“Everything works out to a change.” Banjo had said a right pretty thing. The grand rhythm of life rolled on everlastingly without beginning or end in human comprehension, but the patterns were ever changing, the figures moving on and passing, to be replaced by new ones.

So the life of the Ditch remained, but for Ray the aspect was changed. It was gray now. And he was thinking of moving on and taking with him the splendid impression that the beach boys’ lives had left him in that atmosphere. He would go away now while that impression was gorgeously intact, before the place palled on him. He never liked to stay in a place beyond the point where there was something to like about it. Though the Ditch was dirty and stinking he had preferred it to a better proletarian quarter because of the surprising and warm contacts with the men of his own race and the pecuniary help he could get from them at critical times. Their presence had brought a keen zest to the Ditch that made it in a way beautiful.

So Ray was preparing to move on, although he had not many preparations to make. His baggage had consisted of some books and manuscripts of which he was now unfortunately relieved. Before going to the vintage he had boxed them up and left the box in care of the manager of the Seamen’s Mission. He thought that that was the safest procedure. But when he returned from the vintage the box could not be found and the cockeyed manager could not account for it. White beachcombers had stolen it with the books and the manuscripts, which included all the new things that Ray had done and was trying to do.

“That’s where I get plugged up for fooling with Christian charity,” commented Ray. “I’ve never believed in the thing and yet I went messing with that damned mission with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s angel flying over it. Better I had left my stuff in the African pub.”

“Get you ready, hand and foot, and let’s beat it away from here,” Ray apostrophized his members. Every day he thought of going, but he hesitated, and a week had flashed by since his talk with Banjo. He had had money enough to take him a long way when he returned from the vintage, but it was now considerably reduced. There was no ship in sight with an easy place. Well, whatever it was, he was decided about going.

One morning he went down through the docks to the breakwater, desiring to get certain aspects of it fixed in his memory before leaving. Returning at noon, he came upon the apparition of Lonesome Blue in Joliette Square.

Ray had not seen Lonesome Blue since the day at the Senegalese café when the boys were telling jokes. That afternoon he had gone with Lonesome to police headquarters and seen the assistant chief about his case. That official had told Ray that the police had nothing to do about an order of expulsion but to arrest and prosecute the delinquent again if he did not put himself beyond the frontiers of France. Ray tried to get a written statement to that effect to take to the American consulate, but the official said that that was a generally understood thing.

From police headquarters he went to the American consulate with Lonesome. The French official was right. They knew all about the regulations controlling deportees. Ray saw the chief clerk who was in charge of shipping and seaman’s affairs. The chief clerk was a Britisher of that typical breed, overbearing to common persons and crawling to superiors, that a mere British subject has to buck up against all over the world.

This gentleman recognized Lonesome immediately and vented a low-down growl, such as a vicious hound might make at a mangy mongrel daring to approach his presence.

“Hm. Yer back heah again, eh?” he said to Lonesome. “What do yer want? I swear I’ll do nothing more for yer and I don’t want you to come back to this office.” He brought his fist down on the desk.

Ray told him that he had brought Lonesome there because the man was ill, helpless, and daft. He had been to police headquarters and asked why the boy was continually arrested and punished in prison for violation of the expulsion law when he seemed incapable of acting for himself, and they had told him that his case was the affair of the American consular authorities and not theirs. The chief clerk told Ray that Lonesome Blue had refused without reason to go on the first ship he put him on months ago, and he would do nothing further for him. He had too many pressing cases and other business to give any further attention to Lonesome, who had left the United States on a foreign vessel and did not really merit the same treatment as an American seaman on an American vessel.

The clerk was long and lean, with the appearance of a woman who had suffered and grown gaunt and spidery from never having a man. His lips were tightly compressed, too repellently thin and slight to utter a hearty laugh. He was just the little-official type that is punch-pleased when some poor devil fails to comply with instructions given, gets into trouble, and affords the opportunity to say, “I did my duty.” The wretchedest thing about him was his voice, which was a sort of unnatural amalgam between a cockney whine and the English gentlemanly accent, and it grated up and down Ray’s nerves like a saw against a nail.

