Europe Revised — 28 - Ch. XIII: Our Friend, the Assassin, pt. 2

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?

Chapter XIV