Ray had met a Negro student from Martinique, to whom the greatest glory of the island was that the Empress Josephine was born there. That event placed Martinique above all the other islands of the Antilles in importance.

“I don’t see anything in that for you to be so proud about,” said Ray. “She was not colored.”

“Oh no, but she was Créole, and in Martinique we are rather Créole than Negro. We are proud of the Empress in Martinique. Down there the best people are very distinguished and speak a pure French, not anything like this vulgar Marseilles French.”

Ray asked him if he had ever heard of René Maran’s Batouala. He replied that the sale of Batouala had been banned in the colony and sniggered approvingly. Ray wondered about the truth of that; he had never heard any mention of it.

“It was a naughty book, very strong, very strong,” said the student, defending the act.

They were in a café on the Canebière. That evening Ray had a rendezvous at the African Bar with another student, an African from the Ivory Coast, and asked the Martiniquan to go with him to be introduced. He refused, saying that he did not want to mix with the Senegalese and that the African Bar was in the bas-fonds. He warned Ray about mixing with the Senegalese.

“They are not like us,” he said. “The whites would treat Negroes better in this town if it were not for the Senegalese. Before the war and the coming of the Senegalese it was splendid in France for Negroes. We were liked, we were respected, but now⁠—”

“It’s just about the same with the white Americans,” said Ray. “You must judge civilization by its general attitude toward primitive peoples, and not by the exceptional cases. You can’t get away from the Senegalese and other black Africans any more than you can from the fact that our forefathers were slaves. We have the same thing in the States. The Northern Negroes are standoffish toward the Southern Negroes and toward the West Indians, who are not as advanced as they in civilized superficialities. We educated Negroes are talking a lot about a racial renaissance. And I wonder how we’re going to get it. On one side we’re up against the world’s arrogance⁠—a mighty cold hard white stone thing. On the other the great sweating army⁠—our race. It’s the common people, you know, who furnish the bone and sinew and salt of any race or nation. In the modern race of life we’re merely beginners. If this renaissance we’re talking about is going to be more than a sporadic and scabby thing, we’ll have to get down to our racial roots to create it.”

“I believe in a racial renaissance,” said the student, “but not in going back to savagery.”

“Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people,” said Ray, “is not savagery. It is culture.”

“I can’t see that,” said the student.

“You are like many Negro intellectuals who are bellyaching about race,” said Ray. “What’s wrong with you all is your education. You get a white man’s education and learn to despise your own people. You read biased history of the whites conquering the colored and primitive peoples, and it thrills you just as it does a white boy belonging to a great white nation.

“Then when you come to maturity you realize with a shock that you don’t and can’t belong to the white race. All your education and achievements cannot put you in the intimate circles of the whites and give you a white man’s full opportunity. However advanced, clever, and cultivated you are, you will have the distinguishing adjective of ‘colored’ before your name. And instead of accepting it proudly and manfully, most of you are soured and bitter about it⁠—especially you mixed-bloods.

“You’re a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find yourself in the roots of your own people. You can’t choose as your models the haughty-minded educated white youths of a society living solid on its imperial conquests. Such pampered youths can afford to despise the sweating white brutes of the lower orders.

“If you were sincere in your feelings about racial advancement, you would turn for example to whites of a different type. You would study the Irish cultural and social movement. You would turn your back on all these tiresome clever European novels and read about the Russian peasants, the story and struggle of their lowly, patient, hard-driven life, and the great Russian novelists who described it up to the time of the Russian Revolution. You would learn all you can about Ghandi and what he is doing for the common hordes of India. You would be interested in the native African dialects and, though you don’t understand, be humble before their simple beauty instead of despising them.”

The mulatto student was not moved in his determination not to go to the African Bar, and so Ray went alone. He loved to hear the African dialects sounding around him. The dialects were so rich and round and ripe like soft tropical fruit, as if they were fashioned to eliminate all things bitter and harsh to express. They tasted like brown unrefined cane sugar⁠—Sousou, Bambara, Woloff, Fula, Dindie.⁠ ⁠…

The patron of the African Bar pointed out men of the different tribes to Ray. It was easy to differentiate the types of the interior from those of the port towns, for they bore tribal marks on their faces. Among civilized people they were ashamed, most of them, of this mutilation of which their brothers of the towns under direct European administration were free; but, because tattooing was the fashion among seamen, they were not ashamed to have their bodies pricked and figured all over with the souvenirs of the brothels of civilization.

