Chapter XII. Night Life—with the Life Part Missing
In our consideration of this topic we come first to the night life of the English. They have none.
Passing along to the next subject under the same heading, which is the night life of Paris, we find here so much night life, of such a delightfully transparent and counterfeit character; so much made-to-measure deviltry; so many members of the Madcaps' Union engaged on piece-work; so much delicious, hoydenish derring-do, all carefully stage-managed and expertly timed for the benefit of North and South American spenders, to the end that the deliriousness shall abate automatically in exact proportion as the spenders quit spending—in short, so much of what is typically Parisian that, really Paris, on its merits, is entitled to a couple of chapters of its own.
All of which naturally brings us to the two remaining great cities of Mid-Europe—Berlin and Vienna—and leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the Europeans, in common with all other peoples on the earth, only succeed—when they try to be desperately wicked—in being desperately dull; whereas when they seek their pleasures in a natural manner they present racial slants and angles that are very interesting to observe and very pleasant to have a hand in.
Take the Germans now: No less astute a world traveler than Samuel G. Blythe is sponsor for the assertion that the Berliners follow the night-life route because the Kaiser found his capital did not attract the tourist types to the extent he had hoped, and so decreed that his faithful and devoted subjects, leaving their cozy hearths and inglenooks, should go forth at the hour when graveyards yawn—and who could blame them?—to spend the dragging time until dawn in being merry and bright. So saying His Majesty went to bed, leaving them to work while he slept.
After viewing the situation at first hand the present writer is of the opinion that Mr. Blythe was quite right in his statements. Certainly nothing is more soothing to the eye of the onlooker, nothing more restful to his soul, than to behold a group of Germans enjoying themselves in a normal manner. And absolutely nothing is quite so ghastly sad as the sight of those same well-flushed, well-fleshed Germans cavorting about between the hours of two and four-thirty A.M., trying, with all the pachydermic ponderosity of Barnum's Elephant Quadrille, to be professionally gay and cutuppish. The Prussians must love their Kaiser dearly. We sit up with our friends when they are dead; they stay up for him until they are ready to die themselves.
As is well known Berlin abounds in pleasure palaces, so called. Enormous places these are, where under one widespreading roof are three or four separate restaurants of augmented size, not to mention winecellars and beer-caves below-stairs, and a dancehall or so and a Turkish bath, and a bar, and a skating rink, and a concert hall—and any number of private dining rooms. The German mind invariably associates size with enjoyment.
To these establishments, after his regular dinner, the Berliner repairs with his family, his friend or his guest. There is one especially popular resort, a combination of restaurant and vaudeville theater, at which one eats an excellent dinner excellently served, and between courses witnesses the turns of a first-rate variety bill, always with the inevitable team of American coon shouters, either in fast colors or of the burnt-cork variety, sandwiched into the program somewhere.
In the Friedrichstrasse there is another place, called the Admiralspalast, which is even more attractive. Here, inclosing a big, oval-shaped ice arena, balcony after balcony rises circling to the roof. On one of these balconies you sit, and while you dine and after you have dined you look down on a most marvelous series of skating stunts. In rapid and bewildering succession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals and skating races. Finally scenery is slid in on runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding, and admiring when you are doing neither; while alternating lightwaves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. It is like seeing a Christmas pantomime under an aurora borealis. In America we could not do these things—at least we never have done them. Either the performance would be poor or the provender would be highly expensive, or both. But here the show is wonderful, and the victuals are good and not extravagantly priced, and everybody has a bully time.
At eleven-thirty or thereabout the show at the ice palace is over—concluding with a push-ball match between teams of husky maidens who were apparently born on skates and raised on skates, and would not feel natural unless they were curveting about on skates. Their skates seem as much a part of them as tails to mermaids. It is bedtime now for sane folks, but at this moment a certain madness which does not at all fit in with the true German temperament descends on the crowd. Some go upstairs to another part of the building, where there is a dancehall called the Admiralskasino; but, to the truly swagger, one should hasten to the Palais du Danse on the second floor of the big Metropolpalast in the Behrenstrasse. This place opens promptly at midnight and closes promptly at two o'clock in the morning.
