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! [Footnote: Free translation.]

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 shou1d 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.

They belonged, it seemed, to a troupe of jubilee singers who had been imported from the States for the delectation of French audiences. At night, after their work at a vaudeville theater was done, the members of their company were paired off and sent about to the cafes to earn their keep by singing ragtime songs and dancing buck dances. These two were desperately, pathetically homesick. One of them blinked back the tears when he told us, with the plaintive African quaver in his voice, how long they had been away from their own country and how happy they would be to get back to it again.

"We suttin'ly is glad to heah somebody talkin' de reg'lar New 'Nited States talk, same as we does," he said. "We gits mighty tired of all dis yere French jabberin'!"

"Yas, suh," put in his partner; "dey meks a mighty fuss over cullud folks over yere; but 'tain't noways lak home. I comes from Bummin'ham, Alabama, myse'f. Does you gen'lemen know anybody in Bummin'ham?"

They were the first really wholesome creatures who had crossed our paths that night. They crowded up close to us and there they stayed until we left, as grateful as a pair of friendly puppies for a word or a look. Presently, though, something happened that made us forget these small dark compatriots of ours. We had had sandwiches all round and a bottle of wine. When the waiter brought the check it fell haply into the hands of the one person in our party who knew French and—what was an even more valuable accomplishment under the present circumstances—knew the intricate French system of computing a bill. He ran a pencil down the figures. Then he consulted the price list on the menu and examined the label on the neck of the wine bottle, and then he gave a long whistle. "What's the trouble?" asked one of us.

"Oh, not much!" he said. "We had a bottle of wine priced at eighteen francs and they have merely charged us twenty-four francs for it—six francs overcharge on that one item alone. The total for the sandwiches should have been six francs, and it is put down at ten francs. And here, away down at the bottom, I find a mysterious entry of four francs, which seems to have no bearing on the case at all—unless it be that they just simply need the money. I expected to be skinned somewhat, but I object to being peeled. I'm afraid, at the risk of appearing mercenary, that we'll have to ask our friend for a recount."

He beckoned the waiter to him and fired a volley of rapid French in the waiter's face. The waiter batted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders; then reversing the operation he shrugged his eyelids and batted his shoulderblades, meantime endeavoring volubly to explain. Our friend shoved the check into his hands and waved him away. He was back again in a minute with the account corrected. That is, it was corrected to the extent that the wine item had been reduced to twenty-one francs and the sandwiches to eight francs.

By now our paymaster was as hot as a hornet. His gorge rose—his freeborn, independent American gorge. It rose clear to the ceiling and threw off sparks and red clinkers. He sent for the manager. The manager came, all bows and graciousness and rumply shirtfront; and when he heard what was to be said he became all apologies and indignation. He regretted more than words could tell that the American gentlemen who deigned to patronize his restaurant had been put to annoyance. The garcon—here he turned and burned up that individual with a fiery sideglance—was a debased idiot and the misbegotten son of a yet greater and still more debased idiot. The cashier was a green hand and an imbecile besides. It was incredible, impossible, that the overcharging had been done deliberately; that was inconceivable. But the honor of his establishment was at stake. They should both, garcon and cashier, be discharged on the spot. First, however, he would rectify all mistakes. Would monsieur intrust the miserable addition to him for a moment, for one short moment? Monsieur would and did.

This time the amount was made right and our friend handed over in payment a fifty-franc note. With his own hands the manager brought back the change. Counting it over, the payee found it five francs short. Attention being directed to this error the manager became more apologetic and more explanatory than ever, and supplied the deficiency with a shiny new five-franc piece from his own pocket. And then, when we had gone away from there and had traveled a homeward mile or two, our friend found that the new shiny five-franc piece was counterfeit—as false a thing as that manager's false smile. We had bucked the unbeatable system, and we had lost.

Earlier that same evening we spent a gloom-laden quarter of an hour in another cafe—one which owes its fame and most of its American customs to the happy circumstance that in a certain famous comic opera produced a few years ago a certain popular leading man sang a song extolling its fascinations. The man who wrote the song must have had a full-flowered and glamorous imagination, for he could see beauty where beauty was not. To us there seemed nothing particularly fanciful about the place except the prices they charged for refreshments. However, something unusual did happen there once. It was not premeditated though; the proprietor had nothing to do with it. Had he known what was about to occur undoubtedly he would have advertised it in advance and sold tickets for it.

