Ulysses
cred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums
or model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all
with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling
Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with
their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned
melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and
twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever ...
(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters
complain that they cannot hear.)
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (Without looking
up from their notebooks) Loosen his boots.
PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (From the presstable, coughs
and calls) Cough it up, man. Get it out in bits.
(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket.
A large bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street
Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stiff-
legged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon.
Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He
did not look in the bucket Nobody. Rather a mess. Not com-
pletely. A Titbits back number.)
(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained
with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip
of stickingplaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)
J. J. O’MOLLOY: (In barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown,
speaking with a voice of pained protest) This is no place for
indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised
in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag
nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor
foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and