PART FIVE: THE WORLD OUTSIDE

Andrews, and six other men from his division, sat at a table outside the cafe opposite the Gare de l'Est. He leaned back in his chair with a cup of coffee lifted, looking across it at the stone houses with many balconies. Steam, scented of milk and coffee, rose from the cup as he sipped from it. His ears were full of a rumble of traffic and a clacking of heels as people walked briskly by along the damp pavements. For a while he did not hear what the men he was sitting with were saying. They talked and laughed, but he looked beyond their khaki uniforms and their boat-shaped caps unconsciously. He was taken up with the smell of the coffee and of the mist. A little rusty sunshine shone on the table of the cafe and on the thin varnish of wet mud that covered the asphalt pavement. Looking down the Avenue, away from the station, the houses, dark grey tending to greenish in the shadow and to violet in the sun, faded into a soft haze of distance. Dull gilt lettering glittered along black balconies. In the foreground were men and women walking briskly, their cheeks whipped a little into color by the rawness of the morning. The sky was a faintly roseate grey.

Walters was speaking:

“The first thing I want to see is the Eiffel Tower.”

“Why d'you want to see that?” said the small sergeant with a black mustache and rings round his eyes like a monkey.

“Why, man, don't you know that everything begins from the Eiffel Tower? If it weren't for the Eiffel Tower, there wouldn't be any sky-scrapers....”

“How about the Flatiron Building and Brooklyn Bridge? They were built before the Eiffel Tower, weren't they?” interrupted the man from New York.

“The Eiffel Tower's the first piece of complete girder construction in the whole world,” reiterated Walters dogmatically.

“First thing I'm going to do's go to the Folies Berd-jairs; me for the w.w.'s.”

“Better lay off the wild women, Bill,” said Walters.

“I ain't goin' to look at a woman,” said the sergeant with the black mustache. “I guess I seen enough women in my time, anyway.... The war's over, anyway.”

“You just wait, kid, till you fasten your lamps on a real Parizianne,” said a burly, unshaven man with a corporal's stripes on his arm, roaring with laughter.

Andrews lost track of the talk again, staring dreamily through half-closed eyes down the long straight street, where greens and violets and browns merged into a bluish grey monochrome at a little distance. He wanted to be alone, to wander at random through the city, to stare dreamily at people and things, to talk by chance to men and women, to sink his life into the misty sparkling life of the streets. The smell of the mist brought a memory to his mind. For a long while he groped for it, until suddenly he remembered his dinner with Henslowe and the faces of the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte. He must find Henslowe at once. A second's fierce resentment went through him against all these people about him. Christ! He must get away from them all; his freedom had been hard enough won; he must enjoy it to the uttermost.

“Say, I'm going to stick to you, Andy.” Walters's voice broke into his reverie. “I'm going to appoint you the corps of interpreters.”

Andrews laughed.

“D'you know the way to the School Headquarters?”

“The R. T. O. said take the subway.”

“I'm going to walk,” said Andrews.

“You'll get lost, won't you?”

“No danger, worse luck,” said Andrews, getting to his feet. “I'll see you fellows at the School Headquarters, whatever those are.... So long.”

“Say, Andy, I'll wait for you there,” Walters called after him.

Andrews darted down a side street. He could hardly keep from shouting aloud when he found himself alone, free, with days and days ahead of him to work and think, gradually to rid his limbs of the stiff attitudes of the automaton. The smell of the streets, and the mist, indefinably poignant, rose like incense smoke in fantastic spirals through his brain, making him hungry and dazzled, making his arms and legs feel lithe and as ready for delight as a crouching cat for a spring. His heavy shoes beat out a dance as they clattered on the wet pavements under his springy steps. He was walking very fast, stopping suddenly now and then to look at the greens and oranges and crimsons of vegetables in a push cart, to catch a vista down intricate streets, to look into the rich brown obscurity of a small wine shop where workmen stood at the counter sipping white wine. Oval, delicate faces, bearded faces of men, slightly gaunt faces of young women, red cheeks of boys, wrinkled faces of old women, whose ugliness seemed to have hidden in it, stirringly, all the beauty of youth and the tragedy of lives that had been lived; the faces of the people he passed moved him like rhythms of an orchestra. After much walking, turning always down the street which looked pleasantest, he came to an oval with a statue of a pompous personage on a ramping horse. “Place des Victoires,” he read the name, which gave him a faint tinge of amusement. He looked quizzically at the heroic features of the sun king and walked off laughing. “I suppose they did it better in those days, the grand manner,” he muttered. And his delight redoubled in rubbing shoulders with the people whose effigies would never appear astride ramping-eared horses in squares built to commemorate victories. He came out on a broad straight avenue, where there were many American officers he had to salute, and M. P.'s and shops with wide plate-glass windows, full of objects that had a shiny, expensive look. “Another case of victories,” he thought, as he went off into a side street, taking with him a glimpse of the bluish-grey pile of the Opera, with its pompous windows and its naked bronze ladies holding lamps.

