Banjo’s place at Latnah’s was empty for many days, for he was deep down in the Ditch again. He was even scarce with Malty and the other boys, and they did not know where he was lying low. Malty, Bugsy, and Ginger had the run of a ship, where they ate, did a little galley work, and could even sleep when they wanted to, and Banjo was supposed to eat there, too. But only once had he honored the beach boys’ new mess with his presence. He did, however, send down some dozen white and colored fellows to bum off Malty. For on that ship there was always enough leftover food to feed a regiment of men.

Banjo did not go to the boat to feed because he was having a jolly fat time of it. While his pals had felt quite satisfied with the big treat of eats and drinks and a few francs in coins from the musical seamen, Banjo’s infectious spirit had touched his fellow artistes for over two hundred francs, which they considered nothing at all for the time and freedom of the Ditch that he had so generously given to them.

Latnah was not fretful about his absence. He would come again when he wanted to, just as casually as when they had first met. She had no jealous feeling of possession about him. She was Oriental and her mind was not alien to the idea of man’s insistence on freedom of desire for himself. Perhaps she liked Banjo more because he was vagabond.

Banjo arose from his close corner in the Ditch, yawned, stretched, and proceeded with the necessity of toilet. This was always an irksome affair to him when he was not dressing to strut. And he had nothing now worth showing off except an American silk shirt with blue and mauve stripes, and, jauntily over his ear, a fine bluish felt that the mandolin-player had forced on him.

He was bidding goodbye to the heart of the Ditch for the present, because he had only ten negotiable francs for the moment. He was going to feed himself and he felt that he could feed heavily, for the final exhaustion of his long spell of voluptuous excitement had left him with a feeling of intense natural thirst and hunger. In America, after such a prolonged, exquisite excess, he always experienced a particular craving for swine⁠—pig’s tail, pig’s snout, pig’s ears, pig’s feet, and chittlings.

Banjo smacked his lips recalling and anticipating the delicious taste of pig stuff. He had a special fancy for gras double and pieds paquet Marseillaise. Banjo nosed through the dirty alleys of wine shops and cook shops, hunting for a chittlings joint. He did not want to go through the embarrassing business of entering and sitting down in an eating-place and then having to leave because what he wanted was not there. At last he stood before a long, low, oblong box, the only window of which was packed with a multitude of pink pigs’ feet, while over them stretched an enormous maw of the color of seaweed. In the center of the low ceiling an electric bulb shed a soiled light. On a slate was chalked: Repas, prix fixe: fs. 4 vin compris.

The place was full. Banjo found an end seat not far from the window. A big slovenly woman brought him knife, fork, spoon, a half-pint of red wine, a length of bread, and a plate of soup. Following the soup he had a large plate of chittlings with a good mess of potatoes. Lastly a tiny triangular cut of Holland cheese. It was a remarkably good meal indeed for the price charged, and quite sufficient for an ordinary stomach. But Banjo’s stomach was not in an ordinary state. So he set his bit of cheese aside and asked for a second helping of chittlings and another pint bottle of red wine.

By the time he had finished his supplementary portion the place was three-quarters empty and he was the only person left at his table. Banjo patted his belly and a contented, drowsy noise way down from it escaped from his mouth. He took the folded ten-franc note from his breast pocket, opened it out, and laid it on the table. The woman, instead of picking it up, presented a dirty scrap of bill for fs. 12.50.

“Dawg bite me!” Banjo threw up his hands. He had been expecting change out of which he could get his café-au-rhum. How could an extra plate play him such a dirty trick? He turned out his pockets and said: “No more money, nix money, no plus billet.”

The woman thrust the bill under his nose, gesticulated like a true Provençale and cried with all the trumpets of her body: “Payez! Payez! Il faut payer.” Banjo’s tongue turned loose a rich assortment of Yankee swear words.⁠ ⁠… “Goddamned frog robbers. I eat prix fixe. I pay moh’n enough. Moi paye rien plus. Hey! Ain’t nobody in this tripe-stinking dump can help a man with this heah dawggone lingo?”