“But why did you come here?” he asked Ray. “Why are yer interested in this?”

It was on Ray’s tongue to say that he was there only in the interest of common decency, but he checked that, remembering that his purpose was not to be cleverly sarcastic, but to try to get Lonesome Blue back to the United States, where he might have a chance to pull himself together among his own people. And so Ray was humble and begged the clerk to give Lonesome another chance, because he was sorry for his first mistake. The clerk remained obdurate, and Ray went with Lonesome to see one of the consuls.

He was ushered into the presence of the chief and he explained Lonesome’s case. Quite different from his underling, the consul was attentive and courteous. He reiterated that Lonesome Blue’s initial blunder was a serious one, that seamen’s affairs were dealt with entirely by the chief clerk, but he would speak to him and see that the fellow was given another chance.

Ray thanked the consul and left Lonesome Blue in the office. He did not see him again before going to the vintage and thought that he had been shipped home. Now, here he was like an apparition, swaying strangely and mournfully in the square like a fading tree without roots in the soil.

Ray’s first impulse was to make a detour and pass by without speaking, but he checked it and went over to him. Lonesome showed no signs of surprise or pleasure when Ray addressed him and asked what he was still doing in Marseilles. He was lifeless, existing mechanically because the life-giving gases still gave him sustenance. The pimples on his face had developed into running sores and the texture of his skin was ash gray. His clothes were like rags eaten at by rats. The suit was originally Ray’s who had received it secondhand from an American friend. It was too large for him and he had given it to Lonesome. The soles of his shoes kept contact with the uppers by being corded round his ankles.

“Where were you all this time?” asked Ray.

“In prison again for two months. The day you left me at the consulate the shipping-master gived me twenty francs and tells me to come back every day until he got a ship for me. I went and got me a room in the Ditch and that same night the police comes and gits me right theah in the hotel. It was the fierst time they done took me out of a hotel. That was jest my hard luck. The time they done gived me for the last expulsion was up and I couldn’t explain them nothing that the consul was gwineta send me back home this time, for I ain’t acquainted with the language, and so I jest nacherally had to go right on back to that awful prison.”

“Well, this time you must ask the consul for some kind of paper so that the police will keep off you until you find a ship,” said Ray.

“I don’t know about getting anything moh out a them people,” said Lonesome. “I been up theah this morning and the shipping-master bawled me out and said he thought I was dead or gone away, and if I kain’t find a ship or stow away like any other no-count sailor, I must die, but he ain’t agwineta do nothing moh foh me. And he chased me outa there. Maybe ef you would go back up theah with me again that ’u’d hulp some.”

“I don’t know. I hardly think so,” said Ray. “I think I’ll try a letter this time.”

That was the best and last plan he could think of. In a talk, interrupted by questions and answers and perhaps extraneous matters, he might miss presenting the most important points that would help. He hadn’t the lawyer’s manner of presenting facts verbally. And in this case circumstance and condition did not permit him the lawyer’s privilege. In a letter he would review Lonesome’s case from his initial mistake of refusing to go home the first time he was sent, his subsequent getting into trouble and prison, and the many sentences he had served since, practically all for the same offence. He would say that the chief clerk was right to be angry, but he would show that the man was ill, he had suffered, he was sorry, and was begging for another chance to be sent back to the country of whose ways and language he had some understanding.

Ray thought the letter might have a little more influence if it wore the obvious respectability of this age, so he decided to typewrite it. He went to a typewriter agency and hired the use of a machine. Instead of giving his address in the Ditch he borrowed the decent one of his friend, the gentleman bum. The hotel clerk there knew him and would take care of any reply.

He got the letter done and gave it to Lonesome Blue, and he waited for the result at the African Café. In the late afternoon Lonesome came to the bar with twenty francs, a good pair of secondhand shoes, a serviceable old suit that had been given to him at the Consulate, plus a changed manner.

“I give that there letter a your’n to one a them consuls,” he told Ray. “I don’t know which one, causen I don’t know them differently. And he went up to that shipping-master’s office and gave him all that was coming to him, indeed he did. I was outside, but I was sure listening, and I heared the shipping-master said I hadn’t acted like a knowed I was a colored boy for quitting a ship after he done put me on it and when there is many skippers as don’t want no colored mens. And the consul said he didn’t care about that, I was American and had to be sent on back home.”

