he made a desperate effort to retrieve it, and as it crashed upon the floor he pawed frantically and sprawled after it, in one general ruinous smash of broken crockery.
There was a maddened scream from the proprietor. He came running clumsily, a squat, thick figure of a bourgeois Frenchman, clothed in black and screaming imprecations. His moustaches bristled like the quills of an enraged porcupine, and his ruddy face was swollen and suffused, an apoplectic red:
“Brute! Fool! Imbecile!” he screamed as the frightened boy clambered to his feet and stood staring at him with a face full of foolish and helpless bewilderment. “… Salaud!… Pig… Architect!” he screamed out this meaningless curse in a strangling voice, and rushing at the boy cuffed him clumsily on the side of the face and began to thrust and drive him before him in staggering lunges.
“—And what grace, Frank!” Eugene now said cruelly. “How grand and simple and how unselfconscious they are in everything they do! I mean, the way they use their hands!” he said ironically, as the maddened proprietor gave the unfortunate boy another ugly, clumsy shove that sent him headlong. “I mean, it’s like a fugue—like Cimabue or an early primitive—it really is, you know—”
“Assassin! Criminal!” the proprietor screamed at this moment, and gave the weeping boy a brutal shove that sent him sprawling forward upon his hands and knees:
“Traitor! Misérable scélérat!” he screamed, and kicked clumsily at the prostrate boy with one fat leg.
“Now where?—where?” Eugene said maliciously, as the wretched boy clambered to his feet, weeping bitterly, “—where, Francis, could you see anything like that in America?”
“God!” said Starwick, getting up. “It’s unspeakable!” And desperately: “Let’s go!”
They paid the bill and went out. As they went down the stairs they could still hear the hoarse, choked sobs of the bus-boy, his thick face covered with his thick, blunt fingers, crying bitterly.
He didn’t know what Starwick wanted the money for, but it was plain he wanted it for something, badly. His agitation was pitiable:—the bitter exasperation and open flare of temper he had displayed once or twice in the restaurant was so unnatural to him that it was evident his
