THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 10
III
Figures
are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of
black—looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you
upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over
the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived
railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you
see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 ex. div.)
this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2—78 1/2.
It is like
the opening of a pit just under your feet!
So, too,
Mr. Polly’s happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a
vision of this tracery:
“298”
instead of
the
“350”
he had
come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence.
It gave
him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the
sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to
him. It made his brow moist.
“Going
down a vortex!” he whispered.
By a
characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two
pounds.
“Funererial
baked meats,” he said, recalling possible items.
The happy
dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of
limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a
thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that
exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter.
He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet.
And also
he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to.
He was
distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a
slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson.
“It’s
about time, O’ Man, I saw about doing something,” he said. “Riding about and
looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O’ Man, but it’s time I took one for
keeps.”
“What did
I tell you?” said Johnson.
“How do
you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?” Mr. Polly asked.
“You’re
really meaning it?”
“If it’s a
practable proposition, O’ Man. Assuming it’s practable. What’s your idea of the
figures?”
Johnson
went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. “Let’s
figure it out,” he said with solemn satisfaction. “Let’s see the lowest you
could do it on.”
He squared
himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the
evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little
hoard.
“What
running expenses have we got to provide for?” said Johnson, wetting his pencil.
“Let’s have them first. Rent?...”
At the end
of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: “It’s close. But you’ll
have a chance.”
“M’m,”
said Mr. Polly. “What more does a brave man want?”
“One thing
you can do quite easily. I’ve asked about it.”
“What’s
that, O’ Man?” said Mr. Polly.
“Take the
shop without the house above it.”
“I suppose
I might put my head in to mind it,” said Mr. Polly, “and get a job with my
body.”
“Not
exactly that. But I thought you’d save a lot if you stayed on here—being all
alone as you are.”
“Never
thought of that, O’ Man,” said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the
needlessness of Miriam.
“We were
talking of eighty pounds for stock,” said Johnson. “Of course seventy-five is
five pounds less, isn’t it? Not much else we can cut.”
“No,” said
Mr. Polly.
“It’s very
interesting, all this,” said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and
unfolding it. “I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed
salary. You’ll have to keep books of course.”
“One wants
to know where one is.”
“I should
do it all by double entry,” said Johnson. “A little troublesome at first, but
far the best in the end.”
“Lemme see
that paper,” said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a
nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin’s neat figures with listless
eyes.
“Well,”
said Johnson, rising and stretching. “Bed! Better sleep on it, O’ Man.”
“Right O,”
said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a
bed of thorns.
He had a
dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely
worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner’s backward glance at the trees and
heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as
fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the
quiet complacency, and indeed at times the very face and gestures of Johnson,
guided him towards that undesired establishment at the corner near the station.
“Oh Lord!” he cried, “I’d rather go back to cribs. I should keep my
money anyhow.” Fate never winced.
“Run away
to sea,” whispered Mr. Polly, but he knew he wasn’t man enough.
“Cut my
blooming throat.”
Some
braver strain urged him to think of Miriam, and for a little while he lay
still....
“Well, O’
Man?” said Johnson, when Mr. Polly came down to breakfast, and Mrs. Johnson
looked up brightly. Mr. Polly had never felt breakfast so unattractive before.
“Just a
day or so more, O’ Man—to turn it over in my mind,” he said.
“You’ll
get the place snapped up,” said Johnson.
There were
times in those last few days of coyness with his destiny when his engagement
seemed the most negligible of circumstances, and times—and these happened for
the most part at nights after Mrs. Johnson had indulged everybody in a Welsh
rarebit—when it assumed so sinister and portentous an appearance as to make him
think of suicide. And there were times too when he very distinctly desired to
be married, now that the idea had got into his head, at any cost. Also he tried
to recall all the circumstances of his proposal, time after time, and never
quite succeeded in recalling what had brought the thing off. He went over to
Stamton with a becoming frequency, and kissed all his cousins, and Miriam
especially, a great deal, and found it very stirring and refreshing. They all
appeared to know; and Minnie was tearful, but resigned. Mrs. Larkins met him,
and indeed enveloped him, with unwonted warmth, and there was a big pot of
household jam for tea. And he could not make up his mind to sign his name to
anything about the shop, though it crawled nearer and nearer to him, though the
project had materialised now to the extent of a draft agreement with the place
for his signature indicated in pencil.
