He held up a forefinger of warning.
— If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine
- He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine
- But have to drink water and wish it were plain
- That I make when the wine becomes water again.
He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward
to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one
about to rise in the air, and chanted :
— Goodbye, now, goodbye. Write down all I said
- And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
- What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
- And Olivet’s breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye.
He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind
that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries.
Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said :
— We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not
a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it
somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?
— The ballad of Joking Jesus, Stephen answered.
— O, Haines said, you have heard it before?
— Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
— You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.
— There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.
Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green
stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.
— Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.
Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it
Annotations edit
Olivet
The Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
The Ballad of Joking Jesus
Based on The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly Sarcastic) Jesus by Oliver St. John Gogarty, the real life person that Buck Mulligan is based on.