“The only time they’ll lose anything is when they do it to insult you,” said the white. “They lose more than they gain by such pettiness. Some months ago we picked up a couple of toffs and they took us for a spree down the coast. We stayed a little time in Antibes. One night my friend telephoned me from a café in the square and the proprietor himself told the waiter to charge him two francs. He happened to mention it and I knew the cost was half a franc. The next morning I went and asked the fat old thing why he had overcharged my friend. He tried to make out that it was a double call, which wasn’t true, of course, and would only have amounted to a franc in any case. I left it like that. It was enough for me to see the proprietor in an embarrassing position. I get a devilish lot of fun out of them and their sous. And that’s why I am always correcting their subtraction and addition. But of course we never went back to that café while we stayed in Antibes.”
“I wish they wouldn’t figure against us poor black boys when we speak English,” said Ray. “The trouble is you Europeans make no color distinction—when it is a matter of the color of our money.”
“You mean the French,” said the young man, his Anglo-Saxon pride suddenly bursting forth. “You don’t find anybody in England playing such penny tricks.”
“Oh, well, you’ve got a different method, that’s all,” said Ray. “I’ve got a very definite opinion about it all. When I was in England I always felt myself in an atmosphere of grim, long-headed honesty—honesty because it was the best business policy in the long run. You felt it was a little hard on the English soul. It made it as bleak as a London fog and you felt it was an atmosphere that could chill to the bone anybody who didn’t have a secure living. I wouldn’t want to be broke and be on the bum there for a day, and you wouldn’t, either, I guess.”
“You bet I wouldn’t,” the young man laughed, “judging by where I am now.”
“In America it’s different,” Ray continued. “I didn’t sense any soul-destroying honesty there. What I felt was an awful big efficiency sweeping all over me. You felt that business in its mad race didn’t have time to worry about honesty, and if you thought about honesty at all it was only as a technical thing, like advertising, to help efficiency forward. If you were to go to New York and shop in the popular districts, then do Delancey Street and the Bowery afterward, you’d get what I mean. Down in those tedious-bargain streets, you feel that you are in Europe on the shores of the Mediterranean again, and that their business has nothing to do with the great steamrolling efficiency of America.
“But in Germany I felt something quite different from anything that impressed me in other white countries. I felt a real terrible honesty that you might call moral or religious or national. It seemed like something highly organized, patriotic, rooted in the soul—not a simple, natural, instinctive thing. And with it I felt a confident blind bluntness in the people’s character that was as hard and obvious as a stone wall. I was there when the mark had busted like a bomb in the sky and you could pick up worthless paper marks thrown away in the street. There were exchange booths all over Berlin—some of them newly set up in the street. I saw Americans as heedless as a brass band, lined up to change their dollars in face of misery that was naked to the eye at every step. Yet I never felt any overt hostility to strangers there as I do here.
“When I was going there the French black troops were in the Ruhr. A big campaign of propaganda was on against them, backed by German-Americans, Negro-breaking Southerners, and your English liberals and Socialists. The odd thing about that propaganda was that it said nothing about the exploitation of primitive and ignorant black conscripts to do the dirty work of one victorious civilization over another, but it was all about the sexuality of Negroes—that strange, big bug forever buzzing in the imagination of white people. Friendly whites tried to dissuade me from going to Germany at that time, but I was determined to go.
“And I must tell you frankly I never met any white people so courteous in all my life. I traveled all over Prussia, from Hamburg to Berlin, Potsdam, Stettin, Dresden, Leipzig, and I never met with any discourtesy, not to mention hostility. Maybe it was there underneath the surface, but I never felt it. I went to the big cafés and cabarets in the Friederickstrasse, Potsdammer Platz, and Charlottenburg, and I had a perfectly good time. I went everywhere. I’ve never felt so safe in the low quarters of any city as I have in those of Berlin and Hamburg. One day I went to buy some shirts after noting the prices marked in the shop window. When the clerk gave me the check it was more than the price marked, so I protested. He called the manager and he was so apologetic
