Page:Ulysses, 1922.djvu/594

Rh He might even have done for his man, supposing it was his own case he told, as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness, because meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting news from abroad, would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean seas to draw the long bow about the schooner Hesperus and etcetera. And when all was said and done, the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s all a pure invention, he resumed. Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants, though, that is rather a far cry you see once in a way. Marcella, the midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged. They couldn’t straighten their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline, the sinews, or whatever you like to call them, behind the right knee, were utterly powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as gods. There’s an example again of simple souls.

However, reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who reminded him a bit of Ludwig, alias Ledwidge, when he occupied the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the management in the Flying Dutchman, a stupendous success, and his host of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually fell a bit flat as also did trains), there was nothing intrinsically incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary, that stab in the back touch was quite in keeping with those Italianos, though candidly he was none the less free to admit those ice creamers and friers in the fish way, not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth, over in little Italy there, near the Coombe, were sober thrifty hardworking fellows except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good old succulent tuckink with garlic de rigueur off him or her next day on the quiet and, he added, on the cheap.

Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like