Page:Ulysses, 1922.djvu/596

Rh on the topic for the Irish Times) breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the case of the s. s. Lady Cairns of Swansea, run into by the Mona, which was on an opposite tack, in rather muggyish weather and lost with all hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the Mona’s, said he was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it appears, in her hold.

At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him to unfurl a reef, the sailor vacated his seat.

Let me cross your bows, mate, he said to his neighbour, who was just gently dropping off into a peaceful dose.

He made tracks heavily, slowly, with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door, stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings, Mr Bloom, who noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship’s rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it, or unscrew, and, applying its nozzle to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manœuvre after the counterattraction in the shape of a female, who, however, had disappeared to all intents and purposes, could, by straining, just perceive him, when duly refreshed, by his rum puncheon exploit, gazing up at the piers and girders of the Loop Line, rather out of his depth, as of course it was all radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but, after a brief space of time during which silence reigned supreme, the sailor, evidently giving it a wide berth, eased himself close at hand, the noise of his bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where it apparently woke a horse of the cabrank.

A hoof scooped anyway for new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his sentrybox by the brazier of live coke, the watcher of the corporation, who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability, from dictates of humanity, knowing him before shifted about and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in the arms