A roving-eyed fish youth, wearing proletarian blue, spotted him. He had an odd little stock of English words, just enough to serve the purpose of soliciting, but the flute-boy responded in French, happily proud to try out his high-school acquirement.
“Tu parle français très bien,” said the fish boy.
“Vraiment?”
“Mais oui. Tu a un bon accent, camarade.”
The flute-boy was overwhelmed with a peacock feeling. They were just a step from Boody Lane, which led inevitably into the fish market. A painted old girl, a fish in her hand, elbowed them purposely and went shaking herself mournfully into the alley.
“Ici on nique-nique beaucoup,” said the fishy white with a nasty smirk, bringing palm and fist together in a disgusting manner to emphasize his words. And he showed his find into Boody Lane.
It was a few yards of alleyway with a couple of drinking-dens, a butcher shop, and hole-in-the-wall rooms where the used-up carnivora of the city find their final shelter. Dismal, humid rooming-houses inhabited by youthful scavengers of proletarian life—Provençales, Greeks, Arabs, Italians, Maltese, Spaniards, and Corsicans.
A slimy garbage-strewn little space of hopeless hags, hussies, touts, and cats and dogs forever chasing one another about in nasty imitation of the residents. The hub of low-down proletarian love, stinking, hard, cruel. A ditch abandoned by the city to pernicious manure, harmless-appearing on the surface. Yet ignorant seamen tumbling into it had been relieved of hundreds and thousands of francs, and many of the stupid, cold-blooded murders of the quarter might be traced there. The little trick of hat-snatching was practiced there and the uninitiate, fancying a bawdy joke, might follow that gesture to the loss of his money or his life.
The white boy conducted the yellow toward one of the drinking-places where a pianola was rapidly hammering out a popular song. Near by were two policemen. One stood on the corner and the other paced slowly along the alley, eating peanuts. A young male, wearing rosy pyjamas and painted like a scarecrow, came smirking out of the bar and minced along beside the policeman.
“Ou tu vas?” asked a sloven woman, standing broadly in the door of the bar.
“Coucher,” the policeman flung back at her.
The woman cackled with the full volume of her raucous voice digging her hands into her flabby sides and agitating her clothes so that she displayed all of her naked discolored pillars of legs. “Peut-être, peut-être. … On ne sait jamais.” And she cackled again.
When the flute-boy entered the bar he ordered beer for himself and beer for his guide. The woman who served wanted a small bottle of lemonade-like drink for herself, and all the old girls of the place, crowding around the flute-boy, took the same drink. The flute-boy thought the stuff was cheaper than beer and said, with a grin, “Go ahead.”
But when he was ready to leave he received a bill for four hundred and seventy-five francs. He cried out that he would not pay. It was too much. The patronne showed him her price list. Forty francs a bottle for the lemonade-like drink. The flute-boy said he could not pay. They tried to take his purse. He hugged the pocket. They called the police. The two policemen that he had seen outside the place came in and told him he had to pay. They told him that if he was not satisfied he could lodge a complaint at the police station—afterward. The flute-boy showed his pocketbook. It contained three hundred and fifty francs only. The patronne took that and told him to return with the balance when he got more money. The policemen turned him loose, one of them exchanging a sly wink with the patronne as they walked away.
While the flute-boy was telling his story to Banjo and Ray, Bugsy and Dengel came surreptitiously up behind them in the shadow of the little palm tree. Bugsy made a sharp noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers, and the flute-boy started apprehensively.
“Hi, but you sure is goosey,” laughed Banjo. And right there and thenceforth the flute-boy was dubbed “Goosey.”
“I wish the fire that was lit by that fellow that got six months for it had burned the damned Ditch down,” said Ray.
“Why, whatsmat pardner?” said Banjo. “The Ditch is all right. Nobody don’t have to go rooting in Boody Lane unless you want to. Let everything take its chance, says I.”
“Chance! What good is it, then, Banjo, when the people who should get some fun out of it—the seamen—are always the victims? Think of the police making this boy pay. It’s a crime and graft all round.”
“All the policemen in this Ditch are in league with the women and the maquereaux,” said Dengel. “Some of the police have women in the boxons.”
“Not possible!” exclaimed Ray.
“What will you?” responded Dengel. “The police are just like everybody else, except that they are perhaps the bigger hogs. Their pay is twenty-five francs a day. What will you?”
“We should worry, pardner,” said Banjo. “Look at Goosey. He’s happy about it.”
Goosey’s grin gave an ineffable expression to his features.
“D’you blow the flute?” Banjo asked.
“I sure think that I do.”
“If you blow it real good I can use you.”
“In what way?”
“It’s like this.”
Banjo explained his intention to form an orchestra. There was one thing that he was sure of about this town, and that was that the people loved music. All over the Ditch you never heard anything but bad music. If we could get a set of fellows together to turn out some good music we would sure make a success of the thing. But it was a hard job getting them. The fellows with instruments never stay long in port. Malty could play the guitar, but he had no instrument.
“He would put it in hock if
