That his
stories are out of key with my surroundings, often reminding me of
things I have come miles over the sea to forget, somehow adds to
their charm.
There is no warning given. Suddenly, and apparently without anything
that leads up to the subject in mind, this irrepressible Irishman breaks
out, and before I am aware of the change, the glory of the morning and
all that it holds for me of beauty has faded out of the slide of my
mental camera and another has taken its place. Again I am following
Fin's cab through the mazes of smoky, seething London, now waiting
outside a concert-hall for some young blood, or shopping along Regent
Street, or at full tilt to catch a Channel train at Charing Cross--each
picture enriched by a running account of personal adventure that makes
them doubly interesting.
"You wouldn't mind, sor," he begins, "if I tell ye of a party of three I
took home from a grand ball--one of the toppy balls of the winter, in
one o' them big halls on the Strand? Two o' them Was dressed like the
Royal family in satins that stuck out like a haystack and covered with
diamonds that would hurt your eyes to look at 'em--" And then in his
inimitable dialect--impossible to reproduce by any combination of vowels
at my command, and punctured every few minutes by ringing laughs that
can be heard half a mile away--follows a description of how one of his
fares, Ikey by name, the son of the stoutest of the women, by a sudden
lurch of his cab--Ikey rode outside--while rounding into a side street,
was landed in the mud.
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