Ulysses - Gabler Edition [268]
ZOE
I’m giddy!
(She frees herself, droops on a chair. Stephen seizes Florry and turns with her.)
MAGINNI
Boulangère! Les ronds! Les ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!
(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands the night hours link each each with arching arms in a mosaic of movements. Stephen and Florry turn cumbrously.)
MAGINNI
Dansez avec vos dames! Changez de dames! Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez!
THE PIANOLA
Best, best of all,
Baraabum!
KITTY
(jumps up) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus bazaar!
(She runs to Stephen. He leaves Florry brusquely and seizes Kitty. A screaming bittern’s harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling Toft’s cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the room.)
THE PIANOLA
My girl’s a Yorkshire girl.
ZOE
Yorkshire through and through. Come on all!
(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)
STEPHEN
Pas seul!
(He wheels Kitty into Lynch’s arms, snatches up his ashplant from the table and takes the floor. All wheel whirl waltz twirl Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft’s cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.)
THE PIANOLA
Though she’s a factory lass
And wears no fancy clothes.
(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)
TUTTI
Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!
SIMON
Think of your mother’s people!
STEPHEN
Dance of death.
(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey’s bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Baraabum! On nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin steel shark stone onehandled Nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling Gum he’s a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last switchback lumbering up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Baraabum!
The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes closed he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls. He stops dead.)
STEPHEN
Ho!
(Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)
THE CHOIR
Liliata rutilantium te confessorum ....
Iubilantium te virginum .....
(From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)
BUCK MULLIGAN
She’s beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (he upturns his eyes) Mercurial Malachi!
THE MOTHER
(with the subtle smile of death’s madness) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.
STEPHEN
(horrorstruck) Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman’s trick is this?
BUCK MULLIGAN
(shakes his curling capbell) The mockery of it! Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (tears of molten butter fall from his eyes on to the scone) Our great sweet mother! Epi oinopa ponton.
THE MOTHER
(comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.
STEPHEN
(choking with fright, remorse and horror)