Drifting Through Morning Temptations — Ulysses

Bloom gives Dignam's funeral until eleven and walks the quays past the linseed crusher and the telegraph office as if the hour had slack in it. In Westland Row he stops at the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company. His eyes stay on the leadpapered packets while his hand takes a card from behind the headband of his hat. At the post office the envelope is typed to Henry Flower, care of the office. Answered anyhow. He slips card and letter into a pocket and is back on the street as himself, or near enough. M'Coy stops him with a funeral face and a favour waiting under it. There may be a drowning case at Sandycove. Would Bloom put in a word, identify a valise, save a widow a walk to the morgue. Bloom answers with a larger piece of news, so the ask has to stand beside it. Molly is going to sing at a swagger affair in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twenty-fifth. M'Coy is glad, and still gets the request out. Wife well, he supposes. The card in the hat and the valise on the well are the same kind of errand. Both need a man who will answer to a name slightly beside his own.

The letter in the pocket is from Martha Clifford, written to Henry Flower. She has a headache. She wants an answer by return. She wants to know what perfume his wife uses. He tears her yellow flower from its pin, smells the almost no smell of it, and puts the flower in his heart pocket. The pin goes on the road. Under the railway arch he tears the envelope to shreds and scatters them. Henry Flower sinks in the dank air as easily as a cheque might. He tucks the card behind the hatband again and goes in at the back of All Hallows, where the cold smell of the stone and the choir become a thought about bodies and how they are fed. He does not take the mass. A widow in her weeds makes him cover his head on the way out. He is in mourning too. Quarter past. Time enough, if the lotion can be made up.

The recipe is in the other trousers. So is the latchkey. He had forgotten both, and the funeral is not the fault of the man who died. At Sweny's in Lincoln Place the chemist can look in the book. About a fortnight ago, the day Bloom changed a sovereign. Sweet almond oil, tincture of benzoin, orangeflower water, white wax. He has brought no bottle, so he will call later. He will take a cake of lemon soap now. That makes three and a penny, the chemist says, and he can pay it all together when he comes back. Outside, Bantam Lyons wants a look at the paper. Bloom says he was only going to throw it away. Lyons hears a horse, not a refusal, and the phrase walks off without him. The soap is the one solid thing the drifting morning lets him carry out in his hand. He can already imagine the bath at the end of it, a clean trough, cool enamel, his body in the lemon-yellow water, buoyed. Martha's letter is still in his pocket with the flower, still asking for an answer by return. The water was still ahead of him.