The City in Motion — Ulysses

At five to three Father Conmee reset his watch and came down the presbytery steps with just time to walk to Artane. The boy he meant to speak for was named Dignam, Brother Swan was the person to see, and Mr Cunningham's letter made the errand worth doing. A one-legged sailor held out his cap. Conmee blessed him in the sun and kept the silver crown in his purse. On Mountjoy square he asked after Mrs Sheehy's boys at Belvedere and her husband, still sitting in London, and he had a schoolboy post his letter to the father provincial, with a joke that the child must not post himself into the box. Mrs M'Guinness bowed from the far path, silver-haired and stately. He granted her the carriage of Mary, queen of Scots, and then remembered that she was a pawnbroker. He raised his hat at Saint Joseph's, saw Corny Kelleher totting a funeral daybook, and paused by a turf barge under the trees, pleased that God had put turf in the bogs so poor people might have fires. At Newcomen bridge he took an outward tram rather than walk the dingy way past Mud Island. A newsboard had told of deaths in New York, people gone unprepared, and from there his mind went to the millions of black and brown and yellow souls who had never been baptised. He left the tram at the Howth road. The quiet Malahide road carried him out of the living street and into the story of Mary Rochfort, first countess of Belvedere, walking a lake shore under a jealous husband. Only God, she, and her husband's brother could know whether she had sinned fully. Conmee opened the breviary he should have read before lunch and went on through the nones, the mild rector he had once been. A young man and a young woman with daisies came out of a hedge. He blessed them and turned the page.

That same hour split into other errands. A constable murmured to Corny Kelleher that he had seen a particular party the evening before. Up Eccles street the one-legged sailor growled out For England, and then home and beauty. A blind went up at a window, a card for unfurnished apartments slipped from the sash, and a bare arm flung a coin over the railings. An urchin put it in the cap. In the Dedalus kitchen the books had already been refused at the pawnbroker's. The pot held shirts. The kettle held yellow peasoup from Sister Mary Patrick, and that was dinner. Boody broke bread into it and said their father was not in heaven. Dilly had gone out to find him. A crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode the Liffey towards the sea. In Thornton's, Blazes Boylan had a basket packed with a bottle in pink paper, a jar, pears, and peaches, to go by tram in ten minutes to an invalid. He took a red carnation, set the stalk between his teeth, and asked the shopgirl for the telephone. Miss Dunne, his typist, had just hidden a library novel and typed 16 June 1904 when he rang. She was to book places for Belfast and Liverpool, and Lenehan would be in the Ormond at four. Near Trinity, Almidano Artifoni told Stephen in Italian that the world was a beast and that a voice like his would be an income if he did not throw it away. Stephen called the sacrifice a bloodless one, promised to think, and watched the teacher run after a tram with a roll of music and miss it. In the council chamber of Saint Mary's abbey, Ned Lambert told the Reverend Hugh C. Love that they stood where Silken Thomas had proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534. Love was writing a book about the Fitzgeralds. After he left, Lambert remembered the joke he had forgotten, the earl who burned Cashel cathedral and was sorry only because he thought the archbishop was inside.

The talk on the quay kept coming back to Bloom. Lenehan was on his way to sound Boylan at the Ormond, a good turn owed to Tom Rochford, who had shown them a disk machine for music-hall turns and who had once gone down a manhole after a man choking on sewer gas. Lenehan told that, and then he told the Glencree dinner. On the drive home over the Featherbed Mountain, Bloom had sat naming stars, the bear and the dragon and the rest, while Lenehan, on the wife's side of the car, tucked her rug and felt her against him at every jolt. He laughed until he had to lean on the river wall. Then he grew serious and said there was a touch of the artist about old Bloom. Under Merchants' arch, Bloom was turning books on a hawker's cart. He set aside a Maria Monk confession and a crude Aristotle full of infants in the womb, thought of Mrs Purefoy, and pushed away a ghetto book he already owned. Fair Tyrants was a kind he knew she would not like. Sweets of Sin was more in her line. He read of money spent on gowns for a man named Raoul, of a kiss, of a woman throwing off her wrap, and warmth went through him. He bought it while the shopman coughed phlegm on the floor. At Dillon's auction Dilly asked her father for money. Simon told her to stand up straight, said nobody in Dublin would lend him fourpence, and then handed her a shilling. She wanted more. He called his daughters an insolent pack since their mother died, showed coppers from two shillings Jack Power had given him, a funeral shave already spent out of them, and added two pennies for milk and a bun. He walked off. Mr Kernan, warm with gin and pleased with an order, thought of Emmet hanged nearby and hurried at the sound of hoofs, too late by a hair. Stephen, leaving a lapidary's dusty window, found Dilly at another cart with a French primer bought for a penny. She wanted to know if it was any good. She was going to learn French. He told her to mind Maggy did not pawn it, and supposed his own books were gone. Some were, she said. They had had to. He saw her drowning, her hair like seaweed round his heart, and knew she would pull him under if he tried to save her.

Money and a procession closed the hour, and neither waited for the other. Father Cowley told Simon he was barricaded, two men prowling for a moneylender, Reuben J. Dodd, and that he needed Ben Dollard to buy a little time from the subsheriff. Dollard boomed that the landlord had already distrained for the rent at 29 Windsor avenue, so the writ was worthless. The landlord was the Reverend Mr Love. Martin Cunningham, leaving the Castleyard, said the Dignam youngster would be all right, because he had written to Father Conmee and laid the case before him. John Wyse Nolan caught them up with the list. Bloom had put his name down for five shillings and had paid the five shillings, without a second word. Nolan quoted that there was much kindness in the Jew. Upstairs with the subsheriff they were still sorting out which Dignam it was, a low-sized clerk from Menton's, when hoofs sounded. From the doorway Nolan watched the outriders pass and named them: the lord lieutenant general and general governor of Ireland. In the D.B.C., Mulligan pointed Haines to a man bent over a chessboard, Parnell's brother, and then laughed at Stephen. Visions of hell had driven his wits astray, he said, so Stephen would never be a poet. He was going to write something in ten years. A glassy-eyed strider, Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, swept a blind young man's cane aside with his coat and took a curse for being the blinder of the two. Master Patrick Dignam dawdled home with porksteaks, looked at boxers in a window, and remembered the screws in the coffin and his father's tongue trying to say he must be good to his mother. He hoped the man was in purgatory, because he had confessed on Saturday night. William Humble, earl of Dudley, and Lady Dudley drove from the viceregal lodge to open the Mirus bazaar for Mercer's hospital. Along the quays some hats came off. Simon Dedalus brought his low and was answered. Boylan, the red flower at his mouth, left his hands in his pockets and gave the women in the carriages his look. A man in a brown macintosh crossed their path eating dry bread and went on unscathed. The horses pranced towards Lower Mount street. A door closed over a music teacher's trousers, and the quarter-mile runners started. The viceroy's cavalcade passed. The city did not stop.