Ginger said: “I ain’t no innovation sort of a fellah. When I make a new beach all I want is to make mah way and not make no changes. Just make mah way somehow while everything is going on without me studying them or them studying me.”
He was lying flat on his back on one of the huge stone blocks of the breakwater. The waves were lapping softly around it. He had no shirt on and, unfastening the pin at the collar of his old blue coat, he flung it back and exposed his brown belly to the sun. His trousers waist was pulled down below his navel. “Oh, Gawd, the sun is sweet!” he yawned and, pulling his cap over his eyes, went to sleep. The others also stretched themselves and slept.
Along the great length of the breakwater other careless vagabonds were basking on the blocks. The day was cooling off and the sun shed down a warm, shimmering glow where the light fell full on the water. Over by l’Estaque, where they were extending the port, a P.L.M. coal ship stood black upon the blue surface. The factories loomed on the long slope like a rusty-black mass of shapes strung together, and over them the bluish-gray hills were bathed in a fine, delicate mist, and further beyond an immense phalanx of gray rocks, the inexhaustible source of the cement industry, ran sharply down into the sea.
Sundown found the boys in the Place de la Joliette. In one of the cafés they found a seaman from Zanzibar among some Maltese, from whom they took him away.
“Wese just in time for you,” Malty declared. “What youse looking for is us. Fellahs who speak the same as you speak and not them as you kain’t trust who mix up the speech with a mess of Arabese. Them’s a sort of bastard Arabs, them Maltese, and none of us likes them, much less trusts them.”
The new man was very pleased to fall in with fellows as friendly as Banjo and Malty. He was on a coal boat from South Shields and had a few pounds on him. He was generous and stood drinks in several cafés. From the Place de la Joliette, they took the quiet way of the Boulevard de la Major to reach the Ditch. It was the best way for the beach boys. Some of them had not the proper papers to get by the police and tried to evade them always. By way of the main Rue de la République they were more likely to be stopped, questioned, searched, and taken to the police station. Sometimes they were told that their papers were not in order, but they were only locked up for a night and let out the next morning. Some of them complained of being beaten by the police. Ginger thought the police were getting more brutal and strict, quite different from what they were like when he first landed on the beach. Then they could bung out a cask of wine in any daring old way and drink without being bothered. Now it was different. It was not very long since two fellows from the group had got two months each for wine-stealing. Happily for them, Malty, Ginger, and Bugsy all had passable papers.
On the way to the Ditch they stopped in different bistros to empty in each a bottle of red wine. These fellows, who were used to rum in the West Indies, gin and corn liquor in the States, and whisky in England, took to the red wine of France like ducks to water. They never had that terribly vicious gin or whisky drunk. They seemed to have lost all desire for hard liquor. When they were drunk it was always a sweetly-soft good-natured wine drunk.
They had a big feed in one of the Chinese restaurants of the Rue Torte. The new man insisted on paying for it all. After dinner they went to a little café on the Quai du Port for coffee-and-rum. The newcomer took a mouth organ from his pocket and began playing. This stimulated Banjo, who said, “I guess mah hand c’n do its stuff again,” and so he went up to Latnah’s room and got his banjo.
They went playing from little bistro to bistro in the small streets between the fish market and the Bum Square. They were joined by others—a couple of Senegalese and some British West Africans and soon the company was more than a dozen. They were picturesquely conspicuous as they loitered along, talking in a confused lingo of English, French, and native African. And in the cafés the bottles of beer and wine that they ordered and drank indiscriminately increased as their number increased. Customers were attracted by the music, and the girls, too, who were envious and used all their wiles to get away the newly arrived seaman from the beach boys. …
“Hot damn!” cried Banjo. “What a town this heah is to spread joy in!”
“And you sure did spread yours all at once,” retorted Bugsy. “Burn it up in one throw and finish, you did.”
“Muzzle you’ mouf, nigger,” replied Banjo. “The joy stuff a life ain’t nevah finished for this heah strutter. When I turn mahself loose for a big wild joyful jazz a life, you can bet you’ sweet life I ain’t gwine nevah regretting it. Ise got moh joy stuff in mah whistle than you’re got in you’ whole meager-dawg body.”
“And I wouldn’t want to know,” said Bugsy.
At midnight they were playing in one of the cafés of the Bum Square, when an oldish man came in wearing faded green trousers, a yellowy black-bordered jacket, with a wreath of flowers around his neck and began to dance. He manipulated a stick with such dexterity that it seemed as if his wrist was moving round like a wheel, and he jigged and hopped from side to side