A black young man who had been sitting quietly in the back went over to Banjo and asked what he could help about.

“Can you get a meaning, boh, out a this musical racket?” Banjo asked.

“I guess I can.”

“Well, you jest tell this jabberway lady for me to go right clear where she get off at and come back treating me square. I done eat prix fixe as I often does, and jest because I had a li’l moh place in mah stimach I could fill up and ask for an extry plate, she come asking for as much money as I could eat swell on in Paree itself.”

The intermediary turned to argue with the woman, She said Banjo had not asked for the table d’hôte meal. But it was pointed out to her that she had not served him à la carte. However, there was a slate over the decrepit desk scrawled with à la carte prices, and according to it, and by the most liberal calculation, she seemed to have made the mistake of overcharging Banjo. The woman had been hiding her discomfiture behind a barrage of noise and gesticulation, but suddenly she said, “Voilà,” and threw down a two-franc piece on the table.

Banjo picked it up and said: “Dawgs mah tail! You done talk her into handing me back change? I be fiddled if you don’t handle this lingo same as I does American.”

As they departed the woman vehemently bade them goodbye, à la Provençale, with a swishing stream of saliva sent sharply after them, crying, “Je suis français, moi.”

Je suis français.⁠ ⁠… Ray (it was he who had intervened) smiled. No doubt the woman thought there could be no more stinging insult than making them sensible of being étrangers. Thought, too, perhaps, that that gave her a moral right to cheat them.

“Le’s blow this heah two francs to good friendship beginning,” said Banjo. “My twinkling stars, but this Marseilles is a most wonderful place foh meeting-up.”

Ray laughed. Banjo’s rich Dixie accent went to his head like old wine and reminded him happily of Jake. He had seen Banjo before with Malty and company on the breakwater, but had not yet made contact with any of them.

Since he had turned his back on Harlem he had done much voyaging, sometimes making a prolonged stay in a port whose aspect had taken his imagination. He had not renounced his dream of self-expression. And sometimes when he was down and out of money, desperate in the dumps of deep problematic thinking, unable to find a shore job, he would be cheered up by a little cheque from America for a slight sketch or by a letter of encouragement with a banknote from a friend.

He was up against the fact that a Negro in Europe could not pick up casual work as he could in America. The long-well-tilled, overworked Old World lacked the background that rough young America offered to a romantic black youth to indulge his froward instincts. In America he had lived like a vagabond poet, erect in the racket and rush and terror of that stupendous young creation of cement and steel, determined, courageous, and proud in his swarthy skin, quitting jobs when he wanted to go on a dream wish or a love drunk, without being beholden to anybody.

Now he was always beholden. If he was not bold enough, when he was broke and famishing, to be a bum like Malty in the square, he was always writing panhandling letters to his friends, and naturally he began to feel himself lacking in the free splendid spirit of his American days. More and more the urge to write was holding him with an enslaving grip and he was beginning to feel that any means of achieving self-expression was justifiable. Not without compunction. For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist as a man and remained for him the most wonderful example of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.

It was strange to Ray himself that he should be so powerfully pulled toward Tolstoy when his nature, his outlook, his attitude to life, were entirely turned away from the ideals of the great Russian. Strange that he who was so heathen and carnal, should feel and be responsive to the intellectual superiority of a fanatic moralist.

But it was not by Tolstoy’s doctrines that he was touched. It was depressing to him that the energy of so many great intellects of the modern world had been, like Tolstoy’s, vitiated in futile endeavor to make the mysticism of Jesus serve the spiritual needs of a world-conquering and leveling machine civilization.

What lifted him up and carried him away, after Tolstoy’s mighty art was his equally mighty life of restless searching within and without, and energetic living to find himself until the very end. Rimbaud moved him with the same sympathy, but Tolstoy’s appeal was stronger, because he lived longer and was the greater creator.

