Banjo had the freedom of the Ditch and, as his pal, Ray shared some of it and was introduced to the real depths of the greater Ditch beyond his alley at the extreme end. Banjo had the right of way through Boody Lane and Ray could go through it now without his hat being snatched, as Banjo had a speaking acquaintance with all the occupants of the boxes.

One afternoon Banjo and Ray were playing checkers in a little café of the quarter, with a bottle of wine between them. A demi-crone of the hole came in with a ready-made gladness which seemed as if it might change at any moment into something poisonous. She asked Ray to pay for a drink, calling the patronne of the bistro, who was in the kitchen. Ray agreed and she took a camouflage absinthe. After drinking it, she leaned over Ray’s chair, caressing him. Her touch imparted to him an unbearable sensation as of a loathsome white worm wriggling down his spine. And mingled with that was the smell of the absinthe on her breath. He detested the nauseating sweet-garlicky odor of absinthe. In the thing bending over him he felt an obscene bird, like the pink-headed white buzzard of the Caribbean lands that also exuded an odor like absinthe-and-garlic.

Abruptly Ray shifted away from the creature, who fell awkwardly over the back of the chair.

“I pay you a drink, but I don’t want you to touch me.”

“Merde alors! Why? I am not rotten.”

“I didn’t say you were. Maybe I am. All the same, it is finished. We won’t talk about it any more.”

“Gee, pardner, why you so hard on the old thing?” demanded Banjo.

“To protect myself, Banjo. You’ve got your way with the Ditch and I’ve got mine.”

Banjo laughed. “Youse right, pardner. Gotta meet them as they come⁠—rough. Talk rough, handle them rough, everything make rough. For way down heah is roughhouse way and there ain’t no other way getting by.”

“I don’t mind the roughness at all,” replied Ray. “I like it. I prefer it to the nice pretensions of the upstage places. What gets me down here is the sliminess and rattiness. The only thing rough and real down here is the seamen and the Senegalese.”

“And the onliest thing is the one thing, pardner, that we know.”

“I wouldn’t know if that’s the whole truth.”

“ ’Cause youse tightwad business. You know that Algerian brown gal got a scrunch on you?”

“I know it, but I’m scared of her.”

“Why is you?”

“Because of her mouth. What a marvelous piece of business it is. But she’d just make tiger’s feed of me. Anyhow, I am safe. She thinks I have the change to take her on because I have one good suit of clothes and keep clean. As I haven’t, there’s nothing doing. She isn’t like Latnah.”

“Latnah is all right, eh?” Banjo said, carelessly.

“Sure. She’s the only thing down here I can see,” said Ray.

“Oh, you done fall for her, too?” Banjo chuckled.

It was dinner time. They went to a Chinese restaurant in the Rue Torte to feed for four francs each.

After dinner the boys came together in a café that they called Banjo’s hangout. Dengel, Goosey, Taloufa, Bugsy, Ginger, and Latnah, with Malty fooling near her, quite funny, grinning and gesturing like an overgrown pickaninny in amorous play.

Ray and Banjo came in and, relishing the situation, Banjo smacked his lips aloud and grinned so contagiously that all the beach boys, following his lead, imitated him. Malty became a little embarrassed, and Banjo said: “Go right on with you, buddy. Git that theah honey while the honeycomb is sweet foh you.”

Vexed momentarily, Latnah turned away, humping up her back like a little brown cat against Malty. Although under the reaction of resentment she had loaned those fancy pyjamas to decorate Malty’s limbs first, it had been no real conquest for Malty at all, for when Banjo did at last decide to take a turn in the pretty things, she felt the secondhand wear incomparably better than the first, and realized that for her Malty would never be able to hold a candle to the intractable Banjo.

The patronne of the café was quite taken by Banjo and his hearty-drinking friends, and she had given them a free option on the comfortable space at the rear for the use of their orchestra.

Taloufa had taught them a rollicking West African song, whose music was altogether more insinuating than that of “Shake That Thing.”

“Stay, Carolina, stay,
Oh, stay, Carolina, stay!”

That was the refrain, and all the verses were a repetition, with very slight variations, of the first verse.

Taloufa had a voluptuous voice, richly colored like the sound of water lapping against a bank. And he chanted as he strummed the guitar:

“Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

The whole song⁠—the words of it, the lilt, the pattern, the color of it⁠—seemed to be built up from that one word, Stay! When Taloufa sang, “Stay,” his eyes grew bigger and whiter in his charmingly carnal countenance, the sound came from his mouth like a caressing, appealing command and reminded one of a beautiful, rearing young filly of the pasture that a trainer is breaking in. Stay!

“Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

“There isn’t much to it,” said Goosey: “it’s so easy and the tune is so slight, just one bar repeating itself.”

“Why, it’s splendid, you boob!” said Ray. “It’s got more real stuff in it than a music-hall full of American songs. The words are so wonderful.”

“I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
Stay, Carolina, stay,
Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t blow on the flute so hard; you kinder kill the sound a the banjo,” said Banjo to Goosey.

“I can’t do it any other way. A flute is a flute. It mounts high every time above everything else.”

“I tell you what, Banjo,” said Ray. “Let Goosey play solo on the flute, and you fellows join in the chorus. The chorus is the big thing, anyway.”

