“He is profoundly moved…. What you have said has touched him deeply!”
“Ah-h!” the boy cried, with an air of sudden, happy enlightenment, and thus inspired, began with renewed ardour, and many a vigorous wag of his thick and earnest beak, to proclaim:
“Mais c’est vrai! C’est comme je dis!… La France et l’Amérique—” he intoned anew.
“Oh, God!” groaned Starwick without turning, and waved a feeble and defeated arm. “Tell him to go away!”
“He is deeply moved! He says he can stand no more!”
The boy cast an earnest and immensely gratified look at Starwick’s dejected back, and was on the point of pushing his triumph farther when the proprietor angrily called to him, bidding him be about his work and leave the gentlemen in peace.
He departed with obvious reluctance, but not without vigorously nodding his thick head again, proclaiming that “La France et l’Amérique sont comme ça!” and shaking his thick, clasped fingers earnestly in a farewell gesture of racial amity.
When he had gone, Starwick looked round wearily, and in a dispirited tone said:
“God! What a place! How did you ever find it?… And how do you manage to stand it?”
“But look at him, Frank… I mean, don’t you just lo-o-ve it?” he jibed. “I mean, there’s something so grand and so simple and so unaffected about the way he did it! It’s really quite astonishing! It really is, you know!”
The poor bus-boy, indeed, had been intoxicated by his sudden and unaccustomed success. Now, as he continued his work of clearing tables and stacking dishes on a tray, he could be seen nodding his thick head vigorously and muttering to himself: “Mais oui, mais oui, monsieur!… La France et l’Amérique…. Nous sommes de vrais amis!” and from time to time he would even pause in his work to clasp his thick fingers together illustrating this and to mutter: “C’est toujours comme ça!”
This preoccupied elation soon proved the poor boy’s undoing. For even as he lifted his loaded tray and balanced it on one thick palm he muttered “C’est comme ça,” again, making a recklessly inclusive gesture with his free hand; the mountainously balanced tray was thrown off balance,