Drifting by chance into the harbor of Marseilles, Ray had fallen for its strange enticement just as the beach boys had. He had struck the town in one of those violent periods of agitation when he had worked himself up to the pitch of feeling that if he could not give vent to his thoughts he would break up into a thousand articulate bits. And the Vieux Port had offered him a haven in its frowsy, thickly-peopled heart where he could exist en pension proletarian of a sort and try to create around him the necessary solitude to work with pencil and scraps of paper.

He too was touched by the magic of the Mediterranean, sprayed by its foamy fascination. Of all the seas he had crossed there was none like it. He was ever reminiscent of his own Caribbean, the first salty water he had dipped his swarthy boy’s body in, but its dreamy, trade-wind, cooling charm could not be compared with this gorgeous bowl of blue water unrestingly agitated by the great commerce of all the continents. He loved the docks. If the aspect of the town itself was harsh and forbidding, the docks were of inexhaustible interest. There any day he might meet with picturesque proletarians from far waters whose names were warm with romance: the Caribbean, the Gulf of Guinea, the Persian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the China Seas, the Indian Archipelago. And, oh, the earthy mingled smells of the docks! Grain from Canada, rice from India, rubber from the Congo, tea from China, brown sugar from Cuba, bananas from Guinea, lumber from the Sudan, coffee from Brazil, skins from the Argentine, palm-oil from Nigeria, pimento from Jamaica, wool from Australia, oranges from Spain and oranges from Jerusalem. In piled-up boxes, bags, and barrels, some broken, dropping their stuff on the docks, reposing in the warm odor of their rich perfumes⁠—the fine harvest of all the lands of the earth.

Barrels, bags, boxes, bearing from land to land the primitive garner of man’s hands. Sweat-dripping bodies of black men naked under the equatorial sun, threading a caravan way through the time-old jungles, carrying loads steadied and unsupported on kink-thick heads hardened and trained to bear their burdens. Brown men half-clothed, with baskets on their backs, bending low down to the ancient tilled fields under the tropical sun. Eternal creatures of the warm soil, digging, plucking for the Occident world its exotic nourishment of life, under the whip, under the terror. Barrels⁠ ⁠… bags⁠ ⁠… boxes.⁠ ⁠… Full of the wonderful things of life.

Ray loved the life of the docks more than the life of the sea. He had never learned to love the deep sea. Out there on a boat he always felt like a reluctant prisoner among prisoners cast out upon a menacing dreariness of deep water. He had never known a seaman who really loved the deep sea.⁠ ⁠… He knew of fellows who could love an old freighter as a man might love a woman. Nearly all the colored seamen he knew affectionately called their ship the old “broad.” The real lure of the sea was beyond in the port of call. And of all the great ports there was none so appealing to seamen as Marseilles in its cruel beauty.

The port was a fine big wide-open hole and the docks were wide open too. Ray loved the piquant variety of the things of the docks as much as he loved their colorful human interest. And the highest to him was the Negroes of the port. In no other port had he ever seen congregated such a picturesque variety of Negroes. Negroes speaking the civilized tongues, Negroes speaking all the African dialects, black Negroes, brown Negroes, yellow Negroes. It was as if every country of the world where Negroes lived had sent representatives drifting in to Marseilles. A great vagabond host of jungle-like Negroes trying to scrape a temporary existence from the macadamized surface of this great Provençal port.

Here for Ray was the veritable romance of Europe. This Europe that he had felt through the splendid glamour of history. When at last he did touch it, its effect on him had been a negative reaction. He had to go to books and museums and sacredly-preserved sites to find the romance of it. Often in conversation he had politely pretended to a romance that he felt not. For it was America that was for him the living, hot-breathing land of romance. Its mighty business palaces, vast depots receiving and discharging hurrying hordes of humanity, immense cathedrals of pleasure, far-flung spans of steel roads and tumultuous traffic⁠—the terrible buffalo-tramping crush of life, the raucous vaudeville mob-shouting of a newly-arrived nation of white throats, the clamor and clash of races and the grim-grubbing position of his race among them⁠—all was a great fever in his brain, a rhythm of a pattern with the time-beat of his life, a burning, throbbing romance in his blood.

