Ray had put on his carefully-tended suit for special occasions to go to an agency on the Canebière, the great Main Street of Marseilles. The broad short stretch of thoroughfare was in gala dress, just as crazy as could be.

A Dollar Line boat, and a British ship from the Far East, had come into port that morning and their passengers had swelled the human stream of the ever-overflowing Canebière. Conspicuous on the pavement before a tourist agency of international fame, a bloated, livid-skinned Egyptian solicited all the male tourists that passed by.

“Gu‑ide, gentlemen? Will you have a gu‑ide?” he insinuated in a tone of the color of mustard and the smell of Camembert. “Show you all the sights of Marseilles. Hot stuff in the quarter. Tableaux vivants and blue cinema.”

Other guides were working the crowd, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek⁠—an international gang of them, but none so outstanding as this oleaginous mass out of Egypt with his heavy, eunuch-like face with its drooping fish eyes that seemed unable to look up straight at anything.

There were a number of touring cars filled with sightseers. Cocottes, gigolos, touts, sailors, soldiers everywhere. The cocottes passed in pairs and singly, attractive in their striking frocks and fancy shoes. The Arab-black girl in orange went by arm in arm with a white girl wearing rose. They smiled at Ray, standing on the corner.

Brazenly the gigolos made their signs for the delectation of the tourists. Such signs as monkeys in the zoo delight in when women, fascinated, are watching them.

Two gentlemen in golf clothes, very English-looking and smoking cigarettes, were spending a long time before a shop window, apparently absorbed in a plaster-of-Paris advertisement of a little dog with its nozzle to a funnel. It was a reproduction of the popular American painting that assails the eye in all the shopping centers of the world; under it was the legend: La voix de son Maître. The gentlemen were intent on it. A short distance from them were two sailors with large crimson pommels on their jauntily fixed caps, extra-fine blue capes, and their hands thrust deep in their pockets. Glancing furtively at the gentlemen, who were tongue-licking their lips in a curious, gentlemanly way, one of the sailors approached with a convenient cigarette butt. As they were exchanging lights, two passing cocottes bounced purposely into them and kept going, hip-shimmying and smirking, looking behind.⁠ ⁠… Nothing doing.

A small party of English shouldered Ray against the corner, talking animatedly in that overdone accent they call the Oxford. Ray remarked again, as he often had before, how the pronunciation of some of the words, like “there” “here” and “where,” was similar to that of the Southern Negro.

Two policemen were standing near and as the party passed one of them spat and said, “Les sale Anglais.” Ray started and, looking from the policeman who had spewed out his salival declaration of contempt to the English group crossing the street, he grinned. Just the evening before (he had read in the morning newspaper) an Englishwoman and her escort were nearly lynched by a theater crowd. Police intervened to save them. The woman had tried to push her way too hastily through the crowd while talking English. Commenting on it, the local paper had said such incidents would not happen if the postwar policy of the Anglo-Saxons were not to treat France as if she were a colony.

In Paris and elsewhere tourists were having a hot time of it. The franc was tobogganing and the Anglo-Saxon nations, according to the French press, were responsible for that as well. The panic in the air had reached even Marseilles, the most international place in the country. Up till yesterday these very journals had been doping the unthinking literate mob with pages of peace talk. Today they were feeding the same hordes with war. And to judge from the excitement in the air the mob was as ready for it as the two white apes of policemen standing on the corner.

Ray grinned again, showing all his teeth, and a girl across the street, thinking it was for her, smiled at him. But he was grinning at the civilized world of nations, all keeping their tiger’s claws sharp and strong under the thin cloak of international amity and awaiting the first favorable opportunity to spring. During his passage through Europe it had been an illuminating experience for him to come in contact with the mind of the average white man. A few words would usually take him to the center of a guarded, ancient treasure of national hates.

In conversation he sometimes posed as British, sometimes as American, depending upon his audience. There was no posing necessary with the average Frenchman because he takes it without question that a black man under French civilization is better off than he would be under any other social order in the world. Sometimes, on meeting a French West Indian, Ray would say he was American, and the other, like his white compatriot, could not resist the temptation to be patronizing.

