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The History of Mr. Polly

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #7308 · 412,229 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The History of Mr. Polly

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7308]
                Most recently updated: November 1, 2015

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY ***




Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, and the
Distributed Proofreading Team









The History of Mr. Polly

by

H. G. Wells



Chapter the First

Beginnings, and the Bazaar


I

"Hole!" said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly
increased emphasis: "'Ole!" He paused, and then broke out with one of
his private and peculiar idioms. "Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!"

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare looking fields, and
suffering acutely from indigestion.

He suffered from indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life,
but as he lacked introspection he projected the associated discomfort
upon the world. Every afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a
whole and every aspect of life that presented itself was "beastly."
And this afternoon, lured by the delusive blueness of a sky that was
blue because the wind was in the east, he had come out in the hope of
snatching something of the joyousness of spring. The mysterious
alchemy of mind and body refused, however, to permit any joyousness
whatever in the spring.

He had had a little difficulty in finding his cap before he came out.
He wanted his cap--the new golf cap--and Mrs. Polly must needs fish
out his old soft brown felt hat. "'_Ere's_ your 'at," she said in a
tone of insincere encouragement.

He had been routing among the piled newspapers under the kitchen
dresser, and had turned quite hopefully and taken the thing. He put it
on. But it didn't feel right. Nothing felt right. He put a trembling
hand upon the crown of the thing and pressed it on his head, and tried
it askew to the right and then askew to the left.

Then the full sense of the indignity offered him came home to him. The
hat masked the upper sinister quarter of his face, and he spoke with a
wrathful eye regarding his wife from under the brim. In a voice thick
with fury he said: "I s'pose you'd like me to wear that silly Mud Pie
for ever, eh? I tell you I won't. I'm sick of it. I'm pretty near sick
of everything, comes to that.... Hat!"

He clutched it with quivering fingers. "Hat!" he repeated. Then he
flung it to the ground, and kicked it with extraordinary fury across
the kitchen. It flew up against the door and dropped to the ground
with its ribbon band half off.

"Shan't go out!" he said, and sticking his hands into his jacket
pockets discovered the missing cap in the right one.

There was nothing for it but to go straight upstairs without a word,
and out, slamming the shop door hard.

"Beauty!" said Mrs. Polly at last to a tremendous silence, picking up
and dusting the rejected headdress. "Tantrums," she added. "I 'aven't
patience." And moving with the slow reluctance of a deeply offended
woman, she began to pile together the simple apparatus of their recent
meal, for transportation to the scullery sink.

The repast she had prepared for him did not seem to her to justify his
ingratitude. There had been the cold pork from Sunday and some nice
cold potatoes, and Rashdall's Mixed Pickles, of which he was
inordinately fond. He had eaten three gherkins, two onions, a small
cauliflower head and several capers with every appearance of appetite,
and indeed with avidity; and then there had been cold suet pudding to
follow, with treacle, and then a nice bit of cheese. It was the pale,
hard sort of cheese he liked; red cheese he declared was indigestible.
He had also had three big slices of greyish baker's bread, and had
drunk the best part of the jugful of beer.... But there seems to be no
pleasing some people.

"Tantrums!" said Mrs. Polly at the sink, struggling with the mustard
on his plate and expressing the only solution of the problem that
occurred to her.

And Mr. Polly sat on the stile and hated the whole scheme of
life--which was at once excessive and inadequate as a solution. He
hated Foxbourne, he hated Foxbourne High Street, he hated his shop and
his wife and his neighbours--every blessed neighbour--and with
indescribable bitterness he hated himself.

"Why did I ever get in this silly Hole?" he said. "Why did I ever?"

He sat on the stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with
impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted,
the sunlight metallic and the shadows mixed with blue-black ink.

To the moralist I know he might have served as a figure of sinful
discontent, but that is because it is the habit of moralists to ignore
material circumstances,--if indeed one may speak of a recent meal as a
circumstance,--with Mr. Polly _circum_. Drink, indeed, our teachers
will criticise nowadays both as regards quantity and quality, but
neither church nor state nor school will raise a warning finger
between a man and his hunger and his wife's catering. So on nearly
every day in his life Mr. Polly fell into a violent rage and hatred
against the outer world in the afternoon, and never suspected that it
was this inner world to which I am with such masterly delicacy
alluding, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the
things without. It is a pity that some human beings are not more
transparent. If Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent or even
passably translucent, then perhaps he might have realised from the
Laocoon struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so
much a human being as a civil war.

Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. Polly. Oh!
wonderful things. It must have been like a badly managed industrial
city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence,
strikes, the forces of law and order doing their best, rushings to and
fro, upheavals, the _Marseillaise_, tumbrils, the rumble and the
thunder of the tumbrils....

I do not know why the east wind aggravates life to unhealthy people.
It made Mr. Polly's teeth seem loose in his head, and his skin feel
like a misfit, and his hair a dry, stringy exasperation....

Why cannot doctors give us an antidote to the east wind?

"Never have the sense to get your hair cut till it's too long," said
Mr. Polly catching sight of his shadow, "you blighted, degenerated
Paintbrush! Ugh!" and he flattened down the projecting tails with an
urgent hand.


II

Mr. Polly's age was exactly thirty-five years and a half. He was a
short, compact figure, and a little inclined to a localised
_embonpoint_. His face was not unpleasing; the features fine, but a
trifle too pointed about the nose to be classically perfect. The
corners of his sensitive mouth were depressed. His eyes were ruddy
brown and troubled, and the left one was round with more of wonder in
it than its fellow. His complexion was dull and yellowish. That, as I
have explained, on account of those civil disturbances. He was, in the
technical sense of the word, clean shaved, with a small sallow patch
under the right ear and a cut on the chin. His brow had the little
puckerings of a thoroughly discontented man, little wrinklings and
lumps, particularly over his right eye, and he sat with his hands in
his pockets, a little askew on the stile and swung one leg. "Hole!" he
repeated presently.

He broke into a quavering song. "Ro-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!"

His voice thickened with rage, and the rest of his discourse was
marred by an unfortunate choice of epithets.

He was dressed in a shabby black morning coat and vest; the braid that
bound these garments was a little loose in places; his collar was
chosen from stock and with projecting corners, technically a
"wing-poke"; that and his tie, which was new and loose and rich in
colouring, had been selected to encourage and stimulate customers--for
he dealt in gentlemen's outfitting. His golf cap, which was also from
stock and aslant over his eye, gave his misery a desperate touch. He
wore brown leather boots--because he hated the smell of blacking.

Perhaps after all it was not simply indigestion that troubled him.

Behind the superficialities of Mr. Polly's being, moved a larger and
vaguer distress. The elementary education he had acquired had left him
with the impression that arithmetic was a fluky science and best
avoided in practical affairs, but even the absence of book-keeping and
a total inability to distinguish between capital and interest could
not blind him for ever to the fact that the little shop in the High
Street was not paying. An absence of returns, a constriction of
credit, a depleted till, the most valiant resolves to keep smiling,
could not prevail for ever against these insistent phenomena. One
might bustle about in the morning before dinner, and in the afternoon
after tea and forget that huge dark cloud of insolvency that gathered
and spread in the background, but it was part of the desolation of
these afternoon periods, these grey spaces of time after meals, when
all one's courage had descended to the unseen battles of the pit, that
life seemed stripped to the bone and one saw with a hopeless
clearness.

Let me tell the history of Mr. Polly from the cradle to these present
difficulties.

"First the infant, mewling and puking in its nurse's arms."