There was a barbarous international romance in the ways of Marseilles that was vividly significant of the great modern movement of life. Small, with a population apparently too great for it, Europe’s best back door, discharging and receiving its traffic to the Orient and Africa, favorite port of seamen on French leave, infested with the ratty beings of the Mediterranean countries, overrun with guides, cocottes, procurers, repelling and attracting in its white-fanged vileness under its picturesqueness, the town seemed to proclaim to the world that the grandest thing about modern life was that it was bawdy.

Banjo wanted to see what Ray’s work was like and Ray took him up to his place, which was a little up beyond the Bum Square. Banjo had been interested in Ray’s talking about his work, but when he saw the sheets of ordinary composition paper, a little soiled, and the shabby collection of books, he quickly lost interest and changed the conversation to the hazards of the vagabond panhandling life.

Ray suggested taking a turn along the Corniche. Banjo had never been on the Corniche. Ray said it was one of the three interesting things of the town from a pictorial point of view⁠—the Ditch, the Breakwater and the Corniche. He liked the Corniche in a special way, when he was in one of those oft-recurring solitary, idly-brooding moods. Then he would watch the ships coming in from the east, coming in from the west, and speculate about making a move to some other place.

They went by the Quai de Rive Neuve toward Catalan. At a unique point beyond the baths of that name Ray waved back toward the breakwater.

“Hot damn! What a mahvelous sight!” exclaimed Banjo. “I been in Marcelles all this time and ain’t never come this heah side.”

Two ships were going down the Mediterranean out to the East, and another by the side of l’Estaque out to the Atlantic. A big Peninsular and Orient liner with three yellow-and-black funnels was coming in. The fishing-boats were little colored dots sailing into the long veil of the marge. A swarm of sea gulls gathered where one of the ships had passed, dipping suddenly down, shooting up and circling around joyously as if some prize had been thrown there to them. In the basin of Joliette the ships’ funnels were vivid little splashes of many colors bunched together, and, close to them in perspective, an aggregate of gray factory chimneys spouted from their black mouths great columns of red-brown smoke into the indigo skies. Abruptly, as if it rose out of the heart of the town, a range of hills ran out in a gradual slope like a strong argent arm protecting the harbor, and merged its point in the faraway churning mist of sea and sky.

“It’s an eyeful all right,” said Banjo.

Ray said nothing. He was so happily moved. A delicious symphony was playing on the tendrils that linked his inner being to the world without, and he was afraid to break the spell. They walked the whole length of the Corniche down to the big park by the sea. They leaped over a wall and a murky stream, crossed the race track, and came to rest and doze in the shade of a magnolia.

It was nightfall when they got back to town, returning by the splendid avenue called the Prado. The Bum Square was full of animation. All the life of the dark alleys around it⁠—clients of little hotels and restaurants, bistros, cabarets, love shops, fish shops, meat shops⁠—poured into the square to take the early evening air. A few fishermen were gathered round a table on a café terrace, and fisher-girls promenaded arm in arm, their wooden shoes sounding heavily in the square. The Arab-black girl who had danced so amorously at the Senegalese café was parading with a white girl companion. Five touts, one of whom was a mulatto, stood conversing with a sniffing, expectant air near the urinal. The dogs at their old tricks gamboled about in groups among the playing children. A band of Senegalese, nearly all wearing proletarian blue, were hanging round the entrance of a little café in striking, insouciant ease, talking noisily and laughing in their rich-sounding language. A stumpy fat cocotte and a tall one entered the Monkey Bar, and the loud voice of the pianola kicking out a popular trot rushed across the square.

