The man telling it had spent a fortnight trying to get a penny out of a plumber named Geraghty, who owed Moses Herzog for tea and sugar and dared anyone to summons the merchant for trading without a licence. Joe Hynes found him near Stony Batter and took him to Barney Kiernan's. Joe wanted to give the citizen the hard word from a cattle traders' meeting about the foot and mouth disease. The citizen was in the corner with his cruiskeen lawn and his papers, working for the cause, and the mangy dog Garryowen beside him. Joe stood three pints and landed a sovereign. The prudent member had given him the wheeze. The citizen read English births and deaths out of the Irish Independent and asked how that was for a national press. Little Alf Bergan slipped in laughing, because Denis Breen was traipsing past in bath slippers after a postcard that said U. p: up, and a libel he valued at ten thousand pounds. Alf had hangmen's letters in his pocket. Then he said he had just seen Paddy Dignam in Capel street with Willy Murray. Joe threw the letters down. Dignam was dead. They had buried him that morning. Alf would have sworn he had seen him five minutes ago, as plain as a pikestaff.
Bob Doran woke and wept that it was a ruffian act to take the finest man in Dublin, until Terry tipped him to keep that talk out of a respectable house. The citizen, staring out, said Bloom had been pacing up and down outside for ten minutes. Garryowen growled at the face in the door. Come in, the citizen said, he won't eat you. Bloom asked if Martin Cunningham was there. Joe was reading a letter from H. Rumbold, master barber, who offered to hang a man for five guineas and had a knack with the noose. The citizen called him a barbarian. Joe asked Bloom what he would have. Bloom would not drink, begged them to excuse him, and at last took a cigar. Alf told what the Kilmainham warder had seen when they cut Joe Brady down. Bloom said science could explain it, a natural phenomenon, and got as far as the because. The citizen went off about the Invincibles and ninety-eight and Robert Emmet and dying for your country. Bloom said they did not grasp his point. The citizen lifted his pint and gave him Sinn Fein, the friends we love by our side and the foes we hate before us. What Bloom had come for was the insurance. Martin had asked him to see the house. Dignam had never served notice of the assignment, and under the act the mortgagee could not recover. Joe asked if the wife came out top dog. That was a point, Bloom said, for the wife's admirers. Whose admirers, Joe said. The wife's advisers, Bloom said, and tangled himself in mortgagor and widow until the man listening had a head addled. He also wanted councillor Nannetti. Joe told him Field and Nannetti were going to London that night by the mailboat. That's too bad, Bloom said. He had wanted him particularly.
From a fight the talk turned to a concert tour in the north. Joe asked if Mrs B. was the bright particular star. My wife, Bloom said. She was singing, and he thought it would be a success, because the man organising it was excellent. He asked Joe, on the quiet, to be relied on for a small paragraph in the paper, and Joe said to consider it done. The citizen was busy with strangers, the famine, and the greater Ireland beyond the sea, and with putting force against force. Bloom asked whether discipline was not the same everywhere, and whether it would not be the same here. They talked over him, Killala and Limerick and the wild geese, until he got John Wyse Nolan. Persecution, he said, was all the history of the world, perpetuating national hatred among nations. John Wyse asked if he knew what a nation was. A nation, Bloom said, is the same people living in the same place. Ned Lambert laughed that he himself was a nation, then, having lived in the same place for five years. Or also living in different places, Bloom said. That covers my case, Joe said. The citizen asked Bloom's nation. Ireland, Bloom said. I was born here. Ireland. The citizen spat in the corner. Bloom said he belonged to a race that was hated and persecuted, robbed and sold by auction like cattle. Was that the new Jerusalem, the citizen asked. I'm talking about injustice, Bloom said. John Wyse told him to stand up to it with force, like men. Bloom went limp. Force, hatred, history, all that, was not life for men and women. The opposite of that was really life. What, Alf asked. Love, Bloom said. I mean the opposite of hatred. He had to slip round to the court in case Martin was there. They were to say he would be back in a second. A new apostle to the gentiles, the citizen said. John Wyse asked if love your neighbour was not what they were told. Beggar my neighbour was that chap's motto, the citizen said. Lenehan, who had come in with the Gold Cup result, cracked his fingers. Throwaway had won at twenty to one, and Boylan had plunged two quid on Sceptre for himself and a lady friend. The courthouse, Lenehan said, was a blind. Bloom had a few bob on the winner. The citizen called him a fellow who never backed a horse that won.
Martin Cunningham came on the castle car with Jack Power and Crofton and asked where Bloom was. Defrauding widows and orphans, Lenehan said. They turned the name over. A Jew from Hungary, Martin said, and the name had been Virag before the father changed it. No cousin of Bloom the dentist. Only namesakes. The citizen offered him as the new Messiah for Ireland. Ned remembered the tin of Neave's food bought six weeks before the wife was delivered, and the son who had died. Do you call that a man, the citizen asked. Bloom came back in a hurry, letting on he had been at the courthouse. Don't tell anyone, the citizen bawled. It's a secret. Martin got them out and up on the jaunting car and told the jarvey to go. The citizen waddled to the door and bawled three cheers for Israel. Bloom answered from the car. Mendelssohn was a Jew, and Karl Marx, and Mercadante, and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a Jew, and his father was a Jew. Your God. He had no father, Martin said. Drive ahead. Whose God, the citizen said. Well, his uncle was a Jew, Bloom said. Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me. The citizen plunged back for the biscuitbox. He would brain that man for using the holy name. He would crucify him. Joe shouted stop. He got the tin, little Alf on his elbow, and let fly as the jarvey got the nag's head round. The sun was in his eyes or he would have left him for dead. The tinbox clattered along the street, the mongrel after the car, and the last of them was the car rounding the corner. Did I kill him, the citizen shouted, or what. After him, Garry. The jarvey had saved him by furious driving. Then there came a great brightness, and they beheld the chariot wherein he stood ascend to heaven, and a voice out of heaven called Elijah, Elijah, and he answered with a main cry. They beheld him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels, ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street, like a shot off a shovel.
