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THE FATHERLY FORCE

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

If I were the sisters Taylor of Ongar I should put the following questions into melodious and easily-memorised verse. 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 her incorrigible carelessness forced her to see them almost once a 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 Ambassadors. 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’ attitude, 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 qualified this assertion; 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 Cockspur 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. 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 assemble. 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 passengers 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 association with Mind, like a voter whose hand has been shaken in public by a titled 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’s moving finger writes, goes, as the Americans say.

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. 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 sight-seer; and it was here that the adventure which is the foundation of this narrative befell. From her own lips, at a supper party in 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 premières 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 principal 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 god 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 première danseuse can dread with as much intensity as anyone else, and this poor little lady was terrified. Empresses of the ballet should be free from such trials. No, she vowed, she could never go through with it. Never. 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 fortitude, 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 massive, even colossal, proportions, dressed in the uniform of a London policeman.