Adventures and Enthusiasms Part 21

London may be "the stony-hearted step-mother" that De Quincey called her but Londoners are not necessarily neglected orphans because of that. So long as one policeman remains, we shall never be fatherless.

If I were Miss Jane Taylor of Ongar I should put the following questions into melodious and easily-memorised verse; but instead they are in prose. Who is it, when we are lost, that tells us the way, always extending an arm as he does so? The policeman. Who is it that knows where the nearest chemist's is? The policeman. Who, when we are in danger of being run over if we cross the road, lifts a hand like a York ham and cleaves a path for us? The policeman. At night, when we have lost the latch-key, who is it that effects an entrance (I borrow his own terminology) through a window? The policeman. The tale of his benefactions is endless.

Two American girls recently in London spent much of their time in pretending to an ignorance of the city, entirely (they confessed) in order to experience the delight of conversing with constables; and a lady once told me that the nicest men she had ever met (and she saw them every week) were the policemen in the Lost Umbrella Office on the Embankment. I believe it. I have the same feeling when I go there, and it bewilders me, remembering these fascinating officials, to think that the Foreign Office ever has any difficulty in appointing Amba.s.sadors.

Yet these too, with all their sympathy and suavity and sweet reasonableness, are policemen _au fond_. For the dark blue uniform is very powerful and every man who dons the white worsted glove finds his hand turning to iron beneath it. Whatever he may have been before the Force absorbed him, he will henceforward side with order against disorder, with respectability against Bohemianism, with sobriety against vinous jollity. And yet the policemen make their allowances. I watched four of them the other day frog-marching a very "voilent" (as they always say in their evidence the next morning) reprobate from Burleigh Street to Bow Street. During the struggle he distributed some vicious kicks, but I could not determine by the constables' att.i.tude, though they would, no doubt, have preferred a more tractable captive, that they felt any grudge towards him or thought him any worse than a meeker delinquent.

Although in real life the policeman is so monumentally respectable and solid, on the stage he is never anything but comic. _A kiss for Cinderella_ to some extent qualifies this; for the constable there with the "infalliable" system was romantical as well. But, generally speaking, a policeman's part is a comic part, and must be so. Tradition is too strong for anything else. Too many clowns in too many harlequinades have wreaked their mischievous will on him. Hence, whatever the play, directly we see him we begin to laugh; for we know that though the uniform is honourable the voice will be funny. But in real life the police are serious creatures, while during the first three days of Armistice week, when they had to stand by and watch all kinds of goings-on for which no one was to be whopped, they were pathetic, too.

Seldom can they have been so unhappy as when the bonfire was burning in the middle of c.o.c.kspur Street, and nothing could be done, or was permitted to be done.

London, I maintain, has few sublimer sights than a policeman doing his duty. I saw one yesterday. The window of the room which is princ.i.p.ally devoted to my deeds of inkshed looks upon a point where four roads meet, on three of which are omnibus routes. This means that there is never any lack of moving incident whenever I look out. Sometimes there is a moving accident, too. Yesterday, for example, hearing a warning call and a crash, I was at the window in time to see an omnibus and a small wagon inextricably mixed, and to watch with what celerity a crowd can a.s.semble. But it was not that which drew the eye; it was the steady advance from a distant point of one of our helmeted fathers. He did not hurry: nothing but pursuit of the wicked fleeing makes a policeman run; but his onset was irresistible. Traffic rolled back from him like the waters of the Red Sea. When he reached the scene of trouble, where the motor-driver and the driver of the wagon were in ecstasies of _tu quoque_, while the conductor was examining the bonnet for damage and the pa.s.sengers were wondering whether it was better to wait and work out their fares or change to another bus--when he reached the scene of trouble, he performed an action which never fails to fascinate me: he drew forth his pocket-book. There is something very interesting in the way in which a policeman does this. The gesture is mainly pride, but there is misgiving in it, too: the knowledge that the pen is not as mighty as the truncheon. But the pride is very evident: the satisfaction of Matter being seen in a.s.sociation with Mind, like a voter whose hand has been shaken in public by a t.i.tled candidate. Policemen as a rule are laborious writers, and this one was true to type, but there is none that comes nearer the author of the Book of Fate. What a policeman writes, goes.

One of the best stories of the fatherliness of the Fatherly Force that I ever heard was told to me by that elvish commentator on life, and most tireless of modern Quixotes, the late Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde's devoted friend. He brought it, oddly enough, from Russia, and, when I urged him to write it, with characteristic open-handedness he presented it to me.

The heroine was a famous member of the Russian Imperial Ballet who, though she had not then danced in London--her genius being too precious in her own country--had been here unprofessionally as a sightseer; and it was here that the adventure which is the foundation of this narrative befell. From her own lips, at a supper party in St. Petersburg or Moscow, Ross had the tale, which now, but lacking all his personal enrichments, I tell again.

The dancer when in London had witnessed one of our processions: the opening of Parliament, the Lord Mayor's Show--I can't say what--and she had found herself at a disadvantage in the crowd. It is unusual for _premieres danseuses_ to be tall, even when they are poised on the very tips of their conquering toes; and this lady was no exception. The result was that she could not see, and not to be able to see is for any woman a calamity, but for a foreign woman a tragedy: particularly so when she is in her own country a queen, accustomed to every kind of homage and attention. The _ballerina_ was at the height of her despair when one of the policemen on duty took pity on her, and lifting her in his arms held her up long enough to enjoy the princ.i.p.al moments of the pageant. From that day onwards, she said, the London policeman was, for her, the symbol of strength and comfort and power. Gigantic Cossacks might parade before her all day, but her true G.o.d out of the machine was from Scotland Yard....

