Ulysses Part 57

Brisk 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.

--This gentleman? _Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People?_ To be sure. Good day, sir. _Kilkenny_... We have certainly...

A patient silhouette waited, listening.

--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...

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

The door closed.

--The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.

He jumped up and s.n.a.t.c.hed the card.

--What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.

He rattled on:

--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._

Suddenly he turned to Stephen:

--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 G.o.d pursuing the maiden hid_.

--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.

--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 d.i.c.k 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.

Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de pet.i.tes cochonneries.

Minette? Tu veux?_

--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's mother with her cup of canary for any c.o.c.kcanary.

Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

--Blessed Margaret Mary Anyc.o.c.k!

--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?

Do 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 l.u.s.t and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.

--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

--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.

Love that dare not speak its name.

--As an Englishman, you mean, John st.u.r.dy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.

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

--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.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

--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.

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

He faced their silence.

To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will.

But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.

She was ent.i.tled to her widow's dower At common law. His legal knowledge was great Our judges tell us.

Him Satan fleers, Mocker: And therefore he left out her name From the first draft but he did not leave out The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters, For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford And in London. And therefore when he was urged, As I believe, to name her He left her his Secondbest Bed.

_Punkt._ Leftherhis Secondbest Leftherhis Bestabed Secabest Leftabed.

Woa!

--Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

--He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a t.i.thefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?

--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest Best said finely.

--_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled on.

--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.

Let me think.

--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...

--He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

--What? asked Besteglinton.

William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...