There was an instant’s deathly stillness, and then a gray-haired Englishman observed quietly, “He asked for it.”
Walmar crawled up shakily. His mouth was a mess, and there was blood on his silk shirt. A covey of waiters awoke from their momentary stupor and buzzed in among the tables, interposing themselves between a resumption of the strife. The players abandoned the boule table and swarmed out towards the prospect of more primitive sport, leaving the high priest to intone his forlorn “ Rien ne va plus! ” to a skeleton congregation. The two inevitable policemen, who appear as if at the rubbing of a kind of Aladdin’s lamp on the scene of any French fracas, stalked ponderously into the perspective, closely followed by an agitated manager. The tableau had all the makings of a second-act musical comedy curtain, but Simon overcame the temptation to explore all the avenues of extravagant burlesque which it opened up. He spoke calmly and to the point.
“He upset this lady’s drink — purposely.”
Walmar, struggling dramatically in the grasp of a waiter whom he could have shaken off with a wave of his hand, shouted, “Messieurs! It was an accident. He attacked me—”
The larger agent turned to the waiter.
“ Qu’est-ce qui est arrivé? ” he demanded.
“ Je n’ai rien vu,” answered the man tactfully.
It was the gray-haired Englishman who came forward with quiet corroboration, and the affair turned into a general soothing-party for Maurice Walmar, whose wealth and family entitled him to eccentricities that would rapidly have landed an ordinary visitor in jail. The jaundiced eye with which private battles are viewed in France was well known to the Saint, and he was rather relieved to be spared the unheroic sequels in which offenders against the code of peace are usually involved.
He went out on to the terrace with Mrs Nussberg, and as he left the lounge he caught sight of Myra Campion’s face among the spectators who were staring after him in the pained blank manner of a row of dowagers who have been simultaneously bitten in the fleshy part of the leg by their favorite Pomeranians. Miss Campion’s sweet symmetrical features were almost egg-like in their stupefied bewilderment, and Simon’s smile as he reached the edge of the balcony and looked out over the dark sea came quite naturally.
“You’ve seen for yourself,” he said. “I’ve just got a natural gift for getting into trouble.”