“I think I’ll leave this burg this very evening,” Ray said aloud to himself. He felt a forceful urge to go, and go at once, as if he feared that something else would happen to dampen the hot, hectic, riotous rooting and scramble of the Ditch that he wished to preserve. He wanted always to think of it as he personally preferred it.
He went to his lodging and paid up his rent and put his things in a handbag. In the evening he returned to the African café, looking for Malty and Banjo and Latnah, to have a farewell drink. They were not there, but Lonesome Blue was, drinking up his twenty francs with a group of Portuguese blacks and Senegalese whose company the beach boys spurned because it was said that they lived off the garbage thrown from the big liners.
Lonesome was singing that hideous cockney song, “Show me the way to go home.” He waved his glass at Ray and said: “Come on, nigger, and join the gang and quit playing youse a white man because you got a little book larnin’.”
Ray turned his back on Lonesome and went outside, smiling sardonically at himself. A sharp gust of wind blew through him, a warning that cold weather was coming soon. He buttoned up his coat and thought of a serviceable jersey that he possessed and of an overcoat that he possessed not.
He walked on aimlessly. Before the Monkey Bar a crowd was collected in admiration of a new jangling jazz, and in the Bum Square he came upon Malty, who told him that Banjo was taken suddenly ill and was dying.
XX
The Rock of Refuge
In his little chambre noire in a lodging-house of the Ditch Banjo was bearing his pain. His kidneys were not functioning and his belly was as tight as a drum and hard as a rock. He sat on the little bed, hunched up in a clenched resistance, as if trying to hold the pain back from laying his body out. Sometimes he would lie down on his side, his back, his belly, sometimes slide to the floor, but always in that hard, huddled posture. Sometimes in his shiftings he could not repress a deep-down groan, but he bore his punishment bravely like a man—one who knows that he must take the consequences of spurning the sheltered, cramping ways of respectability to live like a reckless vagabond, who burns up his numbered days gloriously and dies blazing.
“We got to get him into hospital,” Ray said to Malty.
He rushed out to find a taxicab. He found one in the Rue de la Loge whose chauffeur he knew. He had once been a sailor at Toulon and Ray had become acquainted with him during a winter he spent there. He had been of service to Ray in giving him the low-down in that interesting sailor town, and Ray had returned it by teaching him the right English phrases for his frequent picking up trips to Nice and Marseilles, where he met the right sort of tourists that helped eke out his wage pittance.
He had finished his compulsory service and was now, among other things, a chauffeur at Marseilles, where his English was invaluable to him as a chauffeur-guide on the docks and in the town. He greeted Ray familiarly when they met, but they were no longer friends. For Ray was always with the beach boys and the Senegalese and the chauffeur belonged to the touting set of the Ditch who hated the beach boys and the Senegalese, especially as their special field was being invaded and disorganized by the blacks.
Ray and Malty helped Banjo from the third floor down the dim, narrow, frowsy staircase and into the taxicab. The hospital was near a church on the hill above the Ditch. Ray left Banjo in the taxicab and entered the admission bureau. At the desk was a pale, thin woman with a nose sharp-pointing upwards. She was eating a sandwich. Ray told her about Banjo’s illness and that he would like to get him into the hospital. She replied in a familiar, condescending way and asked where Banjo came from. Banjo had declared that he was French, but as he had nothing to prove that and as his accent was so unmistakably Dixie, Ray said that he came from the United States. She asked Ray if he had a paper from the American consul sending Banjo there. Ray said no. She told him that Banjo could be admitted only by an order from the consul or the local police. Ray thought it was better to go to the police. He had had enough of the consulate with Lonesome Blue’s case.
But at the police station they wanted proof of Banjo’s residence in Marseilles. Banjo had nothing to show but a dirty picture card that a stowaway pal had sent him from Egypt. What the police wanted was an identity card and that no beach boy could get.
“The man is dying for want of medical attention,” said Ray to the police officer. “You won’t let him die because he hasn’t got an identity card.”
The police officer reddened and gave Ray a permit for Banjo’s admittance to the hospital.
When they returned the lady of the admission bureau had something more to say before she passed Banjo in. “You know, Sidi,” she said to Ray, “our hospitals here are all filled up with strangers, so
