―Come, he counselled, to close the séance.
Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear, they left the shelter or shanty together and the élite society of oilskin and company whom nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their dolce far niente. Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and fagged out, paused at the, for a moment … the door to …
―One thing I never understood, he said, to be original on the spur of the moment, why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs upside down on the tables in cafés.
To which impromptu the neverfailing Bloom replied without a moment’s hesitation, saying straight off:
―To sweep the floor in the morning.
So saying he skipped around nimbly, considering frankly, at the same time apologetic, to get on his companion’s right, a habit of his, by the bye the right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit weak on his pins.
―It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a moment. The only thing is to walk then you’ll feel a different man. It’s not far. Lean on me.
Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen’s right and led him on accordingly.
―Yes, Stephen said uncertainly, because he thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that.
Anyhow, they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier, etc. where the municipal supernumerary, ex-Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh fields and pastures new. And apropos of coffin of stones, the analogy was not at all bad, as it was in fact a stoning to death on the part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.
So they passed on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made tracks arm-in-arm across Beresford Place. Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots, Meyerbeer’s Seven Last Words on the Cross
, and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass
, he simply revelled in, the Gloria
in that being to his mind the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and Sankey hymns or Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant to be
. He also yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini’s Stabat Mater
, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say greatly adding to her other laurels and putting the others totally in the shade in the jesuit fathers’ church in Upper Gardiner Street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or virtuosi rather. There was the unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and, suffice it to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character, there was a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole, though favouring preferably light opera of the Don Giovanni description, and Martha, a gem in its line, he had a penchant, though with only a surface knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old favourites, he mentioned par excellence Lionel’s air in Martha, M’appari
, which, curiously enough, he heard, or overheard, to be more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the lips of Stephen’s respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in reply to a politely put query, said he didn’t but launched out into praises of Shakespeare’s songs, at least of in or about that period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter Lane near Gerard the herbalist, who anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus, an instrument he was contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom Bloom did not quite recall, though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas and Farnaby and son with their dux and comes conceits and Byrd (William), who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen’s Chapel or anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull.
On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond the swing chain, a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground, brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive guineas and
