— Queenstown Harbour, Stephen replied.
— That’s right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That’s where I hails from. My little woman’s down there. She’s waiting for me, I know. For England, home and beauty. She’s my own true wife I haven’t seen for seven years now, sailing about.
Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene — the homecoming to the mariner’s roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones — a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O’Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece, by the way, of poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way. Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he finelly did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but I’ve come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grass widow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead. Rocked in the cradle of the deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and onions. No chair for father. Boo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, post mortem child. With a high ro! and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted husband, W. B. Murphy.
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of the jarvies with the request :
— You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you, do you?
The jarvey addressed, as it happened, had not but the keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.
— Thank you, the sailor said.
He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing, and with some slow stammers, proceeded :
— We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? W. B. Murphy, A. B. S.
In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket and handed to his neighbours a not very cleanlooking folded document.
