The coal worker is a grim, special type of being, whether he is underground or under water or above ground. On the docks there was always an easy chance to work in coal. But the jolly beach boys never turned to coal when poor panhandling and hunger obliged them to think of a temporary job. Coal that made them blacker than they were and the flesh-eating sulphur were the two principal commodities they avoided. A cargo of grain or fruit was preferable when an overflow of cargoes in port gave them a chance. Coal was not in the line of the regular dock workers either. And so this general aversion saved derelict foreign drifters who wanted to work from starving on the docks.
The irresponsible, carefree Banjo became a steady worker in coal. Every morning he roused at five o’clock, got into his coal rags, and hustled down to Joliette to get into the first line of workers. Sometimes he had a full day’s work, sometimes a morning’s work, sometimes an afternoon’s work, sometimes no work at all. Days when he did nothing he sat drinking in a little bistro near Chère Blanche’s box in the Ditch. Reacting against the trick of the Senegalese that cost him his instrument, Banjo had made up with her again. So much messy fuss about skin color, he reasoned, and this life business ain’t nothing but a skin game with all the skins doing it—black, yaller, white … what’s the difference!
Even the wine he drank afforded him little pleasure. He never got tipsy now in the exciting, guzzling manner of the free banjo-playing, panhandling days. As casually as ever he had returned to hard labor again and remained doggedly at it. Thirty and odd francs a day. Food, wine, a pillow at Chère Blanche’s. He existed now as if those glad camaraderie days had never been.
Ray found Banjo’s new condition exasperatingly melancholy and tried to talk him out of it. Days of drifting without purpose, not knowing what tomorrow might bring them, were altogether better, Ray argued, than the dirty-drab contentment in which Banjo was now burying himself. But Banjo had undergone a complete metamorphosis.
“The gang’s done broke up, pardner, and I done lose mah instrument. Good fun like that kain’t last forevah. Everything works out to a change.”
“But Malty and I are here. We can get together again.”
“I don’t think. I don’t feel habitually ambitious and musical no moh.”
“But you used to be so different. Why, the way you used to talk and act, living the way you talked! When I had the blues so bad and felt like chucking everything, it was you who made me screw up the courage to keep plugging on. The way you were your own big strutting self and to hell with hard life and hard knocks and one hard hussy in the Ditch. Now you’re nothing but a poor slave nigger in coal for une putaine blanche.”
“I was fed up with everything and just had to have some human pusson close to me, pardner. I ain’t back home where I could find a honey-sweet mamma, so I just had to take what was ready and willing. Life is a rectangular crossways affair and the only thing to do is to take it nacheral.”
XIX
Lonesome Blue Again
“Everything works out to a change.” Banjo had said a right pretty thing. The grand rhythm of life rolled on everlastingly without beginning or end in human comprehension, but the patterns were ever changing, the figures moving on and passing, to be replaced by new ones.
So the life of the Ditch remained, but for Ray the aspect was changed. It was gray now. And he was thinking of moving on and taking with him the splendid impression that the beach boys’ lives had left him in that atmosphere. He would go away now while that impression was gorgeously intact, before the place palled on him. He never liked to stay in a place beyond the point where there was something to like about it. Though the Ditch was dirty and stinking he had preferred it to a better proletarian quarter because of the surprising and warm contacts with the men of his own race and the pecuniary help he could get from them at critical times. Their presence had brought a keen zest to the Ditch that made it in a way beautiful.
So Ray was preparing to move on, although he had not many preparations to make. His baggage had consisted of some books and manuscripts of which he was now unfortunately relieved. Before going to the vintage he had boxed them up and left the box in care of the manager of the Seamen’s Mission. He thought that that was the safest procedure. But when he returned from the vintage the box could not be found and the cockeyed manager could not account for it. White beachcombers had stolen it with the books and the manuscripts, which included all the new things that Ray had done and was trying to do.
“That’s where I get plugged up for fooling with Christian charity,” commented Ray. “I’ve never believed in the thing and yet I went messing with that damned mission with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s angel flying over it. Better I had left my stuff in the African pub.”
“Get you ready, hand and foot, and let’s beat it away from here,” Ray apostrophized his members. Every day he thought of going, but he hesitated, and a week had flashed by since his talk with Banjo. He had had money enough to take him a long way when he returned from the vintage, but it was now considerably reduced. There was no ship in sight with
