He had on a long fur-lined coat, and he carried a fifty-dollar suit case that he put down on the seat.
Then he saw me.
"Well! well!" he said, and recognition broke out all over his face like morning sunlight.
"Well! well!" I repeated.
"By Jove!" he said, shaking hands vigorously, "who would have thought of seeing you?"
"Who, indeed," I thought to myself.
He looked at me more closely.
"You haven't changed a bit," he said.
"Neither have you," said I heartily.
"You may be a little stouter," he went on critically.
"Yes," I said, "a little; but you're stouter yourself."
This of course would help to explain away any undue stoutness on my part.
"No," I continued boldly and firmly, "you look just about the same as ever."
And all the time I was wondering who he was. I didn't know him from Adam; I couldn't recall him a bit. I don't mean that my memory is weak. On the contrary, it is singularly tenacious. True, I find it very hard to remember people's names; very often, too, it is hard for me to recall a face, and frequently I fail to recall a person's appearance, and of course clothes are a thing one doesn't notice. But apart from these details I never forget anybody, and I am proud of it. But when it does happen that a name or face escapes me I never lose my presence of mind. I know just how to deal with the situation. It only needs coolness and intellect, and it all comes right.
My friend sat down.
"It's a long time since we met," he said.
"A long time," I repeated with something of a note of sadness. I wanted him to feel that I, too, had suffered from it.
"But it has gone very quickly."
"Like a flash," I assented cheerfully.
"Strange," he said, "how life goes on and we lose track of people, and things alter. I often think about it. I sometimes wonder," he continued, "where all the old gang are gone to."
"So do I," I said. In fact I was wondering about it at the very moment. I always find in circumstances like these that a man begins sooner or later to talk of the "old gang" or "the boys" or "the crowd." That's where the opportunity comes in to gather who he is.
"Do you ever go back to the old place?" he asked.
"Never," I said, firmly and flatly. This had to be absolute. I felt that once and for all the "old place" must be ruled out of the discussion till I could discover where it was.
"No," he went on, "I suppose you'd hardly care to."
"Not now," I said very gently.
"I understand. I beg your pardon," he said, and there was silence for a few moments.
So far I had scored the first point. There was evidently an old place somewhere to which I would hardly care to go. That was something to build on.
Presently he began again.
"Yes," he said, "I sometimes meet some of the old boys and they begin to talk of you and wonder what you're doing."
"Poor things," I thought, but I didn't say it.
I knew it was time now to make a bold stroke; so I used the method that I always employ. I struck in with great animation.
"Say!" I said, "where's Billy? Do you ever hear anything of Billy now?"
This is really a very safe line. Every old gang has a Billy in it.
"Yes," said my friend, "sure--Billy is ranching out in Montana. I saw him in Chicago last spring,--weighed about two hundred pounds,--you wouldn't know him."
"No, I certainly wouldn't," I murmured to myself.
"And where's Pete?" I said. This was safe ground. There is always a Pete.
"You mean Billy's brother," he said.
"Yes, yes, Billy's brother Pete. I often think of him."
"Oh," answered the unknown man, "old Pete's quite changed,--settled down altogether." Here he began to chuckle, "Why, Pete's married!"
I started to laugh, too. Under these circumstances it is always supposed to be very funny if a man has got married. The notion of old Peter (whoever he is) being married is presumed to be simply killing. I kept on chuckling away quietly at the mere idea of it. I was hoping that I might manage to keep on laughing till the train stopped. I had only fifty miles more to go. It's not hard to laugh for fifty miles if you know how.
But my friend wouldn't be content with it.
"I often meant to write to you," he said, his voice falling to a confidential tone, "especially when I heard of your loss."
I remained quiet. What had I lost? Was it money? And if so, how much? And why had I lost it? I wondered if it had ruined me or only partly ruined me.
"One can never get over a loss like that," he continued solemnly.
Evidently I was plumb ruined. But I said nothing and remained under cover, waiting to draw his fire.
"Yes," the man went on, "death is always sad."
Death! Oh, that was it, was it? I almost hiccoughed with joy. That was easy. Handling a case of death in these conversations is simplicity itself. One has only to sit quiet and wait to find out who is dead.
"Yes," I murmured, "very sad. But it has its other side, too."
"Very true, especially, of course, at that age."
"As you say at that age, and after such a life."
"Strong and bright to the last I suppose," he continued, very sympathetically.
"Yes," I said, falling on sure ground, "able to sit up in bed and smoke within a few days of the end."
"What," he said, perplexed, "did your grandmother----"
My grandmother! That was it, was it?
"Pardon me," I said provoked at my own stupidity; "when I say smoked, I mean able to sit up and be smoked to, a habit she had,--being read to, and being smoked to,--only thing that seemed to compose her----"
As I said this I could hear the rattle and clatter of the train running past the semaphores and switch points and slacking to a stop.
My friend looked quickly out of the window.
His face was agitated.
"Great heavens!" he said, "that's the junction. I've missed my stop. I should have got out at the last station. Say, porter," he called out into the alleyway, "how long do we stop here?"
"Just two minutes, sah," called a voice back. "She's late now, she's makin' up tahm!"
My friend had hopped up now and had pulled out a bunch of keys and was fumbling at the lock of the suit case.
"I'll have to wire back or something," he gasped. "Confound this lock--my money's in the suit case."
My one fear now was that he would fail to get off.
"Here," I said, pulling some money out of my pocket, "don't bother with the lock. Here's money."
"Thanks," he said grabbing the roll of money out of my hand,--in his excitement he took all that I had.--"I'll just have time."
He sprang from the train. I saw him through the window, moving toward the waiting-room. He didn't seem going very fast.
