No More Learning

After a brisk exchange of courtesies during which a smart upper cut of
the military man brought blood freely from his opponent's mouth the
lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to
Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean
and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being
counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the
towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of
the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with
delight.

--He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's
running a concert tour now up in the north.

--He is, says Joe. Isn't he?

--Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer
tour, you see. Just a holiday.

--Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? says Joe.

--My wife? says Bloom. She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success
too.

He's an excellent man to organise. Excellent.

Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the
cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the
tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island
bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight
the Boers. Old Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr
Boylan. You what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That's the
bucko that'll organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.

Pride of Calpe's rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There
grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The
gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed.
The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.

And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero
of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned
in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of
Lambert.

--Hello, Ned.

--Hello, Alf.

--Hello, Jack.

--Hello, Joe.

--God save you, says the citizen.

--Save you kindly, says J. J. What'll it be, Ned?

--Half one, says Ned.

So J. J. ordered the drinks.

--Were you round at the court? says Joe.

--Yes, says J. J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.

--Hope so, says Ned.

Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list
and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs's.
Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their
eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.
Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where no-one would
know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing
his boots out of the pop. What's your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and
done says I. Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days,
I'm thinking.

--Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? says Alf. U. p: up.

--Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.

--Ay, says Ned. And he wanted right go wrong to address the court only
Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined
first.

--Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God, I'd give anything to
hear him before a judge and jury.

--Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.

--Me? says Alf. Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character.

--Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence
against you.

--Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not
_compos mentis_. U. p: up.

_--Compos_ your eye! says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he's balmy?
Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat
on with a shoehorn.

--Yes, says J. J. , but the truth of a libel is no defence to an
indictment for publishing it in the eyes of the law.

--Ha ha, Alf, says Joe.

--Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.

--Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half
and half.

--How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he. . .

--Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that's neither fish
nor flesh.

--Nor good red herring, says Joe.

--That what's I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what
that is.

Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on
account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the
old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody
povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him,
bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she
married him because a cousin of his old fellow's was pewopener to the
pope. Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches,
the signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the
Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was
he, tell us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a
week, and he covered with all kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to
the world.

--And moreover, says J. J. , a postcard is publication. It was held to
be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my
opinion an action might lie.

Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our
pints in peace. Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself.

--Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.

--Good health, Ned, says J. J.

---There he is again, says Joe.

--Where? says Alf.

And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter
and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in
as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a
secondhand coffin.

--How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.

--Remanded, says J. J.

One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James
Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers
saying he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see
any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What?
Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and
his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew
Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him,
swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.

--Who tried the case? says Joe.

--Recorder, says Ned.

--Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.

--Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears
of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve
in tears on the bench.

--Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock
the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for
the corporation there near Butt bridge.

And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:

--A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children?
Ten, did you say?

--Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.

--And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court
immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,
sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking
industrious man! I dismiss the case.

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and
in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first
quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the
halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave
his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the
probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first
chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and
final testamentary disposition _in re_ the real and personal estate of
the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone,
an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of
Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there
about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the brehons at
the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the
county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim
of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of
Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the
tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and
of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of
Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the
tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he
conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and
truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their
sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict
give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And
they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by
the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do His
rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from
their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended
in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and
foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge
against him for he was a malefactor.

--Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland
filling the country with bugs.

So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe,
telling him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first
but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high
and holy by this and by that he'd do the devil and all.

--Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have
repetition. That's the whole secret.

--Rely on me, says Joe.

--Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We
want no more strangers in our house.

--O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that
Keyes, you see.

--Consider that done, says Joe.

--Very kind of you, says Bloom.

--The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in.
We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon
robbers here.

--Decree _nisi,_ says J. J.

And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a
spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling
after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and
when.
--A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of all
our misfortunes.

--And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the _Police Gazette_
with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.

--Give us a squint at her, says I.

And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off
of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct
of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds
pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her
bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles
and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be
late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.

--O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!

--There's hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off
of that one, what?

So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on
him as long as a late breakfast.

--Well, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action?
What did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide
about the Irish language?

