Fantasy fiction; Science fiction; Spouses -- Fiction; Subconsciousness -- Fiction
In the next moment the entire room had entered into the spirit of the
occasion. Naturally repressed, the guests of the Wynant were quick
to seize upon this opportunity to give expression to their pent up
feelings. Pandemonium ruled the room from end to end. Trays and diners
slid across the floor together with an air of abandoned democracy. Mrs.
Jones, having long resented the upward tilt of Mrs. Smythe's nose, did
her level best to lower it with a sauce bottle. The action, for the
main part, however, gravitated frenziedly toward the center of the room
where it had started. Toffee, having applied the squab to her victim,
was now gustily engaged in massaging it into the scalp, all the way to
the bone if possible.
Marc, for his part, was busily engaged in reaping the spoils of the
battle. He picked up an abandoned roll here, an unwanted steak there,
and even occasionally caught a delicacy as it flew through the air. He
stuffed himself as ravenously as a starved road-worker at a free lunch.
The Blemishes remained seated at the table, thoroughly confused and
disillusioned at the activities of the upper classes. The waiter merely
leaned back in his chair with an enigmatic smile and enjoyed to the
fullest the spectacle of these people doing to each other what he had
been secretly tempted to do to them nightly for several years.
Marc, still concerned with the matter of dining, reached out for an
abandoned pudding and discovered new and still more alarming element in
the fracas. Just as his hand was closing in on the dessert, the dish
suddenly leaped into the air, poised itself carefully, then sailed
across the room to catch a portly gentleman neatly at the side of the
ear. In a seizure of surprise, as the gooey mess dribbled into his
collar, the man whirled about and dealt his female companion a stinging
blow across the bridge of her nose.
"Oh!" he gasped in instant regret. "I'm so terribly sorry!"
For a moment the woman only stared at him without expression. Then,
with slow calm she reached out to the table, picked up a bottle of
wine, carefully removed the cloth from around it, and belted her abject
attacker a solid blow across the crown of the head.
"Perfectly all right, lover," she murmured as she stepped over his
prone figure and started from the room. "Don't bother getting up."
Marc turned back to the table and frowned sternly.
"George," he said tentatively. "George, I know you're there, so there's
no use hiding. Show yourself."
"Of course," George's voice said out of space, with malicious levity.
"In a moment. Wonderful fight, isn't it?"
"George!" Marc said.
But there was only silence from the ghost. Marc gazed speculatively
around, peering anxiously into the ranks of the warring diners for some
sign; there was no telling what the sporadic spook might undertake in
a situation of this sort. It was only a moment before the worst of his
fears were realized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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