I waited.
The porters were calling, "All abawd! All abawd." There was the clang of a bell, a hiss of steam, and in a second the train was off.
"Idiot," I thought, "he's missed it;" and there was his fifty-dollar suit case lying on the seat.
I waited, looking out of the window and wondering who the man was, anyway.
Then presently I heard the porter's voice again. He evidently was guiding someone through the car.
"Ah looked all through the kyar for it, sah," he was saying.
"I left it in the seat in the car there behind my wife," said the angry voice of a stranger, a well-dressed man who put his head into the door of the compartment.
Then his face, too, beamed all at once with recognition. But it was not for me. It was for the fifty-dollar valise.
"Ah, there it is," he cried, seizing it and carrying it off.
I sank back in dismay. The "old gang!" Pete's marriage! My grandmother's death! Great heavens! And my money! I saw it all; the other man was "making talk," too, and making it with a purpose.
Stung!
And next time that I fall into talk with a casual stranger in a car, I shall not try to be quite so extraordinarily clever.
V.--Under the Barber's Knife
"WAS you to the Arena the other night?" said the barber, leaning over me and speaking in his confidential whisper.
"Yes," I said, "I was there."
He saw from this that I could still speak. So he laid another thick wet towel over my face before he spoke again.
"What did you think of the game," he asked.
But he had miscalculated. I could still make a faint sound through the wet towels. He laid three or four more very thick ones over my face and stood with his five finger tips pressed against my face for support. A thick steam rose about me. Through it I could hear the barber's voice and the flick-flack of the razor as he stropped it.
"Yes, sir," he went on in his quiet professional tone, punctuated with the noise of the razor, "I knowed from the start them boys was sure to win,"--flick-flack-flick-flack,--"as soon as I seen the ice that night and seen the get-away them boys made I knowed it,"--flick-flack,--"and just as soon as Jimmy got aholt of the puck----"
This was more than the barber at the next chair could stand.
"Him get de puck," he cried, giving an angry dash with a full brush of soap into the face of the man under him,--"him get ut-dat stiff--why, boys," he said, and he turned appealingly to the eight barbers, who all rested their elbows on the customers' faces while they listened to the rising altercation; even the manicure girl, thrilled to attention, clasped tight the lumpy hand of her client in her white digits and remained motionless,--"why boys, dat feller can't no more play hockey than----"
"See here," said the barber, suddenly and angrily, striking his fist emphatically on the towels that covered my face. "I'll bet you five dollars to one Jimmy can skate rings round any two men in the league."
"Him skate," sneered the other squirting a jet of blinding steam in the face of the client he was treating, "he ain't got no more go in him than dat rag,"--and he slapped a wet towel across his client's face.
All the barbers were excited now. There was a babel of talk from behind each of the eight chairs. "He can't skate;" "He can skate;" "I'll bet you ten."
Already they were losing their tempers, slapping their customers with wet towels and jabbing great brushfuls of soap into their mouths. My barber was leaning over my face with his whole body. In another minute one or the other of them would have been sufficiently provoked to have dealt his customer a blow behind the ear.
Then suddenly there was a hush.
"The boss," said one.
In another minute I could realize, though I couldn't see it, that a majestic figure in a white coat was moving down the line. All was still again except the quiet hum of the mechanical shampoo brush and the soft burble of running water.
The barber began removing the wet towels from my face one by one. He peeled them off with the professional neatness of an Egyptologist unwrapping a mummy. When he reached my face he looked searchingly at it. There was suspicion in his eye.
"Been out of town?" he questioned.
"Yes," I admitted.
"Who's been doing your work?" he asked. This question, from a barber, has no reference to one's daily occupation. It means "who has been shaving you."
I knew it was best to own up. I'd been in the wrong, and I meant to acknowledge it with perfect frankness.
"I've been shaving myself," I said.
My barber stood back from me in contempt. There was a distinct sensation all down the line of barbers. One of them threw a wet rag in a corner with a thud, and another sent a sudden squirt from an atomizer into his customer's eyes as a mark of disgust.
My barber continued to look at me narrowly.
"What razor do you use?" he said.
"A safety razor," I answered.
The barber had begun to dash soap over my face; but he stopped--aghast at what I had said.
A safety razor to a barber is like a red rag to a bull.
"If it was me," he went on, beating lather into me as he spoke, "I wouldn't let one of them things near my face: No, sir: There ain't no safety in them. They tear the hide clean off you--just rake the hair right out by the follicles," as he said this he was illustrating his meaning with jabs of his razor,--"them things just cut a man's face all to pieces," he jabbed a stick of alum against an open cut that he had made,--"And as for cleanliness, for sanitation, for this here hygiene and for germs, I wouldn't have them round me for a fortune."
I said nothing. I knew I had deserved it, and I kept quiet.
The barber gradually subsided. Under other circumstances he would have told me something of the spring training of the baseball clubs, or the last items from the Jacksonville track, or any of those things which a cultivated man loves to hear discussed between breakfast and business. But I was not worth it. As he neared the end of the shaving he spoke again, this time in a confidential, almost yearning, tone.
"Massage?" he said.
"No thank you."
"Shampoo the scalp?" he whispered.
"No thanks."
"Singe the hair?" he coaxed.
"No thanks."
The barber made one more effort.
"Say," he said in my ear, as a thing concerning himself and me alone, "your hair's pretty well all falling out. You'd better let me just shampoo up the scalp a bit and stop up them follicles or pretty soon you won't--"
"No, thank you," I said, "not to-day."
This was all the barber could stand. He saw that I was just one of those miserable dead-beats who come to a barber shop merely for a shave, and who carry away the scalp and the follicles and all the barber's perquisites as if they belonged to them.
