THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 12
Chapter the Seventh
The Little Shop at Fishbourne
I
For
fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne.
Years they
were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they
had gone in a flash. But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have
described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not
very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with
discontented wrinklings round his eyes. He sat on the stile above Fishbourne
and cried to the Heavens above him: “Oh! Roo-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!”
And he wore a rather shabby black morning coat and vest, and his tie was richly
splendid, being from stock, and his golf cap aslant over one eye.
Fifteen
years ago, and it might have seemed to you that the queer little flower of Mr.
Polly’s imagination must be altogether withered and dead, and with no living
seed left in any part of him. But indeed it still lived as an insatiable hunger
for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for
beauty. He still read books when he had a chance, books that told of glorious places
abroad and glorious times, that wrung a rich humour from life and contained the
delight of words freshly and expressively grouped. But alas! there are not many
such books, and for the newspapers and the cheap fiction that abounded more and
more in the world Mr. Polly had little taste. There was no epithet in them. And
there was no one to talk to, as he loved to talk. And he had to mind his shop.
It was a
reluctant little shop from the beginning.
He had
taken it to escape the doom of Johnson’s choice and because Fishbourne had a
hold upon his imagination. He had disregarded the ill-built cramped rooms
behind it in which he would have to lurk and live, the relentless limitations
of its dimensions, the inconvenience of an underground kitchen that must necessarily
be the living-room in winter, the narrow yard behind giving upon the yard of
the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, the tiresome sitting and waiting for custom, the
restricted prospects of trade. He had visualised himself and Miriam first as at
breakfast on a clear bright winter morning amidst a tremendous smell of bacon,
and then as having muffins for tea. He had also thought of sitting on the beach
on Sunday afternoons and of going for a walk in the country behind the town and
picking marguerites and poppies. But, in fact, Miriam and he were
extremely cross at breakfast, and it didn’t run to muffins at tea. And she
didn’t think it looked well, she said, to go trapesing about the country on
Sundays.
It was
unfortunate that Miriam never took to the house from the first. She did not
like it when she saw it, and liked it less as she explored it. “There’s too
many stairs,” she said, “and the coal being indoors will make a lot of work.”
“Didn’t
think of that,” said Mr. Polly, following her round.
“It’ll be
a hard house to keep clean,” said Miriam.
“White
paint’s all very well in its way,” said Miriam, “but it shows the dirt
something fearful. Better ’ave ’ad it nicely grained.”
“There’s a
kind of place here,” said Mr. Polly, “where we might have some flowers in
pots.”
“Not me,”
said Miriam. “I’ve ’ad trouble enough with Minnie and ’er musk....”
They
stayed for a week in a cheap boarding house before they moved in. They had
bought some furniture in Stamton, mostly second-hand, but with new cheap
cutlery and china and linen, and they had supplemented this from the Fishbourne
shops. Miriam, relieved from the hilarious associations of home, developed a
meagre and serious quality of her own, and went about with knitted brows
pursuing some ideal of “’aving everything right.” Mr. Polly gave himself to the
arrangement of the shop with a certain zest, and whistled a good deal until
Miriam appeared and said that it went through her head. So soon as he had taken
the shop he had filled the window with aggressive posters announcing in no
measured terms that he was going to open, and now he was getting his stuff put
out he was resolved to show Fishbourne what window dressing could do. He meant
to give them boater straws, imitation Panamas, bathing dresses with novelties
in stripes, light flannel shirts, summer ties, and ready-made flannel trousers
for men, youths and boys. Incidentally he watched the small fishmonger over the
way, and had a glimpse of the china dealer next door, and wondered if a
friendly nod would be out of place. And on the first Sunday in this new life he
and Miriam arrayed themselves with great care, he in his wedding-funeral hat
and coat and she in her going-away dress, and went processionally to church, a
more respectable looking couple you could hardly imagine, and looked about
them.
Things
began to settle down next week into their places. A few customers came, chiefly
for bathing suits and hat guards, and on Saturday night the cheapest straw hats
and ties, and Mr. Polly found himself more and more drawn towards the shop door
and the social charm of the street. He found the china dealer unpacking a crate
at the edge of the pavement, and remarked that it was a fine day. The china
dealer gave a reluctant assent, and plunged into the crate in a manner that
presented no encouragement to a loquacious neighbour.
“Zealacious
commerciality,” whispered Mr. Polly to that unfriendly back view....
