THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 19
IX
The next
day was Wednesday and a slack day for the Potwell Inn. It was a hot, close day,
full of the murmuring of bees. One or two people crossed by the ferry, an
elaborately equipped fisherman stopped for cold meat and dry ginger ale in the
bar parlour, some haymakers came and drank beer for an hour, and afterwards
sent jars and jugs by a boy to be replenished; that was all. Mr. Polly had
risen early and was busy about the place meditating upon the probable tactics
of Uncle Jim. He was no longer strung up to the desperate pitch of the first
encounter. But he was grave and anxious. Uncle Jim had shrunken, as all
antagonists that are boldly faced shrink, after the first battle, to the
negotiable, the vulnerable. Formidable he was no doubt, but not invincible. He
had, under Providence, been defeated once, and he might be defeated altogether.
Mr. Polly
went about the place considering the militant possibilities of pacific things, pokers,
copper sticks, garden implements, kitchen knives, garden nets, barbed wire,
oars, clothes lines, blankets, pewter pots, stockings and broken bottles. He
prepared a club with a stocking and a bottle inside upon the best East End
model. He swung it round his head once, broke an outhouse window with a flying
fragment of glass, and ruined the stocking beyond all darning. He developed a subtle
scheme with the cellar flap as a sort of pitfall, but he rejected it finally
because (A) it might entrap the plump woman, and (B) he had no use whatever for
Uncle Jim in the cellar. He determined to wire the garden that evening, burglar
fashion, against the possibilities of a night attack.
Towards
two o’clock in the afternoon three young men arrived in a capacious boat from
the direction of Lammam, and asked permission to camp in the paddock. It was
given all the more readily by Mr. Polly because he perceived in their proximity
a possible check upon the self-expression of Uncle Jim. But he did not foresee
and no one could have foreseen that Uncle Jim, stealing unawares upon the
Potwell Inn in the late afternoon, armed with a large rough-hewn stake, should
have mistaken the bending form of one of those campers—who was pulling a few
onions by permission in the garden—for Mr. Polly’s, and crept upon it swiftly
and silently and smitten its wide invitation unforgettably and unforgiveably.
It was an error impossible to explain; the resounding whack went up to heaven,
the cry of amazement, and Mr. Polly emerged from the inn armed with the
frying-pan he was cleaning, to take this reckless assailant in the rear. Uncle
Jim, realising his error, fled blaspheming into the arms of the other two
campers, who were returning from the village with butcher’s meat and groceries.
They caught him, they smacked his face with steak and punched him with a
bursting parcel of lump sugar, they held him though he bit them, and their idea
of punishment was to duck him. They were hilarious, strong young stockbrokers’
clerks, Territorials and seasoned boating men; they ducked him as though
it was romping, and all that Mr. Polly had to do was to pick up lumps of sugar
for them and wipe them on his sleeve and put them on a plate, and explain that
Uncle Jim was a notorious bad character and not quite right in his head.
“Got a
regular obsession that the Missis is his Aunt,” said Mr. Polly, expanding it.
“Perfect noosance he is.”
But he
caught a glance of Uncle Jim’s eye as he receded before the campers’ urgency
that boded ill for him, and in the night he had a disagreeable idea that
perhaps his luck might not hold for the third occasion.
That came
soon enough. So soon, indeed, as the campers had gone.
Thursday
was the early closing day at Lammam, and next to Sunday the busiest part of the
week at the Potwell Inn. Sometimes as many as six boats all at once would be
moored against the ferry punt and hiring rowboats. People could either have a
complete tea, a complete tea with jam, cake and eggs, a kettle of boiling water
and find the rest, or refreshments á la carte, as they chose. They sat
about, but usually the boiling water-ers had a delicacy about using the
tables and grouped themselves humbly on the ground. The complete tea-ers
with jam and eggs got the best tablecloth on the table nearest the steps that
led up to the glass-panelled door. The groups about the lawn were very
satisfying to Mr. Polly’s sense of amenity. To the right were the complete
tea-ers with everything heart could desire, then a small group of three
young men in remarkable green and violet and pale-blue shirts, and two girls in
mauve and yellow blouses with common teas and gooseberry jam at the green
clothless table, then on the grass down by the pollard willow a small family of
hot water-ers with a hamper, a little troubled by wasps in their jam
from the nest in the tree and all in mourning, but happy otherwise, and on the
lawn to the right a ginger beer lot of ’prentices without their collars and
very jocular and happy. The young people in the rainbow shirts and blouses
formed the centre of interest; they were under the leadership of a
gold-spectacled senior with a fluting voice and an air of mystery; he ordered
everything, and showed a peculiar knowledge of the qualities of the Potwell
jams, preferring gooseberry with much insistence. Mr. Polly watched him,
christened him the “benifluous influence,” glanced at the ’prentices and went
inside and down into the cellar in order to replenish the stock of stone ginger
beer which the plump woman had allowed to run low during the preoccupations of
the campaign. It was in the cellar that he first became aware of the return of
Uncle Jim. He became aware of him as a voice, a voice not only hoarse, but
thick, as voices thicken under the influence of alcohol.