One
morning, just after Mr. Johnson had gone to the station, Mr. Polly wheeled his
bicycle out into the road, went up to his bedroom, packed his long white
nightdress, a comb, and a toothbrush in a manner that was as offhand as he
could make it, informed Mrs. Johnson, who was manifestly curious, that he was
“off for a day or two to clear his head,” and fled forthright into the road,
and mounting turned his wheel towards the tropics and the equator and the south
coast of England, and indeed more particularly to where the little village of
Fishbourne slumbers and sleeps.
When he
returned four days later, he astonished Johnson beyond measure by remarking so
soon as the shop project was reopened:
“I’ve took
a little contraption at Fishbourne, O’ Man, that I fancy suits me better.”
He paused,
and then added in a manner, if possible, even more offhand:
“Oh! and
I’m going to have a bit of a nuptial over at Stamton with one of the Larkins
cousins.”
“Nuptial!”
said Johnson.
“Wedding
bells, O’ Man. Benedictine collapse.”
On the
whole Johnson showed great self-control. “It’s your own affair, O’ Man,” he
said, when things had been more clearly explained, “and I hope you won’t feel
sorry when it’s too late.”
But Mrs.
Johnson was first of all angrily silent, and then reproachful. “I don’t see
what we’ve done to be made fools of like this,” she said. “After all the
trouble we’ve ’ad to make you comfortable and see after you. Out late and
sitting up and everything. And then you go off as sly as sly without a word,
and get a shop behind our backs as though you thought we meant to steal your
money. I ’aven’t patience with such deceitfulness, and I didn’t think it of
you, Elfrid. And now the letting season’s ’arf gone by, and what I shall do
with that room of yours I’ve no idea. Frank is frank, and fair play fair play;
so I was told any’ow when I was a girl. Just as long as it suits you to
stay ’ere you stay ’ere, and then it’s off and no thank you whether we like it
or not. Johnson’s too easy with you. ’E sits there and doesn’t say a word, and
night after night ’e’s been addin’ and thinkin’ for you, instead of seeing to
his own affairs—”
She paused
for breath.
“Unfortunate
amoor,” said Mr. Polly, apologetically and indistinctly. “Didn’t expect it
myself.”
IV
Mr.
Polly’s marriage followed with a certain inevitableness.
He tried
to assure himself that he was acting upon his own forceful initiative, but at
the back of his mind was the completest realisation of his powerlessness to
resist the gigantic social forces he had set in motion. He had got to marry
under the will of society, even as in times past it has been appointed for
other sunny souls under the will of society that they should be led out by
serious and unavoidable fellow-creatures and ceremoniously drowned or burnt or
hung. He would have preferred infinitely a more observant and less conspicuous
rôle, but the choice was no longer open to him. He did his best to play his
part, and he procured some particularly neat check trousers to do it in. The
rest of his costume, except for some bright yellow gloves, a grey and blue
mixture tie, and that the broad crape hat-band was changed for a livelier piece
of silk, were the things he had worn at the funeral of his father. So nearly
akin are human joy and sorrow.
The
Larkins sisters had done wonders with grey sateen. The idea of orange blossom
and white veils had been abandoned reluctantly on account of the expense of
cabs. A novelette in which the heroine had stood at the altar in “a modest
going-away dress” had materially assisted this decision. Miriam was frankly
tearful, and so indeed was Annie, but with laughter as well to carry it off.
Mr. Polly heard Annie say something vague about never getting a chance because
of Miriam always sticking about at home like a cat at a mouse-hole, that
became, as people say, food for thought. Mrs. Larkins was from the first
flushed, garrulous, and wet and smeared by copious weeping; an incredibly
soaked and crumpled and used-up pocket handkerchief never left the clutch of
her plump red hand. “Goo’ girls, all of them,” she kept on saying in a
tremulous voice; “such-goo-goo-goo-girls!” She wetted Mr. Polly dreadfully when
she kissed him. Her emotion affected the buttons down the back of her bodice,
and almost the last filial duty Miriam did before entering on her new life was
to close that gaping orifice for the eleventh time. Her bonnet was small and
ill-balanced, black adorned with red roses, and first it got over her right eye
until Annie told her of it, and then she pushed it over her left eye and looked
ferocious for a space, and after that baptismal kissing of Mr. Polly the
delicate millinery took fright and climbed right up to the back part of her
head and hung on there by a pin, and flapped piteously at all the larger waves
of emotion that filled the gathering. Mr. Polly became more and more aware of
that bonnet as time went on, until he felt for it like a thing alive. Towards
the end it had yawning fits.
