"But there's a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P."

(101.22-103.11)  And so today we reach the end of both our formal introduction to HCE's wife, ALP, and the fourth chapter of Finnegans Wake.  There are still those who deride HCE, but his wife remains steadfast in her support of him.  In Joyce's own exquisite language, she is "one nearer him, dearer than all, first warming creature of his early morn, bondwoman of the house."  She has mothered his children and sacrificed for him, and though she has aged, she retains her youthful vitality.  She protected HCE after his fall, watched over him during his wake, and will not rest in her quest for him until she has crushed the slander's head and restored both his good name and the order of the universe.

HCE is beyond help from our worldly medicines and powers now, and we are warned not to defile his grave.  As the narrator says, "The bane of Tut is on it.  Ware!"  "But," the narrator tells us, "there's a little lady waiting and her name is A.L.P.  And you'll agree.  She must be she.  For her holden heirheaps hanging down her back."  HCE was not faithful.  He spent his time among the harems, with women such as "Poppy Narancy, Giallia, Chlora, Marinka, Anileen, Parme," whose names are words from various languages representing every color of the rainbow.  HCE's actions might cause him to be abandoned by all, but ALP will stand by her man.  As the narrator says, "Then who but Crippled-with-Children would speak up for Dropping-with-Sweat?"

The next section is a lyric based on the song "At Trinity Church I Met My Doom," in which a man sings of the conniving woman who married him and caused his downfall.  In the song, the woman is the deceiver and the man is the victim, but in Joyce's lyric it is the man (HCE) who is to blame, "the groot gudgeon" who "gulped it all."  The Wake's thunder is present in the lyric ("Attabom, attabom, attabombomboom!"), emphasizing the man's fall, and in Joyce's version the victim of that fall is not only the man, but us all, which is why the lyric is punctuated with "Woe!"

Joyce doesn't leave us here with woe, though.  Instead, the fourth chapter ends in a manner similar to the third chapter.  In a passage loaded with biblical allusions, Joyce weaves a comforting image of ALP, the river running in the book's opening word, as the river that buoys and nourishes us during our final rest.  This beautiful prose is worth quoting in full:

Nomad may roam with Nabuch but let naaman laugh at Jordan!  For we, we have taken our sheet upon her stones where we have hanged our hearts in her trees; and we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong.