(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.)
THE CALLS: Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.
THE ANSWERS: Round behind the stable.
(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children 's hands imprisons him.)
THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! Salute!
THE IDIOT: (Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles.) Grhahute!
THE CHILDREN: Where's the great light?
THE IDIOT: (Gobbling.) Ghaghahest.
(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill from a lane.)
CISSY CAFFREY:
I gave it to Molly
Because she was jolly,
The leg of the duck,
The leg of the duck.
(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters, as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago retorts.)
THE VIRAGO: Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.
CISSY CAFFREY: More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. (She sings.)
I gave it to Nelly
To stick in her belly,
The leg of the duck,
The leg of the duck.
(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the redcoats.)
PRIVATE COMPTON: (Jerks his finger.) Way for the parson.
PRIVATE CARR: (Turns and calls.) What ho, parson!
CISSY CAFFREY: (Her voice soaring higher.)
She has it, she got it,
Wherever she put it,
The leg of the duck.
(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy the introit for paschal time. Lynch, his jockeycap low on his brow, attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)
STEPHEN: Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia.
(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a doorway.)
YOU ARE READING
Ulysses
Mystery / ThrillerUlysses is a modernist novel by me, Irish writer James Joyce. I first serialized it in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published it in its entirety in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922...
