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
