"an amalgam as absorbing as calzium chloereydes and hydrophobe sponges could make it"

(34.9-36.7) Picking up with the second chapter's introduction to HCE, we get the first detailed telling of HCE's somewhat mysterious fall, which has been alluded to throughout the Wake.  Slander has not been able to convict HCE of anything graver than this, and it's veracity is in doubt because it was witnessed only by a few drunks.  Getting to it, though, HCE is accused of "having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus [i.e., ungentlemanly immodesty] opposite a pair of dainty maidservants."  No two stories seem to match up, but it appears that these two young women answered the call of nature (à la our old friend Jeanneke Pis), which resulted in an "incautious, but at its wildest, a partial exposure."  

Joyce plays off the old "women: can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" quip in beginning the next paragraph:  "We can't do without them.  Wives, rush to the restyours!"  HCE has maintained his guiltlessness "of much laid to him," and people have taken his word for it.  But they still tell the story (the absorbing amalgam referenced in this post's title) of how HCE met a man we'll call the Cad.  "[A]ges and ages after [HCE's] alleged misdemeanour," HCE was strolling through Phoenix Park when he came upon "a cad with a pipe."  The Cad, who is referred to as "the luciferant," accosts HCE with a greeting spoken in Irish and then asks Earwicker what time it is (evidently, the Cad's watch is broken).  HCE is startled and frightened by the Cad, so, "unwishful as he felt of being hurled into eternity right then, plugged by a soft-nosed bullet from the sap," he tells the luciferant that it's twelve o'clock just as the nearby church bells toll the hour.  Still frazzled, HCE begins to defend himself from the accusation concerning the young women, pleading that the person who made the accusation "was quite beneath parr and several degrees lower than yore triplehydrad snake."  

The reading's starting to get a bit tougher now that I'm getting deeper into the second chapter.  Every day I'm impressed with how much Joyce loads into the Wake.  One thing from this passage that caught my eye in McHugh's Annotations involved the word Joyce uses to express that the Cad's watch is broken.  The phrase reads, "his watch was bradys."  On a literal level, this can mean his watch was brakyn/breaken/broken.  But wait, there's more.  McHugh notes that "bradus" is Greek for "slow."  So, on the translingual level, the phrase can read "his watch was slow."  Then there's the Irish history level.  McHugh points out that Joe Brady was one of the perpetrators of the infamous Phoenix Park murders.  If the Cad's watch was "Joe Brady's," then in a sense he's a witness to the Phoenix Park murders, and HCE, as the Cad's counterpart and someone accused of a crime in Phoenix Park, stands in the role of the nationalistic murderers.  Perhaps it's HCE's perception of the Cad as a witness to his crime that makes him so defensive.