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"Who are you calling the Whistler?" asked the cabman; "Jim Corbett, or John Sullivan?" "Jeffries ate five lamb chops to his breakfast this morning," said the man of information, "and Johnson ate a chicken." "Wish I'd eat both," said the cabman. "What do you think of the upper-cut?" said the other, turning to Mr. Clarkson to escape the cabman's frivolity.
The man had not recovered when we arrived within several blocks of our destination, nor did he show signs of recovery from his profound stupor. Kennedy stopped the cab in a side street, pressed a bill into the cabman's hand, and bade him wait until we returned.
Then he relieved the cabman's anxiety, as the alley possessed a second exit, and was driven to the Wellington Theater, where he secured a stall for that night's performance of the Chinese musical comedy in which Miss Millicent Jaques played the part of a British Admiral's daughter.
"Very well," replied Boleslas, and, raising himself, he whispered in the cabman's ear, in a voice too low for his friend to hear what he said: "Ten francs for you if in five minutes you drive me to the corner of the Rue Napoleon III and the Place de la Victor-Emmanuel."
"This running warmed me to a certain extent, and I went on with a better courage through the maze of less frequented roads that runs hereabouts. My back had now become very stiff and sore, my tonsils were painful from the cabman's fingers, and the skin of my neck had been scratched by his nails; my feet hurt exceedingly and I was lame from a little cut on one foot.
An eminent critic observed of it that: "It fell short only by a little way of being a serious contribution to English literature." Consultation with the keeper of the cabman's shelter at Hyde Park Corner suggested to me that the "little way" the critic had in mind measures exactly eleven hundred yards.
The cabman bustled down and opened the door; Miss Macnamara got in first, then Lady Cicely; her eye fell on the cabman's face, which was lighted full by a street-lamp, and it was Christopher Staines! He started and winced; but the woman of the world never moved a muscle. "Where to?" said Staines, averting his head.
The cabman's next remark was addressed to a boy who took a perilous dive between the byby's nose and a cab in front. "That's roight. Put your head in there and get it jammed a whackin good place for it, I should think." Although the tone was low and circumspect, I have never heard a better off-handed declamation. Every word was cut clear of disreputable alliances with its neighbors.
Soon after this a shade of change in my reception at the cabman's eating-house marked the beginning of a new phase in my distress. The first day I told myself it was but fancy; the next, I made quite sure it was a fact; the third, in mere panic I stayed away, and went for forty-eight hours fasting.
He had dropped dead in the street as he was leaving his cab to enter the office with information which must have appeared to him important to judge from the cabman's evidence as to his intense excitement and repeated directions for faster driving. There was an inquest and a post-mortem, but "death from natural causes" was the verdict. That was all. It was enough for me.
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