— Are you not coming in, Buck Mulligan asked.
— Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.
Stephen turned away.
— I’m going, Mulligan, he said.
— Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.
Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes.
— And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.
Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly : — He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.
His plump body plunged.
— We’ll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at wild Irish.
Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.
— The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.
— Good, Stephen said.
He walked along the upwardcurving path.
Liliata rutilantium.
Turma circumdet.
Jubilantium te virginum
The priest’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.
02
— You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
— Tarentum, sir.
— Very good. Well?
— There was a battle, sir.
— Very good. Where?
The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?
— I forget the place, sir. 279 B.C.
— Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book.
— Yes, sir. And he said : Another victory like that and we are done for.
That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.
— You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?
— End of Pyrrhus, sir?
— I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.
— Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?
A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong’s satchel. He curled them between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to the tissues of his lips. A sweetened boy’s breath. Welloff people, proud that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico Road, Dalkey.
— Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.
— Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy’s shoulder with the book, what is a pier.
— A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the waves. A kind of bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
Some laughed again : mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench whispered. Yes. They knew : had never learned nor ever been innocent. All. With envy he watched their faces. Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their likes : their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering in the struggle.
— Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.
The words troubled their gaze.
— How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.
For Haines’s chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
— Tell us a story, sir.
— Oh, do, sir. A ghoststory.
— Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.
— Weep no more, Comyn said.
— Go on then, Talbot.
— And the history, sir?
— After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.
A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text :
— Weep no more, woful shepherd, weep no more
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor…
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me : under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers : and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is : the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent : form of forms.
Talbot repeated :
—Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,
Through the dear might…
— Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don’t see anything.
— What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.
His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church’s looms. Ay.
Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
My father gave me seeds to sow.
Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.
— Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
—