In a second he had me thrown out of the chair.
"Next," he shouted.
As I passed down the line of the barbers, I could see contempt in every eye while they turned on the full clatter of their revolving shampoo brushes and drowned the noise of my miserable exit in the roar of machinery.
PARISIAN PASTIMES
I.--The Advantages of a Polite Education
"TAKE it from me," said my friend from Kansas, leaning back in his seat at the Taverne Royale and holding his cigar in his two fingers--"don't talk no French here in Paris. They don't expect it, and they don't seem to understand it."
This man from Kansas, mind you, had a right to speak. He knew French. He had learned French--he told me so himself--good French, at the Fayetteville Classical Academy. Later on he had had the natural method "off" a man from New Orleans. It had cost him "fifty cents a throw." All this I have on his own word. But in France something seemed to go wrong with his French.
"No," he said reflectively, "I guess what most of them speak here is a sort of patois."
When he said it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was equivalent to saying that he couldn't understand it.
I had seen him strike patois before. There had been a French steward on the steamer coming over, and the man from Kansas, after a couple of attempts, had said it was no use talking French to that man. He spoke a hopeless patois. There were half a dozen cabin passengers, too, returning to their homes in France. But we soon found from listening to their conversation on deck that what they were speaking was not French but some sort of patois.
It was the same thing coming through Normandy. Patois, everywhere, not a word of French--not a single sentence of the real language, in the way they had it at Fayetteville. We stopped off a day at Rouen to look at the cathedral. A sort of abbot showed us round. Would you believe it, that man spoke patois, straight patois--the very worst kind, and fast. The man from Kansas had spotted it at once. He hadn't listened to more than ten sentences before he recognized it. "Patois," he said.
Of course, it's fine to be able to detect patois like this. It's impressive. The mere fact that you know the word patois shows that you must be mighty well educated.
Here in Paris it was the same way. Everybody that the man from Kansas tried--waiters, hotel clerks, shop people--all spoke patois. An educated person couldn't follow it.
On the whole, I think the advice of the man from Kansas is good. When you come to Paris, leave French behind. You don't need it, and they don't expect it of you.
In any case, you soon learn from experience not to use it.
If you try to, this is what happens. You summon a waiter to you and you say to him very slowly, syllable by syllable, so as to give him every chance in case he's not an educated man:
"Bringez moi de la soupe, de la fish, de la roast pork et de la fromage."
And he answers:
"Yes, sir, roast pork, sir, and a little bacon on the side?"
That waiter was raised in Illinois.
Or suppose you stop a man on the street and you say to him:
"Musshoo, s'il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à le Palais Royal?"
And he answers:
"Well, I tell you, I'm something of a stranger here myself, but I guess it's straight down there a piece."
Now it's no use speculating whether that man comes from Dordogne Inférieure or from Auvergne-sur-les-Puits because he doesn't.
On the other hand, you may strike a real Frenchman--there are some even in Paris. I met one the other day in trying to find my way about, and I asked him:
"Musshoo, s'il vous plait, which is la direction pour aller à Thomas Cook & Son?"
"B'n'm'ss'ulvla'n'fsse'n'sse'pas!"
I said: "Thank you so much! I had half suspected it myself." But I didn't really know what he meant.
So I have come to make it a rule never to use French unless driven to it. Thus, for example, I had a tremendous linguistic struggle in a French tailors shop.
There was a sign in the window to the effect that "completes" might be had "for a hundred." It seemed a chance not to be missed. Moreover, the same sign said that English and German were spoken.
So I went in. True to my usual principle of ignoring the French language, I said to the head man:
"You speak English?"
He shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands and looked at the clock on the wall.
"Presently," he said.
"Oh," I said, "you'll speak it presently. That's splendid. But why not speak it right away?"
The tailor again looked at the clock with a despairing shrug.
"At twelve o'clock," he said.
"Come now," I said, "be fair about this. I don't want to wait an hour and a half for you to begin to talk. Let's get at it right now."
But he was obdurate. He merely shook his head and repeated:
"Speak English at twelve o'clock."
Judging that he must be under a vow of abstinence during the morning, I tried another idea.
"Allemand?" I asked, "German, Deutsch, eh! speak that?"
Again the French tailor shook his head, this time with great decision.
"Not till four o'clock," he said.
This was evidently final. He might be lax enough to talk English at noon, but he refused point-blank to talk German till he had his full strength.
I was just wondering whether there wasn't some common sense in this after all, when the solution of it struck me.
"Ah!" I said, speaking in French, "très bong! there is somebody who comes at twelve, quelqu'un qui vient à midi, who can talk English."
"Precisément," said the tailor, wreathed in smiles and waving his tape coquettishly about his neck.
"You flirt!" I said, "but let's get to business. I want a suit, un soot, un complete, complet, comprenez-vous, veston, gilet, une pair de panteloon--everything--do you get it?"
The tailor was now all animation.
"Ah, certainement," he said, "monsieur desires a fantasy, une fantaisie, is it not?"
A fantasy! Good heavens!
The man had evidently got the idea from my naming so many things that I wanted a suit for a fancy dress carnival.
"Fantasy nothing!" I said--"pas de fantaisie! un soot anglais"--here an idea struck me and I tapped myself on the chest--"like this," I said, "comme ceci."
"Bon," said the tailor, now perfectly satisfied, "une fantaisie comme porte monsieur."
Here I got mad.
"Blast you," I said, "this is not a fantaisie. Do you take me for a dragon-fly, or what? Now come, let's get this fantaisie business cleared up. This is what I want"--and here I put my hand on a roll of very quiet grey cloth on the counter.
"Très bien," said the tailor, "une fantaisie."