It was no superior condescension, no feeling of race solidarity or Back-to-Africa demonstration⁠—no patriotic effort whatsoever⁠—that made Ray love the environment of the common black drifters. He loved it with the poetical enthusiasm of the vagabond black that he himself was. After all, he had himself lived the rough-and-tumble laboring life, and the most precious souvenirs of it were the joyful friendships that he had made among his pals. There was no intellectual friendship to be compared with them.

It was always interesting to compare the African with the West Indian and American Negroes. Indeed, he found the Africans of the same class as the New World Negroes less “savage” and more “primitive.” The Senegalese drunk was a much finer and more tractable animal than the American Negro drunk. And although the Senegalese were always loudly quarreling and fighting among themselves, they always made use of hands, feet, and head (butting was a great art among them) and rarely of a steel weapon as did the American and West Indian Negroes. The colored touts that were reputed to be dangerous gunmen were all from the French West Indies. The few Senegalese who belonged to the sweet brotherhood were disquietingly simple, as if they had not the slightest comprehension of the social stigma attaching to them.

At the African Bar the conversation turned on the hostile feeling that existed between the French West Indians and the native Africans. The patron said that the West Indians felt superior because many of them were appointed as petty officials in the African colonies and were often harder on the natives than the whites.

“Fils d’esclaves! Fils d’esclaves!” cried a Senegalese sergeant. “Because they have a chance to be better instructed than we, they think we are the savages and that they are ‘white’ negroes. Why, they are only the descendants of the slaves that our forefathers sold.”

“They got more advantages than we and they think they’re the finest and most important Negroes in the world,” said the student from the Ivory Coast.

“They’re crazy,” said the patron. “The most important Negroes in the world and the best off are American Negroes.”

“That’s not true! That can’t be true!” said a chorus of voices.

“I think Negroes are treated worse in America than in any other country,” said the student. “They lynch Negroes in America.”

“They do,” said the patron, “but it’s not what you imagine it. It’s not an everyday affair and the lynchings are pulled off in the Southern parts of the country, which are very backward.”

“The Southern States are a powerful unit of the United States,” said Ray, “and you mustn’t forget that nine-tenths of American Negroes live in them.”

“More people are murdered in one year in Marseilles than they lynch in ten years in America,” said the patron.

“But all that comes under the law in spite of the comedy of extenuating circumstances,” said Ray, “while lynch law is its own tribunal.”

“And they Jim Crow all the Negroes in America,” said the student.

“What is Jim Crow?” asked the Senegalese sergeant.

“Negroes can’t ride first class in the trains nor in the same tramcars with white people, no matter how educated and rich they are. They can’t room in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants or sit together in the same theaters. Even the parks are closed to them⁠—”

“That’s only in the Southern States and not in the North,” the patron cut in.

“But Ray has just told us that ninety percent of the Negroes live in those states,” said the student, “and that there are about fifteen millions in America. Well then, the big majority don’t have any privileges at all. There is no democracy for them. Because you went to New York and happened to make plenty of money to come back here and open a business, you are overproud of America and try to make the country out finer than it is, although the Negroes there are living in a prison.”

“You don’t understand,” said the patron. “I wasn’t in the North alone. I was in the old slave states also. I have traveled all over America and I tell you the American Negro is more go-getting than Negroes anywhere else in the world⁠—the Antilles or any part of Africa. Just as the average white American is a long way better off than the European. Look at all these fellows here. What can they do if they don’t go to sea as firemen? Nothing but stay here and become maquereaux. The Italians hog all the jobs on the docks, and the Frenchman will take Armenians and Greeks in the factories because they are white, and leave us. The French won’t come straight out and tell us that they treat us differently because we are black, but we know it. I prefer the American white man. He is boss and he tells you straight where he can use you. He is a brute, but he isn’t a hypocrite.”

The student, perplexed, realizing that from the earnestness of the café proprietor’s tone there was truth in what he said, appealed to Ray in face of the contradictory facts.

