Including Studies Of Traffic "Cops"

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Title:     Including Studies Of Traffic "Cops"
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

The other day it was such a pleasant April day I thought I'd take the afternoon off. It was such a very pleasant day that I didn't want to go anywhere in particular. Do you ever feel that way? I mean like you just wanted to be by yourself and sit down and think awhile.

Later on, you have an idea, you'll come back into things much refreshed. But the thought of answering these letters now, or of doing this or doing that, kind of lets you down inside your stomach. Your brain seems to have dropped down somewhere behind your ears. If that fellow across the office comes over to pull another of his bright ideas on you you think you'll probably scream, or brain him, or something. He's getting terrible, anyhow.

You have any number of excellent friends, and (ordinarily) you are quite fond of them. Perhaps you will go to see one of them. There's Ed, you've been wanting for you don't know how long to go round and see him. Never seemed to have time. But no; you don't want to see Ed--today. Same way with all the others, as you go over the list of them in your mind. Couldn't bear to see any of 'em--not this afternoon. For one thing, they're all so selfish.... So interested in their own affairs.

As I was straightening up my desk an idea came to me about jobs. Seems to me that when I have a job I'm all the while worrying about how to break out of it. I think: Well, I'm tied up here until the first of the year; but I'll sure shake it after that; too cramped and limited. And then when I am out of a job I immediately begin to worry about how to get another one. That's Life, I guess.

I turned uptown and floated along with the current of the Avenue throng. It was a glittering April throng. The newest stockings were out. I had not seen them before. The newest stockings (you will have noted) are so very, very thin and the pores (so to say) in them are so large that they give the ladies who wear them the agreeable effect of being bare-legged.

At Thirty-fourth Street the traffic policeman on post at our side of this corner, by an outward gesture of his arms pressed back the sidewalk stream for a couple of moments of cross-town vehicular traffic. He stood within a few inches of the front row of the largely feminine crush. Whenever an impatient pedestrian broke through the line he had formed and attempted to dart across the street he emitted a peculiar little whistle followed by the admonishment, "Hold on, lady!" or "Hey there, mister!" Thus having returned the derelict to cover, he would smile very intimately, with a kind of sly cuteness, at the more handsome young women directly before him--who invariably tittered back at him. And thus, frequently, a little conversation was started.

Now as a vigilant historian of the social scene this matter of the gallant relations of traffic policemen to perambulating ladies of somewhat fashionable, even patrician aspect, I find highly interesting. It is a subject which does not seem to have been much examined into.

Why, exactly, should flowers of débutante-Bryn-Mawr appearance look with something like tenderness at policemen? Seems to me I have read now and then in the papers strikingly romantic stories wherein a mounted policeman in the park (formerly a cowboy) saved the life of an equestrienne heiress on a runaway mount, and was rewarded the next day (or something like that) with her hand. Such a story my mind always gladly accepts as one of the dramatic instances where life artistically imitates the movies. Crossing Thirty-fourth Street, however, seems to me another matter.

And what system of selection operates in the Department whereby this officer or that is chosen from among all his brethren for the paradisaical job of being beau of a fashionable crossing? And would you not think that a more uniform judgment would be exercised in the election of men to such Brummellian duties? Adonises in the traffic force I have, indeed, seen (there is one at Forty-second Street), but this chap of whom I have just been speaking (the whimsical whistler) certainly was not one of them. He was what is called "pie-faced." Hunched up his shoulders like an owl. Yet his ogling of loveliness in new spring attire was completely successful, was in no instance that I observed resented, was received with arch merriment. Indeed, his heavy, pink-tea attentions were obviously regarded as quite flattering by the fair recipients! As he let the tide break to cross the street it was plain, from bright glances backward, that he had fluttered little hearts which would smile upon him again. And so, in such a Romeo-like manner, does this bulky sentimentalist, armed with concealed weapons, have dalliance with the passing days. What you 'spose it is about him gives him his fascination in flashing eyes haughty to the rest of the masculine world--his bright buttons, or what?

Yes; these curious and romantic little relationships between traffic cops on social duty, so to say, and their dainty admirers are not (in some instances at least) so transient as to be merely the exchange of roguish words and soft glances of the moment. There is that really august being of matinee-idol figure at--well, let us say at Forty-second Street. Sir Walter Raleigh could not with more courtliness pilot his fair freight across the Avenue. So it was the day after Christmas I saw not one but several of his young friends blushingly put dainty packages into his hands.

Is there not an excellent O. Henry sort of story in this piquant city situation?

Well, floating like a cork upon a river I drifted along up the Avenue. I passed a man I had not seen for several years. Yes; that certainly was the fellow I used to know. And yet he was an altogether different being now, too. The sort of a shock I got has perhaps also been experienced by you. Only a short time ago, it seemed to me, this friend of mine had been robust and ruddy, masterful and gay, in the prime of his years. I had somehow innocently expected him always to be so. Just as I find it very unreal to think of myself in any other way than I am now. Don't you? As to yourself, I mean. He was quite grey. His shoulders hung forward. His chest seemed to have fallen in on itself. His legs moved back and forth without ever altogether straightening out. He had a whipped look. Wrinkled clothes and dusty black derby hat, he was conspicuous in the peacockean scene. And yet on a time he had been, I knew, as much a conqueror of hearts as any policeman. So would it sometime be with me--like this?

What do you know about that! In the next block another acquaintance of old I saw. But when I had known him he was stooped and little and thin and dried up and cringing. He worked in a basement and did not wear a collar, at least by day. He used to look very old. Now here he was swinging along looking very much like Mr. Caruso, or some such personage as that.

How may this phenomenon be accounted for, what was the misfortune of one of these persons and the secret of the other? I know a man who has a theory which, at least, sounds all right. It is not buttermilk nor monkey glands, he contends, which will keep a man young and stalwart so much as (what he calls) an objective in life--a distant rampart to take, a golden fleece to pursue. That is why, he declares, scientists and artists frequently live happy and alert to such a great age: Thomas A. Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Jap chap (what's his name? Hokusai) who at a hundred and ten or thereabout was called "the old man mad about painting."

Maybe it was thinking of that idea, maybe it was the fearsome thought of that dusty derby hat of my friend's which haunted my mind, or maybe my competitive instincts had been aroused from spring slumber by the spectacle of my Caruso-like friend careering along, anyhow a decidedly bugged-up feeling began to flow through me; I wavered in my loitering, I turned, my sails (so to speak) caught the wind, and I laid my course abruptly back to the office. I had suddenly a great itch to get at all those letters.

I was very glad to see that fellow across the office from me. He is a good fellow and very helpful. I said to him, "Look here, what do you think about this idea for getting business?"

"Oh, my goodness!" he said; "it's altogether too fine a day to think about work. I'd just like to go out and wander up the Avenue with nothing on my mind but my hair."

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Including Studies Of Traffic "cops"

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