Suddenly the square emptied before an onrushing company of white laborers, led by a stout, bull-bodied man, heading for the little group of Senegalese. The group of Senegalese broke up and scattered, leaving two of their number knocked down, and one of the white attackers who had caught a clout in the head. At that moment, Bugsy and Dengel, coming from the docks, appeared at the southwest corner of the square, just as one of the blacks was felled.

“He‑ey! You see that theah! You see that!” Bugsy cried, and to his amazement the big white man, followed by his gang, came charging toward him. Militant by nature and always ready to defend himself, Bugsy exclaimed: “Hey⁠—hey! Now what they coming to mess with me for?” And he stood his ground, on guard. But when he saw the whole gang coming unswervingly down upon him, he wavered, backed a few steps, then turned and ran nimbly like a rat up one of the dark alleys.

Dengel was soft with the wine of the docks and, comprehending nothing of what was in the air, stood swaying in his tracks where he was struck a vicious blow in the face that felled him.

As suddenly as it had commenced, the onslaught was ended. Bugsy and Dengel went to the African café where some of the Senegalese had gathered. Banjo and Ray also went there. They had seen the eruption from a café in the square.

Dengel’s nose was bleeding badly.

“It’s sure counta you always getting in a fight that Dengel he got hit,” said Banjo to Bugsy.

“Me! It wasn’t no fault a mine. What was I to do, pardner?”

“Jest keep you’ mouth shut and do what you done did at the critical moment⁠—run! What else was there to do when the whole damn ditch a white mens is after one nigger?”

“If them Senegalese had done stand up to it⁠—” Bugsy began.

“They tried to, but what could five men do against an army?”

“But Gawd in heab’n!” exclaimed Bugsy. “I almost got like feeling I was in Dixie with the fire under mah tail.”

“H’m. If it was in Dixie, you wouldn’t be sitting there now, blowing a whole lot a nonsense off’n you’ liver lips.”

Ray was talking to the proprietor of the bar and a Senegalese, who was explaining that the trouble arose out of differences between the Italian dock workers and the Senegalese. There was much jealousy between the rival groups and the Senegalese aggressively reminded the Italians that they were French and possessed the rights of citizens.

“There is no difference between Italians and Frenchmen,” said the barkeeper. “They are all the same white and prejudiced against black skin.”

“C’est pas vrai, pas vrai,” a tall Senegalese seaman jumped to his feet. “Ça n’existe pas en France.”

“It exists, it exists all right,” insisted the patron. He was small and eager and wore glasses and a melancholy aspect. “France is no better than America. In fact, America is better every time for a colored man.”

Upon that a clamorous dispute broke out in Senegalese and French, interspersed with scraps of English. Ray sat back, swallowing all of it that he could understand. The proprietor was a fervid apostle of Americanism and he warmed up to defend his position. He praised American industry, business, houses, theaters, popular music, and progress and opportunity for everybody⁠—even Negroes. He said the Negroes knew how they stood among the Americans, but the French were hypocrites. They had a whole lot of say, which had nothing to do with reality.

At this the Senegalese seaman bellowed another protest, punctuated with swearing merde on the Anglo-Saxons and all those who liked their civilization, and the proprietor invited him to leave his café if he could not be polite to him. The seaman told the proprietor that even though he had been to the United States and made money enough to return to Marseilles and buy a bar, he should not forget that he was only a common blackamoor of the Dakar streets, while he (the seaman) was a fils des nobles, belonging to an old aristocratic Senegambian family. The proprietor retorted that there was nothing left to the African nobility but “bull.” Ask Europe about that, especially France, which was the biggest white hog in Africa.

The Senegalese started again, as if he had been pinched behind, to the defense of the protectress of his country. But the proprietor brought down La Race Nègre on him. This was a journal for the “Defense de la race Nègre,” published by a group of French West Africans in Paris. The journal was displayed conspicuously for sale in the café, although some colored visitors had told the proprietor they did not think it was good for his business to sell it there.

