The Annotated "Ulysses"/Page 028
— Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
— Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir.
— Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.
— No, sir.
Ugly and futile : lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s
bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a
squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from
her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother’s
prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more :
the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and
wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled under foot and had
gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven : and on a heath
beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless
bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra
that Shakespeare’s ghost is Hamlet’s grandfather. Sargent peered askance
through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom : the hollow
knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery
of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse,
bow to partner : so : imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world,
Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing
in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining
in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
— Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
— Yes, sir.
In long shady strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of
shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris : subjective and objective
genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid
from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood
bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far
and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both