Avec les ba-a-a-alles dum-dum!"
Caffiard was to leave them at Villennes after they should have taken their apéritifs. They protested, stormed at him, scolded and cajoled by turns, and called him a score of fantastic names—for by this time they knew him intimately—as they sat in Monsieur Bodin's arbor and sipped amer-menthe, but all in vain. Pierre had Mimi's hand, as always, and he had kissed her a half-hundred times in the course of the afternoon. Mimi had a way of shaking her hair out of her eyes with a curious little backward jerk of her head when Pierre kissed her, and then looking at him seriously, seriously, but smiling when he caught her at it. Caffiard liked that. And Pierre had a trick of turning, as if to ask Mimi's opinion, or divine even her unspoken wishes whenever a question came up for decision—a choice of food or drink, or direction, or what-not. And Caffiard liked that.
He looked across the table at them now, dreamily, through his cigarette smoke.
"Pierrot," he said, after he had persuaded them to let him depart in peace when the train should be due,—"Pierrot. Yes, that is it. You, with your garret, and your painting, and your songs, and your black, black sadness at one moment, and your laughter the next, and, above all, your Pierrette, your bon-bon of a Pierrette:—you are Pierrot, the spirit of Paris in powder and white muslin! Eigho! my children, what a thing it is, la belle jeunesse! Tiens! you have given me a taste of it to-day, and I thank you. I thought I had forgotten. But no, one never forgets. It all comes back,—youth, and strength, and beauty, love, and music, and laughter,—but only like a breath upon a mirror, my children, only like a wind-ripple on a pool; for I am an old man."
He paused, looking up at the vine-leaves on the trellis-roof, and murmured a few words of Mimi's song:—
"Pierrette en songe va venir me voir:
Bonsoir, madame la lune!"
Then his eyes came back to her face.
"I must be off," he said. "Why, what hast thou, little one? There are tears in those two stars!"