam of the sister
island would be played out and if, as time went On, that turned Out to be
how the cat jumped all he could personally say on the matter was that as a
host of contingencies, equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then
it was highly advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both
countries, even