Page 840 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

PADDY DIGNAM: (With pricked up ears, winces)
Overtones. (He wriggles forward and places an ear to the
ground) My master’s voice!

JOHN O’CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U.
P. eightyfive thousand. Field seventeen. House of Keys.
Plot, one hundred and one.
(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail
stiffpointcd, his ears cocked.)
PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.
(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing
its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese
grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace.
Dignam’s voice, muffled, is heard baying under ground:
Dignam’s dead and gone below. Tom Rochford,
robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his
twocolumned machine.)
TOM ROCHFORD: (A hand to his breastbone, bows)
Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a
resolute stare) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow.
(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed
in the coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought.
All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again through the sump.
Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog a piano sounds. He stands before

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