Ray told Lonesome that it wasn’t just because he was American that the consul had spoken like that. It was because his was a special case for there were many stranded Americans abroad, white ones, that consuls did not worry themselves about.

“Oh, I knows all about that,” Lonesome said. “It’s a new day now foh cullud folks. I been reading the cullud newspapers and there is a big organization foh cullud people called the Unia movement of Negroes. Ain’t you heared none of it? I thought you was keeping up with race progress, youse always so indiligence-talking. Theyse got to treat us better now all ovah the wul’. The Unia movement will makem, chappie.”

“Look here, Lonesome,” said Ray. “I always knew that you were the damnedest foolest nigger-head that ever was crazy. It is not because of any organization that the consul is going over the chief clerk’s head and giving you another chance. Let me tell you this, as you don’t seem to know it. The two go-getting things in this white man’s civilization are force and cunning. When you have force or power you make people do things. When you haven’t you use cunning.

“You’re the poorest kinky-head I ever did see. I put my nicest manner in a letter to get you out of this damned fix you’re in, you come shooting off your mouth full a bull about the Unia movement. Don’t think I like frigging round officials. I hate it. The movement you need is something in your block to move you away from here. You’re too damnation dumb for this Frenchman’s town, which is about the meanest place for any fool who’s got no more in his bean than in his block⁠—”

“Oh, quit you’ lecturing and let’s drink up this twenty francs,” said Lonesome.

“No, damn you. I drink with fellows on the beach who are regular fellows, but not with anything like you. I’d drink up the last franc with Banjo, but not you. You’d better take that money and get you a room and report to the consul every day until you get a ship.”

Ray left the café with something of the mixed feelings of Banjo and the chief clerk at the consulate toward Lonesome. He felt that it was men like Lonesome, stupid, and utterly repulsive in their stupidity, who made petty officials the mean creatures of bureaucracy that they were.

He hated with all his soul the odor of bureaucratic places, and right then he felt intensely hostile toward Lonesome as the cause of his coming in contact with them. He was no welfare-worker and had rather wanted to do as Banjo had advised⁠—leave Lonesome alone. But he was unable to rid himself of the insistent thought that, as he was qualified, it was the decent thing for him to do it. He pondered the fact that his education and a different culture had made an attitude that was positively logical for Banjo inhumanly cowardly for him. Banjo’s back was instinctively turned away from the Lonesome trail that leads you straight along to the Helping-Hand brotherhood of Christian charity with all its sanctimonious cant. And though Ray sometimes had to follow the Lonesome trail a little, he felt deep down in his heart that Banjo’s way was the better one and that he would rather lose himself down that road and be happy even to the negation of intellect.

“I think I’ll leave this burg this very evening,” Ray said aloud to himself. He felt a forceful urge to go, and go at once, as if he feared that something else would happen to dampen the hot, hectic, riotous rooting and scramble of the Ditch that he wished to preserve. He wanted always to think of it as he personally preferred it.

He went to his lodging and paid up his rent and put his things in a handbag. In the evening he returned to the African café, looking for Malty and Banjo and Latnah, to have a farewell drink. They were not there, but Lonesome Blue was, drinking up his twenty francs with a group of Portuguese blacks and Senegalese whose company the beach boys spurned because it was said that they lived off the garbage thrown from the big liners.

Lonesome was singing that hideous cockney song, “Show me the way to go home.” He waved his glass at Ray and said: “Come on, nigger, and join the gang and quit playing youse a white man because you got a little book larnin’.”

Ray turned his back on Lonesome and went outside, smiling sardonically at himself. A sharp gust of wind blew through him, a warning that cold weather was coming soon. He buttoned up his coat and thought of a serviceable jersey that he possessed and of an overcoat that he possessed not.

He walked on aimlessly. Before the Monkey Bar a crowd was collected in admiration of a new jangling jazz, and in the Bum Square he came upon Malty, who told him that Banjo was taken suddenly ill and was dying.