ng hands. This owner, that.
Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have
all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age
after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese
wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling
suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter,
for the night.
No-one is anything.
This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate
this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.
Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in
there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid me. Hope
they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware
opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,
unseeing.
There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a
coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't
meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a
corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's
uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on
his high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
pain. Great man's brother: his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the
city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess
there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to
pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That's the
fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister
Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright lik
surgeon M'Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath. Apply
for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot's
banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they
put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and
lead him out of the house of commons by the arm.
--Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which
the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with
a Scotch accent. The tentacles...
They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bi
|