Billy Biasse telephoned to the doctor, a young chocolate-complexioned man. He was graduate of a Negro medical college in Tennessee and of Columbia University. He was struggling to overcome the prejudices of the black populace against Negro doctors and wedge himself in among the Jewish doctors that prescribed for the Harlem clientele. A clever man, he was trying, through Democratic influence, to get an appointment in one of the New York hospitals. Such an achievement would put him all over the Negro press and get him all the practice and more than he could handle in the Belt.

Ray had sent Jake to him.⁠ ⁠…

The landlady brought Jake a rum punch. He shook his head. With a premonition of tragedy, she waited for the doctor, standing against the chiffonier, a blue cloth carelessly knotted round her head.⁠ ⁠…

In the corridor she questioned Billy Biasse about Jake’s seizure.

“All you younger generation in Harlem don’t know no God,” she accused Billy and indicted Young Harlem. “All you know is cabarets and movies and the young gals them exposing them legs a theirs in them jumper frocks.”

“I wouldn’t know ’bout that,” said Billy.

“You all ought to know, though, and think of God Almighty before the trumpet sound and it’s too late foh black sinners. I nevah seen so many trifling and ungodly niggers as there is in this heah Harlem.” She thought of the broken white bowl. “And I done had a warning from heaben.”

The doctor arrived. Ordered a hot-water bottle for Jake’s belly and a hot lemon drink. There was no other remedy to help him but what he had been taking.

“You’ve been drinking,” the doctor said.

“Jest a li’l beer,” Jake murmured.

“O Lawdy! though, listen at him!” cried the landlady. “Mister, if he done had a glass, he had a barrel a day. Ain’t I been getting it foh him?”

“Beer is the worst form of alcohol you could ever take in your state,” said the doctor. “Couldn’t be anything worse. Better you had taken wine.”

Jake growled that he didn’t like wine.

“It’s up to you to get well,” said the doctor. “You have been ill like that before. It’s a simple affair if you will be careful and quiet for a little while. But it’s very dangerous if you are foolish. I know you chaps take those things lightly. But you shouldn’t, for the consequences are very dangerous.”

Two days later Ray’s diner returned to New York. It was early afternoon and the crew went over to the yards to get the stock for the next trip. And after stocking up Ray went directly to see Jake.

Jake was getting along all right again. But Ray was alarmed when he heard of his relapse. Indeed, Ray was too easily moved for the world he lived in. The delicate-fibered mechanism of his being responded to sensations that were entirely beyond Jake’s comprehension.

“The doctor done hand me his. The landlady stahted warning me against sin with her mouth stinking with gin. And now mah chappie’s gwina join the gang.” Jake laughed heartily.

“But you must be careful, Jake. You’re too sensible not to know good advice from bad.”

“Oh, sure, chappie, I’ll take care. I don’t wanta be crippled up as the doctor says I might. Mah laigs got many moh miles to run yet, chasing after the sweet stuff o’ life, chappie.”

“Good oh Jake! I know you love life too much to make a fool of yourself like so many of those other fellows. I’ve never knew that this thing was so common until I started working on the railroad. You know the fourth had to lay off this trip.”

“You don’t say!”

“Yes, he’s got a mean one. And the second cook on Bowman’s diner he’s been in a chronic way for about three months.”

“But how does he get by the doctor? All them crews is examined every week.”

“Hm!⁠ ⁠…” Ray glanced carelessly through The Amsterdam News. “I saw Madame Laura in Fairmount Park and I told her you were sick. I gave her your address, too.”

“Bumbole! What for?”

“Because she asked me for it. She was sympathetic.”

“I never give mah address to them womens, chappie. Bad system that.”

“Why?”

“Because you nevah know when they might bust in on you and staht a roughhouse. Them’s all right, them womens⁠ ⁠… in their own parlors.”

“I guess you ought to know. I don’t,” said Ray. “Say, why don’t you move out of this dump up to the Forties? There’s a room in the same house I stay in. Cheap. Two flights up, right on the court. Steam heat and everything.”