“You are both right,” Ray said to the student. “All the things you say about the Negro in the States are facts and what he says about the Negro’s progress is true. You see race prejudice over there drives the Negroes together to develop their own group life. American Negroes have their own schools, churches, newspapers, theaters, cabarets, restaurants, hotels. They work for the whites, but they have their own social group life, an intense, throbbing, vital thing in the midst of the army of whites milling around them. There is nothing like it in the West Indies nor in Africa, because there you don’t have a hundred-million-strong white pressure that just carries the Negro group along with it. Here in Europe you have more social liberties than Negroes have in America, but you have no warm group life. You need colored women for that. Women that can understand us as human beings and not as wild oversexed savages. And you haven’t any. The successful Negro in Europe always marries a white woman, and I have noticed in almost every case that it is a white woman inferior to himself in brains and physique. The energy of such a Negro is lost to his race and goes to build up some decaying white family.”

“But look at all the mulattoes you have in America,” said the student. “White men are continually going with colored women.”

“Because the colored women like it as much as the white men,” replied Ray.

“Ray!” exclaimed Goosey who had entered the café, “you are scandalous and beneath contempt.”

“That’s all right, Goosey. I know that the American Negro press says that American colored women have no protection from the lust and passion of white men on account of the Southern state laws prohibiting marriage between colored and white and I know that you believe that. But that is newspaper truth and no more real than the crackers shouting that white women live in fear and trembling of black rapists. The days of chivalry are stone dead, and the world today is too enlightened about sex to be fooled by white or black propaganda.

“In the West Indies, where there are no prohibitory laws, the Europeans have all the black and mulatto concubines they need. In Africa, too. Woman is woman all over the world, no matter what her color is. She is cast in a passive role and she worships the active success of man and rewards it with her body. The colored woman is no different from the white in this. If she is not inhibited by race feeling she’ll give herself to the white man because he stands for power and property. Property controls sex.

“When you understand that, Goosey, you’ll understand the meaning of the struggle between class and class, nation and nation, race and race. You’ll understand that society chases after power just as woman chases after property, because society is feminine. And you’ll see that the white races today are ahead of the colored because their women are emancipated, and that there is greater material advancement among those white nations whose women have the most freedom.

“Understand this and you will understand why the white race tries so hard to suppress the colored races. You’ll understand the root of the relation between colored women and white men and why white men will make love to colored women but will not marry them.”

“But white women marry colored men, all the same,” said Goosey. “White women feel better toward colored people than white men.”

“You’re a fool,” replied Ray. “White men are what their women make them. That’s plain enough to see in the South. White women hate Negroes because the colored women steal their men and so many of them are society wives in name only. You know what class of white women marry colored men.”

“There are Negroes in America who had their fortunes made by white women,” said Goosey.

“There are exceptions⁠—white women with money who are fed up. But the majority are what I said a while ago.⁠ ⁠… Show me a white woman or man who can marry a Negro and belong to respectable society in London or New York or any place. I can understand these ignorant black men marrying broken-down white women because they are under the delusion that there is some superiority in the white skin that has suppressed and bossed it over them all their lives. But I can’t understand an intelligent race-conscious man doing it. Especially a man who is bellyaching about race rights. He is the one who should exercise a certain control and self-denial of his desires. Take Senghor and his comrades in propaganda for example. They are the bitterest and most humorless of propagandists and they are all married to white women. It is as if the experience has over-soured them. As if they thought it would bring them closer to the white race, only to realize too late that it couldn’t.

“Why marry, I ask? There are so many other ways of doing it. Europe can afford some of its excess women to successful Negroes and that may help to keep them loyal to conventional ideals. America ‘keeps us in our place’ and in our race. Which may be better for the race in the long run.

“The Jews have kept intact, although they were scattered all over the world, and it was easier for them than for Negroes to lose themselves.

“To me the most precious thing about human life is difference. Like flowers in a garden, different kinds for different people to love. I am not against miscegenation. It produces splendid and interesting types. But I should not crusade for it because I should hate to think of a future in which the identity of the black race in the Western World should be lost in miscegenation.”

Six distinguished whites entered the café, putting an end to the conversation. They were the two gentlemen bums, three other men and one woman. The woman saw Ray and greeted him effusively with surprise.

“Oh, Ray, this is where you ran away to hide yourself, leaving all the artists to mourn for their fine model.”

“But she is American,” the Ivory Coast student, pop-eyed at the woman’s friendly manner, whispered to the patron.

“Sure,” he answered, in malicious triumph. “Did you think there were no human relations between white and black in America, that they were just like two armies fighting against each other all the time?”