By reason of circumstances over which he had no control, but which had mainly to do with a locked-up wardrobe, an American of convivial mentality was in his room at his hotel one evening, fairly consumed with loneliness. Above all things he desired to be abroad amid the life and gayety of the French capital; but unfortunately he had no clothes except boudoir clothes, and no way of getting any, either, Which made the situation worse. He had already tried the telephone in a vain effort to communicate with a ready-made clothing establishment in the Rue St. Honore. Naturally he had failed, as he knew he would before he tried. Among Europeans the telephone is not the popular and handy adjunct of every-day life it is among us. The English have small use for it because it is, to start with, a wretched Yankee invention; besides, an Englishman in a hurry takes a cab, as his father before him did—takes the same cab his father took, if possible—and the Latin races dislike telephone conversations because the gestures all go to absolute waste. The French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair. You wrap it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other end near your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a while; and then you slam it down and go and send a messenger. The hero of the present tale, however, could not send a messenger—the hotel people had their orders to the contrary from one who was not to be disobeyed.

Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk revelry that filtered up to him intermittently, he incased his feet in bed-room slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas, and negotiated a successful escape from the hotel by means of a rear way. Once in the open he climbed into a handy cab and was driven to the cafe of his choice, it being the same cafe mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.

Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance into this place—not that he would have been barred under any circumstances, inasmuch as he had brought a roll with him. A person with a cluster of currency on hand is always suitably dressed in Paris, no matter if he has nothing else on; and this man had brought much ready cash with him. He could have gone in fig-leaved like Eve, or fig-leafless like September Morn, it being remembered that as between these two, as popularly depicted, Morn wears even less than Eve. So he whisked in handily, and when he had hidden the lower part of himself under a table he felt quite at home and proceeded to have a large and full evening.

Soon there entered another American, and by that mental telepathy which inevitably attracts like-spirit to like-spirit he was drawn to the spot where the first American sat. He introduced himself as one feeling the need of congenial companionship, and they shook hands and exchanged names, and the first man asked the second man to be seated; so they sat together and had something together, and then something more together; and as the winged moments flew they grew momentarily more intimate. Finally the newcomer said:

"This seems a pretty lachrymose shop. Suppose we go elsewhere and look for some real doings."

"Your proposition interests me strangely," said the first man; "but there are two reasons—both good ones—why I may not fare forth with you. Look under the table and you'll see 'em."

The second man looked and comprehended, for he was a married man himself; and he grasped the other's hand in warm and comforting sympathy.

"Old Man," he said—for they had already reached the Old Man stage—"don't let that worry you. Why, I've got more pants than any man with only one set of legs has any right to have. I've got pants that've never been worn. You stay right here and don't move until I come back. My hotel is just round the corner from here."

No sooner said than done. He went and in a surprisingly short time was back, bearing spare trousers with him. Beneath the shielding protection of the table draperies the succored one slipped them on, and they were a perfect fit. Now he was ready to go where adventure might await them. They tarried, though, to finish the last bottle.

Over the rim of his glass the second man ventured an opinion on a topic of the day. Instantly the first man challenged him. It seemed to him inconceivable that a person with intelligence enough to have amassed so many pairs of trousers should harbor such a delusion. He begged of his new-found friend to withdraw the statement, or at least to abate it. The other man was sorry, but he simply could not do it. He stood ready to concede almost anything else, but on this particular point he was adamant; in fact, adamant was in comparison with him as pliable as chewing taffy. Much as he regretted it, he could not modify his assertion by so much as one brief jot or one small tittle without violating the consistent principles of a consistent life. He felt that way about it. All his family felt that way about it.

"Then, sir," said the first man with a rare dignity, "I regret to wound your feelings; but my sensibilities are such that I cannot accept, even temporarily, the use of a pair of trousers from the loan collection of a person who entertains such false and erroneous conceptions. I have the pleasure, sir, of wishing you good night."

With these words he shucked off the borrowed habiliments and slammed them into the abashed bosom of the obstinate stranger and went back to his captivity—pantless, 'tis true, but with his honor unimpaired.



Chapter XV



Symptoms of the Disease

The majority of these all-night places in Paris are singularly and monotonously alike. In the early hours of the evening the musicians rest from their labors; the regular habitues lay aside their air of professional abandon; with true French frugality the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band; here comes a sucker! Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can-canners take the floor, the garcons flit hither and yon, and all is excitement.

Enter the opulent American gentleman. Half a dozen functionaries greet him rapturously, bowing before his triumphant progress. Others relieve him of his hat and his coat, so that he cannot escape prematurely. A whole reception committee escorts him to a place of honor facing the dancing arena. The natives of the quarter stand in rows in the background, drinking beer or nothing at all; but the distinguished stranger sits at a front table and is served with champagne, and champagne only. It is inferior champagne; but because it is labeled American Brut—what ever that may denote—and because there is a poster on the bottle showing the American flag in the correct colors, he pays several times its proper value for it. From far corners and remote recesses coryphees and court jesters swarm forth to fawn on him, bask in his presence, glory in his smile—and sell him something. The whole thing is as mercenary as passing the hat. Cigarette girls, flower girls and bonbon girls, postcard venders and confetti dispensers surround him impenetrably, taking him front, rear, by the right flank and the left; and they shove their wares in his face and will not take No for an answer; but they will take anything else.

