THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY
PART 18
VII
Next
morning about half-past ten Mr. Polly found himself seated under a clump of fir
trees by the roadside and about three miles and a half from the Potwell Inn. He
was by no means sure whether he was taking a walk to clear his mind or leaving
that threat-marred Paradise for good and all. His reason pointed a lean,
unhesitating finger along the latter course.
For after
all, the thing was not his quarrel.
That
agreeable plump woman, agreeable, motherly, comfortable as she might be, wasn’t
his affair; that child with the mop of black hair who combined so magically the
charm of mouse and butterfly and flitting bird, who was daintier than a flower
and softer than a peach, was no concern of his. Good heavens! what were they to
him? Nothing!...
Uncle Jim,
of course, had a claim, a sort of claim.
If it came
to duty and chucking up this attractive, indolent, observant, humorous,
tramping life, there were those who had a right to him, a legitimate right, a
prior claim on his protection and chivalry.
Why not
listen to the call of duty and go back to Miriam now?...
He had had
a very agreeable holiday....
And while
Mr. Polly sat thinking these things as well as he could, he knew that if only
he dared to look up the heavens had opened and the clear judgment on his case
was written across the sky.
He knew—he
knew now as much as a man can know of life. He knew he had to fight or perish.
Life had
never been so clear to him before. It had always been a confused, entertaining
spectacle, he had responded to this impulse and that, seeking agreeable and
entertaining things, evading difficult and painful things. Such is the way of
those who grow up to a life that has neither danger nor honour in its texture.
He had been muddled and wrapped about and entangled like a creature born in the
jungle who has never seen sea or sky. Now he had come out of it suddenly into a
great exposed place. It was as if God and Heaven waited over him and all the
earth was expectation.
“Not my
business,” said Mr. Polly, speaking aloud. “Where the devil do I come
in?”
And again,
with something between a whine and a snarl in his voice, “not my blasted
business!”
His mind
seemed to have divided itself into several compartments, each with its own
particular discussion busily in progress, and quite regardless of the others.
One was busy with the detailed interpretation of the phrase “Kick you ugly.”
There’s a sort of French wrestling in which you use and guard against feet.
Watch the man’s eye, and as his foot comes up, grip and over he goes—at your
mercy if you use the advantage right. But how do you use the advantage rightly?
When he
thought of Uncle Jim the inside feeling of his body faded away rapidly to a
blank discomfort....
“Old
cadger! She hadn’t no business to drag me into her quarrels. Ought to go to the
police and ask for help! Dragging me into a quarrel that don’t concern me.”
“Wish I’d
never set eyes on the rotten inn!”
The
reality of the case arched over him like the vault of the sky, as plain as the
sweet blue heavens above and the wide spread of hill and valley about him. Man
comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and
increase it, to fight for it, to face anything and dare anything for it,
counting death as nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And fear,
and dulness and indolence and appetite, which indeed are no more than fear’s
three crippled brothers who make ambushes and creep by night, are against him,
to delay him, to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that
quest. He had but to lift his eyes to see all that, as much a part of his world
as the driving clouds and the bending grass, but he kept himself downcast, a
grumbling, inglorious, dirty, fattish little tramp, full of dreads and
quivering excuses.
“Why the
hell was I ever born?” he said, with the truth almost winning him.
What do
you do when a dirty man who smells, gets you down and under in the dirt and dust
with a knee below your diaphragm and a large hairy hand squeezing your windpipe
tighter and tighter in a quarrel that isn’t, properly speaking, yours?
“If I had
a chance against him—” protested Mr. Polly.
“It’s no
Good, you see,” said Mr. Polly.
He stood
up as though his decision was made, and was for an instant struck still by
doubt.
There lay
the road before him going this way to the east and that to the west.
Westward,
one hour away now, was the Potwell Inn. Already things might be happening there....
Eastward
was the wise man’s course, a road dipping between hedges to a hop garden and a
wood and presently no doubt reaching an inn, a picturesque church, perhaps, a
village and fresh company. The wise man’s course. Mr. Polly saw himself going
along it, and tried to see himself going along it with all the self-applause a
wise man feels. But somehow it wouldn’t come like that. The wise man fell short
of happiness for all his wisdom. The wise man had a paunch and round shoulders
and red ears and excuses. It was a pleasant road, and why the wise man should
not go along it merry and singing, full of summer happiness, was a miracle to
Mr. Polly’s mind, but confound it! the fact remained, the figure went
slinking—slinking was the only word for it—and would not go otherwise than
slinking. He turned his eyes westward as if for an explanation, and if the
figure was no longer ignoble, the prospect was appalling.