There had been a time when two people had thought Mr. Polly the most
wonderful and adorable thing in the world, had kissed his toe-nails,
saying "myum, myum," and marvelled at the exquisite softness and
delicacy of his hair, had called to one another to remark the peculiar
distinction with which he bubbled, had disputed whether the sound he
had made was _just da da_, or truly and intentionally dadda, had
washed him in the utmost detail, and wrapped him up in soft, warm
blankets, and smothered him with kisses. A regal time that was, and
four and thirty years ago; and a merciful forgetfulness barred Mr.
Polly from ever bringing its careless luxury, its autocratic demands
and instant obedience, into contrast with his present condition of
life. These two people had worshipped him from the crown of his head
to the soles of his exquisite feet. And also they had fed him rather
unwisely, for no one had ever troubled to teach his mother anything
about the mysteries of a child's upbringing--though of course the
monthly nurse and her charwoman gave some valuable hints--and by his
fifth birthday the perfect rhythms of his nice new interior were
already darkened with perplexity ....

His mother died when he was seven.

He began only to have distinctive memories of himself in the time when
his education had already begun.

I remember seeing a picture of Education--in some place. I think it
was Education, but quite conceivably it represented the Empire
teaching her Sons, and I have a strong impression that it was a wall
painting upon some public building in Manchester or Birmingham or
Glasgow, but very possibly I am mistaken about that. It represented a
glorious woman with a wise and fearless face stooping over her
children and pointing them to far horizons. The sky displayed the
pearly warmth of a summer dawn, and all the painting was marvellously
bright as if with the youth and hope of the delicately beautiful
children in the foreground. She was telling them, one felt, of the
great prospect of life that opened before them, of the spectacle of
the world, the splendours of sea and mountain they might travel and
see, the joys of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of
effort and the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to achieve.
Perhaps even she whispered of the warm triumphant mystery of love that
comes at last to those who have patience and unblemished hearts....
She was reminding them of their great heritage as English children,
rulers of more than one-fifth of mankind, of the obligation to do and
be the best that such a pride of empire entails, of their essential
nobility and knighthood and the restraints and the charities and the
disciplined strength that is becoming in knights and rulers....

The education of Mr. Polly did not follow this picture very closely.
He went for some time to a National School, which was run on severely
economical lines to keep down the rates by a largely untrained staff,
he was set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no one made
him understand, he was made to read the catechism and Bible with the
utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or
significance, and caused to imitate writing copies and drawing copies,
and given object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and potato
bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and taught various
other subjects his mind refused to entertain, and afterwards, when he
was about twelve, he was jerked by his parent to "finish off" in a
private school of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where
there were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping and
French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken) under the
guidance of an elderly gentleman who wore a nondescript gown and took
snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing, and used a cane with
remarkable dexterity and gusto.

Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private
school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same
state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for
appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather
over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the
climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but
intemperate habits,--that is to say, it was in a thorough mess. The
nice little curiosities and willingnesses of a child were in a jumbled
and thwarted condition, hacked and cut about--the operators had left,
so to speak, all their sponges and ligatures in the mangled
confusion--and Mr. Polly had lost much of his natural confidence, so
far as figures and sciences and languages and the possibilities of
learning things were concerned. He thought of the present world no
longer as a wonderland of experiences, but as geography and history,
as the repeating of names that were hard to pronounce, and lists of
products and populations and heights and lengths, and as lists and
dates--oh! and boredom indescribable. He thought of religion as the
recital of more or less incomprehensible words that were hard to
remember, and of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the
nature of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and unknown
rules, that were always ruthlessly enforced, and with an infinite
capacity for punishment and, most horrible of all to think of!
limitless powers of espial. (So to the best of his ability he did not
think of that unrelenting eye.) He was uncertain about the spelling
and pronunciation of most of the words in our beautiful but abundant
and perplexing tongue,--that especially was a pity because words
attracted him, and under happier conditions he might have used them
well--he was always doubtful whether it was eight sevens or nine
eights that was sixty-three--(he knew no method for settling the
difficulty) and he thought the merit of a drawing consisted in the
care with which it was "lined in." "Lining in" bored him beyond
measure.

But the _indigestions_ of mind and body that were to play so large a
part in his subsequent career were still only beginning. His liver and
his gastric juice, his wonder and imagination kept up a fight against
the things that threatened to overwhelm soul and body together.
Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum he was still
intensely curious. He had cheerful phases of enterprise, and about
thirteen he suddenly discovered reading and its joys. He began to read
stories voraciously, and books of travel, provided they were also
adventurous. He got these chiefly from the local institute, and he
also "took in," irregularly but thoroughly, one of those inspiring
weeklies that dull people used to call "penny dreadfuls," admirable
weeklies crammed with imagination that the cheap boys' "comics" of
to-day have replaced. At fourteen, when he emerged from the valley of
the shadow of education, there survived something, indeed it survived
still, obscured and thwarted, at five and thirty, that pointed--not
with a visible and prevailing finger like the finger of that beautiful
woman in the picture, but pointed nevertheless--to the idea that there
was interest and happiness in the world. Deep in the being of Mr.
Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten
about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion
that over and above the things that are jolly and "bits of all right,"
there was beauty, there was delight, that somewhere--magically
inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere, were pure and easy and
joyous states of body and mind.

He would sneak out on moonless winter nights and stare up at the
stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father where he
had been.

He would read tales about hunters and explorers, and imagine himself
riding mustangs as fleet as the wind across the prairies of Western
America, or coming as a conquering and adored white man into the
swarming villages of Central Africa. He shot bears with a revolver--a
cigarette in the other hand--and made a necklace of their teeth and
claws for the chief's beautiful young daughter. Also he killed a lion
with a pointed stake, stabbing through the beast's heart as it stood
over him.

He thought it would be splendid to be a diver and go down into the
dark green mysteries of the sea.

He led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts, and died on the
ramparts at the moment of victory. (His grave was watered by a
nation's tears.)

He rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten.

He was beloved by queens in barbaric lands, and reconciled whole
nations to the Christian faith.

He was martyred, and took it very calmly and beautifully--but only
once or twice after the Revivalist week. It did not become a habit
with him.

He explored the Amazon, and found, newly exposed by the fall of a
great tree, a rock of gold.

Engaged in these pursuits he would neglect the work immediately in
hand, sitting somewhat slackly on the form and projecting himself in a
manner tempting to a schoolmaster with a cane.... And twice he had
books confiscated.

Recalled to the realities of life, he would rub himself or sigh deeply
as the occasion required, and resume his attempts to write as good as
copperplate. He hated writing; the ink always crept up his fingers and
the smell of ink offended him. And he was filled with unexpressed
doubts. _Why_ should writing slope down from right to left? _Why_
should downstrokes be thick and upstrokes thin? _Why_ should the
handle of one's pen point over one's right shoulder?

His copy books towards the end foreshadowed his destiny and took the
form of commercial documents. "_Dear Sir_," they ran, "_Referring to
your esteemed order of the 26th ult., we beg to inform you_," and so
on.

The compression of Mr. Polly's mind and soul in the educational
institutions of his time, was terminated abruptly by his father
between his fourteenth and fifteenth birthday. His father--who had
long since forgotten the time when his son's little limbs seemed to
have come straight from God's hand, and when he had kissed five minute
toe-nails in a rapture of loving tenderness--remarked:

"It's time that dratted boy did something for a living."

And a month or so later Mr. Polly began that career in business that
led him at last to the sole proprietorship of a bankrupt outfitter's
shop--and to the stile on which he was sitting.


III

Mr. Polly was not naturally interested in hosiery and gentlemen's
outfitting. At times, indeed, he urged himself to a spurious curiosity
about that trade, but presently something more congenial came along
and checked the effort. He was apprenticed in one of those large,
rather low-class establishments which sell everything, from pianos and
furniture to books and millinery, a department store in fact, The Port
Burdock Drapery Bazaar at Port Burdock, one of the three townships
that are grouped around the Port Burdock naval dockyards. There he
remained six years. He spent most of the time inattentive to business,
in a sort of uncomfortable happiness, increasing his indigestion.