“We will treat you right over here! It’s not like America.”

Yet often when he was in public with one of these black élites who could speak a little English, Ray would be asked to speak English instead of French. Upon demanding why, the answer would invariably be, “Because they will treat us better and not as if we were Senegalese.”

Ray had undergone a decided change since he had left America. He enjoyed his role of a wandering black without patriotic or family ties. He loved to pose as this or that without really being any definite thing at all. It was amusing. Sometimes the experience of being patronized provided food for thoughtful digestion. Sometimes it was very embarrassing and deprived an emotion of its significance.

Nevertheless, he was not unaware that his position as a black boy looking on the civilized scene was a unique one. He was having a good grinning time of it. Italians against French, French against Anglo-Saxons, English against Germans, the great Daily Mail shrieking like a mad virago that there were still Germans left who were able to swill champagne in Italy when deserving English gentlemen could not afford to replenish their cellars.⁠ ⁠… Oh it was a great civilization indeed, too entertaining for any savage ever to have the feeling of boredom.

The evening before, an American acquaintance had remarked to Ray that when he had come to Europe he had cut loose from all the back-home strings and had come wanting to love it. But Europe had taught him to be patriotic; it had taught him that he was an American.

He was a jolly nice fellow with French blood from his mother’s line, and after two years of amusing himself in the European scene he was returning to America to settle down to the business of marriage. Ray could see what he was trying to express, but he could not feel it. First, because he had never yet indulged in any illusions about any species of the civilized mammal, and second, because his was not a nature that would let his appetite for the fruit of life be spoiled by the finding of a worm at the core of one apple or more.

The sentiment of patriotism was not one of Ray’s possessions, perhaps because he was a child of deracinated ancestry. To him it was a poisonous seed that had, of course, been planted in his child’s mind, but happily, not having any traditional soil to nourish it, it had died out with other weeds of the curricula of education in the light of mature thought.

It seemed a most unnatural thing to him for a man to love a nation⁠—a swarming hive of human beings bartering, competing, exploiting, lying, cheating, battling, suppressing, and killing among themselves; possessing, too, the faculty to organize their villainous rivalries into a monstrous system for plundering weaker peoples.

Man loves individuals. Man loves things. Man loves places. And the vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in any one nation. Man loves places and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him wherever he may go. A patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.

So⁠ ⁠… Ray had fallen into one of his frequent fits of contemplation there on the corner, alone with his mind and the traffic of life surging around him, when he was tapped on the shoulder and addressed by the smaller Britisher of Taloufa’s shirttail night.

Ray had learned more about the two friends since that entertaining night. The colonial was a careless, roving sort of fellow, ever ready for anything with a touch of novelty that was suggested to him. Yet he seemed to be devoid of any capacity for real enjoyment or deep distaste. He apparently existed for mere unexciting drifting, a purposeless, live-for-the-moment, negative person.

The initiative of planning for both of them rested with his friend, who was English-born. Both had been in the war. The Englishman had a small face with a tight expression. His lips were remarkably thin and compressed, and they twitched, but so imperceptibly that a casual observer would not notice it. He had not been wounded, but had been a prisoner and the experience had left him a little neurotic, and probably more interesting. He liked jazz music, and he liked to hear Negroes play it.

The pair had told Ray that they were just bums. He would not believe it, thinking that they were well-to-do poseurs plumbing low-down bohemian life. But they soon convinced him that it was true. Quite young, they had been called for service during the last year of the war, and, now that it was over, they either could not find a permanent interest in life or could not bring themselves to settle down. Whatever it was, they were gentlemen panhandlers. They had bummed all over continental Europe⁠—Naples, Genoa, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Antwerp, Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris.

Since the night when Banjo had played for them they had gone over to Toulon to meet a ship coming from Australia, and had cleaned up twenty pounds panhandling and showing passengers through the bordel quarter of that interesting town of matelots.

