Episode 15 - Circe - Page 2

Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the redcoats.)

PRIVATE COMPTON (Jerks his finger.) Way for the parson.

PRIVATE CARR (Turns and calls.) What ho, parson!

CISSY CAFFREY (Her voice soaring higher.)

She has it, she got it,
Wherever she put it
The leg of the duck.

(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy the introit for paschal time. Lynch, his jockey cap low on his brow, attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)

STEPHEN Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia.

(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a doorway.)

THE BAWD (Her voice whispering huskily.) Sst! Come here till I tell you. Maidenhead inside. Sst.

STEPHEN (Altius aliqantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit acqua ista.

THE BAWD (Spits in their trail her jet of venom.) Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.

(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with Bertha Supple, draws her shawl across her nostrils.)

EDY BOARDMAN (Bickering.) And say the one: I seen you up Faithful place with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his cometobed hat. Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You never seen me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The likes of her! Stag that one is. Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with two fellows the one time, Kildbride the enginedriver and lancecorporal Oliphant.

STEPHEN (Triumphaliter.) Salvi facti i sunt.

(He flourishes his ashplant shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him, growling. Lynch scar's it with a kick.)

LYNCH So that?

STEPHEN (Looks behind.) So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.

LYNCH Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!

STEPHEN We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.

LYNCH Ba!

STEPHEN Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug? This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread and wine in Omar. Hold my stick.

LYNCH Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?

STEPHEN Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat juventutem meam.

(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher.)

LYNCH Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch