Page:Ulysses, 1922.djvu/542

coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last wiswitchback lumbering up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)

(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes closed, he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn roundabout. Bright midges dance on wall. He stops dead.)

stephen

Ho!

(Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)

the choir

Liliata rutilantium te confessorum…
Jubilantium te virginum…

(From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)

buck mulligan

She’s beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (He upturns his eyes.) Mercurial Malachi.

the mother

(With the subtle smile of death’s madness.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

stephen

(Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogey man’s trick is this?

buck mulligan

(Shakes his curling capbell.) The mockery of it! Kinch killed her dogsbody