The
company did not include Mrs. Johnson, but Johnson came with a manifest
surreptitiousness and backed against walls and watched Mr. Polly with doubt and
speculation in his large grey eyes and whistled noiselessly and doubtful on the
edge of things. He was, so to speak, to be best man, sotto voce. A
sprinkling of girls in gay hats from Miriam’s place of business appeared in
church, great nudgers all of them, but only two came on afterwards to the
house. Mrs. Punt brought her son with his ever-widening mind, it was his first
wedding, and a Larkins uncle, a Mr. Voules, a licenced victualler, very kindly
drove over in a gig from Sommershill with a plump, well-dressed wife to give
the bride away. One or two total strangers drifted into the church and sat down
observantly far away.
This
sprinkling of people seemed only to enhance the cool brown emptiness of the
church, the rows and rows of empty pews, disengaged prayerbooks and abandoned
hassocks. It had the effect of a preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a
thin-legged, short-skirted verger about the disposition of the party. The
officiating clergy appeared distantly in the doorway of the vestry, putting on
his surplice, and relapsed into a contemplative cheek-scratching that was
manifestly habitual. Before the bride arrived Mr. Polly’s sense of the church
found an outlet in whispered criticisms of ecclesiastical architecture with
Johnson. “Early Norman arches, eh?” he said, “or Perpendicular.”
“Can’t
say,” said Johnson.
“Telessated
pavements, all right.”
“It’s well
laid anyhow.”
“Can’t say
I admire the altar. Scrappy rather with those flowers.”
He coughed
behind his hand and cleared his throat. At the back of his mind he was
speculating whether flight at this eleventh hour would be criminal or merely
reprehensible bad taste. A murmur from the nudgers announced the arrival of the
bridal party.
The little
procession from a remote door became one of the enduring memories of Mr.
Polly’s life. The little verger had bustled to meet it, and arrange it
according to tradition and morality. In spite of Mrs. Larkins’ “Don’t take her
from me yet!” he made Miriam go first with Mr. Voules, the bridesmaids followed
and then himself hopelessly unable to disentangle himself from the whispering
maternal anguish of Mrs. Larkins. Mrs. Voules, a compact, rounded woman with a
square, expressionless face, imperturbable dignity, and a dress of considerable
fashion, completed the procession.
Mr.
Polly’s eye fell first upon the bride; the sight of her filled him with a
curious stir of emotion. Alarm, desire, affection, respect—and a queer element
of reluctant dislike all played their part in that complex eddy. The grey dress
made her a stranger to him, made her stiff and commonplace, she was not even
the rather drooping form that had caught his facile sense of beauty when he had
proposed to her in the Recreation Ground. There was something too that did not
please him in the angle of her hat, it was indeed an ill-conceived hat with
large aimless rosettes of pink and grey. Then his mind passed to Mrs. Larkins
and the bonnet that was to gain such a hold upon him; it seemed to be
flag-signalling as she advanced, and to the two eager, unrefined sisters he was
acquiring.
A freak of
fancy set him wondering where and when in the future a beautiful girl with red
hair might march along some splendid aisle. Never mind! He became aware of Mr.
Voules.