Inasmuch as the Palais du Danse is an institution borrowed outright from the French they have adopted a typically French custom here. As the visitor enters—if he be a stranger—a flunky in gorgeous livery intercepts him and demands an entrance fee amounting to about a dollar and a quarter in our money, as I recall. This tariff the American or Englishman pays, but the practiced Berliner merely suggests to the doorkeeper the expediency of his taking a long running start and jumping off into space, and stalks defiantly in without forking over a single pfennig to any person whatsoever.
The Palais du Danse is incomparably the most beautiful ballroom in the world—so people who have been all over the world agree—and it is spotlessly clean and free from brackish smells, which is more than can be said of any French establishment of similar character I have seen. At the Palais du Danse the patron sits at a table—a table with something on it besides a cloth being an essential adjunct to complete enjoyment of an evening of German revelry; and as he sits and drinks he listens to the playing of a splendid band and looks on at the dancing. Nothing is drunk except wine—and by wine I mainly mean champagne of the most sweetish and sickish brand obtainable. Elsewhere, for one-twentieth the cost, the German could have the best and purest beer that is made; but he is out now for the big night. Accordingly he saturates his tissues with the sugary bubble-water of France. He does not join in the dancing himself. The men dancers are nearly all paid dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are either professionals, too, or else belong to a profession that is older even than dancing is. They all dance with a profound German gravity and precision. Here is music to set a wooden leg a-jigging; but these couples circle and glide and dip with an incomprehensible decorum and slowness.
When we were there, they were dancing the tango or one of its manifold variations. All Europe, like all America, was, for the moment, tango mad. While we were in Paris, M. Jean Richepin lectured before the Forty Immortals of the Five Academies assembled in solemn conclave at the Institute of France. They are called the Forty Immortals because nobody can remember the names of more than five of them. He took for his subject the tango—his motto, in short, being one borrowed from the conductors in the New York subway—"Mind your step!"
While he spoke, which was for an hour or more, the bebadged and beribboned bosoms of his illustrious compatriots heaved with emotion; their faces—or such parts of their faces as were visible above the whiskerline—flushed with enthusiasm, and most vociferously they applauded his masterly phrasing and his tracing-out of the evolution of the tango, all the way from its Genesis, as it were, to its Revelation. I judge the revelation particularly appealed to them—that part of it appeals to so many.
After that the tango seemed literally to trail us. We could not escape it. While we were in Berlin the emperor saw fit officially to forbid the dancing of the tango by officers of his navy and army. We reached England just after the vogue for tango teas started.
Naturally we went to one of these affairs. It took place at a theater. Such is the English way of interpreting the poetry of motion—to hire some one else to do it for you, and—in order to get the worth of your money—sit and swizzle tea while the paid performer is doing it. At the tango tea we patronized the tea was up to standard, but the dancing of the box-ankled professionals was a disappointment. Beforehand I had been told that the scene on the stage would be a veritable picture. And so it was—Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair.
As a matter of fact the best dancer I saw in Europe was a performing trick pony in a winter circus in Berlin. I also remember with distinctness of detail a chorusman who took part in a new Lehar opera, there in Berlin. I do not remember him for his dancing, because he was no clumsier of foot than his compatriots in the chorus rank and file; or for his singing, since I could not pick his voice out from the combined voices of the others. I remember him because he wore spectacles—not a monocle nor yet a pair of nose-glasses, but heavy-rimmed, double-lensed German spectacles with gold bows extending up behind his ears like the roots of an old-fashioned wisdom tooth.
Come to think about it, I know of no reason why a chorusman should not wear spectacles if he needs them in his business or if he thinks they will add to his native beauty; but the spectacle of that bolster-built youth, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier and now as a Venetian gondolier, prancing about, with his spectacles goggling owlishly out at the audience, and once in a while, when a gleam from the footlights caught on them, turning to two red-hot disks set in the middle of his face, was a thing that is going to linger in my memory when a lot of more important matters are entirely forgotten.
