Love that dare not speak its name.
As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you deny that in the fifth scene of HAMLET he has branded her with infamy tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will. But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists. She was entitled to her widow's dower At common law. His legal knowledge was great Our judges tell us. Him Satan fleers, Mocker: And therefore he left out her name From the first draft but he did not leave out The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters, For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford And in London. And therefore when he was urged, As I believe, to name her He left her his Secondbest Bed. PUNKT. Leftherhis Secondbest Leftherhis Bestabed Secabest Leftabed.
Woa!
AMPLIUS. IN SOCIETATE HUMANA HOC EST MAXIME NECESSARIUM UT SIT AMICITIA INTER MULTOS.
Saint Thomas, Stephen began ...
ORA PRO NOBIS, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
POGUE MAHONE! ACUSHLA MACHREE! It's destroyed we are from this day! It's destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's widow, is the will to die.
REQUIESCAT! Stephen prayed.
WHAT OF ALL THE WILL TO DO? IT HAS VANISHED LONG AGO ...
She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the MERRY WIVES and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over HOOKS AND EYES FOR BELIEVERS' BREECHES and THE MOST SPIRITUAL SNUFFBOX TO MAKE THE MOST DEVOUT SOULS SNEEZE. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
History shows that to be true, INQUIT EGLINTONUS CHRONOLOLOGOS. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.