Page 789 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

THE IDIOT: (Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles)
Grhahute!
THE CHILDREN: Where’s the great light?

THE IDIOT: (Gobbing) Ghaghahest.
(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a
rope slung between two railings, counting. A form sprawled
against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans,
grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome
totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and
bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last
bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his
peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her
lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep
with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches
her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands
the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night
watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom
tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a
man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens.
In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out
the tatts from the hair of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey’s voice,
still young, sings shrill from a lane.)
CISSY CAFFREY:

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