Page:Ulysses, 1922.djvu/492

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(Lightly.) Only for what happened him.

How?

(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggyneck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchias, a Lybian eunuch, the pope’s bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a whore. Apocalypse.

And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn’t swallow and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral.

(Gravely.) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe?

(Gaily.) C’était le sacré pigeon, Philippe.

(Laughs.) And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.

(Nods.) Locomotor ataxy.

(Gaily.) O, my dictionary.