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
