When the dawn came filtering down through the Ditch, Ray left the party and staggered through Boody Lane to find his bunk. Dengel and Ginger had left the place before him, knocking their heads together in a drowsy roll. Malty had sprawled in a corner over a table. The bistro man helped him to a room upstairs. Banjo was full and tight as a drum, but he kept right on playing and drinking as if he were just beginning a performance. Goosey was tired out, but he was curious about the distinguished company and his desire to keep up with it kept him awake. The gentlemen guides had tried to persuade Ray to go with the party to an all-night café off the Canebière for a big breakfast, but he had declined. All the nourishment Ray needed then was to lay his body down and rest.

Boody Lane showed no stir of life as he passed through it. All the holes in the wall and the cafés were closed. Not a dog, not a cat prowled through the alley. A strange clinical odor rose from the heaps of rubbish in the gutters, communicating to his wine-fogged senses an unpleasant sensation as if he were in quarantine. He had remarked that strange odor in the Ditch at regular intervals and he could not account for it. The big hospital was just on the hill above. That could not be the source of the smell, he argued, for he had often walked through the street right under the hospital without detecting it.

Ray’s head was pounding with the tom-tom of savage pain and his brain was in a maze, reacting against himself. For weeks he had been purposelessly boozing and lazing and shutting his mind against a poem in his heart and a story in his head, both clamoring to be heard. There was no reason why he shouldn’t do something, and yet he couldn’t do anything.

He could not sleep, although he was so tired. The racket in his head left him unstrung. The drinking-bout after the cinema was a stupid thing, he knew. Couldn’t expect anything but a mess from mixing myself up like that. Every time he dozed off he woke up with a broken dream of some vivid experience, as if his real self did not want to go to sleep.

However, repose was so good, even though sleep played the imp, that he had no idea how many hours he had lain there until Banjo broke into the room, demanding if he was going to sleep through the night after sleeping all day.

“You can carry on sleeping forevah,” said Banjo. “I’m gwine to leave you-all. I’m gwine away to the Meedy.”

“Which Midi and who are you going away with?” Ray asked. “You’re right in the Midi now, don’t you know that?”

“Oh, I gwina away to the real Meedy down the coast whar the swell guys hang out at.”

Ray guessed at once that the leader of the party had proposed to take Banjo along, and he said: “You’d better stay here in Marseilles. It’s no use you running off with those people. They’re no good for you.”

“Ain’t nothing bad foh mine, pardner. I was bohn on the go same like you is, and Ise always ready for a change.”

“Where they taking you?”

“Nice, Monte Carlo, some a them tony raysohts. I don’t care which one. But I’m going there and don’t you fear. You hold mah place for me in Boody Lane till I come back, mah friend.”

“Boody Lane in your seat. You’re a damn fool to go. What about the orchestra? Aren’t you going to fool with that any more?”

“The orchestry! What you wanta remember it now for? You’d fo’hgotten it as well as I and everybody did, becausen theah was so many other wonderful things in this sweet poht to take up our time. All the same, pardner, Ise jest right in with the right folkses now to hulp me with an orchestry.”

“Help my black hide. You’ll get nothing but a drunken bath outa those people, and it’s better you get that way in the Ditch than where you’re going. They can’t help themselves, much less you. You can think about an orchestra, but they can’t think about anything. They don’t want to. I know it’s no good your going with them. I’m sorry I introduced you to them.”

“Hi, pardner, what’s eating you? You jealous of a fellah just becausen they done took me in instead a you?”

“You big bonehead. He wanted me to go, and it was after I refused he asked you. I know those people. I’m sure I can stand them better than you by being a charming, drunk, unthinking fool. But I couldn’t stand them sober and thinking just a little bit. You won’t be able to stand them drunk or sober. I know it. You’ll cut a hell of a hog before you know what’s happening.

“How do you think I’ve been traveling round so much without having any money? I wasn’t a steady seaman like you. I did it by getting on to people like those for a while. I could carry on⁠—for a while. But I always got tired and quit. I can’t see you carrying on with them for any time at all⁠—can’t imagine you ever being funny with that big lump of a buffalo.”

“Well, I’m gwina try it, all the same, pardner. I know them folks mahself just like you does. I been around Paree with one a them once, a dandy hoojah. Didn’t I tell you about it?”

“Yes, but he was different.”

“Why don’t you come with us, and ef we didn’t like it we could come back together?”

“I don’t want to go and they wouldn’t want two of us, crazy. One black boy is just odd enough for a little diversion. But what do you want to quit us for? What about Latnah?”

“You know she is mad at me. Nearly stick me with a dagger. I leave her to Malty and you.”

Perhaps Banjo did not know how great his influence was over the beach boys. His going away with his instrument left them leaderless and they fell apart. And as a psychological turn sometimes foreshadows a material change, or vice versa, even in obscure isolated cases, the boys felt that something was happening and realized that it was becoming very difficult for them to gain their unmoral bohemian subsistence as before.

They did not know that the Radical government had fallen, that a National-Union government had come into power, and that the franc had been arrested in its spectacular fall and was being stabilized. They knew very little about governments, and cared less. But they knew that suddenly francs were getting scarce in their world, meals were dearer in the eating-sheds and in the bistros, and more sous were necessary to obtain the desirable red wine and white, so indispensable to their existence.

However, some of them had an imperfect commonsense knowledge of some of the things that were taking place in the important centers of the world, and that those things were threatening to destroy their aristocratic way of life. Great Britain’s black boys, for example. They observed that colored crews on British ships west of Suez were becoming something of a phenomenon. Even the colored crews on the Mediterranean coal ships, of which they had a monopoly in the past, were being replaced by white crews. The beach boys felt the change, for the white crews would not feed them the leftover food.

The beach boys were scattered and broke. Goosey and Bugsy had joined a gang of Arab and Mediterranean laborers and were sent by a municipal agency to work in an upcountry factory. Ray had no money. He owed rent on his room and could not obtain any money by either begging, beseeching, versifying, or storytelling.

Latnah solved the situation by proposing that she, Ray, and Malty should go to the vineyards to work. The agencies wanted hands. The pay was about thirty francs a day, with free board and lodging and plenty of wine. They could save their wages to return to Marseilles. The harvesting would last about a month.

Ray jumped at the idea. He had been just about fed up with the Vieux Port when he met Banjo. The meeting and their friendship had revived his interest. Now that Banjo was gone and the group dispersed, the spell was broken and he felt like moving on. He tried to get Ginger to go along. But Ginger, as an old-timer on the docks, preferred to stay and take his chances with Dengel.