He was in a narrow street full of hotels and fashionable barber shops, from which came an odor of cosmopolitan perfumery, of casinos and ballrooms and diplomatic receptions, when he noticed an American officer coming towards him, reeling a little,--a tall, elderly man with a red face and a bottle nose. He saluted.

The officer stopped still, swaying from side to side, and said in a whining voice:

“Shonny, d'you know where Henry'sh Bar is?”

“No, I don't, Major,” said Andrews, who felt himself enveloped in an odor of cocktails.

“You'll help me to find it, shonny, won't you?... It's dreadful not to be able to find it.... I've got to meet Lootenant Trevors in Henry'sh Bar.” The major steadied himself by putting a hand on Andrews' shoulder. A civilian passed them.

“Dee-donc,” shouted the major after him, “Dee-donc, Monshier, ou ay Henry'sh Bar?”

The man walked on without answering.

“Now isn't that like a frog, not to understand his own language?” said the major.

“But there's Henry's Bar, right across the street,” said Andrews suddenly.

“Bon, bon,” said the major.

They crossed the street and went in. At the bar the major, still clinging to Andrews' shoulder, whispered in his ear: “I'm A. W. O. L., shee?... Shee?.... Whole damn Air Service is A. W. O. L. Have a drink with me.... You enlisted man? Nobody cares here.... Warsh over, Sonny.... Democracy is shafe for the world.”

Andrews was just raising a champagne cocktail to his lips, looking with amusement at the crowd of American officers and civilians who crowded into the small mahogany barroom, when a voice behind him drawled out:

“I'll be damned!”

Andrews turned and saw Henslowe's brown face and small silky mustache. He abandoned his major to his fate.

“God, I'm glad to see you.... I was afraid you hadn't been able to work it.”...Said Henslowe slowly, stuttering a little.

“I'm about crazy, Henny, with delight. I just got in a couple of hours ago....” Laughing, interrupting each other, they chattered in broken sentences.

“But how in the name of everything did you get here?”

“With the major?” said Andrews, laughing.

“What the devil?”

“Yes; that major,” whispered Andrews in his friend's ear, “rather the worse for wear, asked me to lead him to Henry's Bar and just fed me a cocktail in the memory of Democracy, late defunct.... But what are you doing here? It's not exactly... exotic.”

“I came to see a man who was going to tell me how I could get to Rumania with the Red Cross.... But that can wait.... Let's get out of here. God, I was afraid you hadn't made it.”

“I had to crawl on my belly and lick people's boots to do it.... God, it was low!... But here I am.”

They were out in the street again, walking and gesticulating.

“But 'Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme!' as Walt Whitman would have said,” shouted Andrews.

“It's one grand and glorious feeling.... I've been here three days. My section's gone home; God bless them.”

“But what do you have to do?”

“Do? Nothing,” cried Henslowe. “Not a blooming bloody goddam thing! In fact, it's no use trying... the whole thing is such a mess you couldn't do anything if you wanted to.”

“I want to go and talk to people at the Schola Cantorum.”

“There'll be time for that. You'll never make anything out of music if you get serious-minded about it.”

“Then, last but not least, I've got to get some money from somewhere.”

“Now you're talking!” Henslowe pulled a burnt leather pocket book out of the inside of his tunic. “Monaco,” he said, tapping the pocket book, which was engraved with a pattern of dull red flowers. He pursed up his lips and pulled out some hundred franc notes, which he pushed into Andrews's hand.

“Give me one of them,” said Andrews.

“All or none.... They last about five minutes each.”

“But it's so damn much to pay back.”

“Pay it back--heavens!... Here take it and stop your talking. I probably won't have it again, so you'd better make hay this time. I warn you it'll be spent by the end of the week.”

“All right. I'm dead with hunger.”

“Let's sit down on the Boulevard and think about where we'll have lunch to celebrate Miss Libertad.... But let's not call her that, sounds like Liverpool, Andy, a horrid place.”

“How about Freiheit?” said Andrews, as they sat down in basket chairs in the reddish yellow sunlight.

“Treasonable... off with your head.”

“But think of it, man,” said Andrews, “the butchery's over, and you and I and everybody else will soon be human beings again. Human; all too human!”

“No more than eighteen wars going,” muttered Henslowe.