Not even in Paris did the tango experts compare with the tango experts one sees in America. At this juncture I pause a moment, giving opportunity for some carping critic to rise and call my attention to the fact that perhaps the most distinguished of the early school of turkey-trotters bears a French name and came to us from Paris. To which I reply that so he does and so he did; but I add then the counter-argument that he came to us by way of Paris, at the conclusion of a round trip that started in the old Fourth Ward of the Borough of Manhattan, city of Greater New York; for he was born and bred on the East Side—and, moreover, was born bearing the name of a race of kings famous in the south of Ireland and along the Bowery. And he learned his art—not only the rudiments of it but the final finished polish of it—in the dancehalls of Third Avenue, where the best slow-time dancers on earth come from. It was after he had acquired a French accent and had Gallicized his name, thereby causing a general turning-over of old settlers in the graveyards of the County Clare, that he returned to us, a conspicuous figure in the world of art and fashion, and was able to get twenty-five dollars an hour for teaching the sons and daughters of our richest families to trip the light fantastic go. At the same time, be it understood, I am not here to muckrake the past of one so prominent and affluent in the most honored and lucrative of modern professions; but facts are facts, and these particular facts are quoted here to bind and buttress my claim that the best dancers are the American dancers.
After this digression let us hurry right back to that loyal Berliner whom we left seated in the Palais du Danse on the Behrenstrasse, waiting for the hour of two in the morning to come. The hour of two in the morning does come; the lights die down; the dancers pick up their heavy feet—it takes an effort to pick up those Continental feet—and quit the waxen floor; the Oberkellner comes round with his gold chain of office dangling on his breast and collects for the wine, and our German friend, politely inhaling his yawns, gets up and goes elsewhere to finish his good time. And, goldarn it, how he does dread it! Yet he goes, faithful soul that he is.
He goes, let us say, to the Pavilion Mascotte—no dancing, but plenty of drinking and music and food—which opens at two and stays open until four, when it shuts up shop in order that another place in the nature of a cabaret may open. And so, between five and six o'clock in the morning of the new day, when the lady garbagemen and the gentlemen chambermaids of the German capital are abroad on their several duties, he journeys homeward, and so, as Mr. Pepys says, to bed, with nothing disagreeable to look forward to except repeating the same dose all over again the coming night. This sort of thing would kill anybody except a Prussian—for, mark you, between intervals of drinking he has been eating all night; but then a Prussian has no digestion. He merely has gross tonnage in the place where his digestive apparatus ought to be.
The time to see a German enjoying himself is when he is following his own bent and not obeying the imperial edict of his gracious sovereign. I had a most excellent opportunity of observing him while engaged in his own private pursuits of pleasure when by chance one evening, in the course of a solitary prowl, I bumped into a sort of Berlinesque version of Coney Island, with the island part missing. It was not out in the suburbs where one would naturally expect to find such a resort. It was in the very middle of the city, just round the corner from the cafe district, not more than half a mile, as the Blutwurst flies, from Unter den Linden. Even at this distance and after a considerable lapse of time I can still appreciate that place, though I cannot pronounce it; for it had a name consisting of one of those long German compound words that run all the way round a fellow's face and lap over at the back, like a clergyman's collar, and it had also a subname that no living person could hope to utter unless he had a thorough German education and throat trouble. You meet such nouns frequently in Germany. They are not meant to be spoken; you gargle them. To speak the full name of this park would require two able-bodied persons—one to start it off and carry it along until his larynx gave out, and the other to take it up at that point and finish it.
But for all the nine-jointed impressiveness of its title this park was a live, brisk little park full of sideshow tents sheltering mildly amusing, faked-up attractions, with painted banners flapping in the air and barkers spieling before the entrances and all the ballyhoos going at full blast—altogether a creditable imitation of a street fair as witnessed in any American town that has a good live Elks' Lodge in it.
Plainly the place was popular. Germans of all conditions and all ages and all sizes—but mainly the broader lasts—were winding about in thick streams in the narrow, crooked alleys formed by the various tents. They packed themselves in front of each booth where a free exhibition was going on, and when the free part was over and the regular performance began they struggled good-naturedly to pay the admission fee and enter in at the door.
