The Annotated "Ulysses"/Page 389
clapping on the table so as to evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory
Allelujurum was round again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring
through his nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls
her. I bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon.
'Slife, I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of the old
bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell to praising of it,
each after his own fashion, though the same young blade held with his former
view that another than her conjugial had been the man in the gap, a clerk in
orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every
household. Singular, communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully
unequal faculty of metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal
dormitory and the dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity,
that the mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a
pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of an art
which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But, he further
added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in common oppress them
for I have more than once observed that birds of a feather laugh together.
But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,
has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civil
rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity? Where
is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled? During the
recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary advantage with his granados
did this traitor to his kind not seize that moment to discharge his piece
against the empire of which he is a tenant at will while he trembled for the
security of his four per cents? Has he forgotten this as he forgets all benefits
received? Or is it that from being a deluder of others he has become at
last his own dupe as he is, if report belie him not, his own and his only
enjoyer? Far be it from candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable
lady, the daughter of a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections
upon her virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his
interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been too
long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to his
objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of the desperate. He says
this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his piety, who did not scruple,
oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt illicit intercourse with a female
domestic drawn from the lowest strata of society! Nay, had the hussy's
scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel it had gone with her as hard as with