Ulysses - Gabler Edition [240]
BEN DOLLARD
When twins arrive?
BLOOM
Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.
LARRY O’ROURKE
An eightday licence for my new premises. You remember me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I’m sending around a dozen of stout for the missus.
BLOOM
(coldly) You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no presents.
CROFTON
This is indeed a festivity.
BLOOM
(solemnly) You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
ALEXANDER KEYES
When will we have our own house of keys?
BLOOM
I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.
O’MADDEN BURKE
Free fox in a free henroost.
DAVY BYRNE
(yawning) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!
BLOOM
Mixed races and mixed marriage.
LENEHAN
What about mixed bathing?
(Bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration. All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)
FATHER FARLEY
He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith.
MRS RIORDAN
(tears up her will) I’m disappointed in you! You bad man!
MOTHER GROGAN
(removes her boot to throw it at Bloom) You beast! You abominable person!
NOSEY FLYNN
Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.
BLOOM
(with rollicking humour)
I vowed that I never would leave her,
She turned out a cruel deceiver.
With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.
HOPPY HOLOHAN
Good old Bloom! There’s nobody like him after all.
PADDY LEONARD
Stage Irishman!
BLOOM
What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele.
(Laughter.)
LENEHAN
Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!
THE VEILED SIBYL
(enthusiastically) I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I’d give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.
BLOOM
(winks at the bystanders) I bet she’s a bonny lassie.
THEODORE PUREFOY
(in fishingcap and oilskin jacket) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
THE VEILED SIBYL
(stabs herself) My hero god! (she dies)
(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson’s Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness’s brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)
ALEXANDER J DOWIE
(violently) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban!
THE MOB