I stared at him.
"Is that a fantaisie?"
"Certainement, monsieur."
"Now," I said, "let's go into it further," and I touched another piece of plain pepper and salt stuff of the kind that is called in the simple and refined language of my own country, gents' panting.
"This?"
"Une fantaisie," said the French tailor.
"Well," I said, "you've got more imagination than I have."
Then I touched a piece of purple blue that would have been almost too loud for a Carolina nigger.
"Is this a fantaisie?"
The tailor shrugged his shoulders.
"Ah, non," he said in deprecating tones.
"Tell me," I said, speaking in French, "just exactly what it is you call a fantasy."
The tailor burst into a perfect paroxysm of French, gesticulating and waving his tape as he put the sentences over the plate one after another. It was fast pitching, but I took them every one, and I got him.
What he meant was that any single colour or combination of single colours--for instance, a pair of sky blue breeches with pink insertion behind--is not regarded by a French tailor as a fantaisie or fancy. But any mingled colour, such as the ordinary drab grey of the business man is a fantaisie of the daintiest kind. To the eye of a Parisian tailor, a Quakers' meeting is a glittering panorama of fantaisies, whereas a negro ball at midnight in a yellow room with a band in scarlet, is a plain, simple scene.
I thanked him. Then I said:
"Measure me, mesurez-moi, passez le tape line autour de moi."
He did it.
I don't know what it is they measure you in, whether in centimètres or cubic feet or what it is. But the effect is appalling.
The tailor runs his tape round your neck and calls "sixty!" Then he puts it round the lower part of the back--at the major circumference, you understand,--and shouts, "a hundred and fifty!"
It sounded a record breaker. I felt that there should have been a burst of applause. But, to tell the truth, I have friends--quiet sedentary men in the professoriate--who would easily hit up four or five hundred on the same scale.
Then came the last item.
"Now," I said, "when will this 'complete' be ready?"
"Ah, monsieur," said the tailor, with winsome softness, "we are very busy, crushed, écrasés with commands! Give us time, don't hurry us!"
"Well," I said, "how long do you want?"
"Ah, monsieur," he pleaded, "give us four days!"
I never moved an eyelash.
"What!" I said indignantly, "four days! Monstrous! Let me have this whole complete fantasy in one day or I won't buy it."
"Ah, monsieur, three days?"
"No," I said, "make it two days."
"Two days and a half, monsieur."
"Two days and a quarter," I said; "give it me the day after to-morrow at three o'clock in the morning."
"Ah, monsieur, ten o'clock."
"Make it ten minutes to ten and it's a go," I said.
"Bon," said the tailor.
He kept his word. I am wearing the fantaisie as I write. For a fantaisie, it is fairly quiet, except that it has three pockets on each side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable for the throat of an opera singer, and as many buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it's a first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious fantaisie, such as any retired French ballet master might be proud to wear.
II.--The Joys of Philanthropy
"GOOD-MORNING," said the valet de chambre, as I stepped from my room.
"Good-morning," I answered. "Pray accept twenty-five centimes."
"Good-morning, sir," said the maître d'hôtel, as I passed down the corridor, "a lovely morning, sir."
"So lovely," I replied, "that I must at once ask you to accept forty-five centimes on the strength of it."
"A beautiful day, monsieur," said the head waiter, rubbing his hands, "I trust that monsieur has slept well."
"So well," I answered, "that monsieur must absolutely insist on your accepting seventy-five centimes on the spot. Come, don't deny me. This is personal matter. Every time I sleep I simply have to give money away."
"Monsieur is most kind."
Kind? I should think not. If the valet de chambre and the maître d'hôtel and the chef de service and the others of the ten men needed to supply me with fifteen cents worth of coffee, could read my heart, they would find it an abyss of the blackest hatred.
Yet they take their handful of coppers--great grown men dressed up in monkey suits of black at eight in the morning--and bow double for it.
If they tell you it is a warm morning, you must give them two cents. If you ask the time, it costs you two cents. If you want a real genuine burst of conversation, it costs anywhere from a cent to a cent and a half a word.
Such is Paris all day long. Tip, tip, tip, till the brain is weary, not with the cost of it, but with the arithmetical strain.
No pleasure is perfect. Every rose has its thorn. The thorn of the Parisian holiday-maker is the perpetual necessity of handing out small gratuities to a set of overgrown flunkies too lazy to split wood.
Not that the amount of the tips, all added together, is anything serious. No rational man would grudge it if it could be presented in a bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every morning and done with for the day.
But the incessant necessity of handing out small tips of graded amounts gets on one's nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round with enough money of different denominations in one's pocket to start a bank--gold and paper notes for serious purchases, and with them a huge dead weight of great silver pieces, five franc bits as large as a Quaker's shoebuckle, and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket. These one must distribute as extras to cabmen, waiters, news-vendors, beggars, anybody and everybody in fact that one has anything to do with.
The whole mass of the coppers carried only amounts perhaps to twenty-five cents in honest Canadian money. But the silly system of the French currency makes the case appear worse than it is, and gives one the impression of being a walking treasury.
Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually putting his hand into his side pocket and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all day in an unending stream. You enter a French theatre. You buy a programme, fifty centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it. You hand your coat and cane to an aged harpy, who presides over what is called the vestiaire, pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten. You are shown to your seat by another old fairy in dingy black (she has a French name, but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes. Just think of the silly business of it. Your ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has cost you about three dollars and a half. One would almost think the theatre could afford to throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the sake of international good will.
Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell and there appears the valet de chambre, dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of black taffeta. You tell him that you want a bath. "Bien, monsieur!" He will fetch the maître d'hôtel. Oh, he will, will he, how good of him, but really one can't witness such kindness on his part without begging him to accept a twenty-five centime remembrance. "Merci bien, monsieur." The maître d'hôtel comes. He is a noble looking person who wears a dress suit at eight o'clock in the morning with patent leather shoes of the kind that I have always wanted but am still unable to afford. Yet I know from experience that the man merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes a breath. For fifty centimes he'll bow low enough to crack himself. If you gave him a franc, he'd lie down on the floor and lick your boots. I know he would; I've seen them do it.
So when the news comes that you propose to take a bath, he's right along side of you in a minute, all civility. Mind you, in a really French hotel, one with what is called the old French atmosphere, taking a bath is quite an event, and the maître d'hôtel sees a dead sure fifty centimes in it, with perhaps an extra ten centimes if times are good. That is to say, he may clear anything from ten to twelve cents on the transaction. A bath, monsieur? Nothing more simple, this moment, tout de suite, right off, he will at once give orders for it. So you give him eleven cents and he then tells the hotel harpy, dressed in black, like the theatre harpies, to get the bath and she goes and gets it. She was there, of course, all the time, right in the corridor, and heard all that proceeded, but she doesn't "enter into her functions" until the valet de chambre tells the maître d'hôtel and the maître d'hôtel informs her officially of the coming event.
She gets the bath. What does she do? Why, merely opens the door of the bathroom, which wasn't locked, and turns on the water. But, of course, no man with any chivalry in him could allow a harpy to be put to all that labour without pressing her to accept three cents as a mark of personal appreciation.
Thus the maître d'hôtel and the valet de chambre and the harpy go on all day, from six in the morning when they first "enter into functions" until heaven knows when at night when they leave off, and they keep gathering in two cents and three cents and even five cents at a time. Then presently, I suppose, they go off and spend it in their own way. The maître d'hôtel transformed into a cheap Parisian with a dragon-fly coat and a sixty cent panama, dances gaily at the Bal Wagram, and himself hands out coppers to the musicians, and gives a one cent tip to a lower order of maître d'hôtel. The harpy goes forth, and with other harpies absorbs red wine and indescribable cheese at eleven at night in a crowded little café on the crowded sidewalk of a street about as wide as a wagon. She tips the waiter who serves her at the rate of one cent per half hour of attendance, and he, I suppose, later on tips someone else, and so on endlessly.
In this way about fifty thousand people in Paris eke out a livelihood by tipping one another.
The worst part of the tipping system is that very often the knowledge that tips are expected and the uncertainty of their amount, causes one to forego a great number of things that might otherwise be enjoyable.
I brought with me to Paris, for example, a letter of introduction to the President of the Republic. I don't say this in any boasting spirit. A university professor can always get all the letters of introduction that he wants. Everyone knows that he is too simple to make any commercial use of them. But I never presented this letter to the President. What was the use? It wouldn't have been worth it. He would have expected a tip, and of course in his case it would have had to be a liberal one, twenty-five cents straight out. Perhaps, too, some of his ministers would have strolled in, as soon as they saw a stranger, on the chance of picking up something. Put it as three ministers at fifteen cents each, that's forty-five cents or a total of seventy cents for ten minutes' talk with the French Government. It's not worth it.
In all Paris, I only found one place where tipping is absolutely out of the question. That was at the British Embassy. There they don't allow it. Not only the clerks and the secretaries, but even the Ambassador himself is forbidden to take so much as the smallest gratuity.
And they live up to it.
That is why I still feel proud of having made an exception to the rule.
I went there because the present ambassador is a personal friend of mine. I hadn't known this till I went to Paris, and I may say in fairness that we are friends no longer: as soon as I came away, our friendship seemed to have ceased.
I will make no secret of the matter. I wanted permission to read in the National Library in Paris. All Frenchmen are allowed to read there and, in addition, all the personal friends of the foreign ambassadors. By a convenient fiction, everybody is the friend of this ambassador, and is given a letter to prove it, provided he will call at the Embassy and get it. That is how I came to be a friend of the British Ambassador. Whether our friendship will ripen into anything warmer and closer, it is not for me to say.
But I went to the Embassy.
The young man that I dealt with was, I think, a secretary. He was--I could see it at once--that perfect thing called an English gentleman. I have seldom seen, outside of baseball circles, so considerate a manner. He took my card, and from sheer considerateness left me alone for half an hour. Then he came back for a moment and said it was a glorious day. I had heard this phrase so often in Paris that I reached into my pocket for ten cents. But something in the quiet dignity of the young man held me back. So I merely answered that it was indeed a glorious day, and that the crops would soon head out nicely if we got this sunshine, provided there wasn't dew enough to start the rust, in which case I was afraid that if an early frost set in we might be badly fooled. He said "indeed," and asked me if I had read the last London Weekly Times. I said that I had not seen the last one; but that I had read one about a year ago and that it seemed one of the most sparkling things I had ever read; I had simply roared over it from cover to cover.
He looked pleased and went away.
When he came back, he had the letter of commendation in his hand.
Would you believe it? The civility of it! They had printed the letter, every word of it--except my own name--and it explained all about the ambassador and me being close friends, and told of his desire to have me read in the National Library.
I took the letter, and I knew of course that the moment had come to do something handsome for the young man. But he looked so calm that I still hesitated.
I took ten cents out of my pocket and held it where the light could glitter from every point of its surface full in his face.
And I said----
"My dear young friend, I hope I don't insult you. You are, I can see it, an English gentleman. Your manner betrays it. I, too, though I may seem only what I am, had I not been brought up in Toronto, might have been like you. But enough of this weakness,--will you take ten cents?"