But the proprietor had a willful way. He was rather piqued that the café was not doing so well since the first opening days. Before he bought it the clients were all white, and now no whites went there except the broken-down girls of the Ditch. He remarked white people peeping in at the door and not entering when they saw the black boys. The handful of well-dressed Senegalese who went there said they were sure the whites did not enter not because of prejudice, but because the black boys lounging all over the café were dirty, ragged, and smelly. The proprietor stressed his feeling that it was all a matter of prejudice. White people, no matter of what nation, did not want to see colored people prosper.

Also, the proprietor was intransigent about La Race Nègre because he had been rebuked for selling it by a flabby bulk of a man who had once been an official out in one of the colonies, and who now had something to do with the welfare of the indigènes in Marseilles. The white gentleman had told the proprietor that the Negroes who published La Race Nègre were working against France and such a journal should be suppressed and its editors trapped and thrown into jail as criminals. The proprietor of the bar replied that he was not in West Africa, where he had heard the local authorities had forbidden the circulation of the Negro World, but in Marseilles, where he hoped to remain master in his own café. As the proprietor said that the gentleman from the colonies left the café brusquely and unceremoniously without saying goodbye. The patron exploded: “He thought he was in Africa. He wanted to know everything about me. Wanted to see my papers. Like a policeman. If it wasn’t on account of my business I would have shown him my black block. Even wanted to know how I made my money in America. I told him I would never have made it in France.

“That was like a cracker now,” he continued. “I never had a white man nosing into my business like that in America. But these French people are just like detectives. They want to know everything about you, especially if you’re a black. I’m going to let them see I’m not a fool.”

Some time later the barkeeper learned from an indigène employed by his gentleman visitor that that personage had been very offended by the barkeeper’s use of the word “master,” that he had not remained uncovered when talking to him, and that the Senegalese lounging in the café had not saluted when he entered.

The barkeeper spread out the copy of La Race Nègre and began reading, while the Senegalese crowded around him with murmurs of approval and that attitude of credulity held by ignorant people toward the printed word.

He read a list of items:

• Of forced conscription and young Negroes running away from their homes to escape into British African territory.

• Of native officials paid less than whites for the same work.

• Of forced native labor, because the natives preferred to live lazily their own lives, rather than labor for the miserable pittance of daily wages.

• Of native women insulted and their husbands humiliated before them.

• Of flagellation.

• Of youths castrated for theft.

• Of native chiefs punished by mutilation.

• Of the scourge of depopulation⁠ ⁠…

“That’s how the Europeans treat Negroes in the colonies,” said the barkeeper. The protesting seaman appeared crushed under the printed accounts. The barkeeper launched a discourse about Africa for the Africans and the rights of Negroes, from which he suddenly shot off into a panegyric of American culture. He had returned from America inspired by two strangely juxtaposed ideals: the Marcus Garvey Back-to-Africa movement and the grandeur of American progress. He finished up in English, turning toward the English-speaking boys:

“Negroes in America have a chance to do things. That’s what Marcus Garvey was trying to drive into their heads, but they wouldn’t support him⁠—”

“Ain’t no such thing!” exclaimed Banjo. “Marcus Garvey was one nigger who had a chance to make his and hulp other folks make, and he took it and landed himself in prison. That theah Garvey had a white man’s chance and he done nigger it away. The white man gived him plenty a rope to live, and all he done do with it was to make a noose to hang himse’f. When a ofay give another ofay the run of a place he sure means him to make good like a Governor or a President, and when a darky gets a chance⁠—I tell you, boss, Garvey wasn’t worth no more than the good boot in his bahind that he done got.”

“Garvey was good for all Negroes,” the barkeeper turned upon Banjo⁠—“Negroes in America and in Europe and in Africa. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why, the French and the British were keeping the Negro World, Garvey’s newspaper, out of Africa. It was because Garvey was getting too big that they got him.”

