The runner took the money, the francs. He spent them, this time, seeing for the first time, thinking, how finance was like poetry, demanding, requiring a giver and a taker too in order to endure; singer and listener, banker and borrower, buyer and seller, both ethical, unimpugnable, immaculate in devotion and faith; thinking I was the one who failed; I was the debaser, the betrayer, spending the money this time, usually at one blow, in modest orgies of food and drink for whoever would share it with him, ful-filling his sixpence-by-sixpence contract, then borrowing the ten shillings again, with the single-mindedness of a Roman Catholic at his devotions or expiating a penance: through that fall, that winter; it would be spring soon and now his leave would be coming up again and he thought, quietly, without grief, without regret: Of course I could go back home, back to London. Because what else can you do to a cashiered subaltern in this year of Our Lord One Nine One Seven but give him a rifle and a bayonet and I already have those, when, suddenly and peacefully, he knew what he would do with that freedom, that liberty which he no longer had any use for because there was no more any place for it on the earth; and this time he would ask not for shillings but pounds, setting its valuation not in shillings but in pounds, not only on his pilgrimage back to when and where the lost free spirit of man once existed, but on that which made the pilgrimage possible, asking for ten of them and himself setting the rate and interest at ten shillings a day for thirty days.
'Going to Paris to celebrate your f... ing D. C. M. are you?' the other said.
'Why not?' he said: and took the ten pounds in francs and with the ghost of his lost youth dead fifteen years now, he retraced the perimeter of his dead life when he had not only hoped but be-lieved, concentric about the once-sylvan vale where squatted the gray and simple stone of Saint Sulpice, saving for the last the nar-row crooked passageway in which he had lived for three years, passing the Sorbonne but only slowing, not turning in, and the other familiar Left Bank places-quai and bridge, gallery, garden and cafd-where he had spent his rich leisure and his frugal money; it was not until the second solitary and sentimental morning, after coffee (and Figaro: today was April eighth, an English liner, this time practically full of Americans, had been torpedoed yesterday off Ireland; he thought peacefully, tearless: They'll have to come in now; we can destroy both hemispheres now) at the Deux Magots, taking the long way, through the Luxembourg Gardens again among the nursemaids and maimed soldiers (another spring, perhaps by this autumn even, there would be American uniforms Tuesday too) and the stained effigies of gods and queens, into the rue Vaugirard, already looking ahead to discern the narrow crevice which would be the rue Servandoni and the garret which he had called home (perhaps Monsieur and Madame Gargne, patron and patronne, would still be there to greet him), when he saw it-the banner, the lettered cloth strip fastened above the archway where the ducal and princely carriages had used to pass, affirming its grandiose and humble declaration out of the old faubourg of aris-tocrats: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes a la France de Tout le Monde, and, already one in a thin steady trickle of people-sol-diers and civilians, men and women, old and young-entered some-thing which seemed to him afterward like a dream: a vestibule, an anteroom, where a strong hale plain woman of no age, in a white coif like a nun, sat knitting, who said: 'Monsieur?'
'Monsieur le prdsident, Madame, s'il vous plait. Monsieur le Reverend Sutterfield:' and who (the woman) said again, with no pause in the click and flick of the needles: 'Monsieur?'
'Le chef de bureau, Madame. Le directeur. Monsieur Le R��-end Sutterfield,'
'Ah,' the woman said. 'Monsieur Tooleyman': and, still knitting, rose to precede, guide, conduct him: a vast marble-floored hall with gilded cornices and hung with chandeliers and furnished, crowded, heterogeneous and without order, with wooden benches and the sort of battered chairs you rent for a few sous at band concerts in parks, murmurous not with the voices but as though with the simple breathing, the inspiration and suspiration of the people-the soldiers maimed and unmaimed, the old men and women in black veils and armbands and the young women here and there carrying children against or even beneath the complete weeds of bereavement and grieving-singly or in small groups like family groups about the vast room murmurous also still of dukes and princes and millionaires, facing the end of the room across which was suspended another of the cloth banners, the lettered strip like that one above the gateway and lettered like it: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes cl la France de Tout le Monde: not looking at the banner, not watching it; not like people in church: it was not subdued enough for that, but perhaps like people in a railway station where a train has been indefinitely delayed; then the rich curve of a stairway, the woman stopping and standing aside, still knitting and not even looking up to speak: 'Pri�e de monter, monsieur-,' and he did so: who had traversed a cloud, now mounting to the uttermost airy nepenthelcne pin-nacle: a small chamber like a duchess's boudoir in heaven con-verted temporarily to represent a business office in a charade: a new innocent and barren desk and three hard and innocent chairs and behind the desk the serene and noble face in its narrow clasp of white wool rising now from the horizon-blue of an infantry cor-poral's uniform which by its look had lain only yesterday still on a supply sergeant's shelves, and slightly behind him the pole-thin Negro youth in the uniform and badges of a French sub-lieutenant which looked almost as new, himself facing them across it, the voices also serenely congruous and inconsequential, like dream: 'Yes, it used to be Sutterfield. But I changed it. To make it easier for the folks. From the Association,'
'Oh. Tout le Monde,'
'Yes. Tooleyman,'
'So you came up that day to see... I was about to say friend-'
Tes, he aint quite ready yet. It was to see if he needed money,'