THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 4
Chapter the Third
Cribs
I
Port
Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There
were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the “Joy de Vive”
got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as
warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul’s Churchyard, where
references were not required. It became apparent as time passed that new
interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man,
things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his
Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less
picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of
Parsons and work a bore. Platt revealed himself alone as a tiresome companion,
obsessed by romantic ideas about intrigues and vices and “society women.”
Mr.
Polly’s depression manifested itself in a general slackness. A certain
impatience in the manner of Mr. Garvace presently got upon his nerves.
Relations were becoming strained. He asked for a rise of salary to test his
position, and gave notice to leave when it was refused.
It took
him two months to place himself in another situation, and during that time he
had quite a disagreeable amount of loneliness, disappointment, anxiety and
humiliation.
He went at
first to stay with a married cousin who had a house at Easewood. His widowed
father had recently given up the music and bicycle shop (with the post of
organist at the parish church) that had sustained his home, and was living upon
a small annuity as a guest with this cousin, and growing a little tiresome on
account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner
diagnosed as imagination. He had aged with mysterious rapidity and become
excessively irritable, but the cousin’s wife was a born manager, and contrived
to get along with him. Our Mr. Polly’s status was that of a guest pure and
simple, but after a fortnight of congested hospitality in which he wrote nearly
a hundred letters beginning:
Sir:
Referring
to your advt. in the “Christian World” for an improver in Gents’ outfitting I
beg to submit myself for the situation. Have had six years’ experience....
and upset
a bottle of ink over a toilet cover and the bedroom carpet, his cousin took him
for a walk and pointed out the superior advantages of apartments in London from
which to swoop upon the briefly yawning vacancy.
“Helpful,”
said Mr. Polly; “very helpful, O’ Man indeed. I might have gone on there for
weeks,” and packed.
He got a
room in an institution that was partly a benevolent hostel for men in his
circumstances and partly a high minded but forbidding coffee house and a centre
for pleasant Sunday afternoons. Mr. Polly spent a critical but pleasant Sunday
afternoon in a back seat, inventing such phrases as:
“Soulful
Owner of the Exorbiant Largenial Development.”—An Adam’s Apple being in
question.
“Earnest
Joy.”
“Exultant,
Urgent Loogoobuosity.”
A manly
young curate, marking and misunderstanding his preoccupied face and moving
lips, came and sat by him and entered into conversation with the idea of making
him feel more at home. The conversation was awkward and disconnected for a
minute or so, and then suddenly a memory of the Port Burdock Bazaar occurred to
Mr. Polly, and with a baffling whisper of “Lill’ dog,” and a reassuring nod, he
rose up and escaped, to wander out relieved and observant into the varied
London streets.
He found
the collection of men he found waiting about in wholesale establishments in
Wood Street and St. Paul’s Churchyard (where they interview the buyers who have
come up from the country) interesting and stimulating, but far too strongly
charged with the suggestion of his own fate to be really joyful. There were men
in all degrees between confidence and distress, and in every stage between
extravagant smartness and the last stages of decay. There were sunny young men
full of an abounding and elbowing energy, before whom the soul of Polly sank in
hate and dismay. “Smart Juniors,” said Polly to himself, “full of Smart Juniosity.
The Shoveacious Cult.” There were hungry looking individuals of thirty-five or
so that he decided must be “Proletelerians”—he had often wanted to find someone
who fitted that attractive word. Middle-aged men, “too Old at Forty,”
discoursed in the waiting-rooms on the outlook in the trade; it had never been
so bad, they said, while Mr. Polly wondered if “De-juiced” was a permissible
epithet. There were men with an overweening sense of their importance,
manifestly annoyed and angry to find themselves still disengaged, and inclined
to suspect a plot, and men so faint-hearted one was terrified to imagine their
behaviour when it came to an interview. There was a fresh-faced young man with
an unintelligent face who seemed to think himself equipped against the world
beyond all misadventure by a collar of exceptional height, and another who
introduced a note of gaiety by wearing a flannel shirt and a check suit of
remarkable virulence. Every day Mr. Polly looked round to mark how many of the
familiar faces had gone, and the deepening anxiety (reflecting his own) on the
faces that remained, and every day some new type joined the drifting shoal. He
realised how small a chance his poor letter from Easewood ran against this
hungry cluster of competitors at the fountain head.
