Eumaeus
“Preparatory to anything else…”
Exhausted, Bloom takes Stephen for coffee in a late-night shelter. The tired prose drifts as the two finally talk, sort of, beside a dubious sailor.
- Beat 01A long walk
Bloom dusts Stephen off and walks him slowly through the post-midnight streets toward the cabman's shelter under the Loop Line bridge. The prose is on purpose flabby, full of clichés and digressions — both men are exhausted.
- Beat 02The cabman's shelter
Inside, presided over by a man rumoured to be the ex-Invincible 'Skin-the-Goat,' they take coffee and a stale bun and sit among cabmen, sailors, and a streetwalker who is shooed off.
- Beat 03The sailor
A red-bearded sailor named W. B. Murphy spins long, dubious tales of foreign ports and shows tattoos by lamplight. Bloom listens with weary kindness and quietly doubts every word.
- Beat 04Bloom and Stephen, sort of, talk
Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly, talks vaguely about politics, music, and his own scrape at Barney Kiernan's. Stephen replies in monosyllables. They are tired in different ways.
- Beat 05Out the door
Bloom helps Stephen up and they leave together for Eccles Street, walking in step at last as a Dublin street-sweeper watches them pass.
One in the morning. The chaos is over. Bloom walks the dazed, half-drunk Stephen across the city to a cabmen's shelter near the docks for a cup of bad coffee and a stale bun. The prose deliberately goes flat, exhausted, full of clichés and second-hand phrases and small grammatical mistakes, as if even the narrator is too tired to do this properly. They half-listen to a sailor at the next table who is telling tall tales about his travels and may not even be the man he claims to be. They look at a botched newspaper report of Dignam's funeral that's misspelled Bloom's name and listed him among the mourners. They talk a little, awkwardly, the way two strangers do when one of them is sobering up and the other is trying not to push. Bloom shows Stephen a slightly dated photograph of Molly, and lets him look at it longer than is strictly necessary. The chapter is the long, gentle comedown after Nighttown: nothing dramatic happens, nobody confesses anything, and yet something is being quietly negotiated — Bloom is, in his careful, slightly fussy way, offering Stephen a place to land, and Stephen is letting him.
- Scene
- The Shelter
- Hour
- 1:00 AM
- Organ
- Nerves
- Art
- Navigation
- Color
- —
- Symbol
- Sailors
- Technic
- Narrative (old)
- Correspondence
- Eumaeus