“I guess I could stand a new place to lay mah carcass in, all right,” Jake drawled. “Steam heats you say? I’m sure sick o’ this here praying-ma-ma hot air. And the trute is it ain’t nevah much hotter than mah breath.”

“All right. When do you want me to speak to the landlady about the room?”

“This heah very beautiful night, chappie. Mah rent is up tomorrow and I moves. But you got to do me a li’l favor. Go by Billy Biasse this night and tell him to come and git his ole buddy’s suitcase and see him into his new home tomorrow morning.”

Jake was as happy as a kid. He would be frisking if he could. But Ray was not happy. The sudden upset of affairs in his home country had landed him into the quivering heart of a naked world whose reality was hitherto unimaginable. It was what they called in print and polite conversation “the underworld.” The compound word baffled him, as some English words did sometimes. Why underworld he could never understand. It was very much upon the surface as were the other divisions of human life. Having its heights and middle and depths and secret places even as they. And the people of this world, waiters, cooks, chauffeurs, sailors, porters, guides, ushers, hod-carriers, factory hands⁠—all touched in a thousand ways the people of the other divisions. They worked over there and slept over here, divided by a street.

Ray had always dreamed of writing words some day. Weaving words to make romance, ah! There were the great books that dominated the bright dreaming and dark brooding days when he was a boy. Les Misérables, Nana, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist.

From them, by way of free-thought pamphlets, it was only a stride to the great scintillating satirists of the age⁠—Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Anatole France, and the popular problemist, H. G. Wells. He had lived on that brilliant manna that fell like a flame-fall from those burning stars. Then came the great mass carnage in Europe and the great mass revolution in Russia.

Ray was not prophetic-minded enough to define the total evil that the one had wrought nor the ultimate splendor of the other. But, in spite of the general tumults and threats, the perfectly-organized national rages, the ineffectual patching of broken, and hectic rebuilding of shattered, things, he had perception enough to realize that he had lived over the end of an era.

And also he realized that his spiritual masters had not crossed with him into the new. He felt alone, hurt, neglected, cheated, almost naked. But he was a savage, even though he was a sensitive one, and did not mind nakedness. What had happened? Had they refused to come or had he left them behind? Something had happened. But it was not desertion nor young insurgency. It was death. Even as the last scion of a famous line prances out this day and dies and is set aside with his ancestors in their cold whited sepulcher, so had his masters marched with flags and banners flying all their wonderful, trenchant, critical, satirical, mind-sharpening, pity-evoking, constructive ideas of ultimate social righteousness, into the vast international cemetery of this century.

Dreams of patterns of words achieving form. What would he ever do with the words he had acquired? Were they adequate to tell the thoughts he felt, describe the impressions that reached him vividly? What were men making of words now? During the war he had been startled by James Joyce in The Little Review. Sherwood Anderson had reached him with Winesburg, Ohio. He had read, fascinated, all that D. H. Lawrence published. And wondered if there was not a great Lawrence reservoir of words too terrible and too terrifying for nice printing. Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu burnt like a flame in his memory. Ray loved the book because it was such a grand anti-romantic presentation of mind and behavior in that hell-pit of life. And literature, story-telling, had little interest for him now if thought and feeling did not wrestle and sprawl with appetite and dark desire all over the pages.

Dreams of making something with words. What could he make⁠ ⁠… and fashion? Could he ever create Art? Art, around which vague, incomprehensible words and phrases stormed? What was art, anyway? Was it more than a clear-cut presentation of a vivid impression of life? Only the Russians of the late era seemed to stand up like giants in the new. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. When he read them now he thought: Here were elements that the grand carnage swept over and touched not. The soil of life saved their roots from the fire. They were so saturated, so deep-down rooted in it.

Thank God and Uncle Sam that the old dreams were shattered. Nevertheless, he still felt more than ever the utter blinding nakedness and violent coloring of life. But what of it? Could he create out of the fertile reality around him? Of Jake nosing through life, a handsome hound, quick to snap up any tempting morsel of poisoned meat thrown carelessly on the pavement? Of a work pal he had visited in the venereal ward of Bellevue, where youths lolled sadly about? And the misery that overwhelmed him there, until life appeared like one big disease and the world a vast hospital?