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.
“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.