He hesitated. He looked all round. I could see that he was making a great effort. The spirit of Paris battled against his better nature. He was tempted, but he didn't fall.
"I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I'd like to take it, but I'm afraid I mustn't."
"Young man," I said, "I respect your feelings. You have done me a service. If you ever fall into want and need a position in the Canadian Cabinet, or a seat in our Senate, let me know at once."
I left him.
Then by an odd chance, as I passed to the outer door, there was the British Ambassador himself. He was standing beside the door waiting to open it. There was no mistaking him. I could tell by his cocked hat and brass buttons and the brass chain across his chest that it was the Ambassador. The way in which he swung the door back and removed his hat showed him a trained diplomat.
The moment had come. I still held my ten cents.
"My lord," I said, "I understand your position as the only man in Paris who must not accept a tip, but I insist."
I slipped the money into his hand.
"Thank'ee kindly, sir," said the Ambassador.
Diplomatically speaking, the incident was closed.
III.--The Simple Life in Paris
PARIS--at least the Paris of luxury and fashion--is a childless city. Its streets are thronged all day with a crowd that passes in endless succession but with never a child among them. You may stand on the boulevards and count a thousand grown-up persons for one child that goes by.
The case, of course, is not so extreme in the quieter parts of the city. I have seen children, sometimes two or three together, in the Champs Elysées. In the garden of the Tuileries I once saw six all in a group. They seemed to be playing. A passer-by succeeded in getting a snapshot of them without driving them away. In the poorer districts, there are any quantity of children, even enough to sell, but in the Paris of the rich, the child is conspicuous by its absence. The foreign visitors come without their children. The true Parisian lady has pretty well gone out of the business.
Here and there you may see driving past with its mother in an open barouche, or parading the Rue de la Paix on the hand of its nurse, the doll-like substitute for old-time infancy, the fashionable Parisian child. As far as the sex can be determined by looking at it, it is generally a girl. It is dressed in the height of fashion. A huge picture hat reaches out in all directions from its head. Long gloves encase its little arms to prevent it from making a free use of them. A dainty coat of powder on its face preserves it from the distorting effect of a smile. Its little hundred dollar frock reaches down in a sweet simplicity of outline. It has a belt that runs round its thighs to divide it into two harmonious parts. Below that are bare pink legs ending in little silk socks at a dollar an inch and wee slippers clasped with a simple emerald buckle. Therein, of course, the child only obeys the reigning fashion. Simplicity,--so I am informed by the last number of La Mode Parisienne,--is the dominant note of Parisian dress to-day,--simplicity, plainness, freedom from all display. A French lady wears in her hair at the Opera a single, simple tiara bound with a plain row of solitaire diamonds. It is so exquisitely simple in its outline that you can see the single diamonds sticking out from it and can count up the price of each. The Parisian gentleman wears in his button-hole merely a single orchid,--not half a dozen,--and pins his necktie with one plain, ordinary ruby, set in a perfectly unostentatious sunburst of sapphires. There is no doubt of the superiority of this Parisian simplicity. To me, when it broke upon me in reading La Mode Parisienne, it came as a kind of inspiration. I took away the stuffy black ribbon with its stupidly elaborate knot from my Canadian Christie hat and wound a single black ostrich feather about it fastened with just the plainest silver aigrette. When I had put that on and pinned a piece of old lace to the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I walked the street with the quiet dignity of a person whose one idea is not to be conspicuous.
But this is a digression. The child, I was saying, wears about two hundred worth of visible clothing upon it; and I believe that if you were to take it up by its ten-dollar slipper and hold it upside down, you would see about fifty dollars more. The French child has been converted into an elaborately dressed doll. It is altogether a thing of show, an appendage of its fashionably dressed mother, with frock and parasol to match. It is no longer a child, but a living toy or plaything.
Even on these terms the child is not a success. It has a rival who is rapidly beating it off the ground. This is the Parisian dog. As an implement of fashion, as a set-off to the fair sex, as the recipient of ecstatic kisses and ravishing hugs, the Parisian dog can give the child forty points in a hundred and win out. It can dress better, look more intelligent, behave better, bark better,--in fact, the child is simply not in it.
This is why, I suppose, in the world of Parisian luxury, the dog is ousting the infant altogether. You will see, as I said, no children on the boulevards and avenues. You will see dogs by the hundred. Every motor or open barouche that passes up the Champs Elysées, with its little white cloud of fluffy parasols and garden-hats, has a dainty, beribboned dog sitting among its occupants: in every avenue and promenade you will see hundreds of clipped poodles and toy spaniels; in all the fashionable churches you will see dogs bowed at their devotions.
It was a fair struggle. The child had its chance and was beaten. The child couldn't dress: the dog could. The child couldn't or wouldn't pray: the dog could,--or at least he learnt how. No doubt it came awkwardly at first, but he set himself to it till nowadays a French dog can enter a cathedral with just as much reverence as his mistress, and can pray in the corner of the pew with the same humility as hers. When you get to know the Parisian dogs, you can easily tell a Roman Catholic dog from a Low Church Anglican. I knew a dog once that was converted,--everybody said from motives of policy,--from a Presbyterian,--but, stop, it's not fair to talk about it,--the dog is dead now, and it's not right to speak ill of its belief, no matter how mistaken it may have been.
However, let that pass, what I was saying was that between the child and the dog, each had its chance in a fair open contest and the child is nowhere.
