On the evening of Lucien's departure a gang of sailors from the "Provence" and some from other boats and a few girls all crowded into my room. Out of their small wages they had eked enough to buy many bottles of ordinary white and red wine. I bought some cognac. My landlady and her husband joined us and we had a great good time.
My friends knew that I was writing, but they knew nothing of my ideas. I never told them that I had been in Soviet Russia. The French friend whom I had met in Moscow had advised me that so long as I was staying in France I should never do or say anything to let the authorities think that I was making political propaganda. If I followed that line, he said, I would never be bothered. I kept that advice, along with Louise Bryant's, in my head and followed the line.
But toward the end of the evening, when we all began kissing one another on both cheeks, Frenchwise, bidding Lucien a last farewell, a sailor started singing the "Internationale." We all joined our voices with his and heartily sang, I singing in English. One sailor jumped up on my writing table and said: "After the world revolution there will be no more white and black and yellow; we shall all be one fraternity of men." My sense of the distinctive in the difference of color was outraged, and I said, "We can still remain a fraternity of men and guard our complexions." One of the girls said: "That's all well! We wouldn't like you to change your color either."
But the next day I had the honor of a visit from two police officers in plain clothes. They were very courteous. They first satisfied themselves that my French was not worth much and one of them spoke to me in English, which was worth just a little more than my French. I told them all they desired to know about me, except the fact that I had visited Soviet Russia. I explained that the sailors had come to my place to give Lucien a farewell party. "And they sang the 'Internationale'!" commented my inquisitor. I am not sure, but I think there is a government ruling which forbids French sailors and soldiers from singing the "Internationale." "They sang the Marseillaise too," I said, "and I prefer the words and music of the Marseillaise to those of the 'Internationale'." The English-speaking inspector smiled and asked me whether I was a Communist. I said that I was a poet and a great admirer of Victor Hugo. He said, "Well, I wouldn't wonder if a Negro-American had advanced ideas." He excluded the Negro-French of course. But I was courteously left alone and for the ensuing months I lived happily and as I pleased in Toulon. In the restaurants and cafés that I frequented I was treated even better than before.
Lucien wrote, asking if I could visit Brittany in the summer, because his parents wanted to know me. I replied in ungrammatical French, telling him that I would if I could. I finished a novel and mailed it to New York. I had a group of short stories, which I forwarded to Louise Bryant. I received an enthusiastic letter from Louise Bryant, who said that Robert McAlmon wanted to use one of the stories.
Lucien and I kept up a regular correspondence. He wrote that he had fallen ill, but that it was not serious. In the early summer I left Toulon for Marseilles. There I met Marcelle. I told her that I was expecting to go to Brest to visit Lucien and his people. She thought that was fine, and I asked her why she didn't come along too. That was impossible, she said, because a girl of her sort could not think of visiting the family of her lover. Girls like her, she said, were outside friends for outside purposes, and had no desire to intrude themselves upon their friends' families.
In the company of a white American artist I spent a couple of weeks in low-down Marseilles; then I decided to go to Bordeaux to visit a British West Indian Negro friend and his French West Indian wife before going on to Brittany. I got my ticket and boarded a night train. And while I was waiting for my train to pull out, another pulled in, and there in the next car right up against mine was Max Eastman and his Russian wife!
I got out and asked the station master to make my ticket good for the next day. Max Eastman had just published his book, Since Lenin Died. I had left him in Russia before Lenin's death, and we had plenty to talk about. So we spent the larger split of the night talking, and the next day drove round the Corniche and ate bouillabaisse on the quay. In the evening I entrained for Bordeaux.
I wrote from Bordeaux informing Lucien that I would arrive soon in Brest, and was surprised to find the answering letter addressed in a strange handwriting. It was from Lucien's father, stating that his son had died the week before. Lucien had contracted tuberculosis in the navy, and unaware of his serious illness, had not taken any treatment. In Toulon I had noticed that he was rather frail, and, compared to his comrades, unusually quiet, but I never heard him cough, and his physique showed no strain when we went hiking in the country.
In his letter, Lucien's father invited me still to come to St. Pierre. He said his son had talked about my visit up to the moment of his death, and thought that I would like Brittany more than Provence. For the first time in my life I was shocked with the sensation of what "a living dead" might mean. I had seen persons sicken and die after a long illness. I had seen sudden death. But Lucien's passing was weird, like a ghost story. All the time he was regularly writing those healthy letters about the picturesqueness of the wild Breton coast, of the fields full of larks singing in the summertime, of the quaint costumes which the old people still wore naturally, he was actually wasting rapidly away. They say consumptive persons are like that: always optimistic and hopeful of their health. But I had never had any close contact with one.