THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 8
IV
It was
past ten when Mr. Polly found himself riding back towards Easewood in a broad
moonlight with a little Japanese lantern dangling from his handle bar and
making a fiery circle of pinkish light on and round about his front wheel. He
was mightily pleased with himself and the day. There had been four-ale to drink
at supper mixed with gingerbeer, very free and jolly in a jug. No shadow fell
upon the agreeable excitement of his mind until he faced the anxious and
reproachful face of Johnson, who had been sitting up for him, smoking and
trying to read the odd volume of “Purchas his Pilgrimes,”—about the monk who
went into Sarmatia and saw the Tartar carts.
“Not had
an accident, Elfrid?” said Johnson.
The
weakness of Mr. Polly’s character came out in his reply. “Not much,” he said.
“Pedal got a bit loose in Stamton, O’ Man. Couldn’t ride it. So I looked up the
cousins while I waited.”
“Not the
Larkins lot?”
“Yes.”
Johnson
yawned hugely and asked for and was given friendly particulars. “Well,” he
said, “better get to bed. I have been reading that book of yours—rum stuff.
Can’t make it out quite. Quite out of date I should say if you asked me.”
“That’s
all right, O’ Man,” said Mr. Polly.
“Not a bit
of use for anything I can see.”
“Not a
bit.”
“See any
shops in Stamton?”
“Nothing
to speak of,” said Mr. Polly. “Goo-night, O’ Man.”
Before and
after this brief conversation his mind ran on his cousins very warmly and
prettily in the vein of high spring. Mr. Polly had been drinking at the
poisoned fountains of English literature, fountains so unsuited to the needs of
a decent clerk or shopman, fountains charged with the dangerous suggestion that
it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and rather
carelessly. It seemed to him that evening to be handsome and humorous and
practicable to make love to all his cousins. It wasn’t that he liked any of
them particularly, but he liked something about them. He liked their youth and
femininity, their resolute high spirits and their interest in him.
They
laughed at nothing and knew nothing, and Minnie had lost a tooth and Annie
screamed and shouted, but they were interesting, intensely interesting.
And Miriam
wasn’t so bad as the others. He had kissed them all and had been kissed in
addition several times by Minnie,—“oscoolatory exercise.”
He buried
his nose in his pillow and went to sleep—to dream of anything rather than
getting on in the world, as a sensible young man in his position ought to have
done.
V
And now
Mr. Polly began to lead a divided life. With the Johnsons he professed to be
inclined, but not so conclusively inclined as to be inconvenient, to get a shop
for himself, to be, to use the phrase he preferred, “looking for an opening.”
He would ride off in the afternoon upon that research, remarking that he was
going to “cast a strategetical eye” on Chertsey or Weybridge. But if not all
roads, still a great majority of them, led by however devious ways to Stamton,
and to laughter and increasing familiarity. Relations developed with Annie and
Minnie and Miriam. Their various characters were increasingly interesting. The
laughter became perceptibly less abundant, something of the fizz had gone from
the first opening, still these visits remained wonderfully friendly and
upholding. Then back he would come to grave but evasive discussions with
Johnson.
Johnson
was really anxious to get Mr. Polly “into something.” His was a reserved honest
character, and he would really have preferred to see his lodger doing things
for himself than receive his money for housekeeping. He hated waste, anybody’s
waste, much more than he desired profit. But Mrs. Johnson was all for Mr.
Polly’s loitering. She seemed much the more human and likeable of the two to
Mr. Polly.
He tried
at times to work up enthusiasm for the various avenues to well-being his
discussion with Johnson opened. But they remained disheartening prospects. He
imagined himself wonderfully smartened up, acquiring style and value in a
London shop, but the picture was stiff and unconvincing. He tried to rouse
himself to enthusiasm by the idea of his property increasing by leaps and
bounds, by twenty pounds a year or so, let us say, each year, in a well-placed
little shop, the corner shop Johnson favoured. There was a certain picturesque
interest in imagining cut-throat economies, but his heart told him there would
be little in practising them.
And then
it happened to Mr. Polly that real Romance came out of dreamland into life, and
intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him.
She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing
him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of her retreating aspect.
It was all
the more to Mr. Polly’s taste that the thing should happen as things happen in
books.
In a
resolute attempt not to get to Stamton that day, he had turned due southward
from Easewood towards a country where the abundance of bracken jungles, lady’s
smock, stitchwork, bluebells and grassy stretches by the wayside under shady
trees does much to compensate the lighter type of mind for the absence of
promising “openings.” He turned aside from the road, wheeled his machine along
a faintly marked attractive trail through bracken until he came to a heap of
logs against a high old stone wall with a damaged coping and wallflower plants
already gone to seed. He sat down, balanced the straw hat on a convenient lump
of wood, lit a cigarette, and abandoned himself to agreeable musings and the
friendly observation of a cheerful little brown and grey bird his stillness
presently encouraged to approach him. “This is All Right,” said Mr. Polly
softly to the little brown and grey bird. “Business—later.”