People, who have never seen, even from the outside, the Parisian world of fashion, have no idea to what an extent it has been invaded by the dog craze. Dogs are driven about in motors and open carriages. They are elaborately clipped and powdered and beribboned by special "coiffeurs." They wear little buckled coats and blankets, and in motors,--I don't feel quite sure of this,--they wear motor goggles. There are at least three or four--and for all I know there may be more--fashionable shops in Paris for dogs' supplies. There is one that any curious visitor may easily find at once in the Rue des Petits Champs close to the Avenue de l'Opera. There is another one midway in the galleries of the Palais Royal. In these shops you will see, in the first place, the chains, collars, and whips that are marks of the servitude in which dogs still live (though, by the way, there are already, I think, dog suffragettes heading a very strong movement). You will see also the most delicious, fashionable dog coats, very, very simple, fastened in front with one silver clasp, only one. In the Palais Royal shop they advertise, "Newest summer models for 1913 in dogs' tailoring." There are also dogs' beds made in wickerwork in cradle shape with eider-down coverlets worked over with silk.
A little while ago, the New York papers were filled with an account of a dog's lunch given at the Vanderbilt Hotel by an ultra-fashionable American lady. It was recorded that Vi Sin, the Pekin Spaniel of Mrs. H. of New York, was host to about ten thousand dollars worth of "smart" dogs. I do not know whether or not this story is true, for I only read it in the Parisian papers. But certain it is that the episode would have made no sensation in Paris. A dog eating in a restaurant is a most ordinary spectacle. Only a few days ago I had lunch with a dog,--a very quiet, sensible Belgian poodle, very simply dressed in a plain morning stomach coat of ultramarine with leather insertions. I took quite a fancy to him. When I say that I had lunch with him, I ought to explain that he had a lady, his mistress, with him,--that also is quite usual in Paris. But I didn't know her, and she sat on the further side of him, so that I confined myself to ordinary table civilities with the dog. I was having merely a plain omelette, from motives of economy, and the dog had a little dish of entrecote d'agneau aux asperges maître d'hôtel. I took some of it while the lady was speaking to the waiter and found it excellent. You may believe it or not, but the entry of a dog into a French restaurant and his being seated at a table and having his food ordered creates not the slightest sensation. To bring a child into a really good restaurant would, I imagine, be looked upon as rather a serious affair.
Not only is the dog the darling of the hour during his lifetime, but even in death he is not forgotten. There is in Paris a special dog cemetery. It lies among the drooping trees of a little island in the Seine, called the Isle de la Recette, and you may find it by taking the suburban tramway for Asnières. It has little tombstones, monuments, and flowered walks. One sorrow-stricken master has inscribed over a dog's grave,--"Plus je vois les hommes, plus j'aime mon chien." The most notable feature of the cemetery is the monument of Barry, a St. Bernard dog. The inscription states that he saved forty lives in the Alps.
But the dog craze is after all only a sign and sample of the prevailing growth and extent of fashionable luxury. Nowhere in the world, I suppose, is this more conspicuous than in Paris, the very Vanity Fair of mundane pleasure. The hostesses of dinners, dances and fêtes vie with one another in seeking bizarre and extravagant effects. Here is a good example of it taken from actual life the other day. It is an account of an "oriental fête" given at a private mansion in Paris.
It runs thus:--"The sumptuous Paris mansion of the Comtesse Aynard de Chabrillan in the Rue Christophe-Colomb was converted into a veritable scene from the 'Thousand and One Nights' on the occasion of a Persian fête given by her to a large company of friends.
"In the courtyard an immense tent was erected, hung with superb Persian stuffs and tapestries, and here the élite of Paris assembled in gorgeous Oriental costumes.
"The countess herself presided in a magnificent Persian costume of green and gold, with an immense white aigrette in her hair."
Notice it. The simplicity of it! Only green and gold in her costume, no silver, no tin, no galvanized iron, just gold, plain gold; and only "one immense white aigrette." The quiet dignity of it!
The article goes on:--"Each of the sensational entries was announced by M. André de Fouquières, the arbiter of Parisian elegance.
"One of the most striking spectacles of the evening was the appearance of Princesse P. d'Arenberg, mounted on an elephant, richly bedecked with Indian trappings. Then came the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre and the Comtesse Stanislas de Castellane in gold cages, followed by the Marquise de Brantes, in a flower-strewn Egyptian litter, accompanied by Pharaoh and his slaves.
"The Comtesse de Lubersac danced an Oriental measure with charming grace, and Prince Luis Fernando of Spain, in an ethereal costume, his features stained a greenish hue, executed a Hindoo dance before the assembly."
Can you beat it? His features stained with a greenish hue! Now look at that! He might have put on high grade prepared paint or clear white lead,--he's rich enough,--but, no, just a quiet shingle stain is enough for him.
I cannot resist adding from the same source the list of the chief guests. Anybody desiring a set of names for a burlesque show to run three hundred nights on the circuit may have them free of charge or without infringement of copyright.
"Nearly everyone prominent in Paris society was present, including the Maharajah of Kapurthala, Princess Prem Kaur, Prince Aga Khan, the Austrian Ambassador and Countess Szecsen, the Persian and Bulgarian Ministers, Mme. Stancioff, Duc and Duchesse de Noailles, Comtesse A. Potocka, Marquis and Marquise de Mun, Comtesse du Bourg de Bozas, Mrs. Moore, Comte and Comtesse G. de Segonzec and Prince and Princess de Croy."
I am sorry that "Mrs. Moore" was there. She must have slipped in unnoticed.
What is not generally known is that I was there myself. I appeared,--in rivalry with Prince Luis Fernando--dressed as a Bombay soda water bottle, with aerial opalescent streaks of light flashing from the costume which was bound with single wire.
IV.--A Visit to Versailles
"WHAT!" said the man from Kansas, looking up from his asparagus, "do you mean to say that you have never seen the Palace of Versailles?"
"No," I said very firmly, "I have not."
