Bloom brushes the shavings off Stephen, gives him back the hat and the ashplant, and steadies him. Stephen is pale, unsteady, and asking for a drink. There is no pump. Bloom thinks of the cabman's shelter near Butt bridge, close enough for a mineral or a milk and soda, and looks for a cab to get them there. The only fourwheeler stands outside the North Star hotel and will not move when he whistles. They walk. A button is gone from the back of Bloom's trousers. He makes light of it. They pass the shut railway station, the back door of the morgue, the smell of Rourke's bakery, and the police station in Store Street. Bloom is sober, and he uses the walk to warn Stephen. Nighttown is a trap for a young man who drinks. The police swear as they are paid to. Soldiers should not carry arms they can turn on civilians. The worst of it is who you get drunk with, and Stephen's companions left him, all but one. Stephen, silent until then, says that one was Judas. Under the Loop Line a brazier burns by a sentrybox. Gumley, who once knew Simon Dedalus, is inside, and Stephen edges towards the pillars to avoid him. A man salutes from the arches. It is Corley, out of work, on the outs with Lenehan, asking for anything at all. Stephen mentions a post at Mr Deasy's school in Dalkey. Corley says he could never teach. Stephen says he has nowhere to sleep himself. He puts a hand in his pocket to lend a shilling, finds the notes gone, and then coins he takes for pennies. They are half-crowns. He lends one. Corley has seen Bloom with Boylan the billsticker and wants a sandwichboard, even a crossing-sweeper's job. Bloom asks how much went, and where Stephen will sleep. Sandycove is too far, and he would not get in after Westland Row. Why did he leave his father's house? To seek misfortune, Stephen says. Bloom praises Simon, a talker who is proud of his son, and suggests he could go back. There is no answer. Stephen is seeing his sister Dilly by a poor fire. Bloom adds that he would not trust Mulligan, who knows which side his bread is buttered.
He has already whispered that the keeper of the shelter is said to be Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, the Invincible, though he will not swear to it. They sit in a corner of the wooden room. A red-bearded sailor stares longer than the jarveys. Bloom orders coffee and a roll. What comes is a swimming cup labelled coffee and a bun that looks ancient. He pushes the cup towards Stephen and says the Italian quarrel still going on outside is a beautiful language for singing. Why not write poetry in it? Stephen says they were haggling over money, and that sounds are impostures, like names. The sailor asks Stephen's name. Bloom touches his boot. Stephen says Dedalus anyway. The sailor claims he saw Simon Dedalus shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards, over his shoulder, with Hengler's circus in Stockholm. He shouts the two shots. His own name is Murphy, D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe. His wife has waited seven years while he sailed. Bloom can picture the homecoming, another man in the chair, and he does not say so. Murphy shows a dirty discharge. They came up that morning on the threemaster Rosevean, from Bridgwater with bricks, and he was paid off in the afternoon. He tears his shirt. An anchor, the number 16, and a young man's face were tattooed off Odessa by a Greek called Antonio. Murphy pulls the skin, the face seems to laugh, and then he sighs that sharks ate the man. The keeper, whoever he is, leans over to look. Bloom has been measuring the sailor since they sat down. The stories are too large, and too ready, though he allows that something like them can happen. A streetwalker looks in. He turns away, stirs the coffee, and tells Stephen to eat the bun. From a stabbing in Trieste he gets to heat, character, and his own wife, half Spanish, born in Gibraltar. That, he says, is why he asked about Italian.
The talk runs on to Ireland and to Parnell. Bloom gets his eyes on the pink sporting Telegraph. Throwaway, the outsider, has won. Lower down is Patrick Dignam's funeral, the mourners listed, and among them Stephen Dedalus, B.A., who was not in the cemetery, and L. Boom, which is Bloom's name with a letter gone. He is nettled and amused together. A man might get a guinea a column, he thinks, for a piece called My Experiences in a Cabman's Shelter, and he does not write it. He has been working round to Molly. He takes a faded photograph from his pocketbook, leaving the book Sweets of Sin where it is, and lays the picture on the table. Is that a Spanish type? Stephen looks at a woman in a low evening dress, dark eyes, standing by a piano with In Old Madrid on the rest. Lafayette took it in Westmoreland Street, about 1896. Bloom names her. Madam Marion Tweedy, his wife, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy, a singer who faced the public at sixteen. The face is like her. The figure, he says, does not come out as it should. He would like to leave the photograph and walk away so the young man could look. He stays. It would scarcely be etiquette.
Near one it is time to go. Bringing Stephen home is a risk. Molly has a temper, and Bloom remembers a lame dog he once carried back to Ontario Terrace and the peace he spoiled. Both Sandycove and Sandymount are too far. He decides on Epps's cocoa and a shakedown, a rug, an overcoat for a pillow, if there is no row. He pockets the photograph and says the shelter is stuffy, his diggings are close, and does Stephen like cocoa. He will pay. Stephen, for whom one roof is much like another at this hour, does not refuse. Bloom is already planning what he does not say. Concerts, a voice like the father's, duets in Italian with the accent true. The sailor puts on green goggles and reads the paper. They leave him. Beyond the chains a sweeper horse brushes mire along the road. Bloom plucks Stephen's sleeve. Their lives are in peril tonight, he says. Beware of the steamroller. They wait while the poor nervous horse finishes, and Bloom says at last that his wife would be glad to meet Stephen. She is passionately attached to music. Stephen sings, not loudly, a German song about the sirens who murder men sweetly, and he translates as he goes. Bloom hears the tenor and runs too far ahead, to fees and drawing rooms. The horse drops its dung. The driver waits. One full figure and one lean one step through the chains, over a strand of mire, and walk towards lower Gardiner Street and the railway bridge. The man on the car watches the pair of them and cannot hear a word. They stop, and walk, and stop again, still talking of sirens and usurpers, on their way towards Eccles Street, with nothing settled.
