Cast 78. Page 296, line 530.
—A penny for your thoughts.
—What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I was only wondering was it late.
Because she wished to goodness they’d take the snottynosed twins and their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because they were told to be in early.
—Wait, said Cissy, I’ll run ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum.
This is from Episode 13. It is eight in the evening, on Sandymount Strand. Three girls are minding children.
Edy Boardman has the baby in a pram, and Cissy Caffrey has brought along her little twin brothers Tommy and Jacky. This is the moment when Edy speaks to Gerty MacDowell.
Nothing much seems to happen here, but it is surprisingly difficult to pin down the meaning.
“A penny for your thoughts” means, literally, “I’ll give you a penny if you tell me what you’re thinking,” and from that comes the ordinary sense, “What are you thinking about?”
“wish to goodness …” means something like “very much wish that …”
I could not make sense of “to the mischief.”
By the way, perhaps because year 2022 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, a new annotated edition has appeared from Oxford University Press.
Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses. Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner. Oxford University Press; 1st edition May 21, 2022.
Looking at Slote’s annotations, I found that “mischief” here means “the devil.” So it does not mean “mischief” in the ordinary sense. And sure enough, the dictionary does indeed give this meaning.
mischief：mis′chif (coll.) the devil, as in 'What the mischief,' &c
Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
Since “go to the devil” means something like “go to blazes” or “be off with you,” I take “take … home to the mischief” to mean “take them home and be done with them.”
Furthermore, according to Slote’s notes, “out of that” is an Irish expression meaning “at once” or “straight away.” Once that is understood, the sentence begins to make sense.
For the record, this book is a massive volume—1,367 pages and five centimetres thick—but unlike Gifford’s annotations it is set in a single column and in larger type, so it is not actually more detailed. I tried looking up a few passages that had long puzzled me, but they did not become any clearer. It seems there is no danger that the pleasures of reading Ulysses will be taken away.
Now then, the phrase that follows—“it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again”—does seem, as far as I can tell from searching online, to come from a poem. It appears as a refrain in Kissing Time by the American writer Eugene Field, who was famous for verse for children.
Sometimes, maybe, he wanders
A heedless, aimless way—
Sometimes, maybe, he loiters
In pretty, prattling play;
But presently bethinks him
And hastens to me then,
For it's half-past kissing time
And time to kiss again!
I am also not quite sure about “uncle Peter.” “Uncle” can mean a pawnbroker. So perhaps it means something like “that rich old uncle.” In that case, it would refer to Bloom, who is sitting there on the strand.
uncle: A pawnbroker: so called in humorous allusion to the financial favors often expected and sometimes received from rich uncles.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
As for “conundrum,” this awkward Latinate word ordinarily means “a riddle” or “a puzzle,” which does not fit the context here at all. It must be referring to Bloom’s watch. My tentative guess is that Cissy means to say “pendulum,” but gets it wrong and says “conundrum” instead.
Episode 13 has a highly distinctive style, but I regret that I do not quite have the ear to appreciate its individuality properly. In the other episodes, I can at least vaguely sense what is interesting about the style, but this one still escapes me.
Sandymount Strand
"Looking South on Sandymount" by Michael Foley Photography is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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