O'Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the
puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of
that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient
city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after
due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn
counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into
honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.

--It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal
Sassenachs and their _patois. _

So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till
you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your
blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach
a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and
their colonies and their civilisation.

--Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with
them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody
thicklugged sons of whores' gets! No music and no art and no literature
worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.
Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts.

--The European family, says J. J. . . .

--They're not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin
Egan of Paris. You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language
anywhere in Europe except in a _cabinet d'aisance. _

And says John Wyse:

--Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:

--_Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion! _

He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the
medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan _Lamh
Dearg Abu_, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty
valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster
silent as the deathless gods.

--What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had
lost a bob and found a tanner.

--Gold cup, says he.

--Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.

_--Throwaway,_ says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest
nowhere.

--And Bass's mare? says Terry.

--Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid
on my tip _Sceptre_ for himself and a lady friend.

--I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on _Zinfandel_ that Mr Flynn
gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.

--Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. _Throwaway,_
says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name
is _Sceptre. _

So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was
anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his
luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.

--Not there, my child, says he.

--Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the
other dog.

And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom
sticking in an odd word.

--Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they
can't see the beam in their own.

--_Raimeis_, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow
that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost
tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!
And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax
and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our
tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our
Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk
and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent
in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the
Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar
now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to
sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even
Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from
Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish
hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for
the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe
us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the
Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and
bog to make us all die of consumption?

--As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland
with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was
reading a report of lord Castletown's. . .

--Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain
elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the
trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of
Eire, O.

--Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.

The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon
at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief
ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine
Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,
Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde
Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia
Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs
Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss
Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel
Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall,
Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana
Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis
graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by
her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in
a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip
of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with
a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by
bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss
Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very
becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty _motif_ of plume rose being
worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the
jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral.
Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability
and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played
a new and striking arrangement of _Woodman, spare that tree_ at the
conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre _in
Horto_ after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a
playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow,
ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs
Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.

--And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with
Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were
pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.

--And will again, says Joe.

--And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the
citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full
again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom
of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with
a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the
O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the
first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to
the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat,
the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue
field, the three sons of Milesius.

And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like
a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody
life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled
multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly
Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the
holding of an evicted tenant.

--Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?

--An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.

--Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you
asleep?

--Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.

Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of
attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying to
crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head
down like a bull at a gate. And another one: _Black Beast Burned in
Omaha, Ga_. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a
Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under
him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and
crucify him to make sure of their job.

--But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at
bay?

--I'll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.
Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about flogging on
the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself
_Disgusted One_.

So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew
of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the
parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad
brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of
a gun.

--A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John
Beresford called it but the modern God's Englishman calls it caning on
the breech.

And says John Wyse:

--'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane
and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad
till he yells meila murder.

--That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the
earth.

The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber
on the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen
gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about
of drudges and whipped serfs.

--On which the sun never rises, says Joe.

--And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The
unfortunate yahoos believe it.

They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified,
flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose
again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till
further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

--But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn't
it be the same here if you put force against force?

Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his
last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.

--We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater
Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the
black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid
low by the batteringram and the _Times_ rubbed its hands and told the
whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as
redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the
Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full
of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay,
they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in
the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember
the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no
cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.

--Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was. . .

--We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the
poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at
Killala.

--Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us
against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the
broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the
wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O'Donnell, duke of Tetuan
in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria
Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?

--The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know
what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren't they
trying to make an _Entente cordiale_ now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with
perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.

--_Conspuez les Francais_, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.

--And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven't we
had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the
elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?

Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one
with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of
God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting
her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the
whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about _Ehren on the Rhine_
and come where the boose is cheaper.

--Well, says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.

--Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There's a bloody sight more pox
than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!

--And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests
and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic
Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his
jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.

--They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little
Alf.

And says J. J. :

--Considerations of space influenced their lordships' decision.

--Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.

--Yes, sir, says he. I will.

--You? says Joe.

--Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.

--Repeat that dose, says Joe.

Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with
his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.

--Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.
Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

--But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

--Yes, says Bloom.

--What is it? says John Wyse.

--A nation?