And, for a price, there were freaks to be seen who properly belonged on our side of the water, it seemed to me. I had always supposed them to be exclusively domestic articles until I encountered them here. There was a regular Bosco—a genuine Herr He Alive Them Eats—sitting in his canvas den entirely surrounded by a choice and tasty selection of eating snakes. The orthodox tattooed man was there, too, first standing up to display the text and accompanying illustrations on his front cover, and then turning round so the crowd might read what he said on the other side. And there was many another familiar freak introduced to our fathers by Old Dan Rice and to us, their children, through the good offices of Daniel's long and noble line of successors.
A seasonable Sunday is a fine time; and the big Zoological Garden, which is a favorite place for studying the Berlin populace at the diversions they prefer when left to their own devices. At one table will be a cluster of students, with their queer little pill-box caps of all colors, their close-cropped heads and well-shaved necks, and their saber-scarred faces. At the next table half a dozen spectacled, long-coated men, who look as though they might be university professors, are confabbing earnestly. And at the next table and the next and the next—and so on, until the aggregate runs into big figures—are family groups—grandsires, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and children, on down to the babies in arms. By the uncountable thousands they spend the afternoon here, munching sausages and sipping lager, and enjoying the excellent music that is invariably provided. At each plate there is a beer mug, for everybody is forever drinking and nobody is ever drunk. You see a lot of this sort of thing, not only in the parks and gardens so numerous in and near any German city but anywhere on the Continent. Seeing it helps an American to understand a main difference between the American Sabbath and the European Sunday. We keep it and they spend it.
I am given to understand that Vienna night life is the most alluring, the most abandoned, the most wicked and the wildest of all night life. Probably this is so—certainly it is the most cloistered and the most inaccessible. The Viennese does not deliberately exploit his night life to prove to all the world that he is a gay dog and will not go home until morning though it kill him—as the German does. Neither does he maintain it for the sake of the coin to be extracted from the pockets of the tourist, as do the Parisians. With him his night life is a thing he has created and which he supports for his own enjoyment.
And so it goes on—not out in the open; not press-agented; not advertised; but behind closed doors. He does not care for the stranger's presence, nor does he suffer it either—unless the stranger is properly vouched for. The best theaters in Vienna are small, exclusive affairs, privately supported, and with seating capacity for a few chosen patrons. Once he has quit the public cafe with its fine music and its bad waiters the uninitiated traveler has a pretty lonesome time of it in Vienna. Until all hours he may roam the principal streets seeking that fillip of wickedness which will give zest to life and provide him with something to brag about when he gets back among the home folks again. He does not find it. Charades would provide a much more exciting means of spending the evening; and, in comparison with the sights he witnesses, anagrams and acrostics are positively thrilling.
He is tantalized by the knowledge that all about him there are big doings, but, so far as he is concerned, he might just as well be attending a Sunday-school cantata. Unless he be suitably introduced he will have never a chance to shake a foot with anybody or buy a drink for somebody in the inner circles of Viennese night life. He is emphatically on the outside, denied even the poor satisfaction of looking in. At that I have a suspicion, born of casual observation among other races, that the Viennese really has a better time when he is not trying than when he is trying.
Chapter XIII. Our Friend, the Assassin
No taste of the night life of Paris is regarded as complete without a visit to an Apache resort at the fag-end of it. For orderly and law-abiding people the disorderly and lawbreaking people always have an immense fascination anyhow. The average person, though inclined to blink at whatever prevalence of the criminal classes may exist in his own community, desires above all things to know at firsthand about the criminals of other communities. In these matters charity begins at home.
Every New Yorker who journeys to the West wants to see a few roadagents; conversely the Westerner sojourning in New York pesters his New York friends to lead him to the haunts of the gangsters. It makes no difference that in a Western town the prize hold-up man is more apt than not to be a real-estate dealer; that in New York the average run of citizens know no more of the gangs than they know of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which is to say, nothing at all. Human nature comes to the surface just the same.
In Paris they order this thing differently; they exhibit the same spirit of enterprise that in a lesser degree characterized certain promoters of rubberneck tours who some years ago fitted up make-believe opium dens in New York's Chinatown for the awed delectation of out-of-town spectators. Knowing from experience that every other American who lands in Paris will crave to observe the Apache while the Apache is in the act of Apaching round, the canny Parisians have provided a line of up-to-date Apache dens within easy walking distance of Montmartre; and thither the guides lead the round-eyed tourist and there introduce him to well-drilled, carefully made-up Apaches and Apachesses engaged in their customary sports and pastimes for as long as he is willing to pay out money for the privilege.