“I haven't seen any papers for an age.... How do you mean?”

“People are fighting to beat the cats everywhere except on the' western front,” said Henslowe. “But that's where I come in. The Red Cross sends supply trains to keep them at it.... I'm going to Russia if I can work it.”

“But what about the Sorbonne?”

“The Sorbonne can go to Ballyhack.”

“But, Henny, I'm going to croak on your hands if you don't take me somewhere to get some food.”

“Do you want a solemn place with red plush or with salmon pink brocade?”

“Why have a solemn place at all?”

“Because solemnity and good food go together. It's only a religious restaurant that has a proper devotion to the belly. O, I know, we'll go over to Brooklyn.”

“Where?”

“To the Rive Gauche. I know a man who insists on calling it Brooklyn. Awfully funny man... never been sober in his life. You must meet him.”

“Oh, I want to.... It's a dog's age since I met anyone new, except you. I can't live without having a variegated crowd about, can you?”

“You've got that right on this boulevard. Serbs, French, English, Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks; God, is there any uniform that isn't here?... I tell you, Andy, the war's been a great thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it. Just look at their puttees.”

“I guess they'll know how to make a good thing of the Peace too.”

“Oh, that's going to be the best yet.... Come along. Let's be little devils and take a taxi.”

“This certainly is the main street of Cosmopolis.”

They threaded their way through the crowd, full of uniforms and glitter and bright colors, that moved in two streams up and down the wide sidewalk between the cafes and the boles of the bare trees. They climbed into a taxi, and lurched fast through streets where, in the misty sunlight, grey-green and grey-violet mingled with blues and pale lights as the colors mingle in a pigeon's breast feathers. They passed the leafless gardens of the Tuileries on one side, and the great inner Courts of the Louvre, with their purple mansard roofs and their high chimneys on the other, and saw for a second the river, dull jade green, and the plane trees splotched with brown and cream color along the quais, before they were lost in the narrow brownish-grey streets of the old quarters.

“This is Paris; that was Cosmopolis,” said Henslowe.

“I'm not particular, just at present,” cried Andrews gaily.

The square in front of the Odeon was a splash of white and the collonade a blur of darkness as the cab swerved round the corner and along the edge of the Luxembourg, where, through the black iron fence, many brown and reddish colors in the intricate patterns of leafless twigs opened here and there on statues and balustrades and vistas of misty distances. The cab stopped with a jerk.

“This is the Place des Medicis,” said Henslowe.

At the end of a slanting street looking very flat, through the haze, was the dome of the Pantheon. In the middle of the square between the yellow trams and the green low busses, was a quiet pool, where the shadow of horizontals of the house fronts was reflected.

They sat beside the window looking out at the square.

Henslowe ordered.

“Remember how sentimental history books used to talk about prisoners who were let out after years in dungeons, not being able to stand it, and going back to their cells?”

“D'you like sole meuniere?”

“Anything, or rather everything! But take it from me, that's all rubbish. Honestly I don't think I've ever been happier in my life.... D'you know, Henslowe, there's something in you that is afraid to be happy.”

“Don't be morbid.... There's only one real evil in the world: being somewhere without being able to get away;... I ordered beer. This is the only place in Paris where it's fit to drink.”

“And I'm going to every blooming concert...Colonne-Lamoureux on Sunday, I know that.... The only evil in the world is not to be able to hear music or to make it.... These oysters are fit for Lucullus.”

“Why not say fit for John Andrews and Bob Henslowe, damn it?... Why the ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man eats an oyster, I don't see. We're as fine specimens as they were. I swear I shan't let any old turned-toclay Lucullus outlive me, even if I've never eaten a lamprey.”

“And why should you eat a lamp--chimney, Bob?” came a hoarse voice beside them.

Andrews looked up into a round, white face with large grey eyes hidden behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. Except for the eyes, the face had a vaguely Chinese air.

“Hello, Heinz! Mr. Andrews, Mr. Heineman,” said Henslowe.

“Glad to meet you,” said Heineman in a jovially hoarse voice. “You guys seem to be overeating, to reckon by the way things are piled up on the table.” Through the hoarseness Andrews could detect a faint Yankee tang in Heineman's voice.

“You'd better sit down and help us,” said Henslowe.

“Sure....D'you know my name for this guy?” He turned to Andrews.... “Sinbad!”

“Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome, In bad in Trinidad And twice as bad at home.”

He sang the words loudly, waving a bread stick to keep time.

“Shut up, Heinz, or you'll get us run out of here the way you got us run out of the Olympia that night.”

They both laughed.

“An' d'you remember Monsieur Le Guy with his coat?

