Journey to the Graveyard — Ulysses

Martin Cunningham got into the funeral carriage first, Mr Power after him, and Simon Dedalus next. Bloom came last and slammed the door twice before it shut. An old woman peeped from a lowered blind, glad to have been passed over, and he sat on the cake of soap in his hip pocket and left it there. They took Irishtown and Ringsend. Caps lifted along the road. Bloom saw a young man in mourning, a wide hat, and told Dedalus it was his son and heir. The carriage lurched, Dedalus missed the face, and Mulligan's name set him off: a ruffian whose name stank all over Dublin, the Goulding faction down with aunt Sally, and a letter he would write that would open an eye as wide as a gate. He would not have the nephew ruin his son. Bloom looked from the angry moustache to the other two faces. The man was full of his son, and right to be. If little Rudy had lived there would have been a boy walking beside Molly, a voice in the house, something to hand on. Milly at least was growing up in Mullingar. They stopped at the grand canal. A raindrop spat on Bloom's hat. Dedalus cursed the veiled sun and called it as uncertain as a child's bottom. When they moved, Cunningham and Power took off Tom Kernan's pomp about Ben Dollard's Croppy Boy, and Cunningham asked who had read Dan Dawson's speech in the morning paper. Bloom had the paper. Dedalus told him later, please. His eye went down the deaths all the same, and Dignam's name was there among them.

Past the theatres a straw hat flashed in the door of the Red Bank. Blazes Boylan was airing his quiff, and Bloom had been thinking of him at that moment. Dedalus saluted. Power asked how the concert tour was getting on. Bloom said very well, though he himself had private business in county Clare, and what you lost on one town you made up on the next. They would have the best, Doyle and John MacCormack among them. Power smiled and put Madame last but not least. Bloom thought of the weep in Molly's voice, and of what she saw in the worst man in Dublin. A blackbearded figure stumped round a corner. Cunningham called him of the tribe of Reuben. Bloom started the story of Reuben J and the son and the Isle of Man boat, and Cunningham took it away and told it: the young chiseller over the wall into the Liffey, a boatman fishing him out by the slack of the breeches, a florin paid for the life. Dedalus said it was one and eightpence too much. Then they remembered the coffin. Paddy Dignam, as decent a little man as ever wore a hat, had gone suddenly, heart. Bloom said that was the best death, no suffering, a moment and it was over. Nobody answered. A tiny coffin galloped past with white plumes, a child, and Bloom saw a wrinkled face like little Rudy's. Power called suicide the worst of all and the greatest disgrace in a family. Dedalus said people called the man a coward. Cunningham, brisk with his watch, answered temporary insanity, a charitable view, not for them to judge. Bloom shut his lips. The large eyes had met him and looked away. He knew. There had been an inquest, a redlabelled bottle, yellow streaks on the face, the body slipped to the foot of the bed, and a letter: For my son Leopold. Overdose. Death by misadventure.

Cattle and sheep blocked the carriage, lowing and bleating on their way to the boats. Bloom said the corporation should run a tramline for them, and municipal funeral trams like Milan's, out to the cemetery gates, more decent than galloping two abreast. Dedalus damned it for a Pullman story. Power said it would be a poor lookout for Corny Kelleher. They recalled a hearse capsized at Dunphy's, the coffin on the road. White stone figures held out their hands in the stonecutter's yard, and Power pointed to the shuttered house where Childs was said to have murdered his brother. At Prospect Bloom shifted the soap into his handkerchief pocket and stepped out. One coach and three carriages. The mutes took the coffin in, and a girl with a stained face looked up at a woman for the sign to cry. Cunningham whispered that he had been in agony while suicide was talked of in front of Bloom. The father had poisoned himself at the Queen's hotel in Ennis, and the Clare journey was the anniversary. Power had never heard it. Behind them Bloom was asking Kernan if Dignam had been insured. The policy was heavily mortgaged. Five children were left, Martin trying to get the youngster into Artane, Ned Lambert hoping to place a girl at Todd's, a whip of a few bob a skull until the insurance cleared, and Menton down for a quid. In the chapel Bloom knelt on his newspaper while Father Coffey read Latin and shook holy water, the same sleep over every corpse. Out by the cart, Power said O'Connell's heart was buried in Rome. Dedalus pointed to his wife's grave, said he would soon be stretched beside her, and wept until Power took his arm. Kernan preferred Mount Jerome and quoted I am the resurrection and the life. Bloom agreed aloud, and thought the phrase could not touch the man in the ground. Menton asked who the chap behind Kernan was. Lambert told him: Bloom, husband of Marion Tweedy, the soprano. Menton remembered dancing with her at Mat Dillon's, a good armful, and asked what the man did and why she had married him.

John O'Connell shook their hands and told of two drunks who found Mulcahy's grave and told the statue of Our Saviour it was not a bit like the man. The joke was to cheer them, Cunningham said. At the hole Bloom counted heads and came to a thirteenth, a lanky man in a macintosh who had not been in the chapel. The coffin went down. A donkey brayed far off. He thought of his plot towards Finglas, his mother and little Rudy in it, and of how talk forgets you. The gravediggers flung the clods. He turned his face away. If Dignam were alive in the box it would be awful, and then he put the thought down: Monday he died. Hynes took the names. Leopold, Bloom said, and M'Coy's name too, since M'Coy had asked. Hynes wrote Charley, then M'Intosh for the man in the coat, and was gone before Bloom could tell him that was not a name. The mound rose. They went round by Parnell's grave, and Hynes shook his head at the story that the coffin was stones and that the chief would come again. Parnell would never come again. He was there, all that was mortal of him. A grey rat wriggled under a crypt. At the gates Bloom pointed to a dinge in John Henry Menton's hat. Menton stared and did not move. Martin Cunningham pointed as well. Menton smoothed the nap, clapped the hat on, and thanked Cunningham shortly. The two of them walked on, Martin laying down the law. Bloom dropped a few paces behind so as not to overhear, and their talk went on to the gates without him.