As they were leaving the lady president of affairs appeared and suggested their seeing also the tableaux vivants.
“Oh no, the dead ones were enough,” replied the leader.
“Why did you scream?” the leader asked, roughly, when the party was in the street again.
“It was my fault,” said Ray. “I pulled the curtain back and she suddenly saw a roomful of people behind it.”
“That was nothing. I saw them, too, as you did, but I didn’t scream.” He turned on her again. “You say you want to go to any place a man goes and stand anything a man can stand, and yet you scream over a few filthy Chinese.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was out before I could check myself.”
“I suggested leaving in the beginning, but you insisted on staying it out; I didn’t expect you to scream. Did you enjoy it?”
“It was so ugly,” she said, adding: “I think I’ll go to the hotel. You men can stay, but I’m finished for tonight.”
The leader laughed and asked the American to take her home.
“Oh, I don’t need an escort. I’ll just take a taxi,” she said.
“You’d better not go alone. The taxis are not safe this time of night,” said Ray.
“I don’t care whether you need an escort or not. I am taking you to the hotel,” said the American.
They walked to the main street and Ray hailed a green Mattei taxicab. “They are run by a big company and are safe,” he said. “The unsafe ones here hang around the shady places—just as in New York and Chicago. Some of the private drivers are touts, and as you never know which is which, I always recommend my friends to ride with the Trust.”
“Where shall I find you fellows afterward?” the American asked.
“Where now?” said the leader. “After this ‘blue’ refinement I should like to go to the roughest and dirtiest place we can find.”
“I think Banjo’s hangout down Bum Square way is just the place we are looking for,” said Ray.
“That’s the place,” the Britisher agreed.
They told the American how to find it.
“Whether it is blue or any other color of the rainbow, the cinema is for the mob,” said the leader. “It will never be an art.”
“I don’t agree,” said Ray. “Pictorial pantomime can be just as fine an art as any. What about Charlie Chaplin?”
“He’s an exception. A conscientious artist with a popular appeal.”
“All real art is an exception,” said Ray. “You can’t condemn an art wholesale because inartistic people make a bad business of it. The same condition exists in the other arts. Everybody is in a wild business race and the conscientious workers are few. It’s a crazy circle of blue-cinema people, poor conscientious artists, cynical professionals and an indifferent public.”
“You know I like the cinema for exactly the reverse of its object,” said the leader. “Because it’s about the easiest way to see what people really are under the acting.”
Ray laughed and said: “The ‘Blue Cinema’ was just that,” and he added: “Some of us don’t need the cinema, though, to show us up. We are so obvious.”
In the Bum Square they ran into Banjo with his instrument.
“Where you coming from?” Ray asked.
“Just finish performing and said bonne nuit to a kelt.”
The leader was curious to know what “kelt” meant.
Banjo and Ray exchanged glances and grinned.
“That’s a word in black freemasonry,” explained Ray, “but I don’t object to initiating you if Banjo doesn’t.”
“Shoot,” said Banjo.
“In the States,” said Ray, “we Negroes have humorous little words of our own with which we replace unpleasant stock words. And we often use them when we are among white people and don’t want them to know just what we are referring to, especially when it is anything delicate or taboo between the races. For example, we have words like ofay, pink, fade, spade, Mr. Charlie, cracker, peckawood, hoojah, and so on—nice words and bitter. The stock is always increasing because as the whites get on to the old words we invent new ones. ‘Kelt’ I picked up in Marseilles. I think Banjo brought it here and made it popular among the boys. I don’t know if it has anything to do with ‘Celtic.’ ”
“Oh no,” said the leader. “Kelt is a real word of Scottish origin, I think.”
“That might explain how Banjo got it, then. He used to live in Canada.”
The party went to Banjo’s hangout and the whole gang was there drinking and dancing.
The American joined them very late, worried about his younger friend. A panhandling Swede had accosted him in the Bum Square and told him that he had seen his friend in Joliette, helplessly drunk and getting into a taxicab with a couple of mean-looking touts. The American had gone at once to his friend’s hotel, to Joliette, and then had searched in all the bars of the quarter, but could not obtain any information about him.
The next day he was found in a box car on a lonely quay beyond Joliette, stripped of everything and wearing a dirty rag of a loincloth for his only clothing. The sudden and forced reversal to a savage state had shocked him temporarily daft.
XVII
Breaking-Up
When the dawn came filtering down through the Ditch, Ray left the party and staggered through Boody Lane to find his bunk. Dengel and Ginger had left the place before him, knocking their heads together in a drowsy roll. Malty had sprawled in a corner over a table. The
