That was three years later. He was already planning to ask for leave, when one day the manager broached the subject himself. With one correct bag he went to France. But he did not bear eastward at once. He went to the Riviera; for a week he lived like a gentleman, spending his money like a gentleman, lonely, alone in that bright aviary of the svelte kept women of all Europe.
That was why those who saw him descend from the Mediterranean Express that morning in Paris said, "Here is a rich milord," and why they continued to say it in the hardbenched third-class trains, as he sat leaning forward on his stick, lip-moving the names on sheet-iron stations about the battered and waking land lying now three years quiet beneath the senseless and unbroken battalions of days.
He reached London and found what he should have known before he left. His position was gone. Conditions, the manager told him, addressing him punctiliously by his rank.
What savings he had left melted slowly; he spent the last of them on a black silk dress for his mother, with the letter: I am well. Love to Matthew and John Wesley and Elizabeth.
He called upon his friends, upon the officers whom he had known. One, the man he knew best, gave him whisky in a comfortable room with a fire: "You aren't working now? Rotten luck. By the way, you remember Whiteby? He had a company in the 6th. Nice chap: no people, though. He killed himself last week. Conditions."
"Oh. Did he? Yes. I remember him. Rotten luck."
"Yes. Rotten luck. Nice chap."
He no longer gave his pennies to the blind and the maimed in Piccadilly. He needed them for papers: Artisans needed. Become stonemason. Men to drive motor cars. War record not necessary. Shop-assistants (must be under twenty -one). Shipwrights needed and at last: Gentleman with social address and connections to meet out-of-town clients. Temporary. He got the place, and with his waxed moustaches and his correct clothes he revealed the fleshpots of the West End to Birmingham and Leeds. It was temporary.
Artisans. Carpenters. House painters
Winter was temporary, too. In the spring he took his waxed moustaches and his ironed clothes into Surrey, with a set of books, an encyclopedia, on commission. He sold all his things save what he stood in, and gave up his rooms in town.
He still had his stick, his waxed moustaches, his cards.
Surrey, gentle, green, mild. A tight little house in a tight little garden. An oldish man in a smoking jacket puttering in a flower bed: "Good day, sir. Might I..."
The man in the smoking jacket looks up. "Go to the side, can't you? Don't come this way."
He goes to the side entrance. A slatted gate, freshly white, bearing an enameled plate: NO HAWKERS NO BEGGARS. He passes through and knocks at a tidy door smug beneath a vine. "Good day, miss. May I see the..."
"Go away. Didn't you see the sign on the gate?"
"But I"
"Go away, or I'll call the master."
In the fall he returned to London. Perhaps he could not have said why himself. Perhaps it was beyond any saying, instinct perhaps bringing him back to be present at the instant out of all time of the manifestation, apotheosis, of his life which had died again. Anyway, he was there, still with his waxed moustaches, erect, his stick clasped beneath his left armpit, among the Household troops in brass cuirasses, on dappled geldings, and Guards in scarlet tunics, and the Church militant in stole and surplice and Prince defenders of God in humble mufti, all at attention for two minutes, listening to despair. He still had thirty shillings, and he replenished his cards: Captain A. Gray, M. C., D. S. M.
It is one of those spurious, pale days like a sickly and premature child of spring while spring itself is still weeks away. In the thin sunlight buildings fade upward into misty pinks and golds. Women wear violets pinned to their furs, appearing to bloom themselves like flowers in the languorous, treacherous air.
It is the women who look twice at the man standing against the wall at a corner: a gaunt man with white hair, and moustaches twisted into frayed points, with a bleached and frayed regimental scarf in a celluloid collar, a once-good suit now threadbare yet apparently pressed within twenty-four hours, standing against the wall with closed eyes, a dilapidated hat held bottom-up before him.
He stood there for a long time, until someone touched his arm. It was a constable. "Move along, sir. Against orders."
In his hat were seven pennies and three halfpence. He bought a cake of soap and a little food.
Another anniversary came and passed; he stood again, his stick at his armpit, among the bright, silent uniforms, the quiet throng in either frank or stubborn cast-offs, with patient, bewildered faces. In his eyes now is not that hopeful resignation of a beggar, but rather that bitterness, that echo as of bitter and unheard laugher of a hunchback.
A meager fire burns on the sloping cobbles. In the fitful light the damp, fungus-grown wall of the embankment and the stone arch of the bridge loom. At the foot of the cobbled slope the invisible river clucks and gurgles with the tide.
Five figures lie about the fire, some with heads covered as though in slumber, others smoking and talking. One man sits upright, his back to the wall, his hands lying beside him; he is blind: he sleeps that way. He says that he is afraid to lie down.
"Can't you tell you are lying down, without seeing you are?" another says.
"Something might happen," the blind man says.
"What? Do you think they would give you a shell, even if it would bring back your sight?"
"They'd give him the shell, all right," a third said.
"Ow. Why don't they line us all up and put down a bloody barrage on us?"
"Was that how he lost his sight?" a fourth says. "A shell?"
"Ow. He was at Mons. A dispatch rider, on a motorbike. Tell them about it, mate."
The blind man lifts his face a little. Otherwise he does not move. He speaks in a flat voice. "She had the bit of scar on her wrist. That was how I could tell. It was me put the scar on her wrist, you might say. We was working in the shop one day. I had picked up an old engine and we was fitting it onto a bike so we could..."
"What?" the fourth says. "What's he talking about?"
"Shhhh," the first says. "Not so loud. He's talking about his girl. He had a bit of a bike shop on the Brighton Road and they were going to marry." He speaks in a low tone, his voice just under the weary, monotonous voice of the blind man. "Had their picture taken and all the day he enlisted and got his uniform. He had it with him for a while, until one day he lost it. He was fair wild. So at last we got a bit of a card about the same size of the picture. 'Here's your picture, mate,' we says. 'Hold onto it this time.' So he's still got the card. Likely he'll show it to you before he's done. So don't you let on."
"No," the other says. "I shant let on."
The blind man talks. "... got them at the hospital to write her a letter, and sure enough, here she come. I could tell her by the bit of scar on her wrist. Her voice sounded different, but then everything sounded different since. But I could tell by the scar. We would sit and hold hands, and I could touch the bit of scar inside her left wrist. In the cinema too. I would touch the scar and it would be like I..."