“There was nothing big left to him, if you ask me,” said Banjo. “I guess he thought like you, that he was Moses or Napoleon or Frederick Douglass, but he was nothing but a fool, big-mouf nigger.”

“It’s fellahs like you that make it so hard for the race,” replied the barkeeper. “You have no respect for those who’re trying to do something to lift the race higher. American Negroes have the biggest chance that black people ever had in the world, but most of them don’t grab hold of it, but are just trifling and no-’count like you.”

Banjo made a kissing noise with his lips and looked cross-eyed at the barkeeper. “Come on, pard, let’s beat it,” he said to Ray. Outside he remarked: “He grabbed his, all right, and growed thin like a mosquito doing it. Look how his cheeks am sunkin’! I guess he’s even too cheap to pay the price of a li’l’ pot a honey. Why didn’t you say some’n’, Ray? I guess you got more brains in you’ finger nail than in twenty nigger haids like his’n jest rising up outa the bush of Africa.”

“I always prefer to listen,” replied Ray. “You know when he was reading that paper it was just as if I was hearing about Texas and Georgia in French.”

“But, oh, you kink-no-more!” laughed Bugsy. “Did you notice his hair? It’s all nice and straightened out.”

“You don’t have to look two time to decipher an African nigger in him, all the same,” said Banjo, contemptuously. “A really and truly down-there Bungo-Congo.”

“Get out!” said Ray. “You’re a mean hater, Banjo. He’s just like other Negroes from the States and the West Indies.”

“Not from the States, pard. Maybe the monkeys them⁠—”

“Monkey you’ grandmother’s blue yaller outa the red a you’ charcoal-black split coon of a baboon moon!” cried Bugsy, shaking off his rag of a coat. “I’ll fight any nigger foh monkeying me.”

“ ’Scuse me, buddy, I thought you said you was American. I didn’t know you come from them Wesht Indies country. Put you’ coat on. You and me and Ginger and Malty am just like we come from the same home town. We ain’t nevah agwine to fight against one another.”

“But you’ friend there, he’s West Indian, too.” The little wiry belligerent Bugsy was cooling down as quickly as he had warmed up.

Banjo waved his hand deprecatingly: “He ain’t in that class. You know that.”

In the Bum Square they met Latnah and Malty. From the Indian steward of a ship from Bombay, Latnah had gotten a little bag of curry powder and a great choice chunk of mutton, and she was preparing to make a feast.

“Hi, but everything is setting jest as pretty as pretty could be!” cried Banjo. “I been thinking about you, Latnah.”

“Me too think,” said Latnah. “Long time you no come.”

“The fellahs them, you know how it is when we get tight. All night boozing and swapping stories.”

“Stray cock done chased off a neighbor’s lot going strutting back home to his roost,” added Malty.

Banjo kicked him on the heel.

Ray was going off to a little alley restaurant, but Banjo would not hear of that. Latnah supported him.

“Sure, you-all come my place,” she said.

She cooked the food on the step just outside the door. The wood coal that she took from a bright-covered box and lit with a wad of paper, crackled tinnily in the stove, which was the bottom part of some throwaway preserve can, such as tramps use to warm themselves in winter.

The cooking touched pungently the boys’ nostrils and made Ray remember the Indian restaurant in New York where sometimes he used to go for curry food.

“Oh, the wine!” cried Latnah. “Who got money?”

Banjo shrugged, Malty grinned, and Ray said, “I got a couple a francs.”

“No, no you, camarade,” she christened Ray.

“Who’s to have money ef you no got?” Bugsy asked her. She fussed for a while about her waist and extracted a note, which she handed to Banjo. She made Ray shift his position where he was sitting on the box from which she had taken the coal, and got out two quart bottles.

“You get one extra bottle vin blanc,” she said.

“What for vin blanc?” demanded Banjo. “It’s dearer.”

“Mebbe you’ friend⁠—”

“No, I always prefer red,” said Ray.