Being forewarned of this I naturally desired to see the genuine article. I took steps to achieve that end. Suitably chaperoned by a trio of transplanted Americans who knew a good bit about the Paris underworld I rode over miles of bumpy cobblestones until, along about four o'clock in the morning, our taxicab turned into a dim back street opening off one of the big public markets and drew up in front of a grimy establishment rejoicing in the happy and well-chosen name of the Cave of the Innocents.
Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen, and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to caress their goatees and finger their swords. Whether the gendarmes were stationed here to keep the Apaches from preying on the marketmen or the marketmen from preying on the Apaches I know not; but having subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that selfsame market I should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police protection it was the Apaches. My money would be on the marketmen every time.
Beyond the couchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage cut out of stone and so came at length to what seemingly had originally been a winevault, hollowed out far down beneath the foundations of the building. The ceiling was so low that a tall man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off. The place was full of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever since. For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed in a perpetual snarl. I judged some of its most important vital organs were missing too—after I heard it played. On the walls were inscribed such words as naughty little boys write on schoolhouse fences in this country, and more examples of this pleasing brand of literature were carved on the whittled oak benches and the rickety wooden stools. So much for the physical furbishings.
By rights—by all the hallowed rules and precedents of the American vaudeville stage!—the denizens of this cozy retreat in the bowels of the earth should have been wearing high-waisted baggy velvet trousers and drinking absinthe out of large flagons, and stabbing one another between the shoulder blades, and ever and anon, in the mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack-the-whip with the necks and heels of their adoring lady friends; but such was not found to be the case. In all these essential and traditional regards the assembled Innocents were as poignantly disappointing as the costers of London had proved themselves.
According to all the printed information on the subject the London coster wears clothes covered up with pearl buttons and spends his time swapping ready repartee with his Donah or his Dinah. The costers I saw were barren of pearl buttons and silent of speech; and almost invariably they had left their Donahs at home. Similarly these gentlemen habitues of the Cave of the Innocents wore few or no velvet pants, and guzzled little or none of the absinthe. Their favorite tipple appeared to be beer; and their female companions snuggled closely beside them.
We stayed among them fully twenty minutes, but not a single person was stabbed while we were there. It must have been an off-night for stabbings.
Still, I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here, for the first, last and only time in Paris, I found a shop where a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with vociferous enthusiasm. The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner. The waiter, though, bowed before us—a shockheaded personage in the ruins of a dress suit—at the same time saying words which I took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that he had called us something that might be freely translated as a certain kind of female lobster. Circumscribed by our own inflexible and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes further than that—he calls you a female lobster, which seems somehow or other to make it more binding.
However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious—that was what ailed him.
For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of grave peril. It was no use. I felt safe—not exactly comfortable, but perfectly safe. I could not even muster up a spasm of the spine when a member of our party leaned over and whispered in my ear that any one of these gentry roundabout us would cheerfully cut a man's throat for twenty-five cents. I was surprised, though, at the moderation of the cost; this was the only cheap thing I had struck in Paris. It was cheaper even than the same job is supposed to be in the district round Chatham Square, on the East Side of New York, where the credulous stranger so frequently is told that he can have a plain murder done for five dollars—or a fancy murder, with trimmings, for ten; rate card covering other jobs on application. In America, however, it has been my misfortune that I did not have the right amount handy; and here in Paris I was handicapped by my inability to make change correctly. By now I would not have trusted anyone in Paris to make change for me—not even an Apache. I was sorry for this, for at a quarter a head I should have been very glad to engage a troupe of Apaches to kill me about two dollars' worth of cabdrivers and waiters. For one of the waiters at our hotel I would have been willing to pay as much as fifty cents, provided they killed him very slowly. Because of the reasons named, however, I had to come away without making any deal, and I have always regretted it.