“Where’s
that muddy-faced mongrel?” cried Uncle Jim. “Let ’im come out to me! Where’s
that blighted whisp with the punt pole—I got a word to say to ’im. Come out of
it, you pot-bellied chunk of dirtiness, you! Come out and ’ave your ugly
face wiped. I got a Thing for you.... ’Ear me?
“’E’s
’iding, that’s what ’e’s doing,” said the voice of Uncle Jim, dropping for a
moment to sorrow, and then with a great increment of wrathfulness: “Come out of
my nest, you blinking cuckoo, you, or I’ll cut your silly insides out! Come out
of it—you pock-marked rat! Stealing another man’s ’ome away from ’im! Come out
and look me in the face, you squinting son of a Skunk!...”
Mr. Polly
took the ginger beer and went thoughtfully upstairs to the bar.
“’E’s
back,” said the plump woman as he appeared. “I knew ’e’d come back.”
“I heard
him,” said Mr. Polly, and looked about. “Just gimme the old poker handle that’s
under the beer engine.”
The door
opened softly and Mr. Polly turned quickly. But it was only the pointed nose
and intelligent face of the young man with the gilt spectacles and discreet
manner. He coughed and the spectacles fixed Mr. Polly.
“I say,”
he said with quiet earnestness. “There’s a chap out here seems to want
someone.”
“Why don’t
he come in?” said Mr. Polly.
“He seems
to want you out there.”
“What’s he
want?”
“I think,”
said the spectacled young man after a thoughtful moment, “he appears to have
brought you a present of fish.”
“Isn’t he
shouting?”
“He is
a little boisterous.”
“He’d
better come in.”
The manner
of the spectacled young man intensified. “I wish you’d come out and persuade
him to go away,” he said. “His language—isn’t quite the thing—ladies.”
“It never
was,” said the plump woman, her voice charged with sorrow.
Mr. Polly
moved towards the door and stood with his hand on the handle. The
gold-spectacled face disappeared.
“Now, my
man,” came his voice from outside, “be careful what you’re saying—”
“Oo in all
the World and Hereafter are you to call me, me man?” cried Uncle Jim in the
voice of one astonished and pained beyond endurance, and added scornfully: “You
gold-eyed Geezer, you!”
“Tut,
tut!” said the gentleman in gilt glasses. “Restrain yourself!”
Mr. Polly
emerged, poker in hand, just in time to see what followed. Uncle Jim in his
shirtsleeves and a state of ferocious decolletage, was holding something—yes!—a
dead eel by means of a piece of newspaper about its tail, holding it down and
back and a little sideways in such a way as to smite with it upward and hard.
It struck the spectacled gentleman under the jaw with a peculiar dead thud, and
a cry of horror came from the two seated parties at the sight. One of the girls
shrieked piercingly, “Horace!” and everyone sprang up. The sense of helping
numbers came to Mr. Polly’s aid.
“Drop it!”
he cried, and came down the steps waving his poker and thrusting the spectacled
gentleman before him as once heroes were wont to wield the ox-hide shield.
Uncle Jim
gave ground suddenly, and trod upon the foot of a young man in a blue shirt,
who immediately thrust at him violently with both hands.
“Lea go!”
howled Uncle Jim. “That’s the chap I’m looking for!” and pressing the head of
the spectacled gentleman aside, smote hard at Mr. Polly.
But at the
sight of this indignity inflicted upon the spectacled gentleman a woman’s heart
was stirred, and a pink parasol drove hard and true at Uncle Jim’s wiry neck,
and at the same moment the young man in the blue shirt sought to collar him and
lost his grip again.
“Suffragettes,”
gasped Uncle Jim with the ferule at his throat. “Everywhere!” and aimed a
second more successful blow at Mr. Polly.
“Wup!”
said Mr. Polly.
But now
the jam and egg party was joining in the fray. A stout yet still fairly
able-bodied gentleman in white and black checks enquired: “What’s the fellow up
to? Ain’t there no police here?” and it was evident that once more public
opinion was rallying to the support of Mr. Polly.
“Oh, come
on then all the lot of you!” cried Uncle Jim, and
backing dexterously whirled the eel round in a destructive circle. The pink
sunshade was torn from the hand that gripped it and whirled athwart the
complete, but unadorned, tea things on the green table.
“Collar
him! Someone get hold of his collar!” cried the gold-spectacled gentleman,
coming out of the scrimmage, retreating up the steps to the inn door as if to
rally his forces.