On the whole he preferred business to school; the hours were longer
but the tension was not nearly so great. The place was better aired,
you were not kept in for no reason at all, and the cane was not
employed. You watched the growth of your moustache with interest and
impatience, and mastered the beginnings of social intercourse. You
talked, and found there were things amusing to say. Also you had
regular pocket money, and a voice in the purchase of your clothes, and
presently a small salary. And there were girls. And friendship! In the
retrospect Port Burdock sparkled with the facets of quite a cluster of
remembered jolly times.

("Didn't save much money though," said Mr. Polly.)

The first apprentices' dormitory was a long bleak room with six beds,
six chests of drawers and looking glasses and a number of boxes of
wood or tin; it opened into a still longer and bleaker room of eight
beds, and this into a third apartment with yellow grained paper and
American cloth tables, which was the dining-room by day and the men's
sitting-and smoking-room after nine. Here Mr. Polly, who had been an
only child, first tasted the joys of social intercourse. At first
there were attempts to bully him on account of his refusal to consider
face washing a diurnal duty, but two fights with the apprentices next
above him, established a useful reputation for choler, and the
presence of girl apprentices in the shop somehow raised his standard
of cleanliness to a more acceptable level. He didn't of course have
very much to do with the feminine staff in his department, but he
spoke to them casually as he traversed foreign parts of the Bazaar, or
got out of their way politely, or helped them to lift down heavy
boxes, and on such occasions he felt their scrutiny. Except in the
course of business or at meal times the men and women of the
establishment had very little opportunity of meeting; the men were in
their rooms and the girls in theirs. Yet these feminine creatures, at
once so near and so remote, affected him profoundly. He would watch
them going to and fro, and marvel secretly at the beauty of their hair
or the roundness of their necks or the warm softness of their cheeks
or the delicacy of their hands. He would fall into passions for them
at dinner time, and try and show devotions by his manner of passing
the bread and margarine at tea. There was a very fair-haired,
fair-skinned apprentice in the adjacent haberdashery to whom he said
"good-morning" every morning, and for a period it seemed to him the
most significant event in his day. When she said, "I _do_ hope it will
be fine to-morrow," he felt it marked an epoch. He had had no sisters,
and was innately disposed to worship womankind. But he did not betray
as much to Platt and Parsons.

To Platt and Parsons he affected an attitude of seasoned depravity
towards womankind. Platt and Parsons were his contemporary apprentices
in departments of the drapery shop, and the three were drawn together
into a close friendship by the fact that all their names began with P.
They decided they were the Three Ps, and went about together of an
evening with the bearing of desperate dogs. Sometimes, when they had
money, they went into public houses and had drinks. Then they would
become more desperate than ever, and walk along the pavement under the
gas lamps arm in arm singing. Platt had a good tenor voice, and had
been in a church choir, and so he led the singing; Parsons had a
serviceable bellow, which roared and faded and roared again very
wonderfully; Mr. Polly's share was an extraordinary lowing noise, a
sort of flat recitative which he called "singing seconds." They would
have sung catches if they had known how to do it, but as it was they
sang melancholy music hall songs about dying soldiers and the old
folks far away.

They would sometimes go into the quieter residential quarters of Port
Burdock, where policemen and other obstacles were infrequent, and
really let their voices soar like hawks and feel very happy. The dogs
of the district would be stirred to hopeless emulation, and would keep
it up for long after the Three Ps had been swallowed up by the night.
One jealous brute of an Irish terrier made a gallant attempt to bite
Parsons, but was beaten by numbers and solidarity.

The Three Ps took the utmost interest in each other and found no other
company so good. They talked about everything in the world, and would
go on talking in their dormitory after the gas was out until the other
men were reduced to throwing boots; they skulked from their
departments in the slack hours of the afternoon to gossip in the
packing-room of the warehouse; on Sundays and Bank holidays they went
for long walks together, talking.

Platt was white-faced and dark, and disposed to undertones and mystery
and a curiosity about society and the _demi-monde_. He kept himself
_au courant_ by reading a penny paper of infinite suggestion called
_Modern Society_. Parsons was of an ampler build, already promising
fatness, with curly hair and a lot of rolling, rollicking, curly
features, and a large blob-shaped nose. He had a great memory and a
real interest in literature. He knew great portions of Shakespeare and
Milton by heart, and would recite them at the slightest provocation.
He read everything he could get hold of, and if he liked it he read it
aloud. It did not matter who else liked it. At first Mr. Polly was
disposed to be suspicious of this literature, but was carried away by
Parsons' enthusiasm. The Three Ps went to a performance of "Romeo and
Juliet" at the Port Burdock Theatre Royal, and hung over the gallery
fascinated. After that they made a sort of password of: "Do you bite
your thumbs at Us, Sir?"

To which the countersign was: "We bite our thumbs."

For weeks the glory of Shakespeare's Verona lit Mr. Polly's life. He
walked as though he carried a sword at his side, and swung a mantle
from his shoulders. He went through the grimy streets of Port Burdock
with his eye on the first floor windows--looking for balconies. A
ladder in the yard flooded his mind with romantic ideas. Then Parsons
discovered an Italian writer, whose name Mr. Polly rendered as
"Bocashieu," and after some excursions into that author's remains the
talk of Parsons became infested with the word "_amours_," and Mr.
Polly would stand in front of his hosiery fixtures trifling with paper
and string and thinking of perennial picnics under dark olive trees in
the everlasting sunshine of Italy.

And about that time it was that all Three Ps adopted turn-down collars
and large, loose, artistic silk ties, which they tied very much on one
side and wore with an air of defiance. And a certain swashbuckling
carriage.

And then came the glorious revelation of that great Frenchman whom Mr.
Polly called "Rabooloose." The Three Ps thought the birth feast of
Gargantua the most glorious piece of writing in the world, and I am
not certain they were wrong, and on wet Sunday evenings where there
was danger of hymn singing they would get Parsons to read it aloud.

Towards the several members of the Y. M. C. A. who shared the
dormitory, the Three Ps always maintained a sarcastic and defiant
attitude.

"We got a perfect right to do what we like in our corner," Platt
maintained. "You do what you like in yours."

"But the language!" objected Morrison, the white-faced, earnest-eyed
improver, who was leading a profoundly religious life under great
difficulties.

"_Language_, man!" roared Parsons, "why, it's _Literature_!"

"Sunday isn't the time for Literature."

"It's the only time we've got. And besides--"

The horrors of religious controversy would begin....

Mr. Polly stuck loyally to the Three Ps, but in the secret places of
his heart he was torn. A fire of conviction burnt in Morrison's eyes
and spoke in his urgent persuasive voice; he lived the better life
manifestly, chaste in word and deed, industrious, studiously kindly.
When the junior apprentice had sore feet and homesickness Morrison
washed the feet and comforted the heart, and he helped other men to
get through with their work when he might have gone early, a
superhuman thing to do. Polly was secretly a little afraid to be left
alone with this man and the power of the spirit that was in him. He
felt watched.

Platt, also struggling with things his mind could not contrive to
reconcile, said "that confounded hypocrite."

"He's no hypocrite," said Parsons, "he's no hypocrite, O' Man. But
he's got no blessed Joy de Vive; that's what's wrong with him. Let's
go down to the Harbour Arms and see some of those blessed old captains
getting drunk."

"Short of sugar, O' Man," said Mr. Polly, slapping his trouser pocket.

"Oh, _carm_ on," said Parsons. "Always do it on tuppence for a
bitter."

"Lemme get my pipe on," said Platt, who had recently taken to smoking
with great ferocity. "Then I'm with you."

Pause and struggle.

"Don't ram it down, O' Man," said Parsons, watching with knitted
brows. "Don't ram it down. Give it Air. Seen my stick, O' Man? Right
O."

And leaning on his cane he composed himself in an attitude of
sympathetic patience towards Platt's incendiary efforts.


IV

Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on
the stile to look back upon.

