In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public dinners next—think of it!—she might be wanting to ride a bicycle—horrors!—she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
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(from Our Peking Correspondent)
in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience; chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen—yes, cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor—oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill—
O. W. Holmes,