“Stand
clear, you blessed mantel ornaments!” cried Uncle Jim, “stand clear!” and
retired backing, staving off attack by means of the whirling eel.
Mr. Polly,
undeterred by a sense of grave damage done to his nose, pressed the attack in
front, the two young men in violet and blue skirmished on Uncle Jim’s flanks,
the man in white and black checks sought still further outflanking
possibilities, and two of the apprentice boys ran for oars. The gold-spectacled
gentleman, as if inspired, came down the wooden steps again, seized the
tablecloth of the jam and egg party, lugged it from under the crockery with
inadequate precautions against breakage, and advanced with compressed lips,
curious lateral crouching movements, swift flashings of his glasses, and a
general suggestion of bull-fighting in his pose and gestures. Uncle Jim was
kept busy, and unable to plan his retreat with any strategic soundness. He was
moreover manifestly a little nervous about the river in his rear. He gave
ground in a curve, and so came right across the rapidly abandoned camp of the
family in mourning, crunching a teacup under his heel, oversetting the teapot,
and finally tripping backwards over the hamper. The eel flew out at a tangent
from his hand and became a mere looping relic on the sward.
“Hold
him!” cried the gentleman in spectacles. “Collar him!” and moving forward with
extraordinary promptitude wrapped the best tablecloth about Uncle Jim’s arms
and head. Mr. Polly grasped his purpose instantly, the man in checks was
scarcely slower, and in another moment Uncle Jim was no more than a bundle of
smothered blasphemy and a pair of wildly active legs.
“Duck
him!” panted Mr. Polly, holding on to the earthquake. “Bes’ thing—duck him.”
The bundle
was convulsed by paroxysms of anger and protest. One boot got the hamper and
sent it ten yards.
“Go in the
house for a clothes line someone!” said the gentleman in gold spectacles.
“He’ll get out of this in a moment.”
One of the
apprentices ran.
“Bird nets
in the garden,” shouted Mr. Polly. “In the garden!”
The
apprentice was divided in his purpose. And then suddenly Uncle Jim collapsed
and became a limp, dead seeming thing under their hands. His arms were drawn
inward, his legs bent up under his person, and so he lay.
“Fainted!”
said the man in checks, relaxing his grip.
“A fit,
perhaps,” said the man in spectacles.
“Keep
hold!” said Mr. Polly, too late.
For
suddenly Uncle Jim’s arms and legs flew out like springs released. Mr. Polly
was tumbled backwards and fell over the broken teapot and into the arms of the
father in mourning. Something struck his head—dazzingly. In another second
Uncle Jim was on his feet and the tablecloth enshrouded the head of the man in
checks. Uncle Jim manifestly considered he had done all that honour required of
him, and against overwhelming numbers and the possibility of reiterated
duckings, flight is no disgrace.
Uncle Jim
fled.
Mr. Polly
sat up after an interval of an indeterminate length among the ruins of an
idyllic afternoon. Quite a lot of things seemed scattered and broken, but it
was difficult to grasp it all at once. He stared between the legs of people. He
became aware of a voice, speaking slowly and complainingly.
“Someone
ought to pay for those tea things,” said the father in mourning. “We didn’t
bring them ’ere to be danced on, not by no manner of means.”
X
There
followed an anxious peace for three days, and then a rough man in a blue
jersey, in the intervals of trying to choke himself with bread and cheese and
pickled onions, broke out abruptly into information.
“Jim’s
lagged again, Missus,” he said.
“What!”
said the landlady. “Our Jim?”
“Your
Jim,” said the man, and after an absolutely necessary pause for swallowing,
added: “Stealin’ a ’atchet.”
He did not
speak for some moments, and then he replied to Mr. Polly’s enquiries: “Yes, a
’atchet. Down Lammam way—night before last.”
“What’d ’e
steal a ’atchet for?” asked the plump woman.
“’E said
’e wanted a ’atchet.”
“I wonder
what he wanted a hatchet for?” said Mr. Polly, thoughtfully.
“I dessay
’e ’ad a use for it,” said the gentleman in the blue jersey, and he took a
mouthful that amounted to conversational suicide. There was a prolonged pause
in the little bar, and Mr. Polly did some rapid thinking.
He went to
the window and whistled. “I shall stick it,” he whispered at last. “’Atchets or
no ’atchets.”
He turned
to the man with the blue jersey when he thought him clear for speech again.
“How much did you say they’d given him?” he asked.
“Three
munce,” said the man in the blue jersey, and refilled anxiously, as if alarmed
at the momentary clearness of his voice.
XI
Those three
months passed all too quickly; months of sunshine and warmth, of varied novel
exertion in the open air, of congenial experiences, of interest and wholesome
food and successful digestion, months that browned Mr. Polly and hardened him
and saw the beginnings of his beard, months marred only by one anxiety, an
anxiety Mr. Polly did his utmost to suppress. The day of reckoning was never
mentioned, it is true, by either the plump woman or himself, but the name of
Uncle Jim was written in letters of glaring silence across their intercourse.
