Complete Works of James Joyce (69 page)

He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.

An attendant from the doorway called:

 
— Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...

 
— O, Father Dineen! Directly.

Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.

John Eglinton touched the foil.

 
— Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn’t you?

 
— In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

Lapwing.

Where is your brother? Apothecaries’ hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.

Lapwing.

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

 
— You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others? Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann (what’s in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare’s reverence, the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of
King Lear
in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s
Arcadia
and spatchcocked on to a Celtic legend older than history?

 
— That was Will’s way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith.
Que voulez-vous?
Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.

 
— Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in
Much Ado about Nothing
, twice in
As you like It
, in
The Tempest
, in
Hamlet,
in
Measure for Measure
— and in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.

Judge Eglinton summed up.

 
— The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all.

 
— He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all. In
Cymbeline,
in
Othello
he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

 
— Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

 
— And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas
fils
(or is it Dumas
père?)
is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

 
— Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet
(père?)
and Hamlet
fils.
A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says:
If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call
dio boia
, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

 
—
Eureka!
Buck Mulligan cried.
Eureka!

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton’s desk.

 
— May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

 
— Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of
The Taming of the Shrew.

 
— You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?

 
— No, Stephen said promptly.

 
— Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

John Eclecticon doubly smiled.

 
— Well, in that case, he said, I don’t see why you should expect payment for it since you don’t believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery in
Hamlet
but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe?
Egomen.
Who to unbelieve? Other chap.

 
— You are the only contributor to
Dana
who asks for pieces of silver. Then I don’t know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an article on economics.

Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.

 
— For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.

Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then gravely said, honeying malice:

 
— I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the
Summa contra Gentiles
in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the coalquay whore.

He broke away.

 
— Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.

Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts and offals.

Stephen rose.

Life is many days. This will end.

 
— We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said.
Notre ami
Moore says Malachi Mulligan must be there.

Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.

 
— Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of Ireland. I’ll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk straight?

Laughing, he...

Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.

Lubber...

Stephen followed a lubber...

One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.

Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thought.

What have I learned? Of them? Of me?

Walk like Haines now.

The constant readers’ room. In the readers’ book Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet mad? The quaker’s pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.

 
— O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...

Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:

 
— A pleased bottom.

The turnstile.

Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...

The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.

Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:

John Eglinton, my jo, John, Why won’t you wed a wife?

He spluttered to the air:

 
— O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers’ hall. Our players are creating a new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I smell the pubic sweat of monks.

He spat blank.

Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And left the
femme de trente ans.
And why no other children born? And his first child a girl?

Afterwit. Go back.

The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling, minion of pleasure, Phedo’s toyable fair hair.

Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...

 
— Longworth and M’Curdy Atkinson were there...

Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:

    
I hardly hear the purlieu cry

    
Or a tommy talk as I pass one by

    
Before my thoughts begin to run

    
On F. M’Curdy Atkinson,

    
The same that had the wooden leg

    
And that filibustering filibeg

    
That never dared to slake his drouth,

    
Magee that had the chinless mouth.

    
Being afraid to marry on earth

 
   
They masturbated for all they were worth.

Jest on. Know thyself.