Two years ago at a hunting camp in North Carolina, I thought I had met the creature with the most acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I refer to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too—had a colt every year—but in her affiliations she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say Whoa! Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the Whoa Lodge, which has a large membership among humans.

Riding behind Pearl you uttered the talismanic word in the thinnest thread of a whisper and instantly she stopped. You could spell Whoa! on your fingers, and she would stop. You could take a pencil and a piece of paperout of your pocket and write down Whoa!—and she would stop; but, compared with a sample assortment of these cabaret satellites, Pearl would have seemed deaf as a post. Clear across a hundred-foot dance-hall they catch the sound of a restless dollar turning over in the fob pocket of an American tourist.

And they come a-running and get it. Under the circumstances it requires self-hypnotism of a high order, and plenty of it, to make an American think he is enjoying himself. Still, he frequently attains to that happy comsummation. To begin with, is he not in Gay Paree?—as it is familiarly called in Rome Center and all points West? He is! Has he not kicked over the traces and cut loose with intent to be oh, so naughty for one naughty night of his life? Such are the facts. Finally, and herein lies the proof conclusive, he is spending a good deal of money and is getting very little in return for it. Well, then, what better evidence is required? Any time he is paying four or five prices for what he buys and does not particularly need it—or want it after it is bought—the average American can delude himself into the belief that he is having a brilliant evening. This is a racial trait worthy of the scientific consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg and other students of our national psychology. So far the Munsterberg school has overlooked it—but the canny Parisians have not. They long ago studied out every quirk and wriggle of it, and capitalized it to their own purpose. Liberality! Economy! Frugality!—there they are, everywhere blazoned forth—Liberality for you, Economy and Frugality for them. Could anything on earth be fairer than that?

Even so, the rapturous reception accorded to a North American pales to a dim and flickery puniness alongside the perfect riot and whirlwind of enthusiasm which marks the entry into an all-night place of a South American. Time was when, to the French understanding, exuberant prodigality and the United States were terms synonymous; that time has passed. Of recent years our young kinsmen from the sister republics nearer the Equator and the Horn have invaded Paris in numbers, bringing their impulsive temperaments and their bankrolls with them. Thanks to these young cattle kings, these callow silver princes from Argentina and Brazil, from Peru and from Ecuador, a new and more gorgeous standard for money wasting has been established. You had thought, perchance, there was no rite and ceremonial quite so impressive as a head waiter in a Fifth Avenue restaurant squeezing the blood out of a semi-raw canvasback in a silver duck press for a free spender from Butte or Pittsburgh. I, too, had thought that; but wait, just wait, until you have seen a maitre d'hotel on the Avenue de l'Opera, with the smile of the canary-fed cat on his face, standing just behind a hide-and-tallow baron or a guano duke from somewhere in Far Spiggottyland, watching this person as he wades into the fresh fruit—checking off on his fingers each blushing South African peach at two francs the bite, and each purple cluster of hothouse grapes at one franc the grape. That spectacle, believe me, is worth the money every time.

There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter love and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large, broad negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirtfront full of yellow diamonds. To an American—and especially to an American who was reared below Mason and Dixon's justly popular Line—it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourthrater from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart cafe, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and female.

Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there is another Paris besides this—a Paris of history, of art, of architecture, of literature, of refinement; a Paris inhabited by a people with a pride in their past, a pluck in their present, and a faith in their future; a Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty, pious plain people; a Paris of students and savants and scientists, of great actors and great scientists and great dramatists. There is one Paris that might well be burned to its unclean roots, and another Paris that will be glorified in the minds of mankind forever. And it would be as unfair to say that the Paris which comes flaunting its tinsel of vice and pinchbeck villainy in the casual tourist's face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior of the United States to visit New York and, after interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one Tenderloin cabman, and one Broadway ticket speculator, go back home and say he had met fit representatives of the predominant classes of New York society and had found them unfit. Yes, it would be even more unfair. For the alleged gay life of New York touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New Yorkers, whereas in Paris there are numbers of sane and decent folks who seem to know nothing except by hearsay of what goes on after dark in the Montmartre district. Besides, no man in the course of a short and crowded stay may hope to get under the skin of any community, great or small. He merely skims its surface cuticle; he sees no deeper than the pores and the hair-roots. The arteries, the frame, the real tissue-structure remain hidden to him. Therefore the pity seems all the greater that, to the world at large, the bad Paris should mean all Paris. It is that other and more wholesome Paris which one sees—a light-hearted, good-natured, polite and courteous Paris—when one, biding his time and choosing the proper hour and proper place, goes abroad to seek it out.