As the term of that respite drew to an end his anxiety increased, until at last
it even trenched upon his well-earned sleep. He had some idea of buying a
revolver. At last he compromised upon a small and very foul and dirty rook
rifle which he purchased in Lammam under a pretext of bird scaring, and loaded
carefully and concealed under his bed from the plump woman’s eye.
September
passed away, October came.
And at
last came that night in October whose happenings it is so difficult for a
sympathetic historian to drag out of their proper nocturnal indistinctness into
the clear, hard light of positive statement. A novelist should present
characters, not vivisect them publicly....
The best,
the kindliest, if not the justest course is surely to leave untold such things
as Mr. Polly would manifestly have preferred untold.
Mr. Polly
had declared that when the cyclist discovered him he was seeking a weapon that
should make a conclusive end to Uncle Jim. That declaration is placed before
the reader without comment.
The gun
was certainly in possession of Uncle Jim at that time and no human being but
Mr. Polly knows how he got hold of it.
The
cyclist was a literary man named Warspite, who suffered from insomnia; he had
risen and come out of his house near Lammam just before the dawn, and he
discovered Mr. Polly partially concealed in the ditch by the Potwell churchyard
wall. It is an ordinary dry ditch, full of nettles and overgrown with elder and
dogrose, and in no way suggestive of an arsenal. It is the last place in which
you would look for a gun. And he says that when he dismounted to see why Mr.
Polly was allowing only the latter part of his person to show (and that it
would seem by inadvertency), Mr. Polly merely raised his head and advised him
to “Look out!” and added: “He’s let fly at me twice already.” He came out under
persuasion and with gestures of extreme caution. He was wearing a white cotton
nightgown of the type that has now been so extensively superseded by pyjama
sleeping suits, and his legs and feet were bare and much scratched and torn and
very muddy.
Mr.
Warspite takes that exceptionally lively interest in his fellow-creatures which
constitutes so much of the distinctive and complex charm of your novelist all
the world over, and he at once involved himself generously in the case. The two
men returned at Mr. Polly’s initiative across the churchyard to the Potwell
Inn, and came upon the burst and damaged rook rifle near the new monument to
Sir Samuel Harpon at the corner by the yew.
“That must
have been his third go,” said Mr. Polly. “It sounded a bit funny.”
The sight
inspirited him greatly, and he explained further that he had fled to the
churchyard on account of the cover afforded by tombstones from the flight of
small shot. He expressed anxiety for the fate of the landlady of the Potwell
Inn and her grandchild, and led the way with enhanced alacrity along the lane
to that establishment.
They found
the doors of the house standing open, the bar in some disorder—several bottles
of whisky were afterwards found to be missing—and Blake, the village policeman,
rapping patiently at the open door. He entered with them. The glass in the bar
had suffered severely, and one of the mirrors was starred from a blow from a
pewter pot. The till had been forced and ransacked, and so had the bureau in
the minute room behind the bar. An upper window was opened and the voice of the
landlady became audible making enquiries. They went out and parleyed with her.
She had locked herself upstairs with the little girl, she said, and refused to
descend until she was assured that neither Uncle Jim nor Mr. Polly’s gun were
anywhere on the premises. Mr. Blake and Mr. Warspite proceeded to satisfy
themselves with regard to the former condition, and Mr. Polly went to his room
in search of garments more suited to the brightening dawn. He returned
immediately with a request that Mr. Blake and Mr. Warspite would “just come and
look.” They found the apartment in a state of extraordinary confusion, the
bedclothes in a ball in the corner, the drawers all open and ransacked, the
chair broken, the lock of the door forced and broken, one door panel slightly
scorched and perforated by shot, and the window wide open. None of Mr. Polly’s
clothes were to be seen, but some garments which had apparently once formed
part of a stoker’s workaday outfit, two brownish yellow halves of a shirt, and
an unsound pair of boots were scattered on the floor. A faint smell of
gunpowder still hung in the air, and two or three books Mr. Polly had recently
acquired had been shied with some violence under the bed. Mr. Warspite looked
at Mr. Blake, and then both men looked at Mr. Polly. “That’s his boots,”
said Mr. Polly.
Blake
turned his eye to the window. “Some of these tiles ’ave just got
broken,” he observed.
“I got out
of the window and slid down the scullery tiles,” Mr. Polly answered, omitting
much, they both felt, from his explanation....
“Well, we
better find ’im and ’ave a word with ’im,” said Blake. “That’s about my
business now.”
XII
But Uncle
Jim had gone altogether....
