For three minutes he sat that way, with all his strength concentrated in the effort to conquer his drunkenness. He was barely conscious of the effort he was making. It was instinct that warned him of the dangers that lay ahead of him, instinct aroused by the contact with Mulligan’s body. His drunkenness resisted fiercely. Continual waves of reckless delirium surged through his body, rising up from his chest to his head, with the spontaneous action of sea waves swelling up the side of an abrupt precipice. His head hummed and swayed. His eyes blinked. His tongue wagged loose and wanted to talk and sing and laugh. An unaccountable joy permeated him, a joy that did not originate in his actual self but in some strange being that had come to lodge in him temporarily. He could contemplate that new strange being with savage hatred as he pressed his hands against his skull. That being was an enemy of his. He must conquer him. At last he felt his drunkenness weakening, gradually, like the lessening of a pain at night. It did not disappear but its effects changed. Instead of feeling reckless and hilarious, he began to feel cunning, careful, gloomy, defiant, recklessly strong. His head cooled and steadied. It seemed to have become suddenly walled with steel, so that he almost experienced a physical pain from the pressure of his skull against the skin on his forehead. But he took away his hands from his forehead and he found that the pain vanished. His teeth set. His face assumed a look of stony apathy, the lips hanging flabbily, the cheeks loose, the eyes vacant. All the muscles of his body went loose, with the looseness of the athlete, who is standing at ease, but ready to plunge off somewhere like an arrow. In response to this change, as it were in his personality, he got to his feet in a dignified, calculated, imperious manner. He cleared his throat. He held out his right hand. He spoke. “Listen, men,” he said. “I had a drop taken when I came in here. I didn’t know what I was doin’. I just remembered now who I was talkin’ to an’ it nearly knocked me dead. Look at him.” He pointed a thick, short, hairy forefinger at Mulligan. “He wouldn’t speak to me. He’s afraid to look at me. I know why. It’s him that informed on Frankie McPhillip an’ he knows that I saw him.” “It’s a lie,” screamed Mulligan, suddenly starting up and spreading out his hands and feet, downwards and outwards, as if he were resting exhausted after a race. His face was distorted with fear, amazement and rage. “It’s a lie, boys. It’s a lie I tell yez. Before the Blessed Mother of the Infant Jesus I swear on me knees that I never left the house to-day except to go to the chapel to say me prayers.” “Ha! Me fine boyo!” cried Gypo excitedly. “Will ye listen to his oaths? It’s easy work for an informer swearin’ oaths.”