At the
back of Mr. Polly’s mind while he made his observations was a disagreeable
flavour of dentist’s parlour. At any moment his name might be shouted, and he
might have to haul himself into the presence of some fresh specimen of
employer, and to repeat once more his passionate protestation of interest in
the business, his possession of a capacity for zeal—zeal on behalf of anyone
who would pay him a yearly salary of twenty-six pounds a year.
The
prospective employer would unfold his ideals of the employee. “I want a smart,
willing young man, thoroughly willing—who won’t object to take trouble. I don’t
want a slacker, the sort of fellow who has to be pushed up to his work and held
there. I’ve got no use for him.”
At the
back of Mr. Polly’s mind, and quite beyond his control, the insubordinate
phrasemaker would be proffering such combinations as “Chubby Chops,” or “Chubby
Charmer,” as suitable for the gentleman, very much as a hat salesman proffers
hats.
“I don’t
think you’d find much slackness about me, sir,” said Mr. Polly brightly,
trying to disregard his deeper self.
“I want a
young man who means getting on.”
“Exactly,
sir. Excelsior.”
“I beg
your pardon?”
“I said
excelsior, sir. It’s a sort of motto of mine. From Longfellow. Would you want
me to serve through?”
The chubby
gentleman explained and reverted to his ideals, with a faint air of suspicion.
“Do you mean getting on?” he asked.
“I hope
so, sir,” said Mr. Polly.
“Get on or
get out, eh?”
Mr. Polly
made a rapturous noise, nodded appreciation, and said indistinctly—“Quite
my style.”
“Some of
my people have been with me twenty years,” said the employer. “My Manchester
buyer came to me as a boy of twelve. You’re a Christian?”
“Church of
England,” said Mr. Polly.
“H’m,”
said the employer a little checked. “For good all round business work I should
have preferred a Baptist. Still—”
He studied
Mr. Polly’s tie, which was severely neat and businesslike, as became an
aspiring outfitter. Mr. Polly’s conception of his own pose and expression was
rendered by that uncontrollable phrasemonger at the back as “Obsequies
Deference.”
“I am
inclined,” said the prospective employer in a conclusive manner, “to look up
your reference.”
Mr. Polly
stood up abruptly.
“Thank
you,” said the employer and dismissed him.
“Chump
chops! How about chump chops?” said the phrasemonger with an air of
inspiration.
“I hope
then to hear from you, sir,” said Mr. Polly in his best salesman manner.
“If
everything is satisfactory,” said the prospective employer.
II
A man
whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of
ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to
which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusinesslike joy, who reads
Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakespeare with gusto, and uses “Stertoraneous
Shover” and “Smart Junior” as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to
make a great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always
of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the
strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex-President Roosevelt, or
General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite
easily; and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old
England of Washington Irving and the memory of Charles the Second’s courtly
days. His progress was necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost
situations; there was something in his eye employers did not like; he would
have lost his places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally
brilliant salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair
window-dresser.
He went
from situation to situation, he invented a great wealth of nicknames, he
conceived enmities and made friends—but none so richly satisfying as Parsons.
He was frequently but mildly and discursively in love, and sometimes he thought
of that girl who had given him a yellow-green apple. He had an idea, amounting
to a flattering certainty, whose youthful freshness it was had stirred her to
self-forgetfulness. And sometimes he thought of Foxbourne sleeping prosperously
in the sun. And he began to have moods of discomfort and lassitude and
ill-temper due to the beginnings of indigestion.