The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from
his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two
larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among
pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies
reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons
bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and
making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his,
the "Joy de Vive."

There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The
Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some
modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the
night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening.
They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English
country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread
out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram
lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour
waters.

"Back to the collar, O' Man," Parsons would say. There is no
satisfactory plural to O' Man, so he always used it in the singular.

"Don't mention it," said Platt.

And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past
the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping
of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the
ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels
and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr.
Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun
could shoot.

The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an
old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In
those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had
yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take
footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding
lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring,
they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded
undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods.
About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop
gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by
cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean
roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps
could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest
item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds
at last and got ready-made workingmen's hob-nails. There was much
discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory.

There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who
have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale,
its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its
castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms
and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and
shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards
and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other
country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none
that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and
white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its
sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune
repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and
chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and
gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant
Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South
Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there
are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big
and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim
New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New
England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland
of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in
three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so
diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the
strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England
does.

It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget
for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were
doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the
better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and
shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just
happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and
shady trees.

The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were
convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty
serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of
character" drinking in the bar.

There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have,
and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham
and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger
beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug.

The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring
out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the
duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue
heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen
smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click
and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth!

"Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward
Polly! look sharp!"

The going in! The sitting down! The falling to!

"Bread, O' Man?"

"Right O! Don't bag all the crust, O' Man."

Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked
with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be
all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she
preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so
impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant
maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she
waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly,
three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some
day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned
the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they
disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went
there again.

But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no
explanations.

If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will
none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her,
faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows
and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her
spirit to attend to them?...

And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as
possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of
Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea.

Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that
afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles
and coaly _défilements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing
machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after
a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows
of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an
hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the
High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an
agreeable afternoon stillness.

"Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his
big pipe.

It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory.


V

Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked
richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in
his pockets looking quietly speculative.

He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the
rôle of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him
curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking
phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the
mysterious pronunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His
schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had
terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not
avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be
misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every
recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in
order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim.

"Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice."

"Eh?" said Platt.

"Eloquent Rapsodooce."

"Where?" asked Platt.

"In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets.
Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming!
Windmilling! Waw, waw! It's a sight worth seeing. He'll bark his
blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O' Man."

He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture.
"So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come
back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in
fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things
articulariously He stands."

"I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He'd
never hear him coming."

"The O' Man's drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did.
It's worse than when he got on to Raboloose."



Chapter the Second

The Dismissal of Parsons


I

Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed.

He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence,
that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly's mind. He wondered about it
for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case.

Parsons' apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an
Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By
all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own
standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O' Man," he used to say,
"there's one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window."

And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little
Fluffums"--which was the apprentices' name for Mr. Garvace, the senior
partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before
he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of
Manchester goods _tell_.

Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories.

"The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O' Man--in its blooming
Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No
Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get
hold of people, _grip_ 'em as they go along. It stands to reason.
Grip!"

His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?"

Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!"

"He's got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O' Man; let's have some
more of it."

"Look at old Morrison's dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct,
I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout;
"Bleak!"

"Bleak!" echoed Mr. Polly.

"Just pieces of stuff in rows, rows of tidy little puffs, perhaps one
bit just unrolled, quiet tickets."

"Might as well be in church, O' Man," said Mr. Polly.

"A window ought to be exciting," said Parsons; "it ought to make you
say: El-_lo_! when you see it."

He paused, and Platt watched him over a snorting pipe.

"Rockcockyo," said Mr. Polly.

"We want a new school of window dressing," said Parsons, regardless of
the comment. "A New School! The Port Burdock school. Day after
to-morrow I change the Fitzallan Street stuff. This time, it's going to
be a change. I mean to have a crowd or bust!"

And as a matter of fact he did both.

His voice dropped to a note of self-reproach. "I've been timid, O'
Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself Justice. I've
kept down the simmering, seething, teeming ideas.... All that's over
now."

"Over," gulped Polly.

"Over for good and all, O' Man."


II

Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. "O' Man's doing
his Blooming Window."

"What window?"

"What he said."

Polly remembered.

He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior,
Mansfield. Mansfield was presently called away to the counting house,
and instantly Polly shot out by the street door, and made a rapid
transit along the street front past the Manchester window, and so into
the silkroom door. He could not linger long, but he gathered joy, a
swift and fearful joy, from his brief inspection of Parsons'
unconscious back. Parsons had his tail coat off and was working with
vigour; his habit of pulling his waistcoat straps to the utmost
brought out all the agreeable promise of corpulence in his youthful
frame. He was blowing excitedly and running his fingers through his
hair, and then moving with all the swift eagerness of a man inspired.
All about his feet and knees were scarlet blankets, not folded, not
formally unfolded, but--the only phrase is--shied about. And a great
bar sinister of roller towelling stretched across the front of the
window on which was a ticket, and the ticket said in bold black
letters: "LOOK!"

So soon as Mr. Polly got into the silk department and met Platt he
knew he had not lingered nearly long enough outside. "Did you see the
boards at the back?" said Platt.

He hadn't. "The High Egrugious is fairly On," he said, and dived down
to return by devious subterranean routes to the outfitting department.

Presently the street door opened and Platt, with an air of intense
devotion to business assumed to cover his adoption of that unusual
route, came in and made for the staircase down to the warehouse. He
rolled up his eyes at Polly. "Oh _Lor_!" he said and vanished.

Irresistible curiosity seized Polly. Should he go through the shop to
the Manchester department, or risk a second transit outside?

He was impelled to make a dive at the street door.

"Where are you going?" asked Mansfield.

"Lill Dog," said Polly with an air of lucid explanation, and left him
to get any meaning he could from it.

Parsons was worth the subsequent trouble. Parsons really was extremely
rich. This time Polly stopped to take it in.

Parsons had made a huge symmetrical pile of thick white and red
blankets twisted and rolled to accentuate their woolly richness,
heaped up in a warm disorder, with large window tickets inscribed in
blazing red letters: "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," and "Curl up and
Cuddle below Cost." Regardless of the daylight he had turned up the
electric light on that side of the window to reflect a warm glow upon
the heap, and behind, in pursuit of contrasted bleakness, he was now
hanging long strips of grey silesia and chilly coloured linen
dusterings.

It was wonderful, but--

Mr. Polly decided that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the
silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the
exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said Polly.
"Allittritions Artful Aid."

He did not dare go into the street for the third time, and he was
hovering feverishly near the window when he saw the governor, Mr.
Garvace, that is to say, the managing director of the Bazaar, walking
along the pavement after his manner to assure himself all was well
with the establishment he guided.

Mr. Garvace was a short stout man, with that air of modest pride that
so often goes with corpulence, choleric and decisive in manner, and
with hands that looked like bunches of fingers. He was red-haired and
ruddy, and after the custom of such _complexions_, hairs sprang from
the tip of his nose. When he wished to bring the power of the human
eye to bear upon an assistant, he projected his chest, knitted one
brow and partially closed the left eyelid.

An expression of speculative wonder overspread the countenance of Mr.
Polly. He felt he must _see_. Yes, whatever happened he must _see_.

"Want to speak to Parsons, Sir," he said to Mr. Mansfield, and
deserted his post hastily, dashed through the intervening departments
and was in position behind a pile of Bolton sheeting as the governor
came in out of the street.

"What on Earth do you think you are doing with that window, Parsons?"
began Mr. Garvace.

Only the legs of Parsons and the lower part of his waistcoat and an
intervening inch of shirt were visible. He was standing inside the
window on the steps, hanging up the last strip of his background from
the brass rail along the ceiling. Within, the Manchester shop window
was cut off by a partition rather like the partition of an
old-fashioned church pew from the general space of the shop. There was
a panelled barrier, that is to say, with a little door like a pew door
in it. Parsons' face appeared, staring with round eyes at his
employer.