Ray did not know who the woman was, whether she was American or European. She spoke French and German as readily as she spoke English. He had met her at the studio of a Swiss painter in Paris (a man who carried a title on his card) when he was posing there, and she had made polite and agreeable conversation with him while he posed. Later, he saw her twice at cabarets in Montmartre, where he had been taken by bohemian artists, and she had not snubbed him.

The gentlemen bums were as surprised as the Ivory Coast student (but differently) when the woman greeted Ray. They had met the group and were going through the town with them. The leading spirit of the party had desired to stop in the bar when he was told that it was a rendezvous for Negroes.

He was a stout, audacious-looking man, a tireless international traveler, who liked to visit every country in the world except the unpleasantly revolutionary ones. The accidental meeting was a piquant thing for Ray, because he had heard strange talk of the man before. Of celebrations of occult rites and barbaric saturnalia with the tempo of nocturnal festivities regulated by the crack of whips. A bonfire made of a bungalow to show the beauties of the landscape when the night was dark. And a splendid stalwart, like one of the Sultan of Morocco’s guards, brought from Africa, as a result of which he had been involved in trouble with governmental authorities in Europe.

Certainly, Ray had long been desirous of seeing this personage who had been gossiped about so much, for he had a penchant for exotic sins. Indeed, a fine Jewish soul with a strong Jeremiah flame in him had warned Ray in Paris about what he chose to call his cultivation of the heathenish atavistic propensities of the subterranean personality. The Jewish idealist thought that Ray had a talent and a personality so healthily austere at times that they should be fostered for the uplift of his race to the rigorous exclusion of the dark and perhaps damnable artistic urge. But⁠ ⁠…

Well, here was this bold, bad, unregenerate man of whom he had heard so much, and who did not make any deeper impression than a picturesque woman of Ray’s acquaintance, who carried her excessive maternal feelings under a cloak of aggressive masculinity.

The two other men were Americans. The party was bound for any place in the Mediterranean basin that the leader could work up any interest for. They were spending the night in Marseilles and wanted to see the town. The gentlemen bums had taken them through Boody Lane where they had had their hats snatched and had paid to get them back. The hectic setting of Boody Lane with the girls and painted boys in pyjamas posing in their wide-open holes in the wall, the soldiers and sailors and blue-overalled youths loitering through, had given the party the impression that there were many stranger, weirder and unmentionable things to see in the quarter.

“I tell them there is nothing else to show,” said the Britisher, speaking generally and to Ray in particular. “Paris is a show city. This is just a rough town like any other port town, where you’ll see rough stuff if you stick round long enough. I can take you to the boîtes de nuit, but they’re less interesting than they are in Paris.”

“Oh no, not the cabarets. They bore me so,” said the woman. “We’re just running away from them.”

She was tall and of a very pale whiteness. She seated herself on a chair in a posture of fatigue. Ray remembered that strange tired attitude of hers each time he had seen her. Yet her eyes were brimful of life and she was always in an energetic flutter about something.

“There’s nothing else here,” the Britisher apologized to the leader of the party, “but the maisons fermées and the ‘Blue Cinema’ and they are all better in Paris.”

“The ‘Blue Cinema,’ ” the leader repeated casually. “I’ve never seen the thing. We might as well see it.”

He ordered some drinks, cognac and port wine, which they all had standing at the bar. A white tout drifted into the bar. Three girls from Boody Lane followed. Another tout, this time a mulatto from the Antilles, and after him two black ones from Dakar. More girls of the Ditch. The news had spread round that there were distinguished people at the café.

“We’ll go and have dinner and see the ‘Blue Cinema’ afterward,” said the leader.

Sitting on the terrace, a Senegelese in a baboon attitude was flicking his tongue at everything and everybody that passed by. He reclined, lazily contented, in a chair tilted against the wall. One of the girls, following the party as they came out, called him by name and, leaning against the chair, fondled him. He smiled lasciviously, his tongue strangely visible in his pure ebony face.

Ray, turning his head, saw in the face of the woman the same disgust he felt. Those monkey tricks were the special trademarks of the great fraternity of civilized touts and gigolos, born and trained to prey on the carnal passions of humanity.

A primitive person could not play the game as neatly as they. During a winter spent at Nice, he had found the cocottes and gigolos monkeying on the promenade more interesting to watch than the society people. The white monkeys were essential to the great passion play of life to understudy the parts of those who were holding the stage by power of wealth, place, name, title, and class⁠—everything but the real thing.