"Nor the fountains in the gardens?"
"No."
"Nor the battle pictures?"
"No."
"And the Hall of Mirrors,"--added the fat lady from Georgia.
"And Madame du Barry's bed"--said her husband.
"Her which," I asked, with some interest.
"Her bed."
"All right," I said, "I'll go."
I knew, of course, that I had to. Every tourist in Paris has got to go and see Versailles. Otherwise the superiority of the others becomes insufferable, with foreigners it is different. If they worry one about palaces and cathedrals and such--the Château at Versailles, and the Kaiserhof and the Duomo at Milan--I answer them in kind. I ask them if they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch at St. Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and the Toboggo at Montreal. That quiets them wonderfully.
But, as I say, I had to go.
You get to Versailles--as the best of various ways of transport--by means of a contrivance something between a train and a street car. It has a little puffing steam-engine and two cars--double deckers--with the top deck open to the air and covered with a wooden roof on rods. The lower part inside is called the first-class and a seat in it costs ten cents extra. Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it. The engine is a quaint little thing and wears a skirt, painted green, all around it, so that you can just see the tips of its wheels peeping modestly out below. It was a great relief to me to see this engine. It showed that there is such a thing as French delicacy after all. There are so many sights along the boulevards that bring the carmine blush to the face of the tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying to avoid seeing them), that it is well to know that the French draw the line somewhere. The sight of the bare wheels of an engine is too much for them.
The little train whirls its way out of Paris, past the great embankment and the fortifications, and goes rocking along among green trees whose branches sweep its sides, and trim villas with stone walls around quaint gardens. At every moment it passes little inns and suburban restaurants with cool arbours in front of them, and waiters in white coats pouring out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty just to look at them.
In due time the little train rattles and rocks itself over the dozen miles or so that separate Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right in front of the great stone court-yard of the palace. There through the long hours of a summer afternoon you may feast your eyes upon the wonderland of beauty that rose at the command of the grand monarch, Louis XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland that marked the spot two hundred and fifty years ago.
All that royal munificence could effect was lavished on the making of the palace. So vast is it in size that in the days of its greatest splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates. The sheer length of it from side to side is only about a hundred yards short of half a mile. To make the grounds the King's chief landscape artist and his hundreds of workers laboured for twenty years. They took in, as it were, the whole landscape. The beauty of their work lies not only in the wonderful terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that extend from the rear of the Château, but in its blending with the scene beyond. It is so planned that no distant house or building breaks into the picture. The vista ends everywhere with the waving woods of the purple distance.
Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred million dollars on the making of the palace. When made it was filled with treasures of art not to be measured in price. It was meant to be, and it remains, the last word of royal grandeur. The King's court at Versailles became the sun round which gravitated the fate and fortune of his twenty million subjects. Admission within its gates was itself a mark of royal favour. Now, any person with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris on the double-decked street car and wander about the palace at will. For a five cent tip to a guide you may look through the private apartments of Marie Antoinette, and for two cents you may check your umbrella while you inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First. For nothing at all you may stand on the vast terrace behind the Château and picture to yourself the throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two hundred years ago. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of the democracy.
The palace--or the Château, as it is modestly named--stands crosswise upon an elevation that dominates the scene for miles around. The whole building throughout is only of three stories, for French architecture has a horror of high buildings. The two great wings of the Château reach sideways, north and south; and one, a shorter one, runs westwards towards the rear. In the front space between the wings is a vast paved court-yard--the Royal Court--shut in by a massive iron fence. Into this court penetrated, one autumn evening in 1789, the raging mob led by the women of Paris, who had come to drag the descendant of the Grand Monarch into the captivity that ended only with the guillotine. Here they lighted their bonfires and here they sang and shrieked and shivered throughout the night. That night of the fifth of October was the real end of monarchy in France.
No one, I think--not even my friend from Kansas who boasted that he had "put in" three hours at Versailles--could see all that is within the Château. But there are certain things which no tourist passes by. One of them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV, a great series of square apartments all opening sideways into each other with gilded doors as large as those of a barn, and with about as much privacy as a railway station. One room was the King's council chamber; next to this, a larger one, was the "wig-room," where the royal mind selected its wig for the day and where the royal hair-dresser performed his stupendous task. Besides this again is the King's bedroom. Preserved in it, within a little fence, still stands the bed in which Louis XIV died in 1715, after a reign of seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily hold three hundred people. Outside of it is a great antechamber, where the courtiers jealously waited their turn to be present at the King's "lever," or "getting up," eager to have the supreme honour of holding the royal breeches.
But if the King's apartments are sumptuous, they are as nothing to the Hall of Mirrors, the showroom of the whole palace, and estimated to be the most magnificent single room in the world. It extends clear across the end of the rear wing and has a length of 236 feet. It is lighted by vast windows that reach almost to the lofty arch that forms its ceiling; the floor is of polished inlaid wood, on which there stood in Louis the Great's time, tables, chairs, and other furniture of solid silver. The whole inner side of the room is formed by seventeen enormous mirrors set in spaces to correspond in shape to the window opposite, and fitted in between with polished marble. Above them runs a cornice of glittering gilt, and over that again the ceiling curves in a great arch, each panel of it bearing some picture to recall the victories of the Grand Monarch. Ungrateful posterity has somewhat forgotten the tremendous military achievements of Louis XIV--the hardships of his campaign in the Netherlands in which the staff of the royal cuisine was cut down to one hundred cooks--the passage of the Rhine, in which the King actually crossed the river from one side to the other, and so on. But the student of history can live again the triumphs of Louis in this Hall of Mirrors. It is an irony of history that in this room, after the conquest of 1871, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor by his subjects and his allies.
