“Everybody’s doing it. …
Everybody’s doing it now. …”
Ray and the Britisher took a table on a café terrace at the corner of the Rue de la République and the Quai du Port. Down the Canebière the traffic bore like a flooded river to pile up against the bar of the immense horseshoe (on which rested the weight of the city) and flow out on either side of it.
The scene was a gay confusion—peddlers with gaudy bagatelles; Greek and Armenian venders of cacahuètes and buns; fishermen crying shellfish; idling boys in proletarian blue wearing vivid cache-col and caps; long-armed Senegalese soldiers in khaki, some wearing the red fez; zouaves in striking Arab costumes; surreptitious sou gamblers with their dice stands; a strong mutilated man in tights stunting; excursion boats with tinted signs and pennants rocking thick against each other at the moorings—everything massed pell-mell together in a great gorgeous bowl.
A waiter brought them two large cool glasses of orangeade. While they were enjoying it one of the many sidewalk-feature girls stopped by their table with a little word for the Englishman.
“Fiche-moi la paix!” he shot at her.
The girl shrugged and went off, working her hips.
“Bloody wench! Because I was with her last night she tries to get familiar now. She wouldn’t dare do it in London.”
“Don’t say!” said Ray. “Why, back home in America we lift our hats to such as exist.”
“That’s one reason why I don’t like democracies.”
“Is that how you feel about them?” Ray chuckled. “I can’t go with you. Ordinarily I would like to treat those girls like anybody else, but they won’t let you. They are too class-conscious.”
After the cocotte came Banjo.
“Hello!” said Ray. “How’s the plugging?”
“Fine and dandy, pardner. I got the whole wul’ going my way. Look at me!”
“Perfection, kid.”
Banjo was in wonderful form in his cocoa-colored Provençal suit, the steel-gray Australian felt hat he had bought in Sydney, the yellow scarf hanging down his front, and full-square up-at-the-heel. Banjo had struck it right again.
The blues had bitten Taloufa badly after his praiseworthy little affair of race conservation had turned out so disastrously and he had left soon after for England. But before he went Banjo had persuaded him to redeem his suit from the Mont de Piété and had “borrowed” a little cash from him until they should meet again—an eventuality that was taken as a matter of course in the beach boys’ and seamen’s life.
“Sit down and have a drink,” said the white.
“Time is in a hurry with me now, chief,” replied Banjo. “I’m going down to the Dollar Line pier. Theah’s a boat in. What about you, pardner? Going? I been looking foh you. The fellahs am waiting foh me down at Joliette.”
“Sure thing I’ll go,” said Ray. “Want to come?” he asked his white friend.
“No. It’s too far. It’s the farthest dock down. Have a drink with us, Banjo, before you go. Let’s go to the little café in that side street up there. They’ll serve us quicker at the bar.”
The three of them entered the café hurriedly, talking. They had three glasses of vin blanc. The Englishman paid with a five-franc note. When he received his change he told the barwoman that it was not right.
“Comment?” she asked.
“Comment? Because day before yesterday here I paid five sous less for a glass of vin blanc. And I know the price hasn’t gone up since.”
“The pound and the dollar have, though,” Ray grinned.
“Maybe, but I’m not going to pay for banditry in high places.”
“It’s always we who pay heaviest for that,” said Ray.
“We?”
“Yes, we the poor, the vagabonds, the bums of life. You said you were one; that’s why I say we.”
The woman made the change right, saying that she had been mistaken, and the boys left the bar.
“Them’s all sou-crazy, these folkses,” said Banjo.
“It’s a cheap trick,” said the Briton. “I didn’t care about the few sous, but it was the principle of the thing.”
“You English certainly love to play with that word ‘principle,’ ” said Ray.
The white laughed slightly, reddening around the ears. “These people make you pay à l’Anglaise every time they hear you talk English,” he said. “I don’t like to be always paying for that. It’s irritating. And I irritate them, too, in revenge, letting them know they are cheating. Maybe one cause of it is that these little businesses are always changing hands. About a year ago I was in a little bar behind the Bourse. Six months later I saw the proprietor at Toulon, where he had bought another bar, and the other day I saw him at Nice, where he had just taken over a third after selling out at Toulon. I prefer going to an honest bourgeois brasserie. And even then you’ve got to look out for the waiters if they think you’re a greenhorn. Just yesterday one of them brought my friend change for a fifty after he had given him a hundred-franc note. My friend doesn’t speak French, and when I called the bluff he had it all ready for me right on the tip of his tongue like that bistro woman: ‘Pardon. I’ve made a mistake!’ ”
Curiously, the song kept singing in Ray’s head:
“Everybody’s doing it,
Everybody’s doing it …”
“I get along with the little bistros, all right,” said Ray. “They take me for Senegalese and treat me right. But whenever I’m with fellows speaking English they’ve got to pay for it just like you. I never make any trouble when the others pay, especially American fellows. They don’t know, the price is ridiculously cheap to them, coming from a dry country. But when I’ve got to pay for it, I kick like hell. I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a sucker for