Mr. Garvace had to repeat his question.

"Dressing it, Sir--on new lines."

"Come out of it," said Mr. Garvace.

Parsons stared, and Mr. Garvace had to repeat his command.

Parsons, with a dazed expression, began to descend the steps slowly.

Mr. Garvace turned about. "Where's Morrison? Morrison!"

Morrison appeared.

"Take this window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of
fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle out and dress it properly."

Morrison advanced and hesitated.

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said Parsons with an immense politeness,
"but this is _my_ window."

"Take it all out," said Mr. Garvace, turning away.

Morrison advanced. Parsons shut the door with a click that arrested
Mr. Garvace.

"Come out of that window," he said. "You can't dress it. If you want
to play the fool with a window----"

"This window's All Right," said the genius in window dressing, and
there was a little pause.

"Open the door and go right in," said Mr. Garvace to Morrison.

"You leave that door alone, Morrison," said Parsons.

Polly was no longer even trying to hide behind the stack of Bolton
sheetings. He realised he was in the presence of forces too stupendous
to heed him.

"Get him out," said Mr. Garvace.

Morrison seemed to be thinking out the ethics of his position. The
idea of loyalty to his employer prevailed with him. He laid his hand
on the door to open it; Parsons tried to disengage his hand. Mr.
Garvace joined his effort to Morrison's. Then the heart of Polly leapt
and the world blazed up to wonder and splendour. Parsons disappeared
behind the partition for a moment and reappeared instantly, gripping a
thin cylinder of rolled huckaback. With this he smote at Morrison's
head. Morrison's head ducked under the resounding impact, but he clung
on and so did Mr. Garvace. The door came open, and then Mr. Garvace
was staggering back, hand to head; his autocratic, his sacred
baldness, smitten. Parsons was beyond all control--a strangeness, a
marvel. Heaven knows how the artistic struggle had strained that
richly endowed temperament. "Say I can't dress a window, you
thundering old Humbug," he said, and hurled the huckaback at his
master. He followed this up by hurling first a blanket, then an armful
of silesia, then a window support out of the window into the shop. It
leapt into Polly's mind that Parsons hated his own effort and was glad
to demolish it. For a crowded second Polly's mind was concentrated
upon Parsons, infuriated, active, like a figure of earthquake with
its coat off, shying things headlong.

Then he perceived the back of Mr. Garvace and heard his gubernatorial
voice crying to no one in particular and everybody in general: "Get
him out of the window. He's mad. He's dangerous. Get him out of the
window."

Then a crimson blanket was for a moment over the head of Mr. Garvace,
and his voice, muffled for an instant, broke out into unwonted
expletive.

Then people had arrived from all parts of the Bazaar. Luck, the ledger
clerk, blundered against Polly and said, "Help him!" Somerville from
the silks vaulted the counter, and seized a chair by the back. Polly
lost his head. He clawed at the Bolton sheeting before him, and if he
could have detached a piece he would certainly have hit somebody with
it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and
he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the
sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods
just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit
somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the
struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over
the active backs that clustered about the shop window door, an active
whirl of gesture, tearing things down and throwing them, and then he
went under. There was an instant's furious struggle, a crash, a second
crash and the crack of broken plate glass. Then a stillness and heavy
breathing.

Parsons was overpowered....

Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his
transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding,
on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison.

"You--you--you--you annoyed me," said Parsons, sobbing for breath.


III

There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of
occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was
this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended
disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and
beneath it he discovered depths and terrors.

Life was not altogether a lark.

The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch.
But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of
vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion. The way in
which the policeman made a note of everything and aspirated nothing
impressed the sensitive mind of Polly profoundly. Polly presently
found himself straightening up ties to the refrain of "'E then 'It you
on the 'Ed and----"

In the dormitory that night Parsons had become heroic. He sat on the
edge of the bed with his head bandaged, packing very slowly and
insisting over and again: "He ought to have left my window alone, O'
Man. He didn't ought to have touched my window."

Polly was to go to the police court in the morning as a witness. The
terror of that ordeal almost overshadowed the tragic fact that Parsons
was not only summoned for assault, but "swapped," and packing his box.
Polly knew himself well enough to know he would make a bad witness. He
felt sure of one fact only, namely, that "'E then 'It 'Im on the 'Ed
and--" All the rest danced about in his mind now, and how it would
dance about on the morrow Heaven only knew. Would there be a
cross-examination? Is it perjoocery to make a slip? People did
sometimes perjuice themselves. Serious offence.

Platt was doing his best to help Parsons, and inciting public opinion
against Morrison. But Parsons would not hear of anything against
Morrison. "He was all right, O' Man--according to his lights," said
Parsons. "It isn't him I complain of."

He speculated on the morrow. "I shall '_ave_ to pay a fine," he said.
"No good trying to get out of it. It's true I hit him. I hit him"--he
paused and seemed to be seeking an exquisite accuracy. His voice sank
to a confidential note;--"On the head--about here."

He answered the suggestion of a bright junior apprentice in a corner
of the dormitory. "What's the Good of a Cross summons?" he replied;
"with old Corks, the chemist, and Mottishead, the house agent, and all
that lot on the Bench? Humble Pie, that's my meal to-morrow, O' Man.
Humble Pie."

Packing went on for a time.

"But Lord! what a Life it is!" said Parsons, giving his deep notes
scope. "Ten-thirty-five a man trying to do his Duty, mistaken perhaps,
but trying his best; ten-forty--Ruined! Ruined!" He lifted his voice
to a shout. "Ruined!" and dropped it to "Like an earthquake."

"Heated altaclation," said Polly.

"Like a blooming earthquake!" said Parsons, with the notes of a rising
wind.

He meditated gloomily upon his future and a colder chill invaded
Polly's mind. "Likely to get another crib, ain't I--with assaulted the
guvnor on my reference. I suppose, though, he won't give me refs. Hard
enough to get a crib at the best of times," said Parsons.

"You ought to go round with a show, O' Man," said Mr. Polly.

Things were not so dreadful in the police court as Mr. Polly had
expected. He was given a seat with other witnesses against the wall of
the court, and after an interesting larceny case Parsons appeared and
stood, not in the dock, but at the table. By that time Mr. Polly's
legs, which had been tucked up at first under his chair out of respect
to the court, were extended straight before him and his hands were in
his trouser pockets. He was inventing names for the four magistrates
on the bench, and had got to "the Grave and Reverend Signor with the
palatial Boko," when his thoughts were recalled to gravity by the
sound of his name. He rose with alacrity and was fielded by an expert
policeman from a brisk attempt to get into the vacant dock. The clerk
to the Justices repeated the oath with incredible rapidity.

"Right O," said Mr. Polly, but quite respectfully, and kissed the
book.

His evidence was simple and quite audible after one warning from the
superintendent of police to "speak up." He tried to put in a good word
for Parsons by saying he was "naturally of a choleraic disposition,"
but the start and the slow grin of enjoyment upon the face of the
grave and Reverend Signor with the palatial Boko suggested that the
word was not so good as he had thought it. The rest of the bench was
frankly puzzled and there were hasty consultations.

"You mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," said the presiding magistrate.

"I mean 'E 'As a 'Ot temper," replied Polly, magically incapable of
aspirates for the moment.

"You don't mean 'E ketches cholera."

"I mean--he's easily put out."

"Then why can't you say so?" said the presiding magistrate.

Parsons was bound over.

He came for his luggage while every one was in the shop, and Garvace
would not let him invade the business to say good-by. When Mr. Polly
went upstairs for margarine and bread and tea, he slipped on into the
dormitory at once to see what was happening further in the Parsons
case. But Parsons had vanished. There was no Parsons, no trace of
Parsons. His cubicle was swept and garnished. For the first time in
his life Polly had a sense of irreparable loss.

A minute or so after Platt dashed in.