For the stranger who does at least a part of his sight-seeing after a rational and orderly fashion, there are pictures that will live in the memory always: the Madeleine, with the flower market just alongside; the green and gold woods of the Bois de Boulogne; the grandstand of the racecourse at Longchamp on a fair afternoon in the autumn; the Opera at night; the promenade of the Champs-Elysees on a Sunday morning after church; the Gardens of the Tuileries; the wonderful circling plaza of the Place Vendome, where one may spend a happy hour if the maniacal taxi-drivers deign to spare one's life for so unaccountably long a period; the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli, with their exquisite shops, where every other shop is a jeweler's shop and every jeweler's shop is just like every other jeweler's shop—which fact ceases to cause wonder when one learns that, with a few notable exceptions, all these shops carry their wares on commission from the stocks of the same manufacturing jewelers; the old Ile de la Cite, with the second-hand bookstalls stretching along the quay, and the Seine placidly meandering between its man-made, man-ruled banks. Days spent here seem short days; but that may be due in some part to the difference between our time and theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six hours earlier than it does in America.

The two Palaces of Fine Arts are fine enough; and finer still, on beyond them, is the great Pont Alexandre III; but, to my untutored instincts, all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching-white to the eye in the sunlight, seemed overly suggestive of a World's Fair as we know such things in America. Seeing them I knew where the architects who designed the main approaches and the courts of honor for all our big expositions got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better those two ancient triumphal arches of St.-Martin and St.-Denis on the Boulevard St.-Denis, and much better even than these the tremendous sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in the world, and the one with the grimmest, bloodiest history, I reckon.

The Paris to which these things properly appertain is at its very best and brightest on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the parks where well-to-do people drive or ride, and their children play among the trees under the eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of Normandy, though, for all I know, it may be Picardy. Elsewhere in these parks the not-so-well-to-do gather in great numbers; some drinking harmless sirupy drinks at the gay little refreshment kiosks; some packing themselves about the man who has tamed the tree sparrows until they come at his call and hive in chattering, fluttering swarms on his head and his arms and shoulders; some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name —could not find anybody who seemed to know its name—but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers I think it counts ten for the opposing side; but I do not know the other rules.

A certain indefinable, unmistakably Gallic flavor or piquancy savors the life of the people; it disappears only when they cease to be their own natural selves. A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this. The incident she narrated was so typical that it could never have happened except in Paris, I thought. She said she was one of a party who went one night to dine at a little cafe much frequented by artists and art students. The host was himself an artist of reputation. As they dined there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face full of flexible wrinkles; such a figure and such a face as instantly commanded their attention. This man slid into a seat at a table near their table and had a frugal meal. He had reached the stage of demitasse and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and, fetching a bit of cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and shadings; between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who was giving the dinner party. Not to be outdone the artist hauled out his drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man. Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment; and, rising together with low bows, they exchanged pictures—each had done a rattling good caricature of the other—and then, without a word having been spoken or a move made toward striking up an acquaintance, each man sat him down again and finished his dinner.

The lone diner departed first. When the party at the other table had had their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus —one of the common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under tents. Just as they entered, the premier clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring. Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face: it was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before.

Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His ears were painted bright red—the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown—and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drollest master of pantomime I ever saw. On leaving the circus, very naturally we went to the cafe—where the first part of the little dinner comedy had been enacted. We encountered both artists, professional or amateur, of blacklead and bristol board, but we met a waiter there who was an artist—in his line. I ordered a cigar of him, specifying that the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States. He brought one cigar on a tray. In size and shape and general aspect it seemed to answer the required specifications. The little belly band about its dark-brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular; but no sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died. So I examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar, artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the genuine articles and had treasured it, no doubt, against the coming of some unsophisticated patron such as I. And I doubt whether that could have happened anywhere except in Paris either. That is just it, you see. Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris, the Paris of petty larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your purse.

Go where you will, you cannot escape it. You journey, let us assume, to the Tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the wide-armed Hotel des Invalides. From a splendid rotunda you look down to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte; and above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will and testament of him who sleeps here: "I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have so well loved." And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of thousands of them to massacre and mutilation and starvation; but that is the way of world—conquerors the world over—and has absolutely nothing to do with this tale. The point I am trying to get at is, if you can gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are a clod. And if you can get away from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you are a wonder.

Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane and polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey miles away from this spot to the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise. You trudge past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of monuments and mausoleums; you view the storied urns and animated busts that mark the final resting-places of France's illustrious dead. And as you marvel that France should have had so many illustrious dead, and that so many of them at this writing should be so dead, out from behind De Musset's vault or Marshal Ney's comes a snoopy, smirky wretch to pester you to the desperation that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture post cards and his execrable wooden carvings.

You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that shrine of every American who knows his Mark Twain—the joint grave [Footnote: Being French, and therefore economical, those two are, as it were, splitting one tomb between them.] of Hell Loisy and Abie Lard [Footnote: Popular tourist pronunciation.] and lo, in the very shadow of it there lurks a blood brother to the first pest! I defy you to get out of that cemetery without buying something of no value from one or the other, or both of them. The Communists made their last stand in Pere Lachaise. So did I. They went down fighting. Same here. They were licked to a frazzle. Ditto, ditto.

Next, we will say, Notre Dame draws you. Within, you walk the clattering flags of its dim, long aisles; without, you peer aloft to view its gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs—things which no decent man could look at without gagging and would not carry about with him on his person for a million dollars in cash. By threats and hard words you drive him off; but seeing others of his kind drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in mind except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for a few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river and presently you find yourself—at least I found myself there—in one of the very few remaining quarters of old Paris, as yet untouched by the scheme of improvement that is wiping out whatever is medieval and therefore unsanitary, and making it all over, modern and slick and shiny.

Losing yourself—and with yourself your sense of the reality of things—you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids like hostile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers and coops where caged larks and linnets pipe cheery snatches of song; and on beyond, between the eaves, which bend toward one another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences, is a strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there is a rich, nutritious garlicky smell too; and against a jog in the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag-picker is asleep on a pile of sacks, with a big sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not guarantee the rag-picker. He and his cat may have moved since I was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both of being permanent fixtures.

You pass a little church, lolling and lopped with the weight of the years; and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars and soft half-lights, and twinkling candles set upon the high altar. Not even the jimcrackery with which the Latin races dress up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely dispel its abiding, brooding air of peace and majesty. You linger a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of parts might have frequented the while he penned his versified inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily answered, touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows that fell yesteryear and the roses that bloomed yesterweek.

Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall and an ancient gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house, and you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak a warning and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from under the slewed arch will issue a most gallant swashbuckler with his buckles all buckled and his swash swashing; hence the name.

At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder. You spin on your heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword. But 'tis not Master Francois Villon, in tattered doublet, with a sonnet. Nor yet is it a jaunty blade, in silken cloak, with a challenge. It is your friend of the obscene photograph collection. He has followed you all the way from 1914 clear back into the Middle Ages, biding his time and hoping you will change your mind about investing in his nasty wares.

With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre. You look on the Winged Victory and admire her classic but somewhat bulky proportions, meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must have been a mighty hard battle the lady won, because she lost her head and both arms in doing it. You tire of interminable portraits of the Grand Monarch, showing him grouped with his wife, the Old-fashioned Square Upright; and his son, the Baby Grand; and his prime minister, the Lyre; and his brother, the Yellow Clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra. You examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisas has come or has passed. Wandering your weary way past acres of the works of Rubens, and miles of Titians, and townships of Corots, and ranges of Michelangelos, and quarter sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo da Vincis, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man.

Some day somebody will take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets unaccompanied.

Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards. All about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner. As for yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of street life. That emphatically is all you ask; merely that and a little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are not.

Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk venders cluster about you. And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you. Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize. Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his steel-pointed tool of trade.

In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train leaving for anywhere, the only drawback to a speedy consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of French timetables.

It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have despoiled you—it is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and planning to nick you for some sum, great or small; it is the realization that, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy—that, as Walter Pater so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat—and gets it good!

So you shake the dust from your feet—your own dust, not Paris' dust—and you depart per hired hack for the station and per train from the station. And as the train draws away from the trainshed you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital.

One of them says: English Spoken Here!

And the other says: Liberality! Economy! Frugality!



Chapter XVI



As Done in London

London is essentially a he-town, just as Paris is indubitably a she-town. That untranslatable, unmistakable something which is not to be defined in the plain terms of speech, yet which sets its mark on any long-settled community, has branded them both—the one as being masculine, the other as being feminine. For Paris the lily stands, the conventionalized, feminized lily; but London is a lion, a shag-headed, heavy-pawed British lion.

One thinks of Paris as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless of morals and decidedly slovenly of person; craving admiration, but too indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable; covering up the dirt on a piquant face with rice powder; wearing paste jewels in her earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the fact that the ears themselves stand in need of soap and water. London, viewed in retrospect, seems a great, clumsy, slow-moving giant, with hair on his chest and soil under his nails; competent in the larger affairs and careless about the smaller ones; amply satisfied with himself and disdainful of the opinions of outsiders; having all of a man's vices and a good share of his virtues; loving sport for sport's sake and power for its own sake and despising art for art's sake.

