Who's astanding?

After the young men "Scrum in" to the pub, someone asks who's going to pay for drinks: "Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone. Yours?" In five successive sentences, people declare that they have no money at all. The person who finally steps up and asks people what they'll have to drink ("Yours?") is no doubt Stephen Dedalus.

In what seems a universal English idiom, to "stand" means to pay for a round of drinks, and standing rounds is a time-honored Irish custom. But one man after another pleads poverty. One says ironically that he's the "Proud possessor of damnall"—i.e., no money at all. Another simply declares "misery." A third one—probably Lenehan, who has been loudly bemoaning Sceptre's performance in the Gold Cup—says he has "Bet to the ropes," perhaps drawing on boxing terminology to suggest that his racetrack losses have him on the ropes. Another person, drawing on the ancient association between money and salt, says, in pidgin English, "Me nantee saltee." Roman soldiers were paid in salt, hence "salary," and many expressions like "not worth one's salt" and "salting away" money perpetuate the ancient metaphor. A fifth man says that for all the last week he has had "Not a red." The expression "Not a red cent," meaning "flat broke," originated in America, where pennies, the smallest unit of currency, were minted from copper.

Stephen was the one who suggested that the group leave the hospital and head down to "Burke's!," just as he suggested in Aeolus that a different group (Lenehan, fittingly, is a hanger-on in both) leave the newspaper offices and head for a pub: "As the next motion on the agenda paper may I suggest that the house do now adjourn?" In both cases, like the proverbial drunken sailor he extravagantly throws away his month's wages on drinks with people who mean little to him. The noontime binge in Mooney's gave him an occasion to frustrate Mulligan's declaration in Telemachus that "We'll have a glorious drunk" at Stephen's expense at The Ship, but now he turns first to that self-declared Nietzschean superman: "Yours? Mead of our fathers for the Uebermensch. Dittoh. Five number ones." Mulligan says he'll have a Number One Bass Ale, and the others all agree.