“Tha’s the ticket,” agreed Malty, who was blowing the tiny tin horn and looked very comical at it, as he was the heftiest of the bunch.

So Goosey played the solo. And when Banjo, Taloufa, and Malty took up the refrain, Bugsy, stepping with Dengel, led the boys dancing. Bugsy was wiry and long-handed. Dengel, wiry, long-handed, and long-legged. And they made a striking pair as abruptly Dengel turned his back on Bugsy and started round the room in a bird-hopping step, nodding his head and working his hands held against his sides, fists doubled, as if he were holding a guard. Bugsy and all the boys imitated him, forming a unique ring, doing the same simple thing, startlingly fresh in that atmosphere, with clacking of heels on the floor.

It was, perhaps, the nearest that Banjo, quite unconscious of it, ever came to an aesthetic realization of his orchestra. If it had been possible to transfer him and his playing pals and dancing boys just as they were to some Metropolitan stage, he might have made a bigger thing than any of his dreams.

“I took her on a ride and she rode more than me,
I took her on a ride and she rode more than me,
Oh, I took her on a ride and she rode more than me,
Stay, Carolina, stay,
Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

Five men finishing a round of drinks at the bar went and sat at a table among the beach boys. They wore Basque caps. They applauded the playing. One of them was fat and round with a kind of rump roundness all over, but it was the compact fatness of muscle and blood and not of some pulpy fruit. He bought wine for the players and asked Banjo to play more. Glasses chinked. Goosey shook his flute, wiped the mouth of it, and started.

A troop of girls filed in from the boxes, led by Ray’s absinthe lady. They broke in among the boys and began dancing with them in their loud self-conscious way. But as soon as the music stopped they turned to the newcomers. Like sea gulls following a ship, the girls were always after the beach boys, whenever the boys had some paying business in hand. Between the sorority and the fraternity down there in the Ditch the competition was keen. The girls amused themselves with the beach boys when the beach boys had paying guests that they wanted to get at, but when the beach boys, having no money nor any potential catch, attempted, with masculine vanity, to make jolly with the girls, they were ruthlessly given a very contemptuous shoulder⁠—especially if there were any possibility of a “prize” in sight⁠—some white thing prejudiced against the proximity of black beach boys and envious of their joy.

The girls obtained drinks from the white seamen⁠—enough to warm them up to work for more substantial favors. But on this occasion the seamen were limiting themselves to wine and song. However, after a little well-managed, persistent persuasion, one of them, a swarthy, thin-faced, middling type, was carried off.

His remaining companions called for more wine for Banjo and his boys. The girls, all but one, gave them their backs and went off shaking themselves disdainfully. The one who remained was the absinthe lady. Guzzling down his wine, Goosey fondled his flute again.

“I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me,
I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me,
Oh, I took her on a jig and she jigged more than me!
Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

The playing was so good that it stirred the very round sailor to get a little nearer to the musicians. And when the music stopped he put a fraternal arm round Goosey’s shoulder. Banjo grinned at them comically and drawled in rough-ripe accents: “I’m a rooting hog!”

“And I’m a dog,” said Goosey in a giggling fit, and he chanted the little fairy song:

“List to me while I sing to you
Of the Spaniard that ruined my life.⁠ ⁠…”

“Come on, git on to that theah flute,” said Banjo, affecting a rough manner with him.

“What about the ‘West Indies Blues’?” suggested Goosey.

“Why no play ‘Shake That Thing’?” said Dengel.

“ ‘Carolina’ once again,” decided Banjo. “We’ll do the whole show from start to finish and Ray’ll tell us how it was. Eh, pardner?”

Goosey took up his flute and the round sailor sat down with his forefinger posed on his lip. The tout of the absinthe girl, an undersized, mangy-faced man of dead glassy eyes, and wearing proletarian blue, looked in at the bistro and beckoned to her. She went to the entrance and he handed her something and slunk off. It was an enormous carrot, out of the fertile peasant soil of Provence, crudely carved.

The girl went back to the rear and thrust the carrot under the nose of the tight-round sailor. He reddened and, crying, “Slut!” cuffed the girl full in the face, and as she fell he drove a kick at her. The girl shrieked.

The patronne rushed quickly to the door and locked out the crowd that was gathering. In a moment the girl picked herself up and the patronne’s man, a docker who had come in during the evening, let her out and closed the door again. The crowd dispersed.

“Stay, Carolina, stay.⁠ ⁠…”

The sailor who had slapped the girl stood the beach boys some more wine.

“It’s a rough life, pardner,” Banjo said to Ray. “Got to treat ’em rough, all right, or they’ll walk all ovah you.”

“I woulda choked her to death with these black hands of mine,” said Ray.

The swarthy sailor who had gone out returned with his girl and bought her a liqueur⁠—a Cointreau. Soon after the five men left. They had gone a few paces only up the alley when two shots barked out, precipitating the beach boys to the door of the bistro. The plump round sailor came running back.

“They have killed my comrade! They have killed my comrade!” he cried. Two bicycle policemen came sprinting from the waterfront. From out of the sinister houses and bistros the same curious crowd was gathering again, but there was not a witness who had seen the murderer nor could tell whence the shots came. The four sailors stood over their prostrate comrade, the swarthy one who had bought the girl the Cointreau. The bullets, really intended for the round one, had clean finished him.