You do not have to spend a week or a month or a year in either Paris or London to note these things. The distinction is wide enough to be seen in a day; yes, or in an hour. It shows in all the outer aspects. An overtowering majority of the smart shops in Paris cater to women; a large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in their voices; for cities have voices just as individuals have voices. New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun—it's a verb transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries, hysterical babblings—a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of casting up the score; but London now is different. London at all hours speaks with a sustained, sullen, steady, grinding tone, never entirely sinking into quietude, never rising to acute discords. The sound of London rolls on like a river—a river that ebbs sometimes, but rarely floods above its normal banks; it impresses one as the necessary breathing of a grunting and burdened monster who has a mighty job on his hands and is taking his own good time about doing it.

In London, mind you, the newsboys do not shout their extras. They bear in their hands placards with black-typed announcements of the big news story of the day; and even these headings seem designed to soothe rather than to excite—saying, for example, such things as Special From Liner, in referring to a disaster at sea, and Meeting in Ulster, when meaning that the northern part of Ireland has gone on record as favoring civil war before home rule.

The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does not shout his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm of authority and all London obeys. I think the reason why the Londoners turned so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly. They jarred the public peace—that must have been it.

I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art and millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin if he were studying music and municipal control; or to Amsterdam if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time; or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them; or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them. No: I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.

But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums—or anything that is London's.

To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come, full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. It is a still greater joy to find it—house or court or pump or what not—looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere the player, came this way. It is fine to be riding through the country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find these spots.

I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like that, and some dentists' establishments and law offices—musty, fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts. In this particular shop now the chairs were hard, wooden chairs; the looking-glass —you could not rightly call it a mirror—was cracked and bleary; and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering each face; and then the master followed after him, razor in hand, and shaved the waiting countenances in turn. Flies that looked as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear further study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and daring, I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write a piece about it and sell it for money. So, the better to fix its location in my mind, I glanced up at the street sign and, behold! I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once on a time held her court.

Another time I stopped in front of a fruiterer's, my eye having been caught by the presence in his window of half a dozen draggled-looking, wilted roasting ears decorated with a placard reading as follows:

AMERICAN MAIZE OR INDIAN CORN A VEGETABLE—TO BE BOILED AND THEN EATEN

I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a strange race of beings—that if England produced so delectable a thing as green corn we in America would import it by the shipload and serve it on every table; whereas here it was so rare that they needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest people should think it might be an animal—when I chanced to look more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw that it was an ancient house, half-timbered above the first floor, with a queer low-browed roof. Inquiring afterward I learned that this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many; and I began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for the things they had not.

Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand—figuratively—with one foot on Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence. More imposing even than Westminster is St. Paul's. I am not thinking so much of the memorials or the tombs or the statues there, but of the tattered battleflags bearing the names of battles fought by the English in every crack and cranny of the world, from Quebec to Ladysmith, and from Lucknow to Khartum. Beholding them there, draped above the tombs, some faded but still intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk clinging to blackened standards, gives one an uplifting conception of the spirit that has sent the British soldier forth to girth the globe, never faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day but that he took two steps forward to-morrow; never stopping—except for tea.

The fool hath said in his heart that he would go to England and come away and write something about his impressions, but never write a single, solitary word about the Englishman's tea-drinking habit, or the Englishman's cricket-playing habit, or the Englishman's lack of a sense of humor. I was that fool. But it cannot be done. Lacking these things England would not be England. It would be Hamlet without Hamlet or the Ghost or the wicked Queen or mad Ophelia or her tiresome old pa; for most English life and the bulk of English conversation center about sporting topics, with the topic of cricket predominating. And at a given hour of the day the wheels of the empire stop, and everybody in the empire—from the king in the counting house counting up his money, to the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes—drops what he or she may be doing and imbibes tea until further orders. And what oceans of tea they do imbibe!

There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon. As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions; but in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted. I had a mental vision of her interior decorations—all fumed-oak wainscotings and buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether their four-o'clock-tea habit is any worse than our five-o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled. But we are getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by figures and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on them—so the statisticians say.

As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram and a chart. What we do not take into consideration is that, through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled himself into refraining from laughing in public—for fear, you see, of making himself conspicuous—it has become a part of his nature. Indeed, in certain quarters a prejudice against laughing under any circumstances appears to have sprung up.

