Part 7 (2/2)

”How then?” bl.u.s.tered the amazed musician.

”If you go on,” Cartaret warned him, ”you will have to go on from the floor; I'll knock you there.”

”Maurice!” cried Seraphin, rising from his chair.

”Messieurs!” piped Devignes.

Varachon growled at Houdon, and Garnier reached for a water-bottle as the handiest weapon of defense. Houdon and Cartaret were facing each other, erect, each waiting for the other to make a further move, the former red, the latter white, with anger. There followed that flas.h.i.+ng pause of quiet which is the precursor of battle.

The battle, however, was not forthcoming. Instead, through the silence, there came a roar of voices that diverted the attention of even the chief combatants. It was a roar of voices from the cafe below: a heavy rumble that was unmistakably Madame's and a clatter of unintelligible shrieks and demands that were feminine but uncla.s.sifiable. Now one voice shouted and next the other. Then the two joined in a mighty explosion, and little Pasbeaucoup was shot up the stairs and among the diners as if he were the first rock from the crater of an emptying volcano.

He staggered against the table and jolted the water-bottle out of the poet's hand.

”Name of a Name!” he gasped. ”She is a veritable tigress, that woman there!”

They had no time then to inquire whom he referred to, though they knew that, however justly he might think it, he would never, even in terror like the present, say such a thing of his wife. The words were no sooner free of his lips than a larger rock was vomited from the volcano, and a still larger, the largest rock of the three, came immediately after.

Everybody was afoot now. They saw that Pasbeaucoup cowered against the wall in a fear terrible because it was greater than his fear for Madame; they saw that Madame, who was the third rock, was clinging to the ap.r.o.n-strings of another woman, who was rock number two, and they saw that this other woman was a stocky figure, who carried in her hand a curious, wide head-dress, and who wore a parti-colored ap.r.o.n that began over her ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s and ended by brus.h.i.+ng against her equally ample boots, and a black skirt of simple stuff and extravagant puffs, surmounted by a short-skirted blouse or basque of the same material.

Her face was round and wrinkled like a last winter's apple on the kitchen-shelf; but her eyes shone red, her hands beat the air vigorously, and from her lips poured a l.u.s.ty torrent of sounds that might have been protestations, appeals or curses, yet were certainly, considered as words, nothing that any one present had ever heard before.

She ran forward; Madame ran forward. The stranger shouldered Madame; Madame dragged her back. The stranger cried out more of her alien phrases; Madame shouted French denunciations. The Gallic diners formed a grinning circle, eager to lose no detail of the sort of wrangle that a Frenchman loves best to watch: a wrangle between women.

Cartaret made his way through the ring and put his hand on the stranger's shoulder. She seemed to understand, and relapsed into quiet, attentive but alert.

”Now,” said Cartaret, ”one at a time, please. Madame, what is the trouble?”

”Trouble?” roared Madame. Her face did not change expression, but she held her arms akimbo, pug-nose and strong chin poked defiantly at the strange interloper. ”You may well say it, trouble!”

She put her position strongly and at length. She had been in the _caisse_, with no one of the world in the cafe, when, crying barbarous threats incomprehensible, this she-bandit, this--this _anarchiste infame_, had burst in from the street, disrupting the peace of the Deux Colombes and endangering its well-known quiet reputation with the police.

That was the gist of it. When it was delivered, Cartaret faced the stranger.

”And you, Madame?” he asked, in French.

The stranger strode forward as a pugilist steps from his corner for the round that he expects to win the fight for him. She clapped her wide head-dress upon her head, where it settled itself with a rakish tilt.

”Holy pipe!” cried Houdon. ”In that I recognize her. It is the ferocious _tuteur_!”

Cartaret's interest became tense.

”What did you want here?” he urged, still speaking French.

The stranger said, twice over, something that sounded like ”Kar-kar-tay.”

”She is mad,” squeaked Varachon.

”She is worse; she is German,” vowed Madame.

<script>