He
reflected that he might go on this way for four or five years, and then be
scarcely worse off than he had been in his father’s lifetime.
“Vile
Business,” said Mr. Polly.
Then
Romance appeared. Or to be exact, Romance became audible.
Romance
began as a series of small but increasingly vigorous movements on the other
side of the wall, then as a voice murmuring, then as a falling of little
fragments on the hither side and as ten pink finger tips, scarcely apprehended
before Romance became startling and emphatically a leg, remained for a time a
fine, slender, actively struggling limb, brown stockinged and wearing a brown
toe-worn shoe, and then—. A handsome red-haired girl wearing a short dress of
blue linen was sitting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged by
her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly....
His fine
instincts made him turn his head away and assume an attitude of negligent
contemplation, with his ears and mind alive to every sound behind him.
“Goodness!”
said a voice with a sharp note of surprise.
Mr. Polly
was on his feet in an instant. “Dear me! Can I be of any assistance?” he said
with deferential gallantry.
“I don’t
know,” said the young lady, and regarded him calmly with clear blue eyes.
“I didn’t
know there was anyone here,” she added.
“Sorry,”
said Mr. Polly, “if I am intrudaceous. I didn’t know you didn’t want me to be
here.”
She
reflected for a moment on the word. “It isn’t that,” she said, surveying him.
“I
oughtn’t to get over the wall,” she explained. “It’s out of bounds. At least in
term time. But this being holidays—”
Her manner
placed the matter before him.
“Holidays
is different,” said Mr. Polly.
“I don’t
want to actually break the rules,” she said.
“Leave
them behind you,” said Mr. Polly with a catch of the breath, “where they are
safe”; and marvelling at his own wit and daring, and indeed trembling within
himself, he held out a hand for her.
She
brought another brown leg from the unknown, and arranged her skirt with a
dexterity altogether feminine. “I think I’ll stay on the wall,” she decided.
“So long as some of me’s in bounds—”
She
continued to regard him with eyes that presently joined dancing in an
irresistible smile of satisfaction. Mr. Polly smiled in return.
“You
bicycle?” she said.
Mr. Polly
admitted the fact, and she said she did too.
“All my
people are in India,” she explained. “It’s beastly rot—I mean it’s frightfully
dull being left here alone.”
“All my
people,” said Mr. Polly, “are in Heaven!”
“I say!”
“Fact!”
said Mr. Polly. “Got nobody.”
“And
that’s why—” she checked her artless comment on his mourning. “I say,” she said
in a sympathetic voice, “I am sorry. I really am. Was it a fire or a
ship—or something?”
Her
sympathy was very delightful. He shook his head. “The ordinary table of
mortality,” he said. “First one and then another.”
Behind his
outward melancholy, delight was dancing wildly. “Are you lonely?” asked
the girl.
Mr. Polly
nodded.
“I was
just sitting there in melancholy rectrospectatiousness,” he said, indicating
the logs, and again a swift thoughtfulness swept across her face.
“There’s
no harm in our talking,” she reflected.
“It’s a
kindness. Won’t you get down?”
She
reflected, and surveyed the turf below and the scene around and him.
“I’ll stay
on the wall,” she said. “If only for bounds’ sake.”
She
certainly looked quite adorable on the wall. She had a fine neck and pointed
chin that was particularly admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine
eyebrows are never so pretty as when they look down upon one. But no
calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was going on beneath her ruddy shock of
hair.
VI
“Let’s
talk,” she said, and for a time they were both tongue-tied.
Mr.
Polly’s literary proclivities had taught him that under such circumstances a
strain of gallantry was demanded. And something in his blood repeated that
lesson.
“You make
me feel like one of those old knights,” he said, “who rode about the country
looking for dragons and beautiful maidens and chivalresque adventures.”
“Oh!” she
said. “Why?”
“Beautiful
maiden,” he said.
She flushed
under her freckles with the quick bright flush those pretty red-haired people
have. “Nonsense!” she said.
“You are.
I’m not the first to tell you that. A beautiful maiden imprisoned in an
enchanted school.”
“You
wouldn’t think it enchanted!”
“And here
am I—clad in steel. Well, not exactly, but my fiery war horse is anyhow. Ready
to absquatulate all the dragons and rescue you.”
She
laughed, a jolly laugh that showed delightfully gleaming teeth. “I wish you
could see the dragons,” she said with great enjoyment. Mr. Polly felt
they were a sun’s distance from the world of everyday.
“Fly with
me!” he dared.
She stared
for a moment, and then went off into peals of laughter. “You are funny!”
she said. “Why, I haven’t known you five minutes.”
“One
doesn’t—in this medevial world. My mind is made up, anyhow.”
He was
proud and pleased with his joke, and quick to change his key neatly. “I wish
one could,” he said.
“I wonder
if people ever did!”
“If there
were people like you.”
