Stephen Dedalus and Lynch come into Nighttown by the Mabbot Street entrance, where the tram tracks run into the dark and children, a bawd, and two soldiers are already in the lane. Private Carr and Private Compton lurch out of a side turning. Cissy Caffrey is singing. The soldiers call Stephen parson. He answers with the Latin of the Easter water and flourishes his ashplant so the lamplight shivers. A bawd leans from a doorway and offers a maidenhead. Stephen will not stop. She spits after the two young men and calls them Trinity medicals, all prick and no pence. Bloom comes after them at a run, a stitch in his side, a lukewarm crubeen in one parcel and a cold sheep's trotter in the other. He has followed Stephen from the maternity hospital and lost him among the doors. He asks himself why he is following at all, decides Stephen is the best of that company, and fears the money will be gone. A dog noses at him. He means to keep the food and then lets both parcels go. The dog eats. Two raincaped watchmen come up and take him by the shoulders. What happens next is not the lane. Voices charge him, and he answers as a dentist, a soldier, a journalist, a married man of Eccles Street, and none of the answers hold. The accusations keep changing their shape. He cannot find the two he came to find. When that breaks, he is plodging forward again through the fog, and a piano is sounding. He stands before a lighted house. Zoe Higgins comes down the steps in a sapphire slip, a black fillet at her throat, and asks if he is looking for someone. The man is inside with his friend. It is not Mrs Mack's. It is number 81, Mrs Cohen's. She feels in his pocket, thinks she has found a sore, and draws out instead the hard black potato he carries as a talisman. She keeps it. She links his arm, bites his ear, and talks him towards the door. He goes, uneasy, and still looking for Stephen.
Inside, a man's hat and waterproof hang on the rack. Bloom frowns at them, then follows Zoe into the musicroom. Mauve paper dims the chandelier. A moth keeps hitting the light and getting away. Lynch squats on the hearthrug beating time. Kitty Ricketts perches on the table. Stephen is at the piano with Florry. The floor is a scuffle of footmarks in the oilcloth. Bloom trips on the threshold. Zoe catches him. He stands and lets her go first, then lets her draw him over. A man in a purple shirt passes on the stairs with a water jug, and Bloom turns his face away. Later he hears a male voice with the women on the doorstep, and then a cough and a tread going out into the mist, and he listens as if it might be Boylan, come after or because of what has or has not happened. He offers Zoe the chocolate from his pocket. A firmer step sounds on the stairs. The door opens. Bella Cohen comes in, a massive woman in an ivory gown, fanning herself, wedding rings on her hand, a sprouting moustache on her lip, her eyes carboned. She looks the couples over. Her look stops on Bloom. The fan tells him he is married, that the missus is master, that they have met, that he is hers. He laces her boot, kneeling, and calls it courtesy. When he looks up, her face strikes him. The voice that answers is a baritone. Bello names him hound of dishonour, adorer of the adulterous rump, and puts him down. The women are called to hold him and to walk on him. Bello squats on his face. Bloom is no longer the man who came in to fetch a younger man out. He is the one being broken to use, and the room allows it.
He comes back to himself. Bella is the whoremistress again, and he faces her. He asks Zoe for the potato. It is nothing, he says, except a relic, and he wants it. She makes a game of the return and then gives it over. Stephen, polite to the point of mockery, pays Bella in gold and fumbles for more. Bloom quietly lays his own half-sovereign on the table and tells Stephen the rest of the cash had better be handed over, to be kept. Stephen gives him all the coins. Bloom counts one pound six and eleven, and calls it one pound seven. Stephen says it does not matter. Bloom tells him not to smoke, and that he ought to eat. Zoe reads Stephen's palm, Thursday's child, and then Bloom's, and calls him a henpecked husband. The piano and the couples pull the room into dancing. Stephen whirls until the room whirls back. He stops dead. His mother rises through the floor, May Goulding, dead, in leper grey, a wreath of faded orange blossom and a torn bridal veil, her face green with the mould of the grave. A choir sings the Latin that was sung for her. Stephen asks what bogeyman's trick this is. She says she was the beautiful May Goulding, and that she is dead. He says they accuse him of killing her, and that cancer did it, not he. He begs the word known to all men. She tells him to repent, and comes nearer, bile at her mouth, the fire of hell in her cry. Zoe says she is melting. Florry points. Stephen has gone white. Bloom goes to the window to open it. Stephen lifts the ashplant with both hands, cries Nothung, and smashes the chandelier. The gas jets. Lynch grabs his hand too late. Bella screams for the police. Stephen is gone. The women run to the hall door. Bella catches Bloom's coat and asks who pays for the lamp, ten shillings. He snatches the ashplant, shows her how the paper was struck, throws a shilling on the table, and runs.
In the street the row has already started. Stephen, still talking, has been heard by Private Carr, who wants to know if he insulted Cissy Caffrey. Stephen answers in words that are not an apology. Bloom elbows through, tells him to come home, and says he will get into trouble. Stephen will not be led. Lynch will not help. He says Stephen likes argument, and goes off with Kitty. Stephen calls that an exit for Judas. Carr breaks loose. The watch arrive. Carr knocks Stephen down, and the crowd yells to let him up and not to strike him where he lies. Bloom shoves them back and tells the constable that Carr hit him without provocation. He is a witness. He asks for the regimental number. The watch do not want his instructions. Compton pulls Carr away because the police are there, and because Bennett at the barracks will lock them up. Bloom sees a car. Corny Kelleher is in the crowd, weepers on his hat, a funeral wreath in his hand. Bloom whispers that this is Simon Dedalus's son, a bit sprung, and asks him to move the policemen and the loafers. Kelleher tells the watch he knows the young man, laughs about a win on Throwaway, and says boys will be boys. The crowd goes. Kelleher offers a lift towards Cabra. Bloom says Stephen hangs out at Sandycove, and that he himself has the money, the hat, and the stick. Nothing is broken. Kelleher has a burial in the morning and will not wait. Bloom says he will wait, and take him along in a few minutes. The car jingles off. Bloom stands with the hat, still stuck with shavings, and the ashplant, then bends and shakes Stephen by the shoulder. Stephen groans, murmurs the song about Fergus and the wood's woven shade, and turns on his side. Bloom opens his waistcoat so he can breathe, brushes the shavings off, and counts the money again. One pound seven. Not hurt. He stays with him. Against the wall a boy of eleven stands in an Eton suit, a book open in his hand, and Bloom calls a name the lane does not hear. Rudy. He is going to lead Stephen out.
