We Stayed Among Them Fully Twenty Minutes, But Not A Single Person
Was Stabbed While We Were There.
It must have been an off-night
for stabbings.
Still, I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here,
for the first, last and only time in Paris, I found a shop where
a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with
vociferous enthusiasm. The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled
on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner.
The waiter, though, bowed before us - a shockheaded personage in
the ruins of a dress suit - at the same time saying words which I
took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that
he had called us something that might be freely translated as a
certain kind of female lobster. Circumscribed by our own inflexible
and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with
calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes
further than that - he calls you a female lobster, which seems
somehow or other to make it more binding.
However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately
offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which
for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside
the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that
all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World
was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was,
for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself
down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has
liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious - that
was what ailed him.
For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of
grave peril. It was no use. I felt safe - not exactly comfortable,
but perfectly safe. I could not even muster up a spasm of the
spine when a member of our party leaned over and whispered in my
ear that any one of these gentry roundabout us would cheerfully
cut a man's throat for twenty-five cents. I was surprised, though,
at the moderation of the cost; this was the only cheap thing I had
struck in Paris. It was cheaper even than the same job is supposed
to be in the district round Chatham Square, on the East Side of
New York, where the credulous stranger so frequently is told that
he can have a plain murder done for five dollars - or a fancy
murder, with trimmings, for ten; rate card covering other jobs on
application. In America, however, it has been my misfortune that
I did not have the right amount handy; and here in Paris I was
handicapped by my inability to make change correctly. By now I
would not have trusted anyone in Paris to make change for me - not
even an Apache. I was sorry for this, for at a quarter a head I
should have been very glad to engage a troupe of Apaches to kill
me about two dollars' worth of cabdrivers and waiters.
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