"Ugh!" he said, and then discovered Polly. Polly was leaning out of
the window and did not look around. Platt went up to him.

"He's gone already," said Platt. "Might have stopped to say good-by to
a chap."

There was a little pause before Polly replied. He thrust his finger
into his mouth and gulped.

"Bit on that beastly tooth of mine," he said, still not looking at
Platt. "It's made my eyes water, something chronic. Any one might
think I'd been doing a blooming Pipe, by the look of me."



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.



Chapter the Fourth

Mr. Polly an Orphan


I

Then a great change was brought about in the life of Mr. Polly by the
death of his father. His father had died suddenly--the local
practitioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he
suffered from, but compromised in the certificate with the
appendicitis that was then so fashionable--and Mr. Polly found himself
heir to a debateable number of pieces of furniture in the house of his
cousin near Easewood Junction, a family Bible, an engraved portrait of
Garibaldi and a bust of Mr. Gladstone, an invalid gold watch, a gold
locket formerly belonging to his mother, some minor jewelry and
_bric-a-brac_, a quantity of nearly valueless old clothes and an
insurance policy and money in the bank amounting altogether to the sum
of three hundred and ninety-five pounds.

Mr. Polly had always regarded his father as an immortal, as an eternal
fact, and his father being of a reserved nature in his declining years
had said nothing about the insurance policy. Both wealth and
bereavement therefore took Mr. Polly by surprise and found him a
little inadequate. His mother's death had been a childish grief and
long forgotten, and the strongest affection in his life had been for
Parsons. An only child of sociable tendencies necessarily turns his
back a good deal upon home, and the aunt who had succeeded his mother
was an economist and furniture polisher, a knuckle rapper and sharp
silencer, no friend for a slovenly little boy. He had loved other
little boys and girls transitorily, none had been frequent and
familiar enough to strike deep roots in his heart, and he had grown up
with a tattered and dissipated affectionateness that was becoming
wildly shy. His father had always been a stranger, an irritable
stranger with exceptional powers of intervention and comment, and an
air of being disappointed about his offspring. It was shocking to lose
him; it was like an unexpected hole in the universe, and the writing
of "Death" upon the sky, but it did not tear Mr. Polly's heartstrings
at first so much as rouse him to a pitch of vivid attention.

He came down to the cottage at Easewood in response to an urgent
telegram, and found his father already dead. His cousin Johnson
received him with much solemnity and ushered him upstairs, to look at
a stiff, straight, shrouded form, with a face unwontedly quiet and, as
it seemed, with its pinched nostrils, scornful.

"Looks peaceful," said Mr. Polly, disregarding the scorn to the best
of his ability.

"It was a merciful relief," said Mr. Johnson.

There was a pause.

"Second--Second Departed I've ever seen. Not counting mummies," said
Mr. Polly, feeling it necessary to say something.

"We did all we could."

"No doubt of it, O' Man," said Mr. Polly.

A second long pause followed, and then, much to Mr. Polly's great
relief, Johnson moved towards the door.

Afterwards Mr. Polly went for a solitary walk in the evening light,
and as he walked, suddenly his dead father became real to him. He
thought of things far away down the perspective of memory, of jolly
moments when his father had skylarked with a wildly excited little
boy, of a certain annual visit to the Crystal Palace pantomime, full
of trivial glittering incidents and wonders, of his father's dread
back while customers were in the old, minutely known shop. It is
curious that the memory which seemed to link him nearest to the dead
man was the memory of a fit of passion. His father had wanted to get a
small sofa up the narrow winding staircase from the little room behind
the shop to the bedroom above, and it had jammed. For a time his
father had coaxed, and then groaned like a soul in torment and given
way to blind fury, had sworn, kicked and struck at the offending piece
of furniture and finally wrenched it upstairs, with considerable
incidental damage to lath and plaster and one of the castors. That
moment when self-control was altogether torn aside, the shocked
discovery of his father's perfect humanity, had left a singular
impression on Mr. Polly's queer mind. It was as if something
extravagantly vital had come out of his father and laid a warmly
passionate hand upon his heart. He remembered that now very vividly,
and it became a clue to endless other memories that had else been
dispersed and confusing.

A weakly wilful being struggling to get obdurate things round
impossible corners--in that symbol Mr. Polly could recognise himself
and all the trouble of humanity.

He hadn't had a particularly good time, poor old chap, and now it was
all over. Finished....

Johnson was the sort of man who derives great satisfaction from a
funeral, a melancholy, serious, practical-minded man of five and
thirty, with great powers of advice. He was the up-line ticket clerk
at Easewood Junction, and felt the responsibilities of his position.
He was naturally thoughtful and reserved, and greatly sustained in
that by an innate rectitude of body and an overhanging and forward
inclination of the upper part of his face and head. He was pale but
freckled, and his dark grey eyes were deeply set. His lightest
interest was cricket, but he did not take that lightly. His chief
holiday was to go to a cricket match, which he did as if he was going
to church, and he watched critically, applauded sparingly, and was
darkly offended by any unorthodox play. His convictions upon all
subjects were taciturnly inflexible. He was an obstinate player of
draughts and chess, and an earnest and persistent reader of the
_British Weekly_. His wife was a pink, short, wilfully smiling,
managing, ingratiating, talkative woman, who was determined to be
pleasant, and take a bright hopeful view of everything, even when it
was not really bright and hopeful. She had large blue expressive eyes
and a round face, and she always spoke of her husband as Harold. She
addressed sympathetic and considerate remarks about the deceased to
Mr. Polly in notes of brisk encouragement. "He was really quite
cheerful at the end," she said several times, with congratulatory
gusto, "quite cheerful."

She made dying seem almost agreeable.

Both these people were resolved to treat Mr. Polly very well, and to
help his exceptional incompetence in every possible way, and after a
simple supper of ham and bread and cheese and pickles and cold apple
tart and small beer had been cleared away, they put him into the
armchair almost as though he was an invalid, and sat on chairs that
made them look down on him, and opened a directive discussion of the
arrangements for the funeral. After all a funeral is a distinct social
opportunity, and rare when you have no family and few relations, and
they did not want to see it spoilt and wasted.

"You'll have a hearse of course," said Mrs. Johnson. "Not one of them
combinations with the driver sitting on the coffin. Disrespectful I
think they are. I can't fancy how people can bring themselves to be
buried in combinations." She flattened her voice in a manner she used
to intimate aesthetic feeling. "I _do_ like them glass hearses," she
said. "So refined and nice they are."

"Podger's hearse you'll have," said Johnson conclusively. "It's the
best in Easewood."

"Everything that's right and proper," said Mr. Polly.

"Podger's ready to come and measure at any time," said Johnson.

"Then you'll want a mourner's carriage or two, according as to whom
you're going to invite," said Mr. Johnson.

"Didn't think of inviting any one," said Polly.

"Oh! you'll _have_ to ask a few friends," said Mr. Johnson. "You can't
let your father go to his grave without asking a few friends."

"Funerial baked meats like," said Mr. Polly.

"Not baked, but of course you'll have to give them something. Ham and
chicken's very suitable. You don't want a lot of cooking with the
ceremony coming into the middle of it. I wonder who Alfred ought to
invite, Harold. Just the immediate relations; one doesn't want a great
crowd of people and one doesn't want not to show respect."

"But he hated our relations--most of them."

"He's not hating them _now_," said Mrs. Johnson, "you may be sure of
that. It's just because of that I think they ought to come--all of
them--even your Aunt Mildred."

"Bit vulturial, isn't it?" said Mr. Polly unheeded.

"Wouldn't be more than twelve or thirteen people if they _all_ came,"
said Mr. Johnson.

"We could have everything put out ready in the back room and the
gloves and whiskey in the front room, and while we were all at the
ceremony, Bessie could bring it all into the front room on a tray and
put it out nice and proper. There'd have to be whiskey and sherry or
port for the ladies...."