I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical English weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this is the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a clubbed copy of it the crime is assault with a dull blunt instrument, with intent to kill. At the end of a ponderous review of the East Indian question I came on a letter written to the editor by a gentleman signing himself with his own name, and reading in part as follows:

SIR: Laughter is always vulgar and offensive. For instance, whatever there may be of pleasure in a theater—and there is not much—the place is made impossible by laughter ... No; it is very seldom that happiness is refined or pleasant to see—merriment that is produced by wine is false merriment, and there is no true merriment without it ... Laughter is profane, in fact, where it is not ridiculous.

On the other hand the English in bulk will laugh at a thing which among us would bring tears to the most hardened cheek and incite our rebellious souls to mayhem and manslaughter. On a certain night we attended a musical show at one of the biggest London theaters. There was some really clever funning by a straight comedian, but his best efforts died a-borning; they drew but the merest ripple of laughter from the audience. Later there was a scene between a sad person made up as a Scotchman and another equally sad person of color from the States. These times no English musical show is complete unless the cast includes a North American negro with his lips painted to resemble a wide slice of ripe watermelon, singing ragtime ditties touching on his chicken and his Baby Doll. This pair took the stage, all others considerately withdrawing; and presently, after a period of heartrending comicalities, the Scotchman, speaking as though he had a mouthful of hot oatmeal, proceeded to narrate an account of a fictitious encounter with a bear. Substantially this dialogue ensued:

THE SCOTCHMAN—He was a vurra fierce grizzly bear, ye ken; and he rushed at me from behind a jugged rock.

THE NEGRO—Mistah, you means a jagged rock, don't you?

THE SCOTCHMAN—Nay, nay, laddie—a jugged rock.

THE NEGRO—Whut's dat you say? Whut—whut is a jugged rock?

THE SCOTCHMAN (forgetting his accent)—Why, a rock with a jug on it, old chap. (A stage wait to let that soak into them in all its full strength.) A rock with a jug on it would be a jugged rock, wouldn't it—eh?

The pause had been sufficient—they had it now. And from all parts of the house a whoop of unrestrained joy went up.

Witnessing such spectacles as this, the American observer naturally begins to think that the English in mass cannot see a joke that is the least bit subtle. Nevertheless, however, and to the contrary notwithstanding—as Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas, used to say—England has produced the greatest natural humorists in the world and some of the greatest comedians, and for a great many years has supported the greatest comic paper printed in the English language, and that is Punch. Also, at an informal Saturday-night dinner in a well-known London club I heard as much spontaneous repartee from the company at large, and as much quiet humor from the chairman, as I ever heard in one evening anywhere; but if you went into that club on a weekday you might suppose somebody was dead and laid out there, and that everybody about the premises had gone into deep mourning for the deceased. If any member of that club had dared then to crack a joke they would have expelled him—as soon as they got over the shock of the bounder's confounded cheek. Saturday night? Yes. Monday afternoon? Never! And there you are!

Speaking of Punch reminds me that we were in London when Punch, after giving the matter due consideration for a period of years, came out with a colored jacket on him. If the Prime Minister had done a Highland fling in costume at high noon in Oxford Circus it could not have created more excitement than Punch created by coming out with a colored cover. Yet, to an American's understanding, the change was not so revolutionary and radical as all that. Punch's well-known lineaments remained the same. There was merely a dab of palish yellow here and there on the sheet; at first glance you might have supposed somebody else had been reading your copy of Punch at breakfastand had been careless in spooning up his soft-boiled egg.

They are our cousins, the English are; our cousins once removed, 'tis true—see standard histories of the American Revolution for further details of the removing—but they are kinsmen of ours beyond a doubt. Even if there were no other evidences, the kinship between us would still be proved by the fact that the English are the only people except the Americans who look on red meat—beef, mutton, ham—as a food to be eaten for the taste of the meat itself; whereas the other nations of the earth regard it as a vehicle for carrying various sauces, dressings and stuffings southward to the stomach. But, to the notice of the American who is paying them his first visit, they certainly do offer some amazing contradictions.

In the large matters of business the English have been accused of trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious competition speaking; but in the small things they surely are most marvelously honest. Consider their railroad trains now: To a greenhorn from this side the blue water, a railroad journey out of London to almost any point in rural England is a succession of surprises, and all pleasant ones. To begin with, apparently there is nobody at the station whose business it is to show you to your train or to examine your ticket before you have found your train for yourself. There is no mad scurrying about at the moment of departure, no bleating of directions through megaphones. Unchaperoned you move along a long platform under a grimy shed, where trains are standing with their carriage doors hospitably ajar, and unassisted you find your own train and your own carriage, and enter therein.