He did not
return for some days. That perhaps was not very wonderful. But the days
lengthened to weeks and the weeks to months and still Uncle Jim did not recur.
A year passed, and the anxiety of him became less acute; a second healing year
followed the first. One afternoon about thirty months after the Night Surprise
the plump woman spoke of him.
“I wonder
what’s become of Jim,” she said.
“I
wonder sometimes,” said Mr. Polly.
Chapter the Tenth
Miriam Revisited
I
One summer
afternoon about five years after his first coming to the Potwell Inn Mr. Polly
found himself sitting under the pollard willow fishing for dace. It was a
plumper, browner and healthier Mr. Polly altogether than the miserable bankrupt
with whose dyspeptic portrait our novel opened. He was fat, but with a fatness
more generally diffused, and the lower part of his face was touched to gravity
by a small square beard. Also he was balder.
It was the
first time he had found leisure to fish, though from the very outset of his
Potwell career he had promised himself abundant indulgence in the pleasures of
fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of English literature testifies, is a
meditative and retrospective pursuit, and the varied page of memory,
disregarded so long for sake of the teeming duties I have already enumerated,
began to unfold itself to Mr. Polly’s consideration. A speculation about Uncle
Jim died for want of material, and gave place to a reckoning of the years and
months that had passed since his coming to Potwell, and that to a philosophical
review of his life. He began to think about Miriam, remotely and impersonally.
He remembered many things that had been neglected by his conscience during the
busier times, as, for example, that he had committed arson and deserted a wife.
For the first time he looked these long neglected facts in the face.
It is
disagreeable to think one has committed Arson, because it is an action that
leads to jail. Otherwise I do not think there was a grain of regret for that in
Mr. Polly’s composition. But deserting Miriam was in a different category.
Deserting Miriam was mean.
This is a
history and not a glorification of Mr. Polly, and I tell of things as they were
with him. Apart from the disagreeable twinge arising from the thought of what
might happen if he was found out, he had not the slightest remorse about that
fire. Arson, after all, is an artificial crime. Some crimes are crimes in
themselves, would be crimes without any law, the cruelties, mockery, the
breaches of faith that astonish and wound, but the burning of things is in
itself neither good nor bad. A large number of houses deserve to be burnt, most
modern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and books—one might go
on for some time with the list. If our community was collectively anything more
than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, and
build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of
rotten private property. I have failed in presenting Mr. Polly altogether if I
have not made you see that he was in many respects an artless child of Nature,
far more untrained, undisciplined and spontaneous than an ordinary savage. And
he was really glad, for all that little drawback of fear, that he had the
courage to set fire to his house and fly and come to the Potwell Inn.
But he was
not glad he had left Miriam. He had seen Miriam cry once or twice in his life,
and it had always reduced him to abject commiseration. He now imagined her
crying. He perceived in a perplexed way that he had made himself responsible
for her life. He forgot how she had spoilt his own. He had hitherto rested in
the faith that she had over a hundred pounds of insurance money, but now, with
his eye meditatively upon his float, he realised a hundred pounds does not last
for ever. His conviction of her incompetence was unflinching; she was bound to
have fooled it away somehow by this time. And then!
He saw her
humping her shoulders and sniffing in a manner he had always regarded as
detestable at close quarters, but which now became harrowingly pitiful.
“Damn!”
said Mr. Polly, and down went his float and he flicked up a victim to
destruction and took it off the hook.
He
compared his own comfort and health with Miriam’s imagined distress.
“Ought to
have done something for herself,” said Mr. Polly, rebaiting his hook. “She was
always talking of doing things. Why couldn’t she?”
He watched
the float oscillating gently towards quiescence.
“Silly to
begin thinking about her,” he said. “Damn silly!”
But once
he had begun thinking about her he had to go on.
“Oh blow!”
cried Mr. Polly presently, and pulled up his hook to find another fish had just
snatched at it in the last instant. His handling must have made the poor thing
feel itself unwelcome.
He
gathered his things together and turned towards the house.
All the
Potwell Inn betrayed his influence now, for here indeed he had found his place
in the world. It looked brighter, so bright indeed as to be almost skittish,
with the white and green paint he had lavished upon it. Even the garden palings
were striped white and green, and so were the boats, for Mr. Polly was one of
those who find a positive sensuous pleasure in the laying on of paint. Left and
right were two large boards which had done much to enhance the inn’s popularity
with the lighter-minded variety of pleasure-seekers. Both marked innovations.
One bore in large letters the single word “Museum,” the other was as plain and
laconic with “Omlets!” The spelling of the latter word was Mr. Polly’s own, but
when he had seen a whole boatload of men, intent on Lammam for lunch, stop
open-mouthed, and stare and grin and come in and ask in a marked sarcastic
manner for “omlets,” he perceived that his inaccuracy had done more for the
place than his utmost cunning could have contrived. In a year or so the inn was
known both up and down the river by its new name of “Omlets,” and Mr. Polly,
after some secret irritation, smiled and was content. And the fat woman’s omelettes
were things to remember.