And as there were civilized white monkeys, so were there black monkeys, created by the conquests of civilization, learning to imitate the white and even beating them at their game. He recalled the colored sweetmen and touts and girls with whom he had been familiar in America, some who lived in the great obscure region of the boundary between white and black. Following as they did their own shady paths, he had never been strongly repelled by their way of living, because it was a role that they played admirably, scavengers feeding on the backwash of the broad streaming traffic of American life. They were not very different from the monkeys of the French Antilles who carried on their antics side by side with the Provençals and Corsicans and others of the Mediterranean breed. They had acquired enough of civilized tricks to play their parts fittingly.

But not so the Africans, who were closer to the bush, the jungle, where their primitive sex life had been controlled by ancient tribal taboos. Within those taboos they had courted their women, married and made families. And so it was not natural for them, so close to the tradition of paying in cash or kind or hard labor for the joy of a woman, to live the life of the excrescences attaching like mushrooms to the sexual life of civilization. Released from their taboos, turned loose in an atmosphere of prostitution and perversion and trying to imitate the white monkeys, it was no wonder they were very ugly.

After the dinner the younger American created a problem. He was of middle build, wearing a fine New York suit, reddish-brown stuff. He was the clean-shaven, clean-cut type that might have been either a graduate student looking at the world with the confident air of one who is able to go anywhere, or a successful salesman of high-class goods. He wore no horn-rimmed glasses to hide his clear-seeing eyes, and his jaw was developing into the kind common to the men who are earnest, big, and prosperous in the ideals of Americanism.

“But this ‘Blue Cinema,’ what is it, really?” he demanded.

“I suppose it is a cinematic version of the picture cards the guides try to sell you in the street,” the leader answered. “You don’t have to go, you know.”

“Oh, I’d like to see the thing, all right,” replied the young man, “but⁠—are there colored or white persons in the picture?”

“White, I suppose. The colored people are not as advanced and inventive as we in such matters. Excepting what we teach them,” the leader added, facetiously; “they often beat us at our game when they learn.”

“But she isn’t going, is she?” The American indicated the young woman. “They won’t let her in a maison de rendezvous.”

“Most certainly I am. Am I not one of the party? There isn’t anything I am not old enough to see, if I want to. Do you want to discriminate against me because I am a woman?”

“They’ll let her in any place if we pay the price,” said the Britisher.

“But she can’t go if he is going.” The young man looked at Ray.

“Oh, Ray!” The young woman laughed. “That’s what it’s all about. You needn’t worry about him. He has posed in the nude for my friends and he was a perfectly-behaved sauvage.” She stressed the word broadly.

“That’s all right,” said Ray to the young man. “I am not going if you go. I am full of prejudices myself.”

“Well, good night,” the young man said. Abruptly he left the party.

“My friend has done his bit for the honor of the Great Nordic race,” the remaining American remarked.

Nobody thought that the “Blue Cinema” would be really entertaining. The leader was blasé and desired anything that was merely different. But they were all curious, except the gentlemen bums, who had seen the show several times as guides and were indifferent. It was very high-priced, costing fifty francs for each person.

The fee of admission was paid. In the large dim hall they were the only audience.

Before the first reel had finished the leader asked the young woman if she preferred to go.

“No, I’d rather see it out,” she said.

There was no brutal, beastly, orgiastic rite that could rouse terror or wild-animal feeling. It was a calculating, cold, naked abortion.

The “Blue Cinema” struck them with the full force of a cudgel, beating them down into the depths of disgust. Ray wondered if the men who made it had a moral purpose in mind: to terrify and frighten away all who saw it from that phase of life. Or was it possible that there were human beings whose instincts were so brutalized and blunted in the unsparing struggle of modern living that they needed that special stimulating scourge of ugliness. Perhaps. The “Blue Cinema,” he had heard, was a very flourishing business.

He was sitting against a heavy red velvet curtain. Toward the end of the show the curtain was slightly agitated, as if someone on the other side had stirred it. He caught the curtain aside and saw some half a dozen Chinese, conspicuous by their discolored teeth and unlovely bland smiles, standing among a group of girls in a kind of alcove-room which the curtain divided from the cinema hall. The woman of the party saw them, too, before Ray could pull the curtain back, and gave a little scream. The Chinese there did not surprise Ray. He knew that they were hired to perform like monkeys. There were other houses that specialized in Arabs, Corsicans, and Negroes when they were in demand.