Various
forces and suggestions came into his life and swayed him for longer and shorter
periods.
He went to
Canterbury and came under the influence of Gothic architecture. There was a
blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the Gothic; in the middle ages he would no
doubt have sat upon a scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too
flattering portraits of church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he
strolled, with his hands behind his back, along the cloisters behind the
cathedral, and looked at the rich grass plot in the centre, he had the
strangest sense of being at home—far more than he had ever been at home before.
“Portly capóns,” he used to murmur to himself, under the impression that
he was naming a characteristic type of medieval churchman.
He liked
to sit in the nave during the service, and look through the great gates at the
candles and choristers, and listen to the organ-sustained voices, but the
transepts he never penetrated because of the charge for admission. The music
and the long vista of the fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical
happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But
some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: “Metrorious
urnfuls,” “funererial claims,” “dejected angelosity,” for example. He wandered
about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived in the ripe and
cosy houses of grey stone that cluster there so comfortably. Through green
doors in high stone walls he caught glimpses of level lawns and blazing flower
beds; mullioned windows revealed shaded reading lamps and disciplined shelves
of brown bound books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, “Portly
capon,” or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish
in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a butterfly
across the cool still spaces of the place. Particularly he responded to the
ruined arches of the Benedictine’s Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower
from the school buildings. He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, but he
could not get on with Chaucer’s old-fashioned English; it fatigued his
attention, and he would have given all the story telling very readily for a few
adventures on the road. He wanted these nice people to live more and yarn less.
He liked the Wife of Bath very much. He would have liked to have known that
woman.
At
Canterbury, too, he first to his knowledge saw Americans.
His shop
did a good class trade in Westgate Street, and he would see them go by on the
way to stare at Chaucer’s “Chequers,” and then turn down Mercery Lane to Prior
Goldstone’s gate. It impressed him that they were always in a kind of quiet
hurry, and very determined and methodical people,—much more so than any English
he knew.
“Cultured
Rapacicity,” he tried.
“Vorocious
Return to the Heritage.”
He would
expound them incidentally to his attendant apprentices. He had overheard a
little lady putting her view to a friend near the Christchurch gate. The accent
and intonation had hung in his memory, and he would reproduce them more or less
accurately. “Now does this Marlowe monument really and truly matter?” he
had heard the little lady enquire. “We’ve no time for side shows and second
rate stunts, Mamie. We want just the Big Simple Things of the place, just the
Broad Elemental Canterbury praposition. What is it saying to us? I want to get
right hold of that, and then have tea in the very room that Chaucer did, and
hustle to get that four-eighteen train back to London.”
He would
go over these precious phrases, finding them full of an indescribable flavour.
“Just the Broad Elemental Canterbury praposition,” he would repeat....
He would
try to imagine Parsons confronted with Americans. For his own part he knew
himself to be altogether inadequate....
Canterbury
was the most congenial situation Mr. Polly ever found during these wander
years, albeit a very desert so far as companionship went.
III
It was after
Canterbury that the universe became really disagreeable to Mr. Polly. It was
brought home to him, not so much vividly as with a harsh and ungainly
insistence, that he was a failure in his trade. It was not the trade he ought
to have chosen, though what trade he ought to have chosen was by no means
clear.
He made
great but irregular efforts and produced a forced smartness that, like a cheap
dye, refused to stand sunshine. He acquired a sort of parsimony also, in which
acquisition he was helped by one or two phases of absolute impecuniosity. But
he was hopeless in competition against the naturally gifted, the born hustlers,
the young men who meant to get on.
He left
the Canterbury place very regretfully. He and another commercial gentleman took
a boat one Sunday afternoon at Sturry-on-the-Stour, when the wind was in the
west, and sailed it very happily eastward for an hour. They had never sailed a
boat before and it seemed simple and wonderful. When they turned they found the
river too narrow for tacking and the tide running out like a sluice. They
battled back to Sturry in the course of six hours (at a shilling the first hour
and six-pence for each hour afterwards) rowing a mile in an hour and a half or
so, until the turn of the tide came to help them, and then they had a night
walk to Canterbury, and found themselves remorselessly locked out.