(You will
note I have changed her epithet. Time works upon us all.)
She stood
upon the steps as he came towards the house, and smiled at him richly.
“Caught
many?” she asked.
“Got an
idea,” said Mr. Polly. “Would it put you out very much if I went off for a day
or two for a bit of a holiday? There won’t be much doing now until Thursday.”
II
Feeling
recklessly secure behind his beard Mr. Polly surveyed the Fishbourne High
Street once again. The north side was much as he had known it except that
Rusper had vanished. A row of new shops replaced the destruction of the great
fire. Mantell and Throbson’s had risen again upon a more flamboyant pattern,
and the new fire station was in the Swiss-Teutonic style and with much red
paint. Next door in the place of Rumbold’s was a branch of the Colonial Tea
Company, and then a Salmon and Gluckstein Tobacco Shop, and then a little shop
that displayed sweets and professed a “Tea Room Upstairs.” He considered this
as a possible place in which to prosecute enquiries about his lost wife, wavering
a little between it and the God’s Providence Inn down the street. Then his eye
caught a name over the window, “Polly,” he read, “& Larkins! Well,
I’m—astonished!”
A
momentary faintness came upon him. He walked past and down the street, returned
and surveyed the shop again.
He saw a
middle-aged, rather untidy woman standing behind the counter, who for an
instant he thought might be Miriam terribly changed, and then recognised as his
sister-in-law Annie, filled out and no longer hilarious. She stared at him
without a sign of recognition as he entered the shop.
“Can I
have tea?” said Mr. Polly.
“Well,”
said Annie, “you can. But our Tea Room’s upstairs.... My sister’s been
cleaning it out—and it’s a bit upset.”
“It would
be,” said Mr. Polly softly.
“I beg
your pardon?” said Annie.
“I said I
didn’t mind. Up here?”
“I daresay
there’ll be a table,” said Annie, and followed him up to a room whose
conscientious disorder was intensely reminiscent of Miriam.
“Nothing
like turning everything upside down when you’re cleaning,” said Mr. Polly
cheerfully.
“It’s my
sister’s way,” said Annie impartially. “She’s gone out for a bit of air, but I
daresay she’ll be back soon to finish. It’s a nice light room when it’s tidy.
Can I put you a table over there?”
“Let me,”
said Mr. Polly, and assisted. He sat down by the open window and drummed on the
table and meditated on his next step while Annie vanished to get his tea. After
all, things didn’t seem so bad with Miriam. He tried over several gambits in
imagination.
“Unusual
name,” he said as Annie laid a cloth before him. Annie looked interrogation.
“Polly.
Polly & Larkins. Real, I suppose?”
“Polly’s
my sister’s name. She married a Mr. Polly.”
“Widow I
presume?” said Mr. Polly.
“Yes. This
five years—come October.”
“Lord!”
said Mr. Polly in unfeigned surprise.
“Found
drowned he was. There was a lot of talk in the place.”
“Never
heard of it,” said Mr. Polly. “I’m a stranger—rather.”
“In the
Medway near Maidstone. He must have been in the water for days. Wouldn’t have
known him, my sister wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been for the name sewn in his
clothes. All whitey and eat away he was.”
“Bless my
heart! Must have been rather a shock for her!”
“It was
a shock,” said Annie, and added darkly: “But sometimes a shock’s better than a
long agony.”
“No
doubt,” said Mr. Polly.
He gazed
with a rapt expression at the preparations before him. “So I’m drowned,”
something was saying inside him. “Life insured?” he asked.
“We
started the tea rooms with it,” said Annie.
Why, if things
were like this, had remorse and anxiety for Miriam been implanted in his soul?
No shadow of an answer appeared.
“Marriage
is a lottery,” said Mr. Polly.
“She
found it so,” said Annie. “Would you like some jam?”
“I’d like
an egg,” said Mr. Polly. “I’ll have two. I’ve got a sort of feeling—. As though
I wanted keeping up.... Wasn’t particularly good sort, this Mr. Polly?”
“He was a wearing
husband,” said Annie. “I’ve often pitied my sister. He was one of that sort—”
“Dissolute?”
suggested Mr. Polly faintly.
“No,” said
Annie judiciously; “not exactly dissolute. Feeble’s more the word. Weak, ’E
was. Weak as water. ’Ow long do you like your eggs boiled?”
“Four
minutes exactly,” said Mr. Polly.
“One gets
talking,” said Annie.
“One
does,” said Mr.-Polly, and she left him to his thoughts.