“One kick
in the stummick would settle a chap like me,” said Mr. Polly.
“Oh, God!”
cried Mr. Polly, and lifted his eyes to heaven, and said for the last time in
that struggle, “It isn’t my affair!”
And so
saying he turned his face towards the Potwell Inn.
He went
back neither halting nor hastening in his pace after this last decision, but
with a mind feverishly busy.
“If I get
killed, I get killed, and if he gets killed I get hung. Don’t seem just
somehow.
“Don’t
suppose I shall frighten him off.”
VIII
The
private war between Mr. Polly and Uncle Jim for the possession of the Potwell
Inn fell naturally into three chief campaigns. There was first of all the great
campaign which ended in the triumphant eviction of Uncle Jim from the inn
premises, there came next after a brief interval the futile invasions of the
premises by Uncle Jim that culminated in the Battle of the Dead Eel, and after
some months of involuntary truce there was the last supreme conflict of the
Night Surprise. Each of these campaigns merits a section to itself.
Mr. Polly
re-entered the inn discreetly. He found the plump woman seated in her bar, her
eyes a-stare, her face white and wet with tears. “O God!” she was saying over
and over again. “O God!” The air was full of a spirituous reek, and on the
sanded boards in front of the bar were the fragments of a broken bottle and an
overturned glass.
She turned
her despair at the sound of his entry, and despair gave place to astonishment.
“You come
back!” she said.
“Ra-ther,”
said Mr. Polly.
“He’s—he’s
mad drunk and looking for her.”
“Where is
she?”
“Locked
upstairs.”
“Haven’t
you sent to the police?”
“No one to
send.”
“I’ll see
to it,” said Mr. Polly. “Out this way?”
She
nodded.
He went to
the crinkly paned window and peered out. Uncle Jim was coming down the garden
path towards the house, his hands in his pockets and singing hoarsely. Mr.
Polly remembered afterwards with pride and amazement that he felt neither faint
nor rigid. He glanced round him, seized a bottle of beer by the neck as an
improvised club, and went out by the garden door. Uncle Jim stopped amazed. His
brain did not instantly rise to the new posture of things. “You!” he cried, and
stopped for a moment. “You—scoot!”
“Your
job,” said Mr. Polly, and advanced some paces.
Uncle Jim
stood swaying with wrathful astonishment and then darted forward with clutching
hands. Mr. Polly felt that if his antagonist closed he was lost, and smote with
all his force at the ugly head before him. Smash went the bottle, and Uncle Jim
staggered, half-stunned by the blow and blinded with beer.
The lapses
and leaps of the human mind are for ever mysterious. Mr. Polly had never
expected that bottle to break. In the instant he felt disarmed and helpless.
Before him was Uncle Jim, infuriated and evidently still coming on, and for
defence was nothing but the neck of a bottle.
For a time
our Mr. Polly has figured heroic. Now comes the fall again; he sounded abject
terror; he dropped that ineffectual scrap of glass and turned and fled round
the corner of the house.
“Bolls!”
came the thick voice of the enemy behind him as one who accepts a challenge,
and bleeding, but indomitable, Uncle Jim entered the house.
“Bolls!”
he said, surveying the bar. “Fightin’ with bolls! I’ll show ’im fightin’ with
bolls!”
Uncle Jim
had learnt all about fighting with bottles in the Reformatory Home. Regardless of
his terror-stricken aunt he ranged among the bottled beer and succeeded after
one or two failures in preparing two bottles to his satisfaction by knocking
off the bottoms, and gripping them dagger-wise by the necks. So prepared, he
went forth again to destroy Mr. Polly.
Mr. Polly,
freed from the sense of urgent pursuit, had halted beyond the raspberry canes
and rallied his courage. The sense of Uncle Jim victorious in the house
restored his manhood. He went round by the outhouses to the riverside, seeking
a weapon, and found an old paddle boat hook. With this he smote Uncle Jim as he
emerged by the door of the tap. Uncle Jim, blaspheming dreadfully and with dire
stabbing intimations in either hand, came through the splintering paddle like a
circus rider through a paper hoop, and once more Mr. Polly dropped his weapon
and fled.
