The Tower and the Betrayal — Ulysses

Buck Mulligan comes up the stairhead with a shaving bowl held like a chalice, a mirror and a razor crossed on the lather, and he blesses the tower, the bay, and the mountains before breakfast. Stephen Dedalus watches from the parapet and does not take the blessing up. Haines, the Englishman who woke in the night shouting about a black panther, is a guest in the rooms whose rent Stephen pays. Mulligan calls him a ponderous Saxon and is already planning to touch him for a guinea. When the cracked lookingglass comes out, Stephen looks at his own uncombed face in it and says the bitter thing that will not stay a joke. The cracked lookingglass of a servant is a symbol of Irish art.

The offence from the night before will not stay buried. Mulligan had told people that Stephen's mother was beastly dead, and the hurt Stephen names is precise. It is not only the insult to her. It is that Mulligan does not think Stephen's feelings are worth managing. She had asked her son to kneel and pray at the bedside. He refused, and her glazing eyes still come back unasked. He cannot turn the refusal into peace, and he will not turn it into a phrase Mulligan can spend. On the parapet the apology is already over. Stephen will be paid at the school that morning. Mulligan counts the pay and asks for a sovereign. Stephen says he can have it if he wants it. The money and the grief are being handled in the same easy voice.

An old woman brings the milk. Stephen pours, watches her, and hears her bow to the loud medical student while she barely sees him. Haines speaks to her in Irish. She thinks the sounds are French, and is told that Irish is what the people are learning. Stephen sees the country in that service and does not correct it. He will say, before they leave the tower, that he is the servant of two masters, an English one and an Italian one, and of a third who wants him for odd jobs. Mulligan will not leave the Hamlet talk alone either. He parodies it on the stairs: by algebra, Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather, and Stephen is the ghost of his own father. Then the ballad of joking Jesus, three times a day after meals, carries them down toward the fortyfoot hole, and Mulligan asks for the key as if the ask were manners.

Stephen hands over the key and twopence. He will not sleep in the tower tonight, and he has no other door that is waiting for him. Haines has had his folklore, his theological puzzle, and his laugh. Mulligan has the key, the prospect of the sovereign, and the sea. A voice calls Stephen from the water, sweet and held, and a seal's head shows far out, round. He waves once, at the curve, and keeps walking. The joke has finished its work. Usurper.