Ulysses | Page 2

O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
--He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?
--A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
--I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I
don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved
men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.
Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch
and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
--Scutter! he cried thickly.
He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, said:

--Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled
handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the
handkerchief, he said:
--The bard's noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost
taste it, can't you?
He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair
stirring slightly.
--God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The
snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. EPI OINOPA PONTON. Ah, Dedalus, the
Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. THALATTA!
THALATTA! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the
water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown.
--Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.
He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face.
--The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have
anything to do with you.
--Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
--You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck
Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you
with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something
sinister in you ...
He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.
--But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them
all!
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and
gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of
love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her
wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and
rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted
ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by
the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid.

A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile
which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
--Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags.
How are the secondhand breeks?
--They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
--The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God knows what
poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing
in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you're dressed.
--Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.
--He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He
kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.
Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile
eyes.
--That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g.p.i.
He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane!
He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now
radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering
teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.
--Look at yourself, he said,