A careless
observer watching him sprint round and round the inn in front of the lumbering
and reproachful pursuit of Uncle Jim might have formed an altogether erroneous
estimate of the issue of the campaign. Certain compensating qualities of the
very greatest military value were appearing in Mr. Polly even as he ran; if
Uncle Jim had strength and brute courage and the rich toughening experience a
Reformatory Home affords, Mr. Polly was nevertheless sober, more mobile and
with a mind now stimulated to an almost incredible nimbleness. So that he not
only gained on Uncle Jim, but thought what use he might make of this advantage.
The word “strategious” flamed red across the tumult of his mind. As he came
round the house for the third time, he darted suddenly into the yard, swung the
door to behind himself and bolted it, seized the zinc pig’s pail that stood by
the entrance to the kitchen and had it neatly and resonantly over Uncle Jim’s head
as he came belatedly in round the outhouse on the other side. One of the
splintered bottles jabbed Mr. Polly’s ear—at the time it seemed of no
importance—and then Uncle Jim was down and writhing dangerously and noisily
upon the yard tiles, with his head still in the pig pail and his bottles gone
to splinters, and Mr. Polly was fastening the kitchen door against him.
“Can’t go
on like this for ever,” said Mr. Polly, whooping for breath, and selecting a
weapon from among the brooms that stood behind the kitchen door.
Uncle Jim
was losing his head. He was up and kicking the door and bellowing unamiable
proposals and invitations, so that a strategist emerging silently by the tap
door could locate him without difficulty, steal upon him unawares and—!
But before
that felling blow could be delivered Uncle Jim’s ear had caught a footfall, and
he turned. Mr. Polly quailed and lowered his broom,—a fatal hesitation.
“Now
I got you!” cried Uncle Jim, dancing forward in a disconcerting zigzag.
He rushed
to close, and Mr. Polly stopped him neatly, as it were a miracle, with the head
of the broom across his chest. Uncle Jim seized the broom with both hands.
“Lea-go!” he said, and tugged. Mr. Polly shook his head, tugged, and showed
pale, compressed lips. Both tugged. Then Uncle Jim tried to get round the end
of the broom; Mr. Polly circled away. They began to circle about one another,
both tugging hard, both intensely watchful of the slightest initiative on the
part of the other. Mr. Polly wished brooms were longer, twelve or thirteen
feet, for example; Uncle Jim was clearly for shortness in brooms. He wasted
breath in saying what was to happen shortly, sanguinary, oriental
soul-blenching things, when the broom no longer separated them. Mr. Polly
thought he had never seen an uglier person. Suddenly Uncle Jim flashed into
violent activity, but alcohol slows movement, and Mr. Polly was equal to him.
Then Uncle Jim tried jerks, and for a terrible instant seemed to have the broom
out of Mr. Polly’s hands. But Mr. Polly recovered it with the clutch of a
drowning man. Then Uncle Jim drove suddenly at Mr. Polly’s midriff, but again
Mr. Polly was ready and swept him round in a circle. Then suddenly a wild hope
filled Mr. Polly. He saw the river was very near, the post to which the punt
was tied not three yards away. With a wild yell, he sent the broom home into
his antagonist’s ribs.
“Woosh!”
he cried, as the resistance gave.
“Oh! Gaw!”
said Uncle Jim, going backward helplessly, and Mr. Polly thrust hard and
abandoned the broom to the enemy’s despairing clutch.
Splash!
Uncle Jim was in the water and Mr. Polly had leapt like a cat aboard the ferry
punt and grasped the pole.
Up came
Uncle Jim spluttering and dripping. “You (unprofitable matter, and printing it
would lead to a censorship of novels)! You know I got a weak chess!”
The pole
took him in the throat and drove him backward and downwards.
“Lea go!”
cried Uncle Jim, staggering and with real terror in his once awful eyes.
Splash!
Down he fell backwards into a frothing mass of water with Mr. Polly jabbing at
him. Under water he turned round and came up again as if in flight towards the
middle of the river. Directly his head reappeared Mr. Polly had him between the
shoulders and under again, bubbling thickly. A hand clutched and disappeared.