“Do I? God!” They laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. Heineman took off his glasses and wiped them. He turned to Andrews.

“Oh, Paris is the best yet. First absurdity: the Peace Conference and its nine hundred and ninety-nine branches. Second absurdity: spies. Third: American officers A.W.O.L. Fourth: The seven sisters sworn to slay.” He broke out laughing again, his chunky body rolling about on the chair.

“What are they?”

“Three of them have sworn to slay Sinbad, and four of them have sworn to slay me.... But that's too complicated to tell at lunch time.... Eighth: there are the lady relievers, Sinbad's specialty. Ninth: there's Sinbad....”

“Shut up, Heinz, you're getting me maudlin,” spluttered Henslowe.

“O Sinbad was in bad all around,” chanted Heineman. “But no one's given me anything to drink,” he said suddenly in a petulant voice. “Garcon, une bouteille de Macon, pour un Cadet de Gascogne.... What's the next? It ends with vergogne. You've seen the play, haven't you? Greatest play going.... Seen it twice sober and seven other times.”

“Cyrano de Bergerac?”

“That's it. Nous sommes les Cadets de Gasgogne, rhymes with ivrogne and sans vergogne.... You see I work in the Red Cross.... You know Sinbad, old Peterson's a brick.... I'm supposed to be taking photographs of tubercular children at this minute.... The noblest of my professions is that of artistic photographer.... Borrowed the photographs from the rickets man. So I have nothing to do for three months and five hundred francs travelling expenses. Oh, children, my only prayer is 'give us this day our red worker's permit' and the Red Cross does the rest.” Heineman laughed till the glasses rang on the table. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a rueful air.

“So now I call the Red Cross the Cadets!” cried Heineman, his voice a thin shriek from laughter.

Andrews was drinking his coffee in little sips, looking out of the window at the people that passed. An old woman with a stand of flowers sat on a small cane chair at the corner. The pink and yellow and blue-violet shades of the flowers seemed to intensify the misty straw color and azured grey of the wintry sun and shadow of the streets. A girl in a tight-fitting black dress and black hat stopped at the stand to buy a bunch of pale yellow daisies, and then walked slowly past the window of the restaurant in the direction of the gardens. Her ivory face and slender body and her very dark eyes sent a sudden flush through Andrews's whole frame as he looked at her. The black erect figure disappeared in the gate of the gardens.

Andrews got to his feet suddenly.

“I've got to go,” he said in a strange voice.... “I just remember a man was waiting for me at the School Headquarters.”

“Let him wait.”

“Why, you haven't had a liqueur yet,” cried Heineman.

“No... but where can I meet you people later?”

“Cafe de Rohan at five... opposite the Palais Royal.”

“You'll never find it.”

“Yes I will,” said Andrews.

“Palais Royal metro station,” they shouted after him as he dashed out of the door.

He hurried into the gardens. Many people sat on benches in the frail sunlight. Children in bright-colored clothes ran about chasing hoops. A woman paraded a bunch of toy balloons in carmine and green and purple, like a huge bunch of parti-colored grapes inverted above her head. Andrews walked up and down the alleys, scanning faces. The girl had disappeared. He leaned against a grey balustrade and looked down into the empty pond where traces of the explosion of a Bertha still subsisted. He was telling himself that he was a fool. That even if he had found her he could not have spoken to her; just because he was free for a day or two from the army he needn't think the age of gold had come back to earth. Smiling at the thought, he walked across the gardens, wandered through some streets of old houses in grey and white stucco with slate mansard roofs and fantastic complications of chimney-pots till he came out in front of a church with a new classic facade of huge columns that seemed toppling by their own weight.

He asked a woman selling newspapers what the church's name was. “Mais, Monsieur, c'est Saint Sulpice,” said the woman in a surprised tone.

Saint Sulpice. Manon's songs came to his head, and the sentimental melancholy of eighteenth century Paris with its gambling houses in the Palais Royal where people dishonored themselves in the presence of their stern Catonian fathers, and its billets doux written at little gilt tables, and its coaches lumbering in covered with mud from the provinces through the Porte d'Orleans and the Porte de Versailles; the Paris of Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques, with its muddy streets and its ordinaries where one ate bisques and larded pullets and souffles; a Paris full of mouldy gilt magnificence, full of pompous ennui of the past and insane hope of the future.

