On and on we tore, slicing against the sidewalk, curving and jibbing, clattering and careening—now going on two wheels and now on four—while the lunatic shrieked curses of disappointment at the pedestrians who scuttled away to safety from our charging onslaughts; and I held both hands over my mouth to keep my heart from jumping out into my lap.
I saw, with instantaneous but photographic distinctness, a lady, with a dog tucked under her arm, who hesitated a moment in our very path. She was one of the largest ladies I ever saw and the dog under her arm was certainly the smallest dog I ever saw. You might say the lady was practically out of dog. I thought we had her and probably her dog too; but she fell back and was saved by a matter of half an inch or so. I think, though, we got some of the buttons off her shirtwaist and the back trimming of her hat.
Then there was a rending, tearing crash as we took a fender off a machine just emerging from a cross street, but my lunatic never checked up at all. He just flung a curling ribbon of profanity over his shoulder at the other driver and bounded onward like a bat out of the Bad Place. That was the hour when my hair began to turn perceptibly grayer. And yet, when by a succession of miracles we had landed intact at my destination, the fiend seemed to think he had done a praiseworthy and creditable thing. I only wish he had been able to understand the things I called him—that is all I wish!
It is by a succession of miracles that the members of his maniacal craft usually do dodge death and destruction. The providence that watches over the mentally deficient has them in its care, I guess; and the same beneficent influence frequently avails to save those who ride behind them and, to a lesser extent, those who walk ahead. Once in a while a Paris cabman does have a lucky stroke and garner in a foot traveler. In an instant a vast and surging crowd convenes. In another instant the road is impassably blocked. Up rushes a gendarme and worms his way through the press to the center. He has a notebook in his hand. In this book he enters the gloating cabman's name, his age, his address, and his wife's maiden name, if any; and gets his views on the Dreyfus case; and finds out what he thinks about the separation of church and state; and tells him that if he keeps on the way he is headed he will be getting the cross of the Legion of Honor pretty soon. They shake hands and embrace, and the cabman cuts another notch in his mudguard, and gets back on the seat and drives on. Then if, by any chance, the victim of the accident still breathes, the gendarme arrests him for interfering with the traffic. It is a lovely system and sweetly typical.
Under the general classification of thrilling moments in the night life of Europe I should like to list a carriage trip through the outskirts of Naples after dark. In the first place the carriage driver is an Italian driver—which is a shorter way of saying he is the worst driver living. His idea of getting service out of a horse is, first to snatch him to a standstill by yanking on the bit and then to force the poor brute into a gallop by lashing at him with a whip having a particularly loud and vixenish cracker on it; and at every occasion to whoop at the top of his voice. In the second place the street is as narrow as a narrow alley, feebly lighted, and has no sidewalks. And the rutty paving stones which stretch from housefront to housefront are crawling with people and goats and dogs and children. Finally, to add zest to the affair, there are lots of loose cows mooning about—for at this hour the cowherd brings his stock to the doors of his patrons. In an Italian city the people get their milk from a cow, instead of from a milkman as with us. The milk is delivered on the hoof, so to speak.
The grown-ups refuse to make way for you to pass and the swarming young ones repay you for not killing them by pelting pebbles and less pleasant things into your face. Beggars in all degrees of filth and deformity and repulsiveness run alongside the carriage in imminent danger from the wheels, begging for alms. If you give them something they curse you for not giving them more, and if you give them nothing they spit at you for a base dog of a heretic.
But then, what could you naturally expect from a population that thinks a fried cuttlefish is edible and a beefsteak is not?