He became
aware of Mr. Voules as a watchful, blue eye of intense forcefulness. It was the
eye of a man who has got hold of a situation. He was a fat, short, red-faced
man clad in a tight-fitting tail coat of black and white check with a coquettish
bow tie under the lowest of a number of crisp little red chins. He held the
bride under his arm with an air of invincible championship, and his free arm
flourished a grey top hat of an equestrian type. Mr. Polly instantly learnt
from the eye that Mr. Voules knew all about his longing for flight. Its azure
pupil glowed with disciplined resolution. It said: “I’ve come to give this girl
away, and give her away I will. I’m here now and things have to go on all
right. So don’t think of it any more”—and Mr. Polly didn’t. A faint phantom of
a certain “lill’ dog” that had hovered just beneath the threshold of
consciousness vanished into black impossibility. Until the conclusive moment of
the service was attained the eye of Mr. Voules watched Mr. Polly relentlessly,
and then instantly he relieved guard, and blew his nose into a voluminous and
richly patterned handkerchief, and sighed and looked round for the approval and
sympathy of Mrs. Voules, and nodded to her brightly like one who has always
foretold a successful issue to things. Mr. Polly felt then like a marionette
that has just dropped off its wire. But it was long before that release
arrived.
He became
aware of Miriam breathing close to him.
“Hullo!”
he said, and feeling that was clumsy and would meet the eye’s disapproval:
“Grey dress—suits you no end.”
Miriam’s
eyes shone under her hat-brim.
“Not
reely!” she whispered.
“You’re
all right,” he said with the feeling of observation and criticism stiffening
his lips. He cleared his throat.
The verger’s
hand pushed at him from behind. Someone was driving Miriam towards the altar
rail and the clergyman. “We’re in for it,” said Mr. Polly to her
sympathetically. “Where? Here? Right O.” He was interested for a moment or so
in something indescribably habitual in the clergyman’s pose. What a lot of
weddings he must have seen! Sick he must be of them!
“Don’t let
your attention wander,” said the eye.
“Got the
ring?” whispered Johnson.
“Pawned it
yesterday,” answered Mr. Polly and then had a dreadful moment under that
pitiless scrutiny while he felt in the wrong waistcoat pocket....
The
officiating clergy sighed deeply, began, and married them wearily and without
any hitch.
“D’b’loved,
we gath’d ’gether sight o’ Gard ’n face this con’gation join ’gather Man, Worn’
Holy Mat’my which is on’bl state stooted by Gard in times man’s innocency....”
Mr.
Polly’s thoughts wandered wide and far, and once again something like a cold
hand touched his heart, and he saw a sweet face in sunshine under the shadow of
trees.
Someone
was nudging him. It was Johnson’s finger diverted his eyes to the crucial place
in the prayer-book to which they had come.
“Wiltou
lover, cumfer, oner, keeper sickness and health...”
“Say ‘I
will.’”
Mr. Polly
moistened his lips. “I will,” he said hoarsely.
Miriam,
nearly inaudible, answered some similar demand.
Then the
clergyman said: “Who gifs Worn married to this man?”
“Well, I’m
doing that,” said Mr. Voules in a refreshingly full voice and looking round the
church. “You see, me and Martha Larkins being cousins—”
He was
silenced by the clergyman’s rapid grip directing the exchange of hands.
“Pete arf
me,” said the clergyman to Mr. Polly. “Take thee Mirum wed wife—”
“Take thee
Mirum wed’ wife,” said Mr. Polly.
“Have hold
this day ford.”
“Have hold
this day ford.”
“Betworse,
richpoo’—”
“Bet
worsh, richpoo’....”
Then came
Miriam’s turn.
“Lego
hands,” said the clergyman; “got the ring? No! On the book. So! Here! Pete arf
me, ‘withis ring Ivy wed.’”
“Withis
ring Ivy wed—”
So it went
on, blurred and hurried, like the momentary vision of an utterly beautiful
thing seen through the smoke of a passing train....
“Now, my
boy,” said Mr. Voules at last, gripping Mr. Polly’s elbow tightly, “you’ve got
to sign the registry, and there you are! Done!”
Before him
stood Miriam, a little stiffly, the hat with a slight rake across her forehead,
and a kind of questioning hesitation in her face. Mr. Voules urged him past
her.
It was
astounding. She was his wife!
And for some
reason Miriam and Mrs. Larkins were sobbing, and Annie was looking grave.
Hadn’t they after all wanted him to marry her? Because if that was the case—!
He became
aware for the first time of the presence of Uncle Pentstemon in the background,
but approaching, wearing a tie of a light mineral blue colour, and grinning and
sucking enigmatically and judiciously round his principal tooth.
To be
continued