Strangely, they preferred the great commercial ports and cities to the popular tourist resorts. They were not interested in crooked games. Like the beach boys, they were honest bums.

Ray admired the Britisher’s well-fitting clothes.

“It’s the only way to get the jack,” he said. “Wear good clothes and speak like a gentleman. They’ll give you either a real raise or nothing at all, but they won’t treat you like a beggar. The Americans are pretty good. And you can tap an Englishman abroad, if you take him the right way, when you couldn’t at home.”

At that moment a big beefy Englishman went by and Ray’s friend said: “Just a minute. I’m going to get him.”

He caught up with the man on the opposite corner. The tourist was visibly embarrassed as his compatriot solicited him, and, rather avoiding looking in his face, he handed out a five-franc note. The proffered money hung suspended in air, the gentleman panhandler, not deigning to take it, coldly pressing his need of a more substantial amount. Something he said made the big man turn all puffy red in the face, and glancing hastily at the younger man from head to foot, he took from his pocketbook a pound note and handed it to him. The young man took it and thanked him in a politely reserved manner.

Rejoining Ray, he vented his scorn: “The big bastard. Tried to give me five francs.” His funny slit of a lip twitched nervously. “Come and have a drink with me,” he said.

They turned down the Canebière. An old tune was ringing in Ray’s head.

“Everybody’s Doing It.⁠ ⁠…”

It was the song-and-dance that had tickled him so wonderfully that first year he had landed in America. Talk about “Charleston” and “Black Bottom!” They’re all right for exercise, but for a jazzing jig, when a black boy and a gal can get right up together and do that rowdy thing, “Charlestons” and “Black Bottoms” are a long way behind the “Turkey Trot.”⁠ ⁠…

Great big dancing-hall over the grocery store in the barracks town. Day laborers, porters, black students, black soldiers, brown sporting-girls swaying and reeling so close together, turkey-trotting, bunny-hugging, bear-and-dog walking “That Thing” and the delirious black boys singing and playing:

“Everybody’s doing it.⁠ ⁠…
Everybody’s doing it now.⁠ ⁠…”

Ray and the Britisher took a table on a café terrace at the corner of the Rue de la République and the Quai du Port. Down the Canebière the traffic bore like a flooded river to pile up against the bar of the immense horseshoe (on which rested the weight of the city) and flow out on either side of it.

The scene was a gay confusion⁠—peddlers with gaudy bagatelles; Greek and Armenian venders of cacahuètes and buns; fishermen crying shellfish; idling boys in proletarian blue wearing vivid cache-col and caps; long-armed Senegalese soldiers in khaki, some wearing the red fez; zouaves in striking Arab costumes; surreptitious sou gamblers with their dice stands; a strong mutilated man in tights stunting; excursion boats with tinted signs and pennants rocking thick against each other at the moorings⁠—everything massed pell-mell together in a great gorgeous bowl.

A waiter brought them two large cool glasses of orangeade. While they were enjoying it one of the many sidewalk-feature girls stopped by their table with a little word for the Englishman.

“Fiche-moi la paix!” he shot at her.

The girl shrugged and went off, working her hips.

“Bloody wench! Because I was with her last night she tries to get familiar now. She wouldn’t dare do it in London.”

“Don’t say!” said Ray. “Why, back home in America we lift our hats to such as exist.”

“That’s one reason why I don’t like democracies.”

“Is that how you feel about them?” Ray chuckled. “I can’t go with you. Ordinarily I would like to treat those girls like anybody else, but they won’t let you. They are too class-conscious.”

After the cocotte came Banjo.

“Hello!” said Ray. “How’s the plugging?”

“Fine and dandy, pardner. I got the whole wul’ going my way. Look at me!”

“Perfection, kid.”

Banjo was in wonderful form in his cocoa-colored Provençal suit, the steel-gray Australian felt hat he had bought in Sydney, the yellow scarf hanging down his front, and full-square up-at-the-heel. Banjo had struck it right again.

