Fifty yards down the Rue Romaine she met Manon coming towards her, a Manon who had seen Bibi’s mob rush past Mère Vitry’s window. With the rush of those fatal figures an equal fear had leapt into her heart. She had hurried out, and here was Marie, stertorous and quaking, and trying to look calm. From that moment Manon knew what was happening at the Café de la Victoire, and that it was her love against the mob.
“They are there?”
Marie spread out her arms.
“Don’t go. Paul told me to stop you.”
“He told you that!”
She slipped past big Marie as easily as a dog dodges a bull, and began to run towards the corner where the three roads met. Marie Castener turned and lumbered after her, and now that the secret was out she began to use that deep, low voice of hers. Doors were opening, and people pushing their heads out into the street. Marie shouted to them, waving an arm like an Amazon heading a charge.
“Come on, all of you—come on. Help me to save Manon.”
When Manon came to the meeting of the roads she saw a sight that she was never likely to forget. A thing that looked like a bundle of torn clothes was lying in the middle of the street, and Bibi was kicking at it with his heavy boots. There was something grotesquely disgusting in this great blind beast feeling for Paul Brent’s body with his feet, trampling and hacking like a blind stallion. The crowd stood round with an animal stupidity that is fascinated by violent physical action.
Manon’s face lit up with a white and inward blaze. She picked up a loose cobble-stone and ran forward; a little figure of silence, purposeful and intense. No one in the crowd noticed her until she had opened the circle, that little arena held by certain elemental passions, and had flung her stone full in Bibi’s face. It took him between the eyes and laid him on the cobbles.
That physical act of hers dominated the crowd. She stood over Paul’s body and looked round at these men, these creatures of a brutal impulse whom strong drink and their passions had inflamed. It was a moment of physical balance, of hesitation, of poignant self-consciousness, when some little act or word turns men back from the smell of the shambles.