As they were leaving the lady president of affairs appeared and suggested their seeing also the tableaux vivants.

“Oh no, the dead ones were enough,” replied the leader.

“Why did you scream?” the leader asked, roughly, when the party was in the street again.

“It was my fault,” said Ray. “I pulled the curtain back and she suddenly saw a roomful of people behind it.”

“That was nothing. I saw them, too, as you did, but I didn’t scream.” He turned on her again. “You say you want to go to any place a man goes and stand anything a man can stand, and yet you scream over a few filthy Chinese.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was out before I could check myself.”

“I suggested leaving in the beginning, but you insisted on staying it out; I didn’t expect you to scream. Did you enjoy it?”

“It was so ugly,” she said, adding: “I think I’ll go to the hotel. You men can stay, but I’m finished for tonight.”

The leader laughed and asked the American to take her home.

“Oh, I don’t need an escort. I’ll just take a taxi,” she said.

“You’d better not go alone. The taxis are not safe this time of night,” said Ray.

“I don’t care whether you need an escort or not. I am taking you to the hotel,” said the American.

They walked to the main street and Ray hailed a green Mattei taxicab. “They are run by a big company and are safe,” he said. “The unsafe ones here hang around the shady places⁠—just as in New York and Chicago. Some of the private drivers are touts, and as you never know which is which, I always recommend my friends to ride with the Trust.”

“Where shall I find you fellows afterward?” the American asked.

“Where now?” said the leader. “After this ‘blue’ refinement I should like to go to the roughest and dirtiest place we can find.”

“I think Banjo’s hangout down Bum Square way is just the place we are looking for,” said Ray.

“That’s the place,” the Britisher agreed.

They told the American how to find it.

“Whether it is blue or any other color of the rainbow, the cinema is for the mob,” said the leader. “It will never be an art.”

“I don’t agree,” said Ray. “Pictorial pantomime can be just as fine an art as any. What about Charlie Chaplin?”

“He’s an exception. A conscientious artist with a popular appeal.”

“All real art is an exception,” said Ray. “You can’t condemn an art wholesale because inartistic people make a bad business of it. The same condition exists in the other arts. Everybody is in a wild business race and the conscientious workers are few. It’s a crazy circle of blue-cinema people, poor conscientious artists, cynical professionals and an indifferent public.”

“You know I like the cinema for exactly the reverse of its object,” said the leader. “Because it’s about the easiest way to see what people really are under the acting.”

Ray laughed and said: “The ‘Blue Cinema’ was just that,” and he added: “Some of us don’t need the cinema, though, to show us up. We are so obvious.”

In the Bum Square they ran into Banjo with his instrument.

“Where you coming from?” Ray asked.

“Just finish performing and said bonne nuit to a kelt.”

The leader was curious to know what “kelt” meant.

Banjo and Ray exchanged glances and grinned.

“That’s a word in black freemasonry,” explained Ray, “but I don’t object to initiating you if Banjo doesn’t.”

“Shoot,” said Banjo.

“In the States,” said Ray, “we Negroes have humorous little words of our own with which we replace unpleasant stock words. And we often use them when we are among white people and don’t want them to know just what we are referring to, especially when it is anything delicate or taboo between the races. For example, we have words like ofay, pink, fade, spade, Mr. Charlie, cracker, peckawood, hoojah, and so on⁠—nice words and bitter. The stock is always increasing because as the whites get on to the old words we invent new ones. ‘Kelt’ I picked up in Marseilles. I think Banjo brought it here and made it popular among the boys. I don’t know if it has anything to do with ‘Celtic.’ ”

“Oh no,” said the leader. “Kelt is a real word of Scottish origin, I think.”

“That might explain how Banjo got it, then. He used to live in Canada.”

The party went to Banjo’s hangout and the whole gang was there drinking and dancing.

The American joined them very late, worried about his younger friend. A panhandling Swede had accosted him in the Bum Square and told him that he had seen his friend in Joliette, helplessly drunk and getting into a taxicab with a couple of mean-looking touts. The American had gone at once to his friend’s hotel, to Joliette, and then had searched in all the bars of the quarter, but could not obtain any information about him.

The next day he was found in a box car on a lonely quay beyond Joliette, stripped of everything and wearing a dirty rag of a loincloth for his only clothing. The sudden and forced reversal to a savage state had shocked him temporarily daft.