At the outset of the chapter immediately preceding this one I said the English had no night life. This was a slight but a pardonable misstatement of the actual facts. The Englishman has not so much night life as the Parisian, the Berliner, the Viennese or the Budapest; but he has more night life in his town of London than the Roman has in his town of Rome. In Rome night life for the foreigner consists of going indoors at eventide and until bedtime figuring up how much money he has been skinned out of during the course of the day just done—and for the native in going indoors and counting up how much money he has skinned the foreigner out of during the day aforesaid. London has its night life, but it ends early—in the very shank of the evening, so to speak.
This is due in a measure to the operation of the early-closing law, which, however, does not apply if you are a bona-fide traveler stopping at your own inn. There the ancient tavern law protects you. You may sit at ease and, if so minded, may drink and eat until daylight doth appear or doth not appear, as is generally the case in the foggy season. There is another law, of newer origin, to prohibit the taking of children under a certain age into a public house. On the passage of this act there at once sprang up a congenial and lucrative employment for those horrible old-women drunkards who are so distressingly numerous in the poorer quarters of the town. Regardless of the weather one of these bedrabbled creatures stations herself just outside the door of a pub. Along comes a mother with a thirst and a child. Surrendering her offspring to the temporary care of the hag the mother goes within and has her refreshment at the bar. When, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she comes forth to reclaim the youngster she gives the other woman a ha'penny for her trouble, and eventually the other woman harvests enough ha'penny bits to buy a dram of gin for herself. On a rainy day I have seen a draggled, Sairey-Gamp-looking female caring for as many as four damp infants under the drippy portico of an East End groggery.
It is to the cafes that the early-closing law chiefly applies. The cafes are due to close for business within half an hour after midnight. When the time for shutting up draws nigh the managers do not put their lingering patrons out physically. The individual's body is a sacred thing, personal liberty being most dear to an Englishman. It will be made most dear to you too—in the law courts—if you infringe on it by violence or otherwise. No; they have a gentler system than that, one that is free from noise, excitement and all mussy work. Along toward twelve-thirty o'clock the waiters begin going about, turning out the lights. The average London restaurant is none too brightly illuminated to start with, being a dim and dingy ill-kept place compared with the glary, shiny lobster palace that we know; so instantly you are made aware of a thickening of the prevalent gloom. The waiters start in at the far end of the room and turn out a few lights. Drawing nearer and nearer to you they turn out more lights; and finally, by way of strengthening the hint, they turn out the lights immediately above your head, which leaves you in the stilly dark with no means of seeing your food even; unless you have taken the precaution to spread phosphorus on your sandwich instead of mustard—which, however, is seldom done. A better method is to order a portion of one of the more luminous varieties of imported cheese.
The best thing of all, however, is to take your hat and stick and go away from there. And then, unless you belong to a regular club or carry a card of admission to one of the chartered all-night clubs that have sprung up so abundantly in London, and which are uniformly stuffy, stupid places where the members take their roistering seriously—or as a last resort, unless you care to sit for a tiresome hour or two in the grill of your hotel—you might as well be toddling away to bed; that is to say, you might as well go to bed unless you find the scenes in the street as worth while as I found them.
At this hour London's droning voice has abated to a deep, hoarse snore; London has become a great, broody giant taking rest that is troubled by snatches of wakefulness; London's grimy, lined face shows new wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear. From the massed-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out: a flower girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sere and yellow leaf; a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a livecoal in an ashheap; a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night—not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, rushing patrol wagon, which would serve to attract public attention to the distressing state of the overcome one, but conveying him quietly, unostentatiously, surreptitiously almost, in a small-wheeled vehicle partaking somewhat of the nature of a baby carriage and somewhat of the nature of a pushcart.
The policeman shoves this along the road jailward and the drunk lies at rest in it, stretched out full length, with a neat rubber bedspread drawn up over his prostrate form to screen him from drafts and save his face from the gaze of the vulgar. Drunkards are treated with the tenderest consideration in London; for, as you know, Britons never will be slaves—though some of them in the presence of a title give such imitations of being slaves as might fool even so experienced a judge as the late Simon Legree; and—as perchance you may also have heard—an Englishman's souse is his castle. So in due state they ride him and his turreted souse to the station house in a perambulator.
