Leopold Bloom comes to the door of Dr Horne's maternity hospital in Holles Street as night is falling. A nurse lets him in under a flash of lightning. He asks after Dr O'Hare, and she tells him the young doctor died of a belly cancer on the Isle of Man three years ago, with a priest there and the oils on his limbs. They stand with that news a moment. Then he asks how it goes with the woman in the ward. Mina Purefoy has been in labour three full days, the nurse says, harder than any birth she has watched, though the end ought to be soon. Dixon, a medical student who once dressed a wound of Bloom's, comes out of a noisy room and will not let him go. Bloom had meant to slip away. He goes in instead, tired from the walking, and sits down among them.
He drinks little of what they pour, and tips most of it into his neighbour's glass. A cry carries from the floor above. He cannot tell if it is the woman or the child, and he thinks the waiting has gone on too long. Lenehan, older than the rest and already full of drink, says they expect her any moment. The table holds Dixon, Lynch, Madden, Lenehan, Crotthers, Stephen Dedalus at the head, and Punch Costello, who is the drunkest and keeps calling for more. They argue a birth that goes wrong. Madden says the wife should live. He has a case from this same house, a woman who died after the doctors sat on her, and a husband who would not, for a vow, let her be saved by the loss of the child. The others shout him down. Let the wife live and the babe die, they cry, and Lenehan keeps the cups filled so the mirth will not fail. Stephen asks what becomes of the souls they make impossible night after night, and calls that the offence against life itself. Costello's answer is only that he would take any woman he could. When they press Bloom, he will not say he would put his own wife in that danger. He jokes that the Church might like a birth fee and a death fee in one stroke, and so gets clear of them. Stephen is delighted. Bloom is not. Under the joke he remembers Marion, and the boy who lived eleven days and died, and the little woollen vest she put on him for the burial in midwinter. He looks at Stephen, his friend's son, and grieves for that spending of a life among these men as well.
Stephen fills the empty cups and shows coins and notes, two pounds nineteen, which he says he was paid for a song. He talks of the word made flesh in the womb, and of a virgin birth with no joy and no pang, until Costello beats the table and starts a bawdy song. Nurse Quigley comes to the door and orders them quiet. A woman is near her time, and Lord Andrew is expected, and the honour of her watch is not to be shortened by their noise. They fall on Costello and shut him up. Dixon asks why Stephen never took vows. Stephen says he has obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb, and poverty whether he chose it or not. The jokes turn filthy again. Then thunder cracks over the street. Stephen, who had been boasting, goes white. Lynch tells him the god is angry at his mockery. Bloom, at his side, gives him the plain account. It is fluid breaking from a thunderhead, a natural thing, not a voice. The fear stays in Stephen anyway. Out in the rain, Mulligan and Alec Bannon are on their way to the hospital, Mulligan from a writer's house and Bannon new in from Mullingar with a story of a girl. They come in wet. Lenehan fumbles for a letter in the evening paper about cattle and a plague, then gives the search up. The talk swells into a long fable of a bull sent into Ireland, of women who follow him, and of men who take ship and leave. Mulligan likes the fable because it suits a plan of his own. He hands round cards printed that day: Malachi Mulligan, fertiliser and incubator, Lambay Island. He means to buy the island and offer himself, for nothing, to any woman who wants a child. Dixon asks if he also means to carry coals to Newcastle. The room cheers him. Bannon, overjoyed at something that has just happened to him, shows a locket and talks of the girl who gave it, her cap, her feastday. Bloom tells them he came only to ask after a lady of the house, and whether her trouble is over. The talk runs on to rain, to French letters, to what a woman will not wear. A bell cuts it off.
Miss Callan comes in, speaks low to Dixon, and bows herself out. Costello calls her a fine bit of flesh and swears she is with child. Dixon stands, says the nurse has told him the lady's suffering is over and that she has given birth to a bouncing boy, and rebukes them for fouling a woman and a maid in Horne's house at the moment a child comes into the world. He goes to the ward. Bloom, who has put up with their mocks since he sat down, is more than a little eased. A child has been brought through. Crotthers says the husband was round again today, an older man with dundrearies, asking after Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her, and the table praises the old man's vigour, though one voice still hints the child might not be his. Bloom tries to quiet what follows and cannot. With nurse and doctor gone, the students pull the whole of birth apart: the cut that opens the womb, twins, murder, rape, monsters, the beliefs that a pregnant woman must not step over a stile. Mulligan adds a horror tale of Haines and a phial of poison, told for the shiver. Later the same questions return in a colder voice, as if a journal were reporting a debate in the high hall of the hospital. How is a boy's sex fixed? Why does a healthy child die? Stephen's contribution is a foul joke about the flesh of a calf just dropped from its mother. Bloom's answer is short. Once a woman has conceived, Stephen says, she must bring the child out to save herself. At the risk of her own, Bloom answers. Meanwhile the birth is told again as Mina's hour of joy. She lies with the motherlight in her eyes and wishes only for Doady, Theodore Purefoy of the Ulster bank, to stand beside her, the children of their years gathered about the bed, and this last one, a Purefoy to the nose, waiting to be christened Mortimer Edward. None of that talk has made the young men wiser. Stephen shouts for Burke's. They seize hats, sticks, and ashplants and run, Dixon swearing and running too. Nurse Callan cannot hold them. Bloom stays long enough to send a kind word up to the mother and the new child, then asks the nurse, quietly, when the stork will come for her. Out in the wet he thinks of Theodore as the man who actually did the work the others only talk, and of the scholars and the preventers of birth left to hang. At Burke's of Denzille Street they drink until the barman calls time, Stephen's money the target of every empty pocket. Stephen and Lynch peel off towards the brothels, the medicals hallooing after them, a fire engine clanging down Mount Street. A boy has been born in Holles Street. The talk that accompanied him has not become any wiser.
