Part 111 (1/2)

THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!

_(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)_

SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate cla.s.s?

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Indignantly)_ I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation, six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave owing to his carryings on.

FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?

MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself as poor as I am.

BLOOM: _(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly)_ I treated you white.

I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.

Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering.

There's a medium in all things. Play cricket.

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Excitedly)_ As G.o.d is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters!

FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?

MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing.

BLOOM: She countera.s.saulted.

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully)_ I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it quiet.

_(General laughter.)_

GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly)_ Order in court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.

_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but, though branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths' child, he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever..._

_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that they cannot hear.)_

LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: _(Without looking up from their notebooks)_ Loosen his boots.

PROFESSOR MACHUGH: _(From the presstable, coughs and calls)_ Cough it up, man. Get it out in bits.

_(The cross.e.xamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket.

Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street Gripe, yes. Quite bad.

A plasterer's bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery.

Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He did not look in the bucket n.o.body. Rather a mess. Not completely._ A t.i.tbits _back number_.)

_(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.)_

J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest)_ This is no place for indecent levity at the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the Pharaoh. _Prima facie_, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of s.h.i.+pwreck and somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold--one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.

BLOOM: _(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about him dazedly, pa.s.sing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches his belt sailor fas.h.i.+on and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.)_ Him makee velly muchee fine night. _(He begins to lilt simply)_