Europe Revised

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?

Chapter XIV. That Gay Paresis

As you walk along the Rue de la Paix [Footnote: The X being one of the few silent things in France.] and pay and pay, and keep on paying, your eye is constantly engaged by two inscriptions that occur and recur with the utmost frequency. One of these appears in nearly every shopwindow and over nearly every shopdoor. It says:

English Spoken Here

This, I may tell you, is one of the few absolutely truthful and dependable statements encountered by the tourist in the French capital. Invariably English is spoken here. It is spoken here during all the hours of the day and until far into the dusk of the evening; spoken loudly, clearly, distinctly, hopefully, hopelessly, stridently, hoarsely, despondently, despairingly and finally profanely by Americans who are trying to make somebody round the place understand what they are driving at.

The other inscription is carved, painted or printed on all public buildings, on most monuments, and on many private establishments as well. It is the motto of the French Republic, reading as follows:

Liberality! Economy! Frugality!1

The first word of this—the Liberality part—is applicable to the foreigner and is aimed directly at him as a prayer, an injunction and a command; while the rest of it—the Economy and the Frugality—is competently attended to by the Parisians themselves. The foreigner has only to be sufficiently liberal and he is assured of a flattering reception wheresoever his straying footsteps may carry him, whether in Paris or in the provinces; but wheresoever those feet of his do carry him he will find a people distinguished by a frugality and inspired by an economy of the frugalest and most economical character conceivable. In the streets of the metropolis he is expected, when going anywhere, to hail the fast-flitting taxicab [Footnote: Stops on signal only—and sometimes not then.], though the residents patronize the public bus. Indeed, the distinction is made clear to his understanding from the moment he passes the first outlying fortress at the national frontier [Footnote: Flag station.]—since, for the looks of things if for no better reason, he must travel first-class on the de-luxe trains [Footnote: Diner taken off when you are about half through eating.], whereas the Frenchmen pack themselves tightly but frugally into the second-class and the third-class compartments.

Before I went to France I knew Saint Denis was the patron saint of the French; but I did not know why until I heard the legend connected with his death. When the executioner on the hill at Montmartre cut off his head the good saint picked it up and strolled across the fields with it tucked under his arm—so runs the tale. His head, in that shape, was no longer of any particular value to him, but your true Parisian is of a saving disposition. And so the Paris population have worshiped Saint Denis ever since. Both as a saint and as a citizen he filled the bill. He would not throw anything away, whether he needed it or not.

Paris—not the Paris of the art lover, nor the Paris of the lover of history, nor yet again the Paris of the worth-while Parisians—but the Paris which the casual male visitor samples, is the most overrated thing on earth, I reckon—except alligator-pear salad—and the most costly. Its system of conduct is predicated, based, organized and manipulated on the principle that a foreigner with plenty of money and no soul will be along pretty soon. Hence by day and by night the deadfall is rigged and the trap is set and baited—baited with a spurious gayety and an imitation joyousness; but the joyousness is as thin as one coat of sizing, and the brass shines through the plating; and behind the painted, parted lips of laughter the sharp teeth of greed show in a glittering double row. Yet gallus Mr. Fly, from the U.S.A., walks debonairly in, and out comes Monsieur Spider, ably seconded by Madame Spiderette; and between them they despoil him with the utmost dispatch. When he is not being mulcted for large sums he is being nicked for small ones. It is tip, brother, tip, and keep right on tipping.

I heard a story of an American who spent a month in Paris, taking in the sights and being taken in by them, and another month motoring through the country. At length he reached the port whence he was to sail for home. He went aboard the steamer and saw to it that his belongings were properly stored; and in the privacy of his stateroom he sat down to take an inventory of his letter of credit, now reduced to a wan and wasted specter of its once plethoric self. In the midst of casting-up he heard the signal for departure; and so he went topside of the ship and, stationing himself on the promenade deck alongside the gang-plank, he raised his voice and addressed the assembled multitude on the pier substantially as follows:

"If"—these were his words—"if there is a single, solitary individual in this fair land who has not touched me for something of value—if there be in all France a man, woman or child who has not been tipped by me—let him, her or it speak now or forever after hold their peace; because, know ye all men by these presents, I am about to go away from here and if I stay in my right mind I'm not coming back!"

And several persons were badly hurt in the crush; but they were believed afterward to have been repeaters.

