The boys had helped Banjo into the entrance and he was sitting patiently and silently on the lower step. While the woman was talking and before she had made out the necessary paper, a medical student came down the stairs and spoke to Ray. They had met in a café frequented by students. He was attracted to Ray, as he also wrote a little.
The woman, seeing that Ray was acquainted with a superior of the hospital, completed the formality of Banjo’s admittance with dispatch and politeness.
The student was going home, but he turned back and conducted Ray and Banjo to the emergency ward, into an atmosphere so full of kindliness, courtesy, and solicitous attention that the irritation of getting there was immediately wiped off the boys’ minds. There were two nurses, an intern, and another medical student. Banjo was put on an operating table and given first aid, which relieved him a little. The student stayed until that was finished. Afterward Banjo was conducted to a regular ward. The doctor said he would have to undergo a real operation.
Ray stayed with him until he was settled. As soon as Banjo was relieved, a little of the old vagabond color came back to him and he said, “I thought I was Canaan bound by a hellova way.”
“You thought right, maybe,” said Ray. “The little street leading up here is called Montée du Saint Esprit, which means Going up to the Holy Ghost.”
“Don’t mention that theah haunsting name, pardner, because I ain’t noneatall ready for him yet.”
Ray told Banjo about Lonesome Blue.
“That haunts back in this sweet poht again!” he exclaimed. “No wonder I done fallen ill, foh that nigger is hard luck. Don’t ask me how, but I know he ain’t nothing else.”
Banjo, like the other beach boys, was superstitious. Things they saw and people they met and shook hands with. The food they ate. They could tell on getting up of a morning whether their day would be lucky or unlucky, by the kind of thing or person they first met. Certain types of people, like Lonesome Blue, always brought trouble. Their superstitions were logical reactions.
As for Lonesome Blue, Ray fully sympathized with Banjo’s belief that he was a bringer of bad luck.
When Ray left the ward the chauffeur was gone, although he had not been paid. A couple of days later Ray saw him and asked how much was owed. The chauffeur replied: “Nothing at all. You were my good comrade once and now you help a comrade who is sick and you are poor. I don’t demand anything for the taxi.”
He invited Ray into a café for a drink and told him that he was going to get married in a short time. The chauffeur had a girl in Boody Lane from whom he got money, and he mentioned another in one of the maisons fermés. The girl he was going to marry came from the country. He boasted that she wore her hair long and did not use rouge.
One day Ray saw them on a café terrace in the Rue de la République and he was introduced. The girl was all the chauffeur had said besides being heavy, simple and possessed of no noticeable charm. Ray supposed that the chauffeur after dealing so much in ready-made attractive girls desired for a wife a type that was radically different. He was buying a piece of ground and a cottage in one of the suburbs and wanted Ray to ride out with him and his fiancée to see it, but Ray declined, pleading a rendezvous.
The chauffeur told Ray with the frankest gusto that, besides his legitimate trade, he had an interest in Boody Lane and a Maison Fermé and that he was employing all the tricks he knew to obtain his cottage and lot and settle down to a respectable married life.
He was merely one illustration of the sound business sense inherent in the life of the Ditch.
There was no mistaking the scheme of life of the Ditch, that bawdiness was only a means toward the ultimate purpose of respectability. And that was why it was so hard on simple seamen and beach boys who came to it with romantic ideas as a place of loose pleasure.
Ray decided that he could not think of going away without seeing Banjo through his operation. He had shared the boys’ pleasures and it was merely decent for him to share their troubles and do what he was individually capable of doing to help.
He had wanted very much to leave taking intact the rough, joyous, free picture of the beach boys’ life in the regimented rhythm of the Ditch. He felt that time, circumstance, and chance had contributed to fill it full of a special and unique interest that he would never find there again, and he wanted the scene to remain always in his mind as he had reacted to it.
But life is so artistically uncompromising, it does not care a rap about putting a hard fist through a splendid plan and destroying our dearest artifice. So the unwelcome reappearance of Lonesome Blue was the beginning of a series of events that enlarged and altered greatly the impression of the Ditch that Ray had hoped to preserve.
“As them doctors am gwina cut me up, pardner,” said Banjo, “I guess you’d better write back home foh me.” Facing the prospect of an operation, with, on one hand, his Canadian army discharge certificate which made him in a sense British, and, on the other, the fact of his deportation to France as a French citizen, Banjo’s thoughts at last reluctantly turned to America as home. His parents were long ago dead. He had only an aunt in a Cotton-Belt town. She had raised him and a brother who had died in adolescence.