“We don’t
even know each other’s names,” she remarked with a descent to matters of fact.
“Yours is
the prettiest name in the world.”
“How do
you know?”
“It must
be—anyhow.”
“It is
rather pretty you know—it’s Christabel.”
“What did
I tell you?”
“And
yours?”
“Poorer than
I deserve. It’s Alfred.”
“I
can’t call you Alfred.”
“Well,
Polly.”
“It’s a
girl’s name!”
For a
moment he was out of tune. “I wish it was!” he said, and could have bitten out
his tongue at the Larkins sound of it.
“I shan’t
forget it,” she remarked consolingly.
“I say,”
she said in the pause that followed. “Why are you riding about the country on a
bicycle?”
“I’m doing
it because I like it.”
She sought
to estimate his social status on her limited basis of experience. He stood
leaning with one hand against the wall, looking up at her and tingling with
daring thoughts. He was a littleish man, you must remember, but neither
mean-looking nor unhandsome in those days, sunburnt by his holiday and now
warmly flushed. He had an inspiration to simple speech that no practised
trifler with love could have bettered. “There is love at first sight,”
he said, and said it sincerely.
She stared
at him with eyes round and big with excitement.
“I think,”
she said slowly, and without any signs of fear or retreat, “I ought to get back
over the wall.”
“It
needn’t matter to you,” he said. “I’m just a nobody. But I know you are the
best and most beautiful thing I’ve ever spoken to.” His breath caught against
something. “No harm in telling you that,” he said.
“I should have
to go back if I thought you were serious,” she said after a pause, and they
both smiled together.
After that
they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr.
Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as
an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to
find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in
armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his
normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a
thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face.
“Boom!”
came the sound of a gong.
“Lordy!”
cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone.
Then her
pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. “Knight!” she cried
from the other side of the wall. “Knight there!”
“Lady!” he
answered.
“Come
again to-morrow!”
“At your
command. But——”
“Yes?”
“Just one
finger.”
“What do
you mean?”
“To kiss.”
The rustle
of retreating footsteps and silence....
But after
he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of
breath with the effort to surmount the wall—and head first this time. And it
seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the
dreams and enchanted memories that had filled the interval.
VII
From first
to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed
ten years of dreams.
“He don’t
seem,” said Johnson, “to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the
corner’s bound to be snapped up if he don’t look out.”
The girl
and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and
she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague
excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or
less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and
try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation,
watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement
into him—with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age.
And Mr.
Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had
dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate
hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable
ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable
way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys—they were indeed
but the merest remote glimpses of joy—were brighter than a dying martyr’s vision
of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless
pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but
all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly’s nature broke like a wave and
foamed up at that girl’s feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on
the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and
wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a
freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and
suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil
and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream....
And then
with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best
friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had
discovered on the other side of the wall.
“Look
here,” said Mr. Polly, “I’m wild for the love of you! I can’t keep up this
gesticulations game any more! I’m not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You
may sit up there smiling, but I’d die in torments to have you mine for an hour.
I’m nobody and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years?
You’re just a girl yet, and it wouldn’t be hard.”
“Shut up!”
said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see
touched her hand.
“I’ve
always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I’ve just
woke up. Wait till I’ve got a chance with the money I’ve got.”
“But you
haven’t got much money!”
“I’ve got
enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I’d find a chance. I’ll do
that anyhow. I’ll go away. I mean what I say—I’ll stop trifling and shirking.
If I don’t come back it won’t matter. If I do——”
Her
expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him.
“Don’t!”
she said in an undertone.
“Don’t—what?”
“Don’t go
on like this! You’re different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my
hand as his—what did you call it?” The ghost of a smile curved her face.
“Gurdrum!”
“But——!”
Then
through a pause they both stared at each other, listening.
A muffled
tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself.
“Shut up,
Rosie!” said a voice.
“I tell
you I will see! I can’t half hear. Give me a leg up!”
“You
Idiot! He’ll see you. You’re spoiling everything.”
The bottom
dropped out of Mr. Polly’s world. He felt as people must feel who are going to
faint.
“You’ve
got someone—” he said aghast.
She found
life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. “You filthy
little Beasts!” she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung
herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear,
and a swift, fierce altercation.
For a
couple of seconds he stood agape.
Then a wild
resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall
made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with
insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall.
Romance
and his goddess had vanished.
A
red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who
shrieked with pain and cried: “Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christabel!”
“You
idiot!” cried Christabel. “You giggling Idiot!”
Two other
young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery.
Then the
grip of Mr. Polly’s fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and
slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and
hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a
moment he crouched against the wall.
He swore,
staggered to the pile of logs and sat down.
He
remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together.
“Fool,” he
said at last; “you Blithering Fool!” and began to rub his shin as though he had
just discovered its bruises.
Afterwards
he found his face was wet with blood—which was none the less red stuff from the
heart because it came from slight abrasions.
To be continued