What
perplexed him was his recent remorse and tenderness for Miriam. Now he was back
in her atmosphere all that had vanished, and the old feeling of helpless
antagonism returned. He surveyed the piled furniture, the economically managed
carpet, the unpleasing pictures on the wall. Why had he felt remorse? Why had
he entertained this illusion of a helpless woman crying aloud in the pitiless
darkness for him? He peered into the unfathomable mysteries of the heart, and ducked
back to a smaller issue. Was he feeble?
The eggs
came up. Nothing in Annie’s manner invited a resumption of the discussion.
“Business
brisk?” he ventured to ask.
Annie
reflected. “It is,” she said, “and it isn’t. It’s like that.”
“Ah!” said
Mr. Polly, and squared himself to his egg. “Was there an inquest on that chap?”
“What
chap?”
“What was
his name?—Polly!”
“Of
course.”
“You’re
sure it was him?”
“What you
mean?”
Annie
looked at him hard, and suddenly his soul was black with terror.
“Who else
could it have been—in the very cloes ’e wore?”
“Of
course,” said Mr. Polly, and began his egg. He was so agitated that he only
realised its condition when he was half way through it and Annie safely
downstairs.
“Lord!” he
said, reaching out hastily for the pepper. “One of Miriam’s! Management! I
haven’t tasted such an egg for five years.... Wonder where she gets them! Picks
them out, I suppose!”
He
abandoned it for its fellow.
Except for
a slight mustiness the second egg was very palatable indeed. He was getting on
to the bottom of it as Miriam came in. He looked up. “Nice afternoon,” he said
at her stare, and perceived she knew him at once by the gesture and the voice.
She went white and shut the door behind her. She looked as though she was going
to faint. Mr. Polly sprang up quickly and handed her a chair. “My God!” she
whispered, and crumpled up rather than sat down.
“It’s you”
she said.
“No,” said
Mr. Polly very earnestly. “It isn’t. It just looks like me. That’s all.”
“I knew
that man wasn’t you—all along. I tried to think it was. I tried to think
perhaps the water had altered your wrists and feet and the colour of your
hair.”
“Ah!”
“I’d
always feared you’d come back.”
Mr. Polly
sat down by his egg. “I haven’t come back,” he said very earnestly. “Don’t you
think it.”
“’Ow we’ll
pay back the insurance now I don’t know.” She was weeping. She produced
a handkerchief and covered her face.
“Look
here, Miriam,” said Mr. Polly. “I haven’t come back and I’m not coming back.
I’m—I’m a Visitant from Another World. You shut up about me and I’ll shut up
about myself. I came back because I thought you might be hard up or in trouble
or some silly thing like that. Now I see you again—I’m satisfied. I’m satisfied
completely. See? I’m going to absquatulate, see? Hey Presto right away.”
He turned
to his tea for a moment, finished his cup noisily, stood up.
“Don’t you
think you’re going to see me again,” he said, “for you ain’t.”
He moved
to the door.
“That was
a tasty egg,” he said, hovered for a second and vanished.
Annie was
in the shop.
“The
missus has had a bit of a shock,” he remarked. “Got some sort of fancy about a
ghost. Can’t make it out quite. So Long!”
And he had
gone.
III
Mr. Polly
sat beside the fat woman at one of the little green tables at the back of the
Potwell Inn, and struggled with the mystery of life. It was one of those
evenings, serenely luminous, amply and atmospherically still, when the river
bend was at its best. A swan floated against the dark green masses of the
further bank, the stream flowed broad and shining to its destiny, with scarce a
ripple—except where the reeds came out from the headland—the three poplars rose
clear and harmonious against a sky of green and yellow. And it was as if it was
all securely within a great warm friendly globe of crystal sky. It was as safe
and enclosed and fearless as a child that has still to be born. It was an
evening full of the quality of tranquil, unqualified assurance. Mr. Polly’s
mind was filled with the persuasion that indeed all things whatsoever must
needs be satisfying and complete. It was incredible that life has ever done
more than seemed to jar, that there could be any shadow in life save such
velvet softnesses as made the setting for that silent swan, or any murmur but
the ripple of the water as it swirled round the chained and gently swaying
punt. And the mind of Mr. Polly, exalted and made tender by this atmosphere,
sought gently, but sought, to draw together the varied memories that came
drifting, half submerged, across the circle of his mind.
He spoke
in words that seemed like a bent and broken stick thrust suddenly into water,
destroying the mirror of the shapes they sought. “Jim’s not coming back again
ever,” he said. “He got drowned five years ago.”
“Where?”
asked the fat woman, surprised.
“Miles
from here. In the Medway. Away in Kent.”
“Lor!”
said the fat woman.
“It’s
right enough,” said Mr. Polly.
“How d’you
know?”
“I went to
my home.”
“Where?”
“Don’t
matter. I went and found out. He’d been in the water some days. He’d got my
clothes and they’d said it was me.”
“They?”