“All right, get three bottles vin rouge,” said Latnah, counting over her guests with a quick birdlike nodding.

“No forget change,” she called after Banjo, tramping heavily down the stairs.

“Not much change coming outa ten francs,” he flung back.

“It’s no ten; it’s twenty,” she said. “Don’t let the whites rob you.”

“Sweet nuts, ef it ain’t!” exclaimed Banjo. “All right, mamma. I got you.”

When Banjo returned with the wine he forgot to hand over the change. Latnah drew the cot into the middle of the little room and, spreading newspapers, she served the feast on it. The boys ranged themselves on each side of the cot, Latnah sitting where she could lean a little against Banjo. Ginger came in when they were in the middle of the feast.

“Whar you been? We been looking for you all over,” said Malty.

“I was cruising around,” said Ginger, “but Ise right here with you, all right. What it takes to find you when there’s a high feeding going on Ise got right here.” He pointed to his nose.

“Sure, youse got a combination of color there,” said Banjo, “that oughta smell out lots a things in this heah white man’s wul’.”

“Chuts, combination!” said Bugsy. “You got to show me that there’s any more to it than there is to naturalization, that you and me and Malty is. Ginger here ain’t nothing from combination but a mistake.”

“What’s that, you Bugsyboo?” said Ginger.

“You heared me, Lights-out,” replied Bugsy.

Latnah rolled up the newspapers in a bundle and put them in a corner. They smoked cigarettes. Banjo fell into a talking mood and gave a highly extravagant account of how he met Ray. The proprietress of the restaurant became a terrifying virago who would have him arrested by the police, if Ray had not intervened. And when he threatened to call in the police against her, she begged him not to and handed over the change in tears.

“I got something for you,” Latnah said to Banjo. “Bet you no guess.”

“American cigarettes⁠—or English?” asked Banjo. “No.”

“Oh, I can’t guess. What is it?”

Latnah took a paper packet out of a cardboard suit box and gave it to Banjo. It contained a pair of pyjamas all bright yellow and blue and black.

“Oh, Lawdy! Lemme see you in them, Banjo!” cried Malty, who jumped up and made a few fairy motions.

“What you want waste money on these heah things for?” demanded Banjo.

“A man had plenty of them selling cheap,” said Latnah. “Ten francs. I think he steal them. They good for you.”

“You evah hear a seaman fooling with pyjamas?” said Banjo.

“Sure,” said Ginger. “I used to wear pyjamas mahself one time. It’s good for a change. You’ hide will feel better in them tonight.”

Latnah tried to hide her coy little smile behind her hand.

“Plugging home, plugging home,” chanted Malty to the air of the “West Indies Blues.”

They were short of cigarettes and Banjo went off to get some. Banjo remained so long Bugsy and Ginger left to look for him. Ginger returned after a while, stuck his head through the door, and tossed a packet of yellow French cigarettes at Latnah. “Can’t find that nigger Banjo anywheres,” he said. “He done vanish like a spook.”

“Like a rat into one a them holes, you mean,” said Malty.

Latnah became fidgety and melancholy. She tossed a cigarette at Ray. “Banjo is one big dirty man,” she said.

“Oh, he’ll come all right,” said Malty. “He’s broke.”

“He no broke,” said Latnah. “He got change of the twenty francs.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Malty. And he slightly shifted his position where he was squatting on an old cushion, so that his feet could touch Latnah’s. “Gee! Latnah, you’ cooking was so mahvelous it makes me feel sweet and drowsy all over.”

“You good friend, Malty, very good friend.” And she did not change her position. “You more appreciate than Banjo.”

“Oh, he’s all right, though; but you know his way.⁠ ⁠… I ain’t got the price of a room to stay up this end tonight, and I feels too good and tired to walk way back to the box car. I wish you’d let me sleep on the floor here.”

Latnah gave no reply. Ray slipped out, saying he would see them tomorrow.