From midnight to daylight the taxicabs by the countless swarm will be charging about in every direction—charging, moreover, at the rate of eight pence a mile. Think that over, ye taxitaxed wretches of New York, and rend your garments, with lamentations loud! There is this also to be said of the London taxi service—and to an American it is one of the abiding marvels of the place—that, no matter where you go, no matter how late the hour or how outlying and obscure the district, there is always a trim taxicab just round the next corner waiting to come instantly at your whistle, and with it a beggar with a bleak, hopeless face, to open the cab door for you and stand, hat in hand, for the penny you toss him.
In the main centers, such as Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross, and along the Embankment, the Strand and Pall Mall, they are as thick as fleas on the Missouri houn' dawg famous in song and story—the taxis, I mean, though the beggars are reasonably thick also—and they hop like fleas, bearing you swiftly and surely and cheaply on your way. The meters are honest, openfaced meters; and the drivers ask no more than their legal fares and are satisfied with tips within reason. Here in America we have the kindred arts of taxidermy and taxicabbery; one of these is the art of skinning animals and the other is the art of skinning people. The ruthless taxirobber of New York would not last half an hour in London; for him the jail doors would yawn.
Oldtime Londoners deplored the coming of the taxicab and the motorbus, for their coming meant the entire extinction of the driver of the horse-drawn bus, who was an institution, and the practical extinction of the hansom cabby, who was a type and very frequently a humorist too. But an American finds no fault with the present arrangement; he is amply satisfied with it.
Personally I can think of no more exciting phase of the night life of the two greatest cities of Europe than the stunt of dodging taxicabs. In London the peril that lurks for you at every turning is not the result of carelessness on the part of the drivers; it is due to the rules of the road. Afoot, an Englishman meeting you on the sidewalk turns, as we do, to the right hand; but mounted he turns to the left. The foot passenger's prerogative of turning to the right was one of the priceless heritages wrested from King John by the barons at Runnymede; but when William the Conqueror rode into the Battle of Hastings he rode a left-handed horse—and so, very naturally and very properly, everything on hoof or wheel in England has consistently turned to the left ever since. I took some pains to look up the original precedents for these facts and to establish them historically.
The system suits the English mind, but it is highly confusing to an American who gets into the swirl of traffic at a crossing—and every London crossing is a swirl of traffic most of the time—and looks left when he should look right, and looks right when he should be looking left until the very best he can expect, if he survive at all, is cross-eyes and nervous prostration.
I lost count of the number of close calls from utter and mussy destruction I had while in London. Sometimes a policeman took pity on me and saved me, and again, by quick and frenzied leaping, I saved myself; but then the London cabmen were poor marksmen at best. In front of the Savoy one night the same cabman in rapid succession had two beautiful shots at me and each time missed the bull's-eye by a disqualifying margin of inches. A New York chauffeur who had failed to splatter me all over the vicinage at the first chance would have been ashamed to go home afterward and look his innocent little ones in the face.
Even now I cannot decide in my own mind which is the more fearsome and perilous thing—to be afoot in Paris at the mercy of all the maniacs who drive French motor cars or to be in one of the motor cars at the mercy of one of the maniacs. Motoring in Paris is the most dangerous sport known—just as dueling is the safest. There are some arguments to be advanced in favor of dueling. It provides copy for the papers and harmless excitement for the participants—and it certainly gives them a chance to get a little fresh air occasionally, but with motoring it is different. In Paris there are no rules of the road except just these two—the pedestrian who gets run over is liable to prosecution, and all motor cars must travel at top speed.
If I live to be a million I shall never get over shuddering as I think back to a taxicab ride I had in the rush hour one afternoon over a route that extended from away down near the site of the Bastille to a hotel away up near the Place Vendome. The driver was a congenital madman, the same as all Parisian taxicab drivers are; and in addition he was on this occasion acquiring special merit by being quite drunk. This last, however, was a detail that did not dawn on my perceptions until too late to cancel the contract. Once he had got me safely fastened inside his rickety, creaky devil-wagon he pulled all the stops all the way out and went tearing up the crowded boulevard like a comet with a can tied to its tail.