“It don’t
matter. I’m not going back to them.”
The fat
woman regarded him silently for some time. Her expression of scrutiny gave way
to a quiet satisfaction. Then her brown eyes went to the river.
“Poor
Jim,” she said. “’E ’adn’t much Tact—ever.”
She added
mildly: “I can’t ’ardly say I’m sorry.”
“Nor me,”
said Mr. Polly, and got a step nearer the thought in him. “But it don’t seem
much good his having been alive, does it?”
“’E wasn’t
much good,” the fat woman admitted. “Ever.”
“I suppose
there were things that were good to him,” Mr. Polly speculated. “They weren’t our
things.”
His hold
slipped again. “I often wonder about life,” he said weakly.
He tried
again. “One seems to start in life,” he said, “expecting something. And it
doesn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter. One starts with ideas that things are
good and things are bad—and it hasn’t much relation to what is good and
what is bad. I’ve always been the skeptaceous sort, and it’s always seemed rot
to me to pretend we know good from evil. It’s just what I’ve never done.
No Adam’s apple stuck in my throat, ma’am. I don’t own to it.”
He
reflected.
“I set
fire to a house—once.”
The fat
woman started.
“I don’t
feel sorry for it. I don’t believe it was a bad thing to do—any more than
burning a toy like I did once when I was a baby. I nearly killed myself with a
razor. Who hasn’t?—anyhow gone as far as thinking of it? Most of my time I’ve
been half dreaming. I married like a dream almost. I’ve never really planned my
life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with
everyone. Jim couldn’t help himself. I shot at him and tried to kill him. I dropped
the gun and he got it. He very nearly had me. I wasn’t a second too
soon—ducking.... Awkward—that night was.... M’mm.... But I don’t blame him—come
to that. Only I don’t see what it’s all up to....
“Like
children playing about in a nursery. Hurt themselves at times....
“There’s
something that doesn’t mind us,” he resumed presently. “It isn’t what we try to
get that we get, it isn’t the good we think we do is good. What makes us happy
isn’t our trying, what makes others happy isn’t our trying. There’s a sort of
character people like and stand up for and a sort they won’t. You got to work
it out and take the consequences.... Miriam was always trying.”
“Who was
Miriam?” asked the fat woman.
“No one
you know. But she used to go about with her brows knit trying not to do
whatever she wanted to do—if ever she did want to do anything—”
He lost
himself.
“You can’t
help being fat,” said the fat woman after a pause, trying to get up to his
thoughts.
“You
can’t,” said Mr. Polly.
“It helps
and it hinders.”
“Like my
upside down way of talking.”
“The
magistrates wouldn’t ’ave kept on the license to me if I ’adn’t been
fat....”
“Then what
have we done,” said Mr. Polly, “to get an evening like this? Lord! look at it!”
He sent his arm round the great curve of the sky.
“If I was
a Italian I should come out here and sing. I whistle sometimes, but bless you,
it’s singing I’ve got in my mind. Sometimes I think I live for sunsets.”
“I don’t
see that it does you any good always looking at sunsets like you do,” said the
fat woman.
“Nor me.
But I do. Sunsets and things I was made to like.”
“They
don’t ’elp you,” said the fat woman thoughtfully.
“Who
cares?” said Mr. Polly.
A deeper
strain had come to the fat woman. “You got to die some day,” she said.
“Some things
I can’t believe,” said Mr. Polly suddenly, “and one is your being a
skeleton....” He pointed his hand towards the neighbour’s hedge. “Look at
’em—against the yellow—and they’re just stingin’ nettles. Nasty weeds—if you
count things by their uses. And no help in the life hereafter. But just look at
the look of them!”
“It isn’t
only looks,” said the fat woman.
“Whenever
there’s signs of a good sunset and I’m not too busy,” said Mr. Polly, “I’ll
come and sit out here.”
The fat
woman looked at him with eyes in which contentment struggled with some obscure
reluctant protest, and at last turned them slowly to the black nettle pagodas
against the golden sky.
“I wish we
could,” she said.
“I will.”
The fat
woman’s voice sank nearly to the inaudible.
“Not
always,” she said.
Mr. Polly
was some time before he replied. “Come here always when I’m a ghost,” he
replied.
“Spoil the
place for others,” said the fat woman, abandoning her moral solicitudes for a
more congenial point of view.
“Not my
sort of ghost wouldn’t,” said Mr. Polly, emerging from another long pause. “I’d
be a sort of diaphalous feeling—just mellowish and warmish like....”
They said
no more, but sat on in the warm twilight until at last they could scarcely
distinguish each other’s faces. They were not so much thinking as lost in a
smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted by.
“Time we
was going in, O’ Party,” said Mr. Polly, standing up. “Supper to get. It’s as
you say, we can’t sit here for ever.”
The End
