Part 2 (1/2)

--Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

--O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

--Are you up there, Mulligan?

--I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

--Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down. The Sa.s.senach wants his morning rashers.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof:

--Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead:

_And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars._

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Insh.o.r.e and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words s.h.i.+mmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets: old featherfans, ta.s.selled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

_I am the boy That can enjoy Invisibility._

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

_And no more turn aside and brood._

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her gla.s.s of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's s.h.i.+rts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoa.r.s.e loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circ.u.mdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat._

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.