I thought this story was overdrawn, but, after traveling over somewhat the same route which this fellow countryman had taken, I came to the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a theater to see one of the topical revues, in which Paris is supposed to excel; and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris revues do, indeed, excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or in America, which is saying quite a mouthful.

In the French revue the members of the chorus reach their artistic limit in costuming when they dance forth from the wings wearing short and shabby undergarments over soiled pink fleshings and any time the dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the pipes a male comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a woman. But to kick her is regarded as much the more whimsical conceit. This invariably sets the audience rocking with uncontrollable merriment. Howsomever, I am not writing a critique of the merits of the performance. If I were I should say that to begin with the title of the piece was wrong. It should have been called Lapsus Lingerie—signifying as the Latins would say, "A Mere Slip." At this moment I am concerned with what happened upon our entrance.

At the door a middle-aged female, who was raising a natty mustache, handed us programs. I paid her for the programs and tipped her. She turned us over to a stout brunette lady who was cultivating a neat and flossy pair of muttonchops. This person escorted us down the aisle to where our seats were; so I tipped her. Alongside our seats stood a third member of the sisterhood, chiefly distinguished from her confreres by the fact that she was turning out something very fetching in the way of a brown vandyke; and after we were seated she continued to stand there, holding forth her hand toward me, palm up and fingers extended in the national gesture, and saying something in her native tongue very rapidly. Incidentally she was blocking the path of a number of people who had come down the aisle immediately behind us.

I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled them out and exhibited them. She shook her head at that and gabbled faster than ever. It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to furnish us with programs and was asking in advance for the money with which to pay for them. I explained to her that I already secured programs from her friend with the mustache. I did this mainly in English, but partly in French—at least I employed the correct French word for program, which is programme. To prove my case I pulled the two programs from my pocket and showed them to her. She continued to shake her head with great emphasis, babbling on at an increased speed. The situation was beginning to verge on the embarrassing when a light dawned on me. She wanted a tip, that was it! She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could see; and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in a professional aspect; but I tipped her and bade her begone, and straightway she bewent, satisfied and smiling. From that moment on I knew my book. When in doubt I tipped one person—the person nearest to me. When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons. And all was well.

On the next evening but one I had another lesson, which gave me further insight into the habits and customs of these gay and gladsome Parisians. We were completing a round of the all-night cafes and cabarets. There were four of us. Briefly, we had seen the Dead Rat, the Abbey, the Bal Tabarin the Red Mill, Maxim's, and the rest of the lot to the total number of perhaps ten or twelve. We had listened to bad singing, looked on bad dancing, sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at bad food; and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths. We had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris was just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called gay life of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life and gay livers. A scrap of the gristle end of the New York Tenderloin; a suggestion of a certain part of New Orleans; a short cross section of the Levee, in Chicago; a dab of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco in its old, unexpurgated days; a touch of Piccadilly Circus in London, after midnight, with a top dressing of Gehenna the Unblest—it had seemed to us a compound of these ingredients, with a distinctive savor of what was essentially Gallic permeating through it like garlic through a stew. We had had enough. Even though we had attended only as onlookers and seekers after local color, we felt that we had a-plenty of onlooking and entirely too much of local color; we felt that we should all go into retreat for a season of self-purification to rid our persons of the one and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the other. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that the evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that had—so he said—an international reputation for its supposed sauciness and its real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might be. Overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed thither.

This particular cafe was found, in its physical aspects, to be typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated, underlighted, and stuffy to suffocation with the mingled aromas of stale drink and cheap perfume. As we entered a wrangle was going on among a group of young Frenchmen picturesquely attired as art students—almost a sure sign that they were not art students. An undersized girl dressed in a shabby black-and-yellow frock was doing a Spanish dance on a cleared space in the middle of the floor. We knew her instantly for a Spanish dancer, because she had a fan in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. Another girl, dressed as a pierrot, was waiting to do her turn when the Spanish dancer finished. Weariness showed through the lacquer of thick cosmetic on her peaked little face. An orchestra of three pieces sawed wood steadily; and at intervals, to prove that these were gay and blithesome revels, somebody connected with the establishment threw small, party-colored balls of celluloid about. But what particularly caught our attention was the presence in a far corner of two little darkies in miniature dress suits, both very wally of eye, very brown of skin, and very shaved as to head, huddled together there as though for the poor comfort of physical contact. As soon as they saw us they left their place and sidled up, tickled beyond measure to behold American faces and hear American voices.