The Machinery of Words and Power — Ulysses

Before Nelson's pillar the trams were bawled off to Rathgar, Kingstown, Sandymount, and the rest of the lines, and under the post office the red mailcars took the sacks for Britain and overseas. In the Freeman office Red Murray cut Alexander Keyes's advertisement out of the paper, and Bloom carried the square through the printing works. William Brayden went up the stairs, beard framed, steered by an umbrella. Red Murray thought the face was Our Saviour's. Bloom said Mario, and then that his grace was one of our saviours also, if he could save the circulation. Hynes was at Nannetti's closet with the funeral paragraph. The foreman marked it press and sent it on without a word, and Bloom pointed Hynes after the cashier, who was just going to lunch. Three bob had been owing three weeks. Then he laid the cutting down. Keyes wanted it for July, changed: two keys crossed in a circle, the name, and round the top the house of keys, the Manx parliament, an innuendo of home rule to catch a tourist's eye. Nannetti said they could do the design and a little paragraph, if Keyes gave a three months' renewal. Bloom had not got the design. It had been in a Kilkenny paper. He would go and ask.

The machines threw off the folded papers with a sound like a voice. Nannetti shouted for Monks and the archbishop's letter, and Bloom left him to it. A typesetter distributed type at speed, reading backwards, so that a dead name would have stood reversed on the stick, and Bloom thought of his father reading the hagadah that way, a story that ends in everything eating everything else. On the stairs he found the lemon soap in his handkerchief and buttoned it into his hip pocket. Laughter took him into the Evening Telegraph. Ned Lambert was reading Dan Dawson's speech aloud, purling rills and a pensive bosom, and Simon Dedalus told him to stop, life was too short. Professor MacHugh called it bombast and named the speaker Doughy Daw. Bloom asked whose land it was. Dawson's, last night. J. J. O'Molloy came in looking for the editor, pale, the clever junior of the bar on the way down, debts of honour and a dwindling practice. Crawford was inside with Lenehan. He put his scarlet face out, refused a drink before mass, and Dedalus and Lambert left. The editor strode to the mantelpiece shouting that the North Cork militia had won every time, in Ohio.

Bloom telephoned from the inner office and came out sure he could catch Keyes at an auction on Bachelor's walk. Lenehan had offered Sceptre for the Gold cup. Newsboys rushed the hall, and MacHugh threw one out. Bloom said he was running round to Dillon's to fix the advertisement. Crawford told him to begone, the world was before him. From the window they watched the newsboys capering after him, taking off his flat feet and his walk. Crawford locked a drawer and got a cigarette lit, and then Stephen Dedalus came in behind Mr O'Madden Burke with typed sheets. The governor, Crawford said, had just gone. The letter was Mr Garrett Deasy's, not Stephen's. Crawford knew the man and the wife who had thrown soup in a waiter's face, ran his eye down the page, and told Stephen not to forget the Irishman who saved an emperor on the ramparts of Vienna. O'Molloy called saving princes a thank-you job. MacHugh would not be led off by the word Rome. The Roman, like the Englishman after him, brought sewers, not altars. They were loyal to lost causes. Lenehan got his riddle in. What opera is like a railway line? The Rose of Castile. Crawford put a hand on Stephen's shoulder and asked for something with a bite in it, the whole of them in it, not foot and mouth. He showed how Ignatius Gallaher had done it in eighty-one, the Phoenix Park murders cabled to the New York World as an advertisement, the route spelled in letters across the map, Skin-the-Goat's drive for an alibi among them. The telephone went. MacHugh came back to say Bloom was on the line. Tell him go to hell, Crawford said, and went on with the pub where the trail ended. O'Molloy told him his Cork legs were running away with him. The bar had its Whitesides. Sufficient for the day was the newspaper thereof.

Crawford cried that Grattan and Flood had written for this paper. O'Molloy answered with Seymour Bushe in the Childs murder, Roman evidence set against the Mosaic law, the Moses of Michelangelo a stony effigy in frozen music. Stephen blushed and took a cigarette. MacHugh set that aside. The finest oratory he had heard was John F. Taylor, up from a sickbed, answering Justice Fitzgibbon on the revival of Irish. Fitzgibbon had poured contempt on a new movement because it was weak. Taylor, as MacHugh gave the words back, set an Egyptian high priest before the young Moses: a mighty people, cities and galleys, against nomad herdsmen. Had Moses bowed to that, he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor come down from Sinai bearing the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw. No one contradicted him. O'Molloy said the man had died without entering the land of promise. Stephen moved that the house adjourn. Lenehan carried it and led them towards Mooney's. In Abbey street, with the racing special already being yelled, Stephen began a thing of his own. Two elderly women, Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe, save three and tenpence, buy brawn and plums, and waddle up the stair of Nelson's pillar, afraid of the dark, asking each other have you the brawn. Bloom caught Crawford on the steps. Keyes would renew for two months, not three, and wanted a paragraph in the Saturday pink, the design copied from the Kilkenny People, a play on the name. What should he be told? Crawford said to tell him he could kiss his arse, and then, over his shoulder, his royal Irish arse, any time he liked. He walked on. O'Molloy, wanting a bill backed, got nothing either. Take the will for the deed. Stephen finished. The women settle on their striped petticoats, eat the plums, and spit the stones out between the railings, peering up at the onehandled adulterer. MacHugh liked the phrase and asked the title. Stephen refused the Latin he was offered. He called it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, or the Parable of the Plums. At the crossing the trams stood with their trolleys still, becalmed in a short circuit, while the cabs rattled past. MacHugh peered up at Nelson from the pavement island and said the onehandled adulterer tickled him. Crawford said it had tickled the old ones too. The speeches stayed indoors. Out in the street the trams did not move, and Bloom was left on the steps with an answer he could not take back to Keyes.