"Where'll you get your mourning?" asked Johnson abruptly.

Mr. Polly had not yet considered this by-product of sorrow. "Haven't
thought of it yet, O' Man."

A disagreeable feeling spread over his body as though he was
blackening as he sat. He hated black garments.

"I suppose I must have mourning," he said.

"Well!" said Johnson with a solemn smile.

"Got to see it through," said Mr. Polly indistinctly.

"If I were you," said Johnson, "I should get ready-made trousers.
That's all you really want. And a black satin tie and a top hat with a
deep mourning band. And gloves."

"Jet cuff links he ought to have--as chief mourner," said Mrs.
Johnson.

"Not obligatory," said Johnson.

"It shows respect," said Mrs. Johnson.

"It shows respect of course," said Johnson.

And then Mrs. Johnson went on with the utmost gusto to the details of
the "casket," while Mr. Polly sat more and more deeply and droopingly
into the armchair, assenting with a note of protest to all they said.
After he had retired for the night he remained for a long time perched
on the edge of the sofa which was his bed, staring at the prospect
before him. "Chasing the O' Man about up to the last," he said.

He hated the thought and elaboration of death as a healthy animal must
hate it. His mind struggled with unwonted social problems.

"Got to put 'em away somehow, I suppose," said Mr. Polly.

"Wish I'd looked him up a bit more while he was alive," said Mr.
Polly.


II

Bereavement came to Mr. Polly before the realisation of opulence and
its anxieties and responsibilities. That only dawned upon him on the
morrow--which chanced to be Sunday--as he walked with Johnson before
church time about the tangle of struggling building enterprise that
constituted the rising urban district of Easewood. Johnson was off
duty that morning, and devoted the time very generously to the
admonitory discussion of Mr. Polly's worldly outlook.

"Don't seem to get the hang of the business somehow," said Mr. Polly.
"Too much blooming humbug in it for my way of thinking."

"If I were you," said Mr. Johnson, "I should push for a first-class
place in London--take almost nothing and live on my reserves. That's
what I should do."

"Come the Heavy," said Mr. Polly.

"Get a better class reference."

There was a pause. "Think of investing your money?" asked Johnson.

"Hardly got used to the idea of having it yet, O' Man."

"You'll have to do something with it. Give you nearly twenty pounds a
year if you invest it properly."

"Haven't seen it yet in that light," said Mr. Polly defensively.

"There's no end of things you could put it into."

"It's getting it out again I shouldn't feel sure of. I'm no sort of
Fiancianier. Sooner back horses."

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"Not my style, O' Man."

"It's a nest egg," said Johnson.

Mr. Polly made an indeterminate noise.

"There's building societies," Johnson threw out in a speculative tone.
Mr. Polly, with detached brevity, admitted there were.

"You might lend it on mortgage," said Johnson. "Very safe form of
investment."

"Shan't think anything about it--not till the O' Man's underground,"
said Mr. Polly with an inspiration.

They turned a corner that led towards the junction.

"Might do worse," said Johnson, "than put it into a small shop."

At the moment this remark made very little appeal to Mr. Polly. But
afterwards it developed. It fell into his mind like some small obscure
seed, and germinated.

"These shops aren't in a bad position," said Johnson.

The row he referred to gaped in the late painful stage in building
before the healing touch of the plasterer assuages the roughness of
the brickwork. The space for the shop yawned an oblong gap below,
framed above by an iron girder; "windows and fittings to suit tenant,"
a board at the end of the row promised; and behind was the door space
and a glimpse of stairs going up to the living rooms above. "Not a bad
position," said Johnson, and led the way into the establishment. "Room
for fixtures there," he said, pointing to the blank wall. The two men
went upstairs to the little sitting-room or best bedroom (it would
have to be) above the shop. Then they descended to the kitchen below.

"Rooms in a new house always look a bit small," said Johnson.

They came out of the house again by the prospective back door, and
picked their way through builder's litter across the yard space to the
road again. They drew nearer the junction to where a pavement and
shops already open and active formed the commercial centre of
Easewood. On the opposite side of the way the side door of a
flourishing little establishment opened, and a man and his wife and a
little boy in a sailor suit came into the street. The wife was a
pretty woman in brown with a floriferous straw hat, and the group was
altogether very Sundayfied and shiny and spick and span. The shop
itself had a large plate-glass window whose contents were now veiled
by a buff blind on which was inscribed in scrolly letters: "Rymer,
Pork Butcher and Provision Merchant," and then with voluptuous
elaboration: "The World-Famed Easewood Sausage."

Greetings were exchanged between Mr. Johnson and this distinguished
comestible.

"Off to church already?" said Johnson.

"Walking across the fields to Little Dorington," said Mr. Rymer.

"Very pleasant walk," said Johnson.

"Very," said Mr. Rymer.

"Hope you'll enjoy it," said Mr. Johnson.

"That chap's done well," said Johnson _sotto voce_ as they went on.
"Came here with nothing--practically, four years ago. And as thin as a
lath. Look at him now!

"He's worked hard of course," said Johnson, improving the occasion.

Thought fell between the cousins for a space.

"Some men can do one thing," said Johnson, "and some another.... For a
man who sticks to it there's a lot to be done in a shop."


III

All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and happily under Mrs.
Johnson's skilful hands. On the eve of the sad event she produced a
reserve of black sateen, the kitchen steps and a box of tin-tacks, and
decorated the house with festoons and bows of black in the best
possible taste. She tied up the knocker with black crape, and put a
large bow over the corner of the steel engraving of Garibaldi, and
swathed the bust of Mr. Gladstone, that had belonged to the deceased,
with inky swathings. She turned the two vases that had views of Tivoli
and the Bay of Naples round, so that these rather brilliant landscapes
were hidden and only the plain blue enamel showed, and she anticipated
the long-contemplated purchase of a tablecloth for the front room, and
substituted a violet purple cover for the now very worn and faded
raptures and roses in plushette that had hitherto done duty there.
Everything that loving consideration could do to impart a dignified
solemnity to her little home was done.

She had released Mr. Polly from the irksome duty of issuing
invitations, and as the moments of assembly drew near she sent him and
Mr. Johnson out into the narrow long strip of garden at the back of
the house, to be free to put a finishing touch or so to her
preparations. She sent them out together because she had a queer
little persuasion at the back of her mind that Mr. Polly wanted to
bolt from his sacred duties, and there was no way out of the garden
except through the house.

Mr. Johnson was a steady, successful gardener, and particularly good
with celery and peas. He walked slowly along the narrow path down the
centre pointing out to Mr. Polly a number of interesting points in the
management of peas, wrinkles neatly applied and difficulties wisely
overcome, and all that he did for the comfort and propitiation of that
fitful but rewarding vegetable. Presently a sound of nervous laughter
and raised voices from the house proclaimed the arrival of the earlier
guests, and the worst of that anticipatory tension was over.

When Mr. Polly re-entered the house he found three entirely strange
young women with pink faces, demonstrative manners and emphatic
mourning, engaged in an incoherent conversation with Mrs. Johnson. All
three kissed him with great gusto after the ancient English fashion.
"These are your cousins Larkins," said Mrs. Johnson; "that's Annie
(unexpected hug and smack), that's Miriam (resolute hug and smack),
and that's Minnie (prolonged hug and smack)."

"Right-O," said Mr. Polly, emerging a little crumpled and breathless
from this hearty introduction. "I see."

"Here's Aunt Larkins," said Mrs. Johnson, as an elderly and stouter
edition of the three young women appeared in the doorway.

Mr. Polly backed rather faint-heartedly, but Aunt Larkins was not to
be denied. Having hugged and kissed her nephew resoundingly she
gripped him by the wrists and scanned his features. She had a round,
sentimental, freckled face. "I should '_ave_ known 'im anywhere," she
said with fervour.