I hammered on the glass and begged him to slow down—that is, I hammered on the glass and tried to beg him to slow down. For just such emergencies I had previously stocked up with two French words—"Doucement!" and "Vite!" I knew that one of those words meant speed and the other meant less speed, but in the turmoil of the moment I may have confused them slightly. Anyhow, to be on the safe side, I yelled "Vite!" a while and then "Doucement" a while; and then "Doucement" and "Vite!" alternately, and mixed in a few short, simple Anglo-Saxon cusswords and prayers for dressing. But nothing I said seemed to have the least effect on that demoniac scoundrel. Without turning his head he merely shouted back something unintelligible and threw on more juice.
On and on we tore, slicing against the sidewalk, curving and jibbing, clattering and careening—now going on two wheels and now on four—while the lunatic shrieked curses of disappointment at the pedestrians who scuttled away to safety from our charging onslaughts; and I held both hands over my mouth to keep my heart from jumping out into my lap.
I saw, with instantaneous but photographic distinctness, a lady, with a dog tucked under her arm, who hesitated a moment in our very path. She was one of the largest ladies I ever saw and the dog under her arm was certainly the smallest dog I ever saw. You might say the lady was practically out of dog. I thought we had her and probably her dog too; but she fell back and was saved by a matter of half an inch or so. I think, though, we got some of the buttons off her shirtwaist and the back trimming of her hat.
Then there was a rending, tearing crash as we took a fender off a machine just emerging from a cross street, but my lunatic never checked up at all. He just flung a curling ribbon of profanity over his shoulder at the other driver and bounded onward like a bat out of the Bad Place. That was the hour when my hair began to turn perceptibly grayer. And yet, when by a succession of miracles we had landed intact at my destination, the fiend seemed to think he had done a praiseworthy and creditable thing. I only wish he had been able to understand the things I called him—that is all I wish!
It is by a succession of miracles that the members of his maniacal craft usually do dodge death and destruction. The providence that watches over the mentally deficient has them in its care, I guess; and the same beneficent influence frequently avails to save those who ride behind them and, to a lesser extent, those who walk ahead. Once in a while a Paris cabman does have a lucky stroke and garner in a foot traveler. In an instant a vast and surging crowd convenes. In another instant the road is impassably blocked. Up rushes a gendarme and worms his way through the press to the center. He has a notebook in his hand. In this book he enters the gloating cabman's name, his age, his address, and his wife's maiden name, if any; and gets his views on the Dreyfus case; and finds out what he thinks about the separation of church and state; and tells him that if he keeps on the way he is headed he will be getting the cross of the Legion of Honor pretty soon. They shake hands and embrace, and the cabman cuts another notch in his mudguard, and gets back on the seat and drives on. Then if, by any chance, the victim of the accident still breathes, the gendarme arrests him for interfering with the traffic. It is a lovely system and sweetly typical.
Under the general classification of thrilling moments in the night life of Europe I should like to list a carriage trip through the outskirts of Naples after dark. In the first place the carriage driver is an Italian driver—which is a shorter way of saying he is the worst driver living. His idea of getting service out of a horse is, first to snatch him to a standstill by yanking on the bit and then to force the poor brute into a gallop by lashing at him with a whip having a particularly loud and vixenish cracker on it; and at every occasion to whoop at the top of his voice. In the second place the street is as narrow as a narrow alley, feebly lighted, and has no sidewalks. And the rutty paving stones which stretch from housefront to housefront are crawling with people and goats and dogs and children. Finally, to add zest to the affair, there are lots of loose cows mooning about—for at this hour the cowherd brings his stock to the doors of his patrons. In an Italian city the people get their milk from a cow, instead of from a milkman as with us. The milk is delivered on the hoof, so to speak.
The grown-ups refuse to make way for you to pass and the swarming young ones repay you for not killing them by pelting pebbles and less pleasant things into your face. Beggars in all degrees of filth and deformity and repulsiveness run alongside the carriage in imminent danger from the wheels, begging for alms. If you give them something they curse you for not giving them more, and if you give them nothing they spit at you for a base dog of a heretic.
But then, what could you naturally expect from a population that thinks a fried cuttlefish is edible and a beefsteak is not?