It was
stupendous! Mr. Polly had discovered the heel of Achilles. Uncle Jim had no
stomach for cold water. The broom floated away, pitching gently on the swell.
Mr. Polly, infuriated with victory, thrust Uncle Jim under again, and drove the
punt round on its chain in such a manner that when Uncle Jim came up for the
fourth time—and now he was nearly out of his depth, too buoyed up to walk and
apparently nearly helpless,—Mr. Polly, fortunately for them both, could not
reach him. Uncle Jim made the clumsy gestures of those who struggle insecurely
in the water. “Keep out,” said Mr. Polly. Uncle Jim with a great effort got a
footing, emerged until his arm-pits were out of water, until his waistcoat
buttons showed, one by one, till scarcely two remained, and made for the camp
sheeting.
“Keep
out!” cried Mr. Polly, and leapt off the punt and followed the movements of his
victim along the shore.
“I tell
you I got a weak chess,” said Uncle Jim, moistly. “This ain’t fair fightin’.”
“Keep
out!” said Mr. Polly.
“This
ain’t fair fightin’,” said Uncle Jim, almost weeping, and all his terrors had
gone.
“Keep
out!” said Mr. Polly, with an accurately poised pole.
“I tell
you I got to land, you Fool,” said Uncle Jim, with a sort of despairing wrathfulness,
and began moving down-stream.
“You keep
out,” said Mr. Polly in parallel movement. “Don’t you ever land on this place
again!...”
Slowly,
argumentatively, and reluctantly, Uncle Jim waded down-stream. He tried
threats, he tried persuasion, he even tried a belated note of pathos; Mr. Polly
remained inexorable, if in secret a little perplexed as to the outcome of the
situation. “This cold’s getting to my marrer!” said Uncle Jim.
“You want
cooling. You keep out in it,” said Mr. Polly.
They came
round the bend into sight of Nicholson’s ait, where the backwater runs down to
the Potwell Mill. And there, after much parley and several feints, Uncle Jim
made a desperate effort and struggled into clutch of the overhanging osiers
on the island, and so got out of the water with the millstream between them. He
emerged dripping and muddy and vindictive. “By Gaw!” he said. “I’ll skin
you for this!”
“You keep
off or I’ll do worse to you,” said Mr. Polly.
The spirit
was out of Uncle Jim for the time, and he turned away to struggle through the osiers
towards the mill, leaving a shining trail of water among the green-grey stems.
Mr. Polly
returned slowly and thoughtfully to the inn, and suddenly his mind began to
bubble with phrases. The plump woman stood at the top of the steps that led up
to the inn door to greet him.
“Law!” she
cried as he drew near, “’asn’t ’e killed you?”
“Do I look
like it?” said Mr. Polly.
“But
where’s Jim?”
“Gone
off.”
“’E was
mad drunk and dangerous!”
“I put him
in the river,” said Mr. Polly. “That toned down his alcolaceous frenzy! I gave
him a bit of a doing altogether.”
“Hain’t he
’urt you?”
“Not a bit
of it!”
“Then
what’s all that blood beside your ear?”
Mr. Polly
felt. “Quite a cut! Funny how one overlooks things! Heated moments! He must
have done that when he jabbed about with those bottles. Hullo, Kiddy! You
venturing downstairs again?”
“Ain’t he
killed you?” asked the little girl.
“Well!”
“I wish
I’d seen more of the fighting.”
“Didn’t you?”
“All I saw
was you running round the house and Uncle Jim after you.”
There was
a little pause. “I was leading him on,” said Mr. Polly.
“Someone’s
shouting at the ferry,” she said.
“Right O.
But you won’t see any more of Uncle Jim for a bit. We’ve been having a conversazione
about that.”
“I believe
it is Uncle Jim,” said the little girl.
“Then he
can wait,” said Mr. Polly shortly.
He turned
round and listened for the words that drifted across from the little figure on
the opposite bank. So far as he could judge, Uncle Jim was making an
appointment for the morrow. He replied with a defiant movement of the punt
pole. The little figure was convulsed for a moment and then went on its way
upstream—fiercely.
So it was
the first campaign ended in an insecure victory.
To be continued
