The reading stopped at ". . . in case they." (16.1118)
Summary:
The sailor continues to be loquacious. Though actually not much happens at this late hour in the cabman's shelter, many different topics are touched upon: Bloom compares the women of Italy with those of Ireland (to the latter's disadvantage), mentions that he was in the Kildare street museum earlier in the day, where he was impressed by the splendid proportions of hips, bosom. The sailor goes out to have a swig out of the flasks in his pocket and to relieve himself, while the other customers of the cabman's shelter talk of ships, ship wrecks, and the sorry state of the Irish shipping industry. This inspires the keeper, Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, who has his own axe to grind, to sing the glory of Ireland, and to proclaim that Ireland will be the Achilles heel of England. His advice to every Irishman [is]: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.
Bloom clearly does not agree with all this rhetoric. He tells Stephen, recalling the scene with the citizen earlier, how he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo, and how he simply but effectually silenced the offender. He says - in the typical manner in which we have come to know how Bloom speaks, confusing issues, - “He called me a jew . . . So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I'm not.” (The question of whether Bloom is a Jew or not, discussed in an episode that seems to keep asking “What is reality?” is ingenious.)
Remembering this earlier incident with the citizen in the pub, Bloom makes, what is perhaps the most important statement on these pages in this episode. He says: “I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form.” “It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak.”
Stephen continues to be reticent.
