“The Froggies am all tight that way,” said Malty. “They’re a funny people. If you’d a taken up a collection every jack man a them woulda gived you a copper, thinking that you make you’ living that way—”
“Hell with their coppers,” said Banjo. “I expected them to stand a round just for expreciation only of a good thing.”
“As for that, they ain’t the treating kind a good fellahs that you and I am used to on the other side,” said Malty. …
From the bistro on the breakwater, the boys rocked slowly along up to Joliette. Ginger had a favorite drinking-place on the Rue Forbin, a dingy tramps’ den. They stopped there, drinking until twilight. Ginger and Dengel became so staggeringly soft that they decided to go back to the box car and sleep.
Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy, “Let’s take our tail up to the Bum Square.”
The Place Victor Gelu of the Vieux Port was called by the boys on the beach the “Bum Square” because it was there they gathered at night to bum or panhandle seamen and voyagers who passed through to visit the Quartier Réservé. The Quartier Réservé they called “the Ditch” with the same rough affection with which they likened their ship to an easy woman by calling it the “broad.”
Avoiding the populous Rue de la République, Malty, Banjo, and Bugsy followed the little-frequented Boulevard de la Major, passing by the shadow of the big cathedral and the gate of the Central Police Building, to reach the Bum Square. They took two more rounds of red wine on the way, the last in a little café in the Place de Lenche before they descended to the Ditch.
Malty had a dinner engagement with a mulatto seaman from a boat of the American Export Line, whom he was to meet in the Bum Square. The wine had worked so hard on their appetites that all three were hungry again. Malty looked in all the cafés of the square, but did not find his man. A big blond fellow, his clothes starched with dirt, was standing in the shadow of a palm, looking sharply out for customers. Malty asked him if he had seen his mulatto.
“He went up that way with a tart,” replied the blond, pointing toward the Canebière.
“Let’s go and eat, anyway,” Malty said to Banjo and Bugsy. “I got some money yet.”
“Latnah musta gived you an extry raise; she is always handing you something,” said Bugsy.
“I ain’t seen her for ovah three days,” replied Malty.
“Oh, you got a sweet mamma helping you on the side?” Banjo asked, laughing.
“Not mine, boh,” replied Malty. “Is jest a li’l’ woman bumming like us on the beach. I don’t know whether she is Arabian or Persian or Indian. She knows all landwidges. I stopped a p.i. from treating her rough one day, and evah since she pals out with our gang, nevah passing us without speaking, no matter ef she even got a officer on the string, and always giving us English and American cigarettes and a little change when she got ’em. It’s easy for her, you see, to penetrate any place on a ship, when we can’t, ’cause she’s a skirt with some legs all right, and her face ain’t nothing that would scare you.”
“And none a you fellahs can’t make her?” cried Banjo. “Why you-all ain’t the goods?”
“It ain’t that, you strutting cock, but she treats us all like pals and don’t leave no ways open for that. Ain’t it better to have her as a pal than to lose out ovah a li’l’ crazy craving that a few sous can settle up here?”
They went up one of the humid, somber alleys, thick with little eating-dens of all the Mediterranean peoples; Greek, Yugoslav, Neapolitan, Arab, Corsican, and Armenian, Czech and Russian.
When they had finished eating, Malty suggested that they might go up to the gayer part of the Ditch. Bugsy said he would go to the cinema to see Hoot Gibson in a Wild West picture. But Banjo accepted the invitation with alacrity. Every chord in him responded to the loose, bistro-love-life of the Ditch.
Banjo was a great vagabond of lowly life. He was a child of the Cotton Belt, but he had wandered all over America. His life was a dream of vagabondage that he was perpetually pursuing and realizing in odd ways, always incomplete but never unsatisfactory. He had worked at all the easily-picked-up jobs—longshoreman, porter, factory worker, farm hand, seaman.
He was in Canada when the Great War began and he enlisted in the Canadian army. That gave him a glimpse of London and Paris. He had seen a little of Europe before, having touched some of the big commercial ports when he was a husky fireman. But he had never arrived at the sailor’s great port, Marseilles. Twice he had been to Genoa and once to Barcelona. Only those who know the high place that Marseilles holds in the imagination of seamen can get the feeling of his disappointment. All through his seafaring days Banjo had dreamed dreams of the seaman’s dream port. And at last, because the opportunity that he had long hoped for did not come to take him there, he made it.
Banjo had been returned to Canada after the general demobilization. From there he crossed to the States, where he worked at several jobs. Seized by the old restlessness for a sea change while he was working in an industrial plant, he hit upon the unique plan of getting himself deported.
Some of his fellow workmen who had entered the United States illegally had been held for deportation, and they were all lamenting that fact. Banjo, with his unquenchable desire to be always going, must have thought them very poor snivelers. They had all been thunderstruck when he calmly announced that he was not an American. Everything about him—accent, attitude, and movement—shouted Dixie. But Banjo had insisted that his parentage was