He walked down a narrow, smoky street full of antique shops and old bookshops and came out unexpectedly on the river opposite the statue of Voltaire. The name on the corner was quai Malaquais. Andrews crossed and looked down for a long time at the river. Opposite, behind a lace-work of leafless trees, were the purplish roofs of the Louvre with their high peaks and their ranks and ranks of chimneys; behind him the old houses of the quai and the wing, topped by a balustrade with great grey stone urns of a domed building of which he did not know the name. Barges were coming upstream, the dense green water spuming under their blunt bows, towed by a little black tugboat with its chimney bent back to pass under the bridges. The tug gave a thin shrill whistle. Andrews started walking downstream. He crossed by the bridge at the corner of the Louvre, turned his back on the arch Napoleon built to receive the famous horses from St. Marc's,--a pinkish pastry-like affair--and walked through the Tuileries which were full of people strolling about or sitting in the sun, of doll-like children and nursemaids with elaborate white caps, of fluffy little dogs straining at the ends of leashes. Suddenly a peaceful sleepiness came over him. He sat down in the sun on a bench, watching, hardly seeing them, the people who passed to and fro casting long shadows. Voices and laughter came very softly to his ears above the distant stridency of traffic. From far away he heard for a few moments notes of a military band playing a march. The shadows of the trees were faint blue-grey in the ruddy yellow gravel. Shadows of people kept passing and repassing across them. He felt very languid and happy.

Suddenly he started up; he had been dozing. He asked an old man with a beautifully pointed white beard the way to rue du Faubourg St. Honore.

After losing his way a couple of times, he walked listlessly up some marble steps where a great many men in khaki were talking. Leaning against the doorpost was Walters. As he drew near Andrews heard him saying to the man next to him:

“Why, the Eiffel tower was the first piece of complete girder construction ever built.... That's the first thing a feller who's wide awake ought to see.”

“Tell me the Opery's the grandest thing to look at,” said the man next it.

“If there's wine an' women there, me for it.”

“An' don't forget the song.”

“But that isn't interesting like the Eiffel tower is,” persisted Walters.

“Say, Walters, I hope you haven't been waiting for me,” stammered Andrews.

“No, I've been waiting in line to see the guy about courses.... I want to start this thing right.”

“I guess I'll see them tomorrow,” said Andrews.

“Say have you done anything about a room, Andy? Let's you and me be bunkies.”

“All right.... But maybe you won't want to room where I do, Walters.”

“Where's that? In the Latin Quarter?... You bet. I want to see some French life while I am about it.”

“Well, it's too late to get a room to-day.”

“I'm going to the 'Y' tonight anyway.”

“I'll get a fellow I know to put me up.... Then tomorrow, we'll see. Well, so long,” said Andrews, moving away.

“Wait. I'm coming with you.... We'll walk around town together.”

“All right,” said Andrews.

The rabbit was rather formless, very fluffy and had a glance of madness in its pink eye with a black center. It hopped like a sparrow along the pavement, emitting a rubber tube from its back, which went up to a bulb in a man's hand which the man pressed to make the rabbit hop. Yet the rabbit had an air of organic completeness. Andrews laughed inordinately when he first saw it. The vendor, who had a basket full of other such rabbits on his arm, saw Andrews laughing and drew timidly near to the table; he had a pink face with little, sensitive lips rather like a real rabbit's, and large frightened eyes of a wan brown.

“Do you make them yourself?” asked Andrews, smiling.

The man dropped his rabbit on the table with a negligent air.

“Oh, oui, Monsieur, d'apres la nature.”

He made the rabbit turn a somersault by suddenly pressing the bulb hard. Andrews laughed and the rabbit man laughed.

“Think of a big strong man making his living that way,” said Walters, disgusted.

“I do it all... de matiere premiere au profit de l'accapareur,” said the rabbit man.

“Hello, Andy... late as hell.... I'm sorry,” said Henslowe, dropping down into a chair beside them. Andrews introduced Walters, the rabbit man took off his hat, bowed to the company and went off, making the rabbit hop before him along the edge of the curbstone.

“What's happened to Heineman?”

“Here he comes now,” said Henslowe.

An open cab had driven up to the curb in front of the cafe. In it sat Heineman with a broad grin on his face and beside him a woman in a salmon-colored dress, ermine furs and an emerald-green hat. The cab drove off and Heineman, still grinning, walked up to the table.

“Where's the lion cub?” asked Henslowe.

“They say it's got pneumonia.”

“Mr. Heineman. Mr. Walters.”

The grin left Heineman's face; he said: “How do you do?” curtly, cast a furious glance at Andrews and settled himself in a chair.

The sun had set. The sky was full of lilac and bright purple and carmine. Among the deep blue shadows lights were coming on, primrose-colored street lamps, violet arc lights, ruddy sheets of light poured out of shop windows.

“Let's go inside. I'm cold as hell,” said Heineman crossly, and they filed in through the revolving door, followed by a waiter with their drinks.

“I've been in