The blues had bitten Taloufa badly after his praiseworthy little affair of race conservation had turned out so disastrously and he had left soon after for England. But before he went Banjo had persuaded him to redeem his suit from the Mont de Piété and had “borrowed” a little cash from him until they should meet again⁠—an eventuality that was taken as a matter of course in the beach boys’ and seamen’s life.

“Sit down and have a drink,” said the white.

“Time is in a hurry with me now, chief,” replied Banjo. “I’m going down to the Dollar Line pier. Theah’s a boat in. What about you, pardner? Going? I been looking foh you. The fellahs am waiting foh me down at Joliette.”

“Sure thing I’ll go,” said Ray. “Want to come?” he asked his white friend.

“No. It’s too far. It’s the farthest dock down. Have a drink with us, Banjo, before you go. Let’s go to the little café in that side street up there. They’ll serve us quicker at the bar.”

The three of them entered the café hurriedly, talking. They had three glasses of vin blanc. The Englishman paid with a five-franc note. When he received his change he told the barwoman that it was not right.

“Comment?” she asked.

“Comment? Because day before yesterday here I paid five sous less for a glass of vin blanc. And I know the price hasn’t gone up since.”

“The pound and the dollar have, though,” Ray grinned.

“Maybe, but I’m not going to pay for banditry in high places.”

“It’s always we who pay heaviest for that,” said Ray.

“We?”

“Yes, we the poor, the vagabonds, the bums of life. You said you were one; that’s why I say we.”

The woman made the change right, saying that she had been mistaken, and the boys left the bar.

“Them’s all sou-crazy, these folkses,” said Banjo.

“It’s a cheap trick,” said the Briton. “I didn’t care about the few sous, but it was the principle of the thing.”

“You English certainly love to play with that word ‘principle,’ ” said Ray.

The white laughed slightly, reddening around the ears. “These people make you pay à l’Anglaise every time they hear you talk English,” he said. “I don’t like to be always paying for that. It’s irritating. And I irritate them, too, in revenge, letting them know they are cheating. Maybe one cause of it is that these little businesses are always changing hands. About a year ago I was in a little bar behind the Bourse. Six months later I saw the proprietor at Toulon, where he had bought another bar, and the other day I saw him at Nice, where he had just taken over a third after selling out at Toulon. I prefer going to an honest bourgeois brasserie. And even then you’ve got to look out for the waiters if they think you’re a greenhorn. Just yesterday one of them brought my friend change for a fifty after he had given him a hundred-franc note. My friend doesn’t speak French, and when I called the bluff he had it all ready for me right on the tip of his tongue like that bistro woman: ‘Pardon. I’ve made a mistake!’ ”

Curiously, the song kept singing in Ray’s head:

“Everybody’s doing it,
Everybody’s doing it⁠ ⁠…”

“I get along with the little bistros, all right,” said Ray. “They take me for Senegalese and treat me right. But whenever I’m with fellows speaking English they’ve got to pay for it just like you. I never make any trouble when the others pay, especially American fellows. They don’t know, the price is ridiculously cheap to them, coming from a dry country. But when I’ve got to pay for it, I kick like hell. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a sucker for these hoggish petits commerçants. I know it’s the dollar complex these people have that makes them like that, but I’m no dollar baby. I don’t ever see enough francs, much less dollars. And they can get bloody insulting sometimes when you call their hand. For instance, I found out the woman who did my laundry was overcharging Banjo and the boys whenever they could afford to have their clothes done. The next time they were getting their laundry I went with them to straighten it out, and she got mad and shouted, ‘Dollah, dollah,’ and refused to do any more for us. What the hell do we boys know about dollars?”

“The only time they’ll lose anything is when they do it to insult you,” said the white. “They lose more than they gain by such pettiness. Some months ago we picked up a couple of toffs and they took us for a spree down the coast. We stayed a little time in Antibes. One night my friend telephoned me from a café in the square and the proprietor himself told the waiter to charge him two francs. He happened to mention it and I knew the cost was half a franc. The next morning I went and asked the fat old thing why he had overcharged my friend. He tried to make out that it was a double call, which wasn’t true, of course, and would only have amounted to a franc in any case. I left it like that. It was enough for me to see the proprietor in an embarrassing position. I get a devilish lot of fun out of them and their sous. And that’s why I am always correcting their subtraction and addition. But of course we never went back to that café while we stayed in Antibes.”

