Ah no! Nothing so fancifully real. Nevertheless, she was the first playmate of his dream port.
The girl, seeing Banjo, turned her eyes casually away and went to sit where she could concentrate her charms on the mulatto. Banjo had no further interest for her. He had spent all his money and, like all the beach boys, would never have more for a wild fling as long as he remained in port. It was the mulatto that had brought her there. For as soon as a new arrival enters any of the dens of the Ditch, the girls are made aware of it by the touts, who are always on the lookout. Banjo was vexed. Hell! She might have been more cordial, he thought. The player-piano was rattling out “Fleur d’Amour.” He would ask her to dance. Maybe her attitude was only an insolent little exhibition of cattishness. He went over to her and asked, “Danser?”
“No,” she said, disdainfully, and turned away. He touched her shoulder playfully.
“Laissez-moi tranquil, imbecile.” She spat nastily on the floor.
A rush of anger seized Banjo. “You pink sow!” he cried. His eyes caught the glint of the gold watch he had given to her, and wrenching it from her wrist, he smashed it on the red-tiled floor and stamped his heel upon it in a rage. The girl screamed agonizingly, wringing her hands, her wide eyes staring tragically at the remains of her watch. The little tout who had come in with her leaped over at Banjo. “What is it? What is it?” he cried, and hunching up his body and thrusting his head up and out like a comic actor, he began working his open hands up and down in Banjo’s face, without touching him. Banjo looked down upon the boy contemptuously and seized his left wrist, intending to twist it and push him outside, for he could not think of fighting with such an undersized antagonist. But in a flash the boy drew a knife across his wrist and, released, dashed through the door.
Banjo wrapped the cut in his handkerchief, but it was soon soaked with blood. It was late. The pharmacies were closed. The patronne of the bistro said that there were pharmacies open all night. Malty took Banjo to hunt for one.
As they were passing through the Bum Square a woman’s voice called Malty. They stopped and she came up to them. She was a little olive-toned woman of an indefinable age, clean-faced, not young and far from old, with an amorous charm round her mouth. It was Latnah.
“Ain’t gone to bed yet?” Malty said to her. “Ise got a case here.” He exhibited Banjo’s hand.
“It plenty bleed,” she said. She looked at Banjo and said, “I see you before around here.”
Banjo grinned. “Maybe I seen you, too.”
“I no think. Pharmacie no open now,” she answered Malty’s question. Then she said to Banjo: “Come with me. I see your hand. Tomorrow see you, Malty. Good night.” She took Banjo away, while Malty’s eyes followed them in a wistful, bewildered gaze.
She took Banjo back in the direction from which he had come, but by way of the Quai du Port. After a few minutes’ walk they turned into one of the somber side streets. They went into a house a little southwest of the Ditch. Her room was on the top floor, a quaint, tiny thing, the only one up there, and opened right on the stairs. There was a little shutter-window, the size of a Saturday Evening Post, that gave a view of the Vieux Port, where the lights of the boats were twinkling. A bright, inexpensive Oriental shawl covered the cot-bed. On the table was a washbowl, two little jars of cosmetics, and packets of different brands of cigarettes.
There was no water in the room, and Latnah went down two flights of stairs to get a jugful. When she returned she washed Banjo’s wound, then, getting a bottle of liquid from a basket against the foot of the cot, she anointed and bandaged it.
Banjo liked the woman’s gentle fussing over him. He thanked her when she had finished. “Rien du tout,” she replied. There was a little silence between them, slightly embarrassing but piquant.
Then Banjo said: “I wonder whereat I can find Malty now? I didn’t have a room yet for tonight.”
“You sleep here,” she said, simply.
He undressed while she found something to do—empty the washbowl, wipe the table, and when at last he caught a glimpse of her between her deshabille and the covers he murmured softly to himself: “Don’t care how I falls, may be evah so long a drop, but it’s always on mah feets.”
II
The Breakwater
The quarter of the old port exuded a nauseating odor of mass life congested, confused, moving round and round in a miserable suffocating circle. Yet everything there seemed to belong and fit naturally in place. Bistros and love shops and girls and touts and vagabonds and the troops of dogs and cats—all seemed to contribute so essentially and colorfully to that vague thing called atmosphere. No other setting could be more appropriate for the men on the beach. It was as if all the derelicts of all the seas had drifted up here to sprawl out the days in the sun.
The men on the beach spent the day between the breakwater and the docks, and the night between the Bum Square and the Ditch. Most of the whites, especially the blond ones of northern countries, seemed to have gone down hopelessly under the strength of hard liquor, as if nothing mattered for them now but that. They were stinking-dirty, and lousy, without any apparent desire to clean
