“The Jews have kept intact, although they were scattered all over the world, and it was easier for them than for Negroes to lose themselves.
“To me the most precious thing about human life is difference. Like flowers in a garden, different kinds for different people to love. I am not against miscegenation. It produces splendid and interesting types. But I should not crusade for it because I should hate to think of a future in which the identity of the black race in the Western World should be lost in miscegenation.”
Six distinguished whites entered the café, putting an end to the conversation. They were the two gentlemen bums, three other men and one woman. The woman saw Ray and greeted him effusively with surprise.
“Oh, Ray, this is where you ran away to hide yourself, leaving all the artists to mourn for their fine model.”
“But she is American,” the Ivory Coast student, pop-eyed at the woman’s friendly manner, whispered to the patron.
“Sure,” he answered, in malicious triumph. “Did you think there were no human relations between white and black in America, that they were just like two armies fighting against each other all the time?”
Ray did not know who the woman was, whether she was American or European. She spoke French and German as readily as she spoke English. He had met her at the studio of a Swiss painter in Paris (a man who carried a title on his card) when he was posing there, and she had made polite and agreeable conversation with him while he posed. Later, he saw her twice at cabarets in Montmartre, where he had been taken by bohemian artists, and she had not snubbed him.
The gentlemen bums were as surprised as the Ivory Coast student (but differently) when the woman greeted Ray. They had met the group and were going through the town with them. The leading spirit of the party had desired to stop in the bar when he was told that it was a rendezvous for Negroes.
He was a stout, audacious-looking man, a tireless international traveler, who liked to visit every country in the world except the unpleasantly revolutionary ones. The accidental meeting was a piquant thing for Ray, because he had heard strange talk of the man before. Of celebrations of occult rites and barbaric saturnalia with the tempo of nocturnal festivities regulated by the crack of whips. A bonfire made of a bungalow to show the beauties of the landscape when the night was dark. And a splendid stalwart, like one of the Sultan of Morocco’s guards, brought from Africa, as a result of which he had been involved in trouble with governmental authorities in Europe.
Certainly, Ray had long been desirous of seeing this personage who had been gossiped about so much, for he had a penchant for exotic sins. Indeed, a fine Jewish soul with a strong Jeremiah flame in him had warned Ray in Paris about what he chose to call his cultivation of the heathenish atavistic propensities of the subterranean personality. The Jewish idealist thought that Ray had a talent and a personality so healthily austere at times that they should be fostered for the uplift of his race to the rigorous exclusion of the dark and perhaps damnable artistic urge. But …
Well, here was this bold, bad, unregenerate man of whom he had heard so much, and who did not make any deeper impression than a picturesque woman of Ray’s acquaintance, who carried her excessive maternal feelings under a cloak of aggressive masculinity.
The two other men were Americans. The party was bound for any place in the Mediterranean basin that the leader could work up any interest for. They were spending the night in Marseilles and wanted to see the town. The gentlemen bums had taken them through Boody Lane where they had had their hats snatched and had paid to get them back. The hectic setting of Boody Lane with the girls and painted boys in pyjamas posing in their wide-open holes in the wall, the soldiers and sailors and blue-overalled youths loitering through, had given the party the impression that there were many stranger, weirder and unmentionable things to see in the quarter.
“I tell them there is nothing else to show,” said the Britisher, speaking generally and to Ray in particular. “Paris is a show city. This is just a rough town like any other port town, where you’ll see rough stuff if you stick round long enough. I can take you to the boîtes de nuit, but they’re less interesting than they are in Paris.”
“Oh no, not the cabarets. They bore me so,” said the woman. “We’re just running away from them.”
She was tall and of a very pale whiteness. She seated herself on a chair in a posture of fatigue. Ray remembered that strange tired attitude of hers each time he had seen her. Yet her eyes were brimful of life and she was always in an energetic flutter about something.
“There’s nothing else here,” the Britisher apologized to the leader of the party, “but the maisons fermées and the ‘Blue Cinema’ and they are all better in Paris.”
“The ‘Blue Cinema,’ ” the leader repeated casually. “I’ve never seen the thing. We might as well see it.”
He ordered some drinks, cognac and port wine, which they all had standing at the bar. A white tout drifted into the bar. Three girls from Boody Lane followed. Another tout, this time a mulatto from the Antilles, and after him two black ones from Dakar. More girls of the Ditch. The news had spread round that there were distinguished people at the café.
“We’ll go and have dinner and see the ‘Blue Cinema’ afterward,” said the leader.
Sitting on the terrace, a Senegelese in a baboon attitude was flicking his tongue at everything and everybody