“I wish they wouldn’t figure against us poor black boys when we speak English,” said Ray. “The trouble is you Europeans make no color distinction⁠—when it is a matter of the color of our money.”

“You mean the French,” said the young man, his Anglo-Saxon pride suddenly bursting forth. “You don’t find anybody in England playing such penny tricks.”

“Oh, well, you’ve got a different method, that’s all,” said Ray. “I’ve got a very definite opinion about it all. When I was in England I always felt myself in an atmosphere of grim, long-headed honesty⁠—honesty because it was the best business policy in the long run. You felt it was a little hard on the English soul. It made it as bleak as a London fog and you felt it was an atmosphere that could chill to the bone anybody who didn’t have a secure living. I wouldn’t want to be broke and be on the bum there for a day, and you wouldn’t, either, I guess.”

“You bet I wouldn’t,” the young man laughed, “judging by where I am now.”

“In America it’s different,” Ray continued. “I didn’t sense any soul-destroying honesty there. What I felt was an awful big efficiency sweeping all over me. You felt that business in its mad race didn’t have time to worry about honesty, and if you thought about honesty at all it was only as a technical thing, like advertising, to help efficiency forward. If you were to go to New York and shop in the popular districts, then do Delancey Street and the Bowery afterward, you’d get what I mean. Down in those tedious-bargain streets, you feel that you are in Europe on the shores of the Mediterranean again, and that their business has nothing to do with the great steamrolling efficiency of America.

“But in Germany I felt something quite different from anything that impressed me in other white countries. I felt a real terrible honesty that you might call moral or religious or national. It seemed like something highly organized, patriotic, rooted in the soul⁠—not a simple, natural, instinctive thing. And with it I felt a confident blind bluntness in the people’s character that was as hard and obvious as a stone wall. I was there when the mark had busted like a bomb in the sky and you could pick up worthless paper marks thrown away in the street. There were exchange booths all over Berlin⁠—some of them newly set up in the street. I saw Americans as heedless as a brass band, lined up to change their dollars in face of misery that was naked to the eye at every step. Yet I never felt any overt hostility to strangers there as I do here.

“When I was going there the French black troops were in the Ruhr. A big campaign of propaganda was on against them, backed by German-Americans, Negro-breaking Southerners, and your English liberals and Socialists. The odd thing about that propaganda was that it said nothing about the exploitation of primitive and ignorant black conscripts to do the dirty work of one victorious civilization over another, but it was all about the sexuality of Negroes⁠—that strange, big bug forever buzzing in the imagination of white people. Friendly whites tried to dissuade me from going to Germany at that time, but I was determined to go.

“And I must tell you frankly I never met any white people so courteous in all my life. I traveled all over Prussia, from Hamburg to Berlin, Potsdam, Stettin, Dresden, Leipzig, and I never met with any discourtesy, not to mention hostility. Maybe it was there underneath the surface, but I never felt it. I went to the big cafés and cabarets in the Friederickstrasse, Potsdammer Platz, and Charlottenburg, and I had a perfectly good time. I went everywhere. I’ve never felt so safe in the low quarters of any city as I have in those of Berlin and Hamburg. One day I went to buy some shirts after noting the prices marked in the shop window. When the clerk gave me the check it was more than the price marked, so I protested. He called the manager and he was so apologetic I felt confused. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he said, ‘but the law. All strangers must pay ten percent more.’ And he turned red as if he were ashamed of the law. Yet I never liked Germany. It was a country too highly organized for my temperament. I felt something American about it, but without the dynamic confusion of America.”

They had reached Joliette, where the Britisher said he must turn back.

“Come on, let’s have a look at the Dollar boat,” said Ray.

“No. I have an important engagement with my friend.”