Sharp on the minute an unseen hand—at least I never saw it—slams the doors and coyly—you might almost say secretively—the train moves out of the terminal. It moves smoothly and practically without jarring sounds. There is no shrieking of steel against steel. It is as though the rails were made of rubber and the wheel-flanges were faced with noise-proof felt. No conductor comes to punch your ticket, no brakeman to bellow the stops, no train butcher bleating the gabbled invoice of his gumdrops, bananas and other best-sellers.

Glory be! It is all so peaceful and soothing; as peaceful and as soothing as the land through which you are gliding when once you have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred years ago and since then has not been altered in any material aspect whatsoever. Every blade of grass is in its right place; every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to grow in exactly the right and the proper way. Streaming by your car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering brooks, the ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged estates of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and robust children in the doorways—just as you have always seen them in the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns, and lawns that are carpets of green cut-plush. England is the only country I know of that lives up—exactly and precisely—to its storybook descriptions and its storybook illustrations.

Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have reason to believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a washing compound. Nor may you count on any travelers who may be sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely word or two. Your fellow passengers may pity you for your ignorance and your perplexity, but they would not speak; they could not, not having been introduced. A German or a Frenchman would be giving you gladly what aid he might; but a well-born Englishman who had not been introduced would ride for nine years with you and not speak. I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to consult the timecard. If the timecard said our train would reach a given point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might be pretty sure this was the given point. Timetables in England are written by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the impressionistic school, as is frequently the case in America.

So, if this timecard says it is time for you to get off you get off, with your ticket still in your possession; and if it be a small station you go yourself and look up the station master, who is tucked away in a secluded cubbyhole somewhere absorbing tea, or else is in the luggage room fussing with baby carriages and patentchurns. Having ferreted him out in his hiding-place you hand over your ticket to him and he touches his cap brim and says "Kew" very politely, which concludes the ceremony so far as you are concerned.

Then, if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage car—pardon, I meant the luggage van—you go back to the platform and pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there by the train hands. With ordinary luck and forethought you could easily pick out and claim and carry off some other person's trunk, provided you fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not. You do not do this any more than, having purchased a second-class ticket, or a third-class, you ride first-class; though, so far as I could tell, there is no check to prevent a person from so doing. At least an Englishman never does. It never seems to occur to him to do so. The English have no imagination.

I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general public there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from passenger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders at the end of the fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition on my part. I may be wrong.



Chapter XVII



Britain in Twenty Minutes

To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them—and learns them well. Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do.

An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying reasons—that we are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their little island like oats in a bin. London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the lower classes turn up—there is not room for them to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses; but whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks' business. If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had not learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary noises; if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender tissues from irritation—they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive.

In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafed a reasonable amount of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose. Royalty may ride in Rotten Row of a morning, promenade on the Mall at noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and at all times go unguarded and unbothered—I had almost said unnoticed. It may be that long and constant familiarity with the institution of royalty has bred indifference in the London mind to the physical presence of dukes and princes and things; but I am inclined to think a good share of it should be attributed to the inborn and ingrown British faculty for letting other folks be.

One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside it, and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera in the road, and a small knot of passers-by lingering on the opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come along or something to happen. I waited too. In a minute a handsome old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture. At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and set off at a run to follow, as far as they might, the course of the balloon. Now in America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot, bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day.

The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the bridal procession. Though there were crowds all along the route followed by the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving, no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about the chapel where the ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire's daughter is being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church—it reminded me of that because it was so different.

Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure. Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal house. As I recollect, they passed in the following order:

His Majesty, King George the Fifth. Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other Four Fifths. Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more.

I got a clear view of the side face of the queen. As one looked on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence, one understood—or anyway one thought one understood—why an English assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times, always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.

Only one untoward incident occurred: The inevitable militant lady broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a Votes for Women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice. The police were competently on the job. They always are—which brings me round to the subject of the London bobby and leads me to venture the assertion that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work. The finest thing in London is the London policeman and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets. He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English law; he is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make the law. And always he knows his business.

In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion, first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted; and it stayed halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In that packed mass of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there were probably dukes and archbishops—dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in London—but they waited until he was through directing me. It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat. I sincerely hope there was at least one archbishop.

Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere. Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps on top of the taxicab. At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks. When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything—that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache. It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull—at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.

I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law—a police court. I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity—and his humility—when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or witness.

It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the high courts. Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine. What struck into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament—men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship —the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.

Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts. I said to myself that if I wanted justice—exact justice, heaping high in time scales—I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should take my custom elsewhere.

I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution. They call this place London's safety valve. It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same thing, into speechlessness.

When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers. These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly. In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him—heckling, I believe this is called—but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him.

At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated moo-cow. At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship. The old man had two favorite words—behoove and emit—but behoove was evidently his choice. As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere.