of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at
heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and
scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble
every student there. Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them
nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full
pound if a milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha? They
are out tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it, Burke’s of
Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows, giving them sharp
language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with nurse a
thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up there.
Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward of
watching in Horne’s house has told its tale in that washedout pallor. Them all
being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in going :
Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher’s bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod’s slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music. Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask,
