BLOOM: (Behind his hand.) She’s drunk. The woman is inebriated. (He murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim.) Shitbroleeth.
SECOND WATCH: (Tears in his eyes, to Bloom.) You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.
BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain’s fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift.
FIRST WATCH: Regiment.
BLOOM: (Turns to the gallery.) The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms up there among you. The R. D. F., with our own Metropolitan police, guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as physique, in the service of our sovereign.
A VOICE: Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
BLOOM: (His hand on the shoulder of the first watch.) My old dad too was a J. P. I’m as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. (With quiet feeling.) Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.
FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.
BLOOM: Well, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. In fact we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected with the British and Irish press. If you ring up…
(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)
MYLES CRAWFORD: (His cock’s wattles wagging.) Hello, seventyseven eightfour. Hello. Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here. Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?
(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio labelled Matcham’s Masterstrokes.)
BEAUFOY: (Drawls.) No, you aren’t. Not by a long shot if I know it. I don’t see it, that’s all. No born gentleman, no-one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak masquerading as a literateur. It’s perfectly obvious that with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the kingdom.
BLOOM: (Murmurs with hangdog meekness glum.) That bit about the laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may…
BEAUFOY: (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court.) You funny ass, you! You’re too beastly awfully weird for words! I don’t think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses’ fees, shan’t we? We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.
BLOOM: (Indistinctly.) University of life. Bad art.
BEAUFOY: (Shouts.) It’s a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness of the man! (He extends his portfolio.) We have here damning evidence, the corpus delicti, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.
A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY:
Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
BLOOM: (Bravely.) Overdrawn.
BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter! (To the court.) Why, look at the man’s private life! Leading a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!
BLOOM: (To the court.) And he, a bachelor, how…
FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
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 class?
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 God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oylsters!
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 counterassaulted.
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 crossexamination 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. Nobody. Rather a mess. Not completely. A Titbits 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 shipwreck 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,