The
Canterbury employer was an amiable, religious-spirited man and he would
probably not have dismissed Mr. Polly if that unfortunate tendency to phrase
things had not shocked him. “A Tide’s a Tide, Sir,” said Mr. Polly, feeling
that things were not so bad. “I’ve no lune-attic power to alter that.”
It proved
impossible to explain to the Canterbury employer that this was not a highly
disrespectful and blasphemous remark.
“And
besides, what good are you to me this morning, do you think?” said the
Canterbury employer, “with your arms pulled out of their sockets?”
So Mr.
Polly resumed his observations in the Wood Street warehouses once more, and had
some dismal times. The shoal of fish waiting for the crumbs of employment
seemed larger than ever.
He took
counsel with himself. Should he “chuck” the outfitting? It wasn’t any good for
him now, and presently when he was older and his youthful smartness had passed
into the dulness of middle age it would be worse. What else could he do?
He could
think of nothing. He went one night to a music hall and developed a vague idea
of a comic performance; the comic men seemed violent rowdies and not at all
funny; but when he thought of the great pit of the audience yawning before him
he realised that his was an altogether too delicate talent for such a use. He
was impressed by the charm of selling vegetables by auction in one of those
open shops near London Bridge, but admitted upon reflection his general want of
technical knowledge. He made some enquiries about emigration, but none of the
colonies were in want of shop assistants without capital. He kept up his
attendance in Wood Street.
He subdued
his ideal of salary by the sum of five pounds a year, and was taken at that
into a driving establishment in Clapham, which dealt chiefly in ready-made
suits, fed its assistants in an underground dining-room and kept them until
twelve on Saturdays. He found it hard to be cheerful there. His fits of
indigestion became worse, and he began to lie awake at night and think.
Sunshine and laughter seemed things lost for ever; picnics and shouting in the
moonlight.
The chief
shopwalker took a dislike to him and nagged him. “Nar then Polly!” “Look alive
Polly!” became the burthen of his days. “As smart a chap as you could have,”
said the chief shopwalker, “but no Zest. No Zest! No Vim!
What’s the matter with you?”
During his
night vigils Mr. Polly had a feeling—A young rabbit must have very much the
feeling, when after a youth of gambolling in sunny woods and furtive jolly
raids upon the growing wheat and exciting triumphant bolts before ineffectual
casual dogs, it finds itself at last for a long night of floundering effort and
perplexity, in a net—for the rest of its life.
He could
not grasp what was wrong with him. He made enormous efforts to diagnose his
case. Was he really just a “lazy slacker” who ought to “buck up”? He couldn’t
find it in him to believe it. He blamed his father a good deal—it is what
fathers are for—in putting him to a trade he wasn’t happy to follow, but he
found it impossible to say what he ought to have followed. He felt there had
been something stupid about his school, but just where that came in he couldn’t
say. He made some perfectly sincere efforts to “buck up” and “shove”
ruthlessly. But that was infernal—impossible. He had to admit himself miserable
with all the misery of a social misfit, and with no clear prospect of more than
the most incidental happiness ahead of him. And for all his attempts at
self-reproach or self-discipline he felt at bottom that he wasn’t at fault.
As a
matter of fact all the elements of his troubles had been adequately diagnosed
by a certain high-browed, spectacled gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a
gold pince-nez, and writing for the most part in the beautiful
library of the Reform Club. This gentleman did not know Mr. Polly personally,
but he had dealt with him generally as “one of those ill-adjusted units that
abound in a society that has failed to develop a collective intelligence and a
collective will for order, commensurate with its complexities.”
But
phrases of that sort had no appeal for Mr. Polly.
To be
continued
