a semi-distraction, fleeting among
the tables as if pursued by some dodging animal. Their breaths came in
gasps. If they had been convict labourers they could not have surveyed
their positions with countenances of more unspeakable injury. Withal,
they carried incredible masses of dishes and threaded their ways with
skill. They served people with such speed and violence that it often
resembled a personal assault. They struck two blows at a table and left
there a knife and fork. Then came the viands in a volley. The clatter of
this business was loud and bewilderingly rapid, like the gallop of a
thousand horses.

In a remote corner a band of mandolins and guitars played the long,
sweeping, mad melody of a Spanish waltz. It seemed to go tingling to the
hearts of many of the diners. Their eyes glittered with enthusiasm, with
abandon, with deviltry. They swung their heads from side to side in
rhythmic movement. High in air curled the smoke from the innumerable
cigarettes. The long, black claret bottles were in clusters upon the
tables. At an end of the hall two men with maudlin grins sang the waltz
uproariously, but always a trifle belated.

An unsteady person, leaning back in his chair to murmur swift
compliments to a woman at another table, suddenly sprawled out upon the
floor. He scrambled to his feet, and, turning to the escort of the
woman, heatedly blamed him for the accident. They exchanged a series of
tense, bitter insults, which spatted back and forth between them like
pellets. People arose from their chairs and stretched their necks. The
musicians stood in a body, their faces turned with expressions of keen
excitement toward this quarrel, but their fingers still twinkling over
their instruments, sending into the middle of this turmoil the
passionate, mad, Spanish music. The proprietor of the place came in
agitation and plunged headlong into the argument, where he thereafter
appeared as a frantic creature harried to the point of insanity, for
they buried him at once in long, vociferous threats, explanations,
charges, every form of declamation known to their voices. The music, the
noise of the galloping horses, the voices of the brawlers, gave the
whole thing the quality of war.

There were two men in the _cafe_ who seemed to be tranquil. Hollanden
carefully stacked one lump of sugar upon another in the middle of his
saucer and poured cognac over them. He touched a match to the cognac and
the blue and yellow flame