Banjo

found was a fundamental contempt for black people quite as pronounced as in the Anglo-Saxon lands. The common idea of the Negro did not differ from that of the civilized world in general. There was, if anything, an unveiled condescension in it that was gall to a Negro who wanted to live his life free of the demoralizing effect of being pitied and patronized. Here, like anywhere (as the police inspector had so clearly intimated by his declaration) one black villain made all black villains as one black tout made all black touts, one black nigger made all black niggers, and one black failure made all black failures.

Exceptions were not considered. Ray would have considered the white world an utterly contemptible thing from its attitude toward the black if it were not for his principle of stressing the exception above the average. The white mind in general approached the black world from exactly the opposite angle. He often pondered if an intellectual life could have been possible for him without that principle to support it.

Supposing he were to react to French or any other civilization solely from the faits divers columns of the newspapers. For one crazy month of the past summer he had read of nothing but crazy crimes: young couple dispatching their grandparents with a hatchet for a meager inheritance; mother holding her children under water until they were drowned; father seducing daughter at the time of her first communion; murderer shooting up street; and all the sordid crimes d’amour et de la passion that were really crimes d’argent.

It could have been easy for him, a black spectator of the drama, to seize upon and gloat over these things as evidences of the true nature of this civilization if he had allowed them to warp and rob him of his primitive sense of comparative values and his instinct to see through superficial appearances to the strange and profound variations of human life.

But life was more wonderful to savor than to indict. Leave the indictment to the little moral creatures of civilized justice. They had their little daggers sharpened for the victims who were white, and when they had the good luck to find a black victim, they made a club of him to slay the whole Negro race.

Ray had been specially entertained by one of these slaughterings, resulting from a terrible crime committed by a crazy Senegalese soldier and for which the entire black race was haled before the bar of public opinion.

It was authorized by a radical paper supporting the radical government under whose regime the West African Negroes were being torn out of their native soil, wrenched away from their families and shipped to Europe to get acquainted with the arts of war and the disease of syphilis. It was such an amusing revelation of civilized logic that Ray had preserved it, especially as he was in tacit agreement with the thesis while loathing the manner of its presentation:

“Un tirailleur sénégalais, pris d’on ne sait quel vertigo, a fait, à Toulon, un affreux carnage.

“On s’évertue maintenant à savoir par quelle suite de circonstances ce noir a pu fracturer un coffre et s’emparer des cartouches avec lesquelles il a accompli le massacre.

“Qu’on le sache, soit. Mais la question me semble ailleurs. Il faudrait peut-être se mettre la main sur le cœur et se demander s’il est bien prudent d’apprendre à des primitifs à se servir d’un fusil.

“Je n’ignore pas qu’il y a de belles exceptions; qu’il y a des ‘nègres’ députés, avocats, professeurs et que l’un d’eux a même obtenu le prix Goncourt. Mais la majorité de ces ‘indigènes’ à peau noire sont de grands enfants auxquels les subtilités de notre morale échappent autant que les subtilités de notre langue. La plus dangereuse de ces subtilités est celle-ci:

“Tu tueras des êtres humains en certaines circonstances que nous appelons guerre.

“Mais tu seras châtié si tu tues en dehors de ces circonstances.

“Le Sénégalais Yssima appartient à une catégorie humaine où il est d’usage, paraît-il, quand on doit mourir de ne pas mourir seul. Le point d’honneur consiste à en ‘expédier’ le plus possible avant d’être soi-même expédié.

“Si cela est vrai, on voit où peuvent conduire certaines blagues de chambrées. Pour tout dire franchement, il n’est pas prudent de faire des soldats avec des hommes dont l’âme contient encore des replis inexplorés et pour qui notre civilisation est un vin trop fort. Sous les bananiers originels, Yssima était sans doute un brave noir, en parfaite harmonie avec la morale de sa race et les lois de la nature. Transplanté, déraciné, il est devenue un fou sanguinaire.

“Je ne veux tirer de cet horrible fait divers aucune conclusion. Je dis que de semblables aventures (qui ne sont d’ailleurs pas isolées) devraient nous faire réfléchir sérieusement⁠ ⁠…”

Suddenly and strangely Ray felt a hard hatred for Crosby that seemed inexplicable, and yet was not. He had fallen into a mood in which the whole white world of civilization appeared like an obscene phenomenon. And Crosby sitting there by him was a freak because he was not indecent. He was too fine a type, something too real for Ray’s frame of mind. His presence became unbearable.

“I am going back to the Ditch,” Ray said. He frowned at Crosby and left him without any word of explanation.

He went to his hotel and got his bag and returned to the Ditch. It was moving out of the Ditch that caused the policeman to take me for a criminal nosing round the quarter of respectability, thought Ray. Better had I stayed down here with Banjo and the boys where the white bastards thought I ought to be. They always searched me like a criminal down there, but they never beat me up. I moved away from there and got myself messed up. It was all through Crosby persuading me to go respectable. Whenever I get mixed up with nice people I always catch it. Better to know nice people, if I