A time came when, to the grief of her vast public, she fell ill. The Tsar's own physicians attended her, but she became no better, and at last it was realised that an operation was inevitable. Now, an operation is an ordeal which a _premiere danseuse_ can dread with as much intensity as any one else, and this poor little lady was terrified.

Empresses of the ballet should be exempted from such trials. No, she vowed, she could never go through with it. The idea was too frightening.

"But," said the first physician, "you must. It will only be a slight affair; you will come out of your convalescence better than before."

"Yes," said the second physician, "and more beautiful than before."

"And," urged the third physician, "more popular than before."

"And," added the surgeon, "you will live for ever."

But she still trembled and refused.... It was impossible, unthinkable....

What then?

Well, let me say at once that, as a matter of fact, she underwent the operation with perfect fort.i.tude, and it was a great success. But how do you think she brought herself to face it? Only by tightly holding the white gloved hand of a specially constructed doll of ma.s.sive, even colossal, proportions, dressed in the uniform of a London policeman.

XIV

MY FRIEND FLORA

"How much is this bunch?" I asked of the flower-woman at the corner.

"A s.h.i.+lling," she replied, "but you can have it for sixpence. I hate the sight of it."

Now here was an oddity in a world of self-centred, acquisitive tradespeople: a dealer who decried her own wares. Obviously flower-women can have temperaments.

I asked her what there was about palm, as we call those branches of willow with the fluffy, downy buds on them, that so annoyed her.

"It's such stupid stuff," she explained. "I can understand people buying daffodils or tulips or violets, because they're pretty or sweet, but not this dried-up stuff with the little kittens."

The remark set me wondering to what extent dealers in other articles are perplexed by their customers' preferences. (Some milliners, I hope.) For the most part we are encouraged by the shopkeeper to follow our own inclinations. His taste may be utterly different, but he doesn't impose it on us; he ventures to suggest only when there are varying prices and we seem unduly inclined to the lowest. But this old lady was prepared, long before the bargaining stage had set in, to knock off fifty per cent. and traduce the goods as well. Surely a character.

"And that's not all," she added. "What do you think a lady--calls herself a lady--said to me just now when she bought threepenny worth?

She said it lasted a year. Fancy telling a poor flower-woman that!"

We went on to talk of her calling. I found her an "agreeable blend" (as the tobacconists say) of humour and resignation; and very practical.

"Why are your flowers," I asked her, "so much better than the flowers of the man the other side of the road?"

"Because he takes his home at night," she said. "You should never do that. If I've got any unsold I leave them at the fire-station and then they're fresh in the morning. But I don't often have any left over."

This was, I should say, a day of acute discomfort: it had been bitterly raining since early morning, and yet there was no bitterness in the flower-woman. She was merely resigned. Very damp, but cheerfully apathetic. "When it's cold and wet like this," I asked, "is life worth living?"

"Of course," was her splendid answer; "aren't there the nights?"

Rather fine that--even if as a commentary on the wakeful hours a little acid. And for those who can sleep, how true! "Aren't there the nights?"

I must remember the solace when next the cynic or the misanthrope girds at sunless noons.

Of her philosophy she then gave me another taste, for, observing a great ma.s.s of loose coins, many of them silver, lying in the basket, I asked if she were not afraid of a thief s.n.a.t.c.hing at it. "Oh, no," she said.

"But I don't always have it there. It's because it's so wet to-day.

Counting helps."

My guess would have been that although the life of flower-women calls for philosophy, for philosophy to respond is by no means the rule; and her consolation and cheerfulness made me very happy. Yet what a penance much of their lives must be! First of all, there is the weather. Wet or fine, hot or cold, they must be out in it, and stationary at that. What to place second and third I do not know, but there is the perishable character of the stock-in-trade to be considered, and, when fogs and frosts interfere, the chance of being unable to collect any stock-in-trade at all. But exposure must be the crucial strain.

The whole question of this motionless, receptive att.i.tude to the elements is interesting to me, who catch cold several times a day. How these people can stand it is a constant mystery. That blind man, for instance, at the little door of the Temple just below the Ess.e.x Street archway--ever since I can remember London he has been there, with his matches, always placid, no matter what new buffetings Heaven has for him.

The blind in particular seem to become indifferent to climatic extremes; and there must be in every one's cognizance two or three immovable sightless mendicants defying rain and chill. Every town in the country has such landmarks, and all seem to retain their health. But I recollect that the blind man who used to sit in front of the Grand Hotel at Brighton forty years ago spelling out Holy Writ, while the dog at his feet collected coppers in a little box, always in winter wore mittens and a cap with ear-flaps, and had fingers red and swollen. Still, he endured. Whether with those red and swollen fingers he really deciphered the Evangel or merely repeated from memory, we never knew, but I can still hear the droning voice, "And Jesus said----"

This insensitiveness to January blasts and February drenchings may be one of the compensations that the blind enjoy. Whatever else happens to them they never, perhaps, catch cold. And that is more than something.

But how odd that these stolid, shabby, and often rather battered old florists should be the middle-men and middle-women between the country and the city, but for whose indifference to pitiless skies so many town-dwellers would never see a blossom at all! There is nothing of the country about them, nothing of the garden--almost no Londoner less suggests the riot of a herbaceous border--and yet it is they who form the link between flower-bed and street.

"Well," I said, grasping the bunch of palm that the old flower-woman had sold me at such a sacrifice, "good-bye; I hope you'll empty your basket."

"And I hope you'll empty yours," she replied.

"Mine?" I said, "I haven't got one."

"Oh, yes, you have," said Flora; "every one's got a basket, only they don't always know where to take it."

THE END