II
Miriam
combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was
never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or
tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound
moralist’s entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from
her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages
clothed under duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is
too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her
husband’s talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink
in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a
quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps
there was legitimate excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the
shop a great deal, to read—an indolent habit—and presently to seek company for
talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God’s Providence Inn with
some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which
bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish
variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken
five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no
charms for Mr. Polly’s mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and
too easily fatigued.
It was
soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense, and Miriam did
not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and “do things,” though
what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your
capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will
not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion
you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering
place, compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel
trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to
find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the
organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth,
Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the
watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding
clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn’t, in spite of
Miriam’s quietly persistent protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he
would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where
there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going
again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about
with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is
a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to
discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn
for economy prevailed with her.
The books
he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology,
and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of
life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop,
pretending to dust it with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or
overdone or a herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam’s way and full of
little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing,
standing at the door saying “How do!” to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip
or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium of a
theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last,
old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose
backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam.
There was,
for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts
and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman,
homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated,
smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his
head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled
at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a
book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial
forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked
“The Island Nights Entertainments,” and it never palled upon him that in the
dusky stabbing of the “Island of Voices” something poured over the stabber’s
hands “like warm tea.” Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid
phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!
And
another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the
Travels of the Abbés Hue and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls
from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them
donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a
hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him
that was never quenched to find the other volume and whence they came, and who
in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and “Tom Cringle’s Log” side by side
with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West
Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died.
Conrad’s prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a
peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled
sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing
bicycle, Bart Kennedy’s “A Sailor Tramp,” all written in livid jerks, and had
forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who
slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering
appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some
reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he
liked Lever and Thackeray’s “Catherine,” and all Dumas until he got to the
Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I
record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is
much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was
because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he
infinitely preferred any prose to any metrical writing.
A book he
browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton’s Wanderings in South
America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds
in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities
that made him chuckle when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the
ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but
when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost,
through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at
least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts
of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and
Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, Tales
from Blackwood, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He
developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William
Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and
walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of
sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge
from the world of everyday!...
The
essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well
athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing
himself with a sigh to attend to business.
Meanwhile
he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods,
he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened
his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter
ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at
the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him—forgetful of those books
and all he had lived and seen through them—that he had been in his shop for
exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during
that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly
hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope—and that it had
brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey.
III
I have
already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain high-browed
gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a golden pince-nez
and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the library of the Reform
Club. There he wrestles with what he calls “social problems” in a bloodless but
at times, I think one must admit, an extremely illuminating manner. He has a
fixed idea that something called a “collective intelligence” is wanted in the
world, which means in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about
things frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be
shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and respect (I
suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and artists and ill-groomed
difficult people, instead of using our brains in a moderate, sensible manner to
play golf and bridge (pretending a sense of humour prevents our doing anything
else with them) and generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way,
confound him! Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr.
Polly was unhappy entirely through that.
“A rapidly
complicating society,” he writes, “which as a whole declines to contemplate its
future or face the intricate problems of its organisation, is in exactly the
position of a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from
baths and exercise and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless
and aimless lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it
declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes discomfort and
misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by a maximum of avoidable
distress and inconvenience and human waste....
“Nothing
can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our community, the crying need
for a strenuous intellectual renewal than the consideration of that vast mass
of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained and altogether
pitiable people we contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term,
the Lower Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should
properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are only not
that, because the possession of some small hoard of money, savings during a
period of wage earning, an insurance policy or suchlike capital, prevents a
direct appeal to the rates. But they are doing little or nothing for the
community in return for what they consume; they have no understanding of any
relation of service to the community, they have never been trained nor their
imaginations touched to any social purpose. A great proportion of small
shopkeepers, for example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that
comes from inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in
machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and who set up
in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon which they count.
They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of their expenditure, the rest
is drawn from the shrinking capital. Essentially their lives are failures, not
the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves,
but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses which may end if the
individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before
actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means
are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular
development of transit and communications has made the organisation of
distributing businesses upon large and economical lines, inevitable; except in
the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn
an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone
for ever. Yet every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty
bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us
to avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five columns of
abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which means the final
collapse of another struggling family upon the resources of the community, and
continually a fresh supply of superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming
out of employment with savings or ‘help’ from relations, of widows with a husband’s
insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the
fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that everywhere abound....”
I quote
these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are
worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come
back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so
returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General
and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing
clearly—I suppose he sees clearly—the big process that dooms millions of lives
to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help,
no hint, by which we may get that better “collective will and intelligence”
which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly
sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing
nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort—with
life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at
least as keen and subtle as yours or mine.
To be continued