"Hark at mother!" said the cousin called Annie. "Why, she's never set
eyes on him before!"

"I should '_ave_ known 'im anywhere," said Mrs. Larkins, "for Lizzie's
child. You've got her eyes! It's a Resemblance! And as for _never
seeing 'im_-- I've _dandled_ him, Miss Imperence. I've dandled him."

"You couldn't dandle him now, Ma!" Miss Annie remarked with a shriek
of laughter.

All the sisters laughed at that. "The things you say, Annie!" said
Miriam, and for a time the room was full of mirth.

Mr. Polly felt it incumbent upon him to say something. "_My_ dandling
days are over," he said.

The reception of this remark would have convinced a far more modest
character than Mr. Polly that it was extremely witty.

Mr. Polly followed it up by another one almost equally good. "My turn
to dandle," he said, with a sly look at his aunt, and convulsed
everyone.

"Not me," said Mrs. Larkins, taking his point, "_thank_ you," and
achieved a climax.

It was queer, but they seemed to be easy people to get on with anyhow.
They were still picking little ripples and giggles of mirth from the
idea of Mr. Polly dandling Aunt Larkins when Mr. Johnson, who had
answered the door, ushered in a stooping figure, who was at once
hailed by Mrs. Johnson as "Why! Uncle Pentstemon!" Uncle Pentstemon
was rather a shock. His was an aged rather than venerable figure; Time
had removed the hair from the top of his head and distributed a small
dividend of the plunder in little bunches carelessly and impartially
over the rest of his features; he was dressed in a very big old frock
coat and a long cylindrical top hat, which he had kept on; he was very
much bent, and he carried a rush basket from which protruded coy
intimations of the lettuces and onions he had brought to grace the
occasion. He hobbled into the room, resisting the efforts of Johnson
to divest him of his various encumbrances, halted and surveyed the
company with an expression of profound hostility, breathing hard.
Recognition quickened in his eyes.

"_You_ here," he said to Aunt Larkins and then; "You _would_ be....
These your gals?"

"They are," said Aunt Larkins, "and better gals----"

"That Annie?" asked Uncle Pentstemon, pointing a horny thumb-nail.

"Fancy your remembering her name!"

"She mucked up my mushroom bed, the baggage!" said Uncle Pentstemon
ungenially, "and I give it to her to rights. Trounced her I
did--fairly. I remember her. Here's some green stuff for you, Grace.
Fresh it is and wholesome. I shall be wanting the basket back and mind
you let me have it.... Have you nailed him down yet? You always was a
bit in front of what was needful."

His attention was drawn inward by a troublesome tooth, and he sucked
at it spitefully. There was something potent about this old man that
silenced everyone for a moment or so. He seemed a fragment from the
ruder agricultural past of our race, like a lump of soil among things
of paper. He put his basket of vegetables very deliberately on the new
violet tablecloth, removed his hat carefully and dabbled his brow, and
wiped out his hat brim with a crimson and yellow pocket handkerchief.

"I'm glad you were able to come, Uncle," said Mrs. Johnson.

"Oh, I _came_" said Uncle Pentstemon. "I _came_."

He turned on Mrs. Larkins. "Gals in service?" he asked.

"They aren't and they won't be," said Mrs. Larkins.

"No," he said with infinite meaning, and turned his eye on Mr. Polly.

"You Lizzie's boy?" he said.

Mr. Polly was spared much self-exposition by the tumult occasioned by
further arrivals.

"Ah! here's May Punt!" said Mrs. Johnson, and a small woman dressed in
the borrowed mourning of a large woman and leading a very small
long-haired observant little boy--it was his first funeral--appeared,
closely followed by several friends of Mrs. Johnson who had come to
swell the display of respect and made only vague, confused impressions
upon Mr. Polly's mind. (Aunt Mildred, who was an unexplained family
scandal, had declined Mrs. Johnson's hospitality.)

Everybody was in profound mourning, of course, mourning in the modern
English style, with the dyer's handiwork only too apparent, and hats
and jackets of the current cut. There was very little crape, and the
costumes had none of the goodness and specialisation and genuine
enjoyment of mourning for mourning's sake that a similar continental
gathering would have displayed. Still that congestion of strangers in
black sufficed to stun and confuse Mr. Polly's impressionable mind. It
seemed to him much more extraordinary than anything he had expected.

"Now, gals," said Mrs. Larkins, "see if you can help," and the three
daughters became confusingly active between the front room and the
back.

"I hope everyone'll take a glass of sherry and a biscuit," said Mrs.
Johnson. "We don't stand on ceremony," and a decanter appeared in the
place of Uncle Pentstemon's vegetables.

Uncle Pentstemon had refused to be relieved of his hat; he sat stiffly
down on a chair against the wall with that venerable headdress between
his feet, watching the approach of anyone jealously. "Don't you go
squashing my hat," he said. Conversation became confused and general.
Uncle Pentstemon addressed himself to Mr. Polly. "You're a little
chap," he said, "a puny little chap. I never did agree to Lizzie
marrying him, but I suppose by-gones must be bygones now. I suppose
they made you a clerk or something."

"Outfitter," said Mr. Polly.

"I remember. Them girls pretend to be dressmakers."

"They _are_ dressmakers," said Mrs. Larkins across the room.

"I _will_ take a glass of sherry. They 'old to it, you see."

He took the glass Mrs. Johnson handed him, and poised it critically
between a horny finger and thumb. "You'll be paying for this," he said
to Mr. Polly. "Here's _to_ you.... Don't you go treading on my hat,
young woman. You brush your skirts against it and you take a shillin'
off its value. It ain't the sort of 'at you see nowadays."

He drank noisily.

The sherry presently loosened everybody's tongue, and the early
coldness passed.

"There ought to have been a _post-mortem_," Polly heard Mrs. Punt
remarking to one of Mrs. Johnson's friends, and Miriam and another
were lost in admiration of Mrs. Johnson's decorations. "So very nice
and refined," they were both repeating at intervals.

The sherry and biscuits were still being discussed when Mr. Podger,
the undertaker, arrived, a broad, cheerfully sorrowful, clean-shaven
little man, accompanied by a melancholy-faced assistant. He conversed
for a time with Johnson in the passage outside; the sense of his
business stilled the rising waves of chatter and carried off
everyone's attention in the wake of his heavy footsteps to the room
above.


IV

Things crowded upon Mr. Polly. Everyone, he noticed, took sherry with
a solemn avidity, and a small portion even was administered
sacramentally to the Punt boy. There followed a distribution of black
kid gloves, and much trying on and humouring of fingers. "_Good_
gloves," said one of Mrs. Johnson's friends. "There's a little pair
there for Willie," said Mrs. Johnson triumphantly. Everyone seemed
gravely content with the amazing procedure of the occasion. Presently
Mr. Podger was picking Mr. Polly out as Chief Mourner to go with Mrs.
Johnson, Mrs. Larkins and Annie in the first mourning carriage.

"Right O," said Mr. Polly, and repented instantly of the alacrity of
the phrase.

"There'll have to be a walking party," said Mrs. Johnson cheerfully.
"There's only two coaches. I daresay we can put in six in each, but
that leaves three over."

There was a generous struggle to be pedestrian, and the two other
Larkins girls, confessing coyly to tight new boots and displaying a
certain eagerness, were added to the contents of the first carriage.

"It'll be a squeeze," said Annie.

"_I_ don't mind a squeeze," said Mr. Polly.

He decided privately that the proper phrase for the result of that
remark was "Hysterial catechunations."

Mr. Podger re-entered the room from a momentary supervision of the
bumping business that was now proceeding down the staircase.

"Bearing up," he said cheerfully, rubbing his hands together. "Bearing
up!"

That stuck very vividly in Mr. Polly's mind, and so did the
close-wedged drive to the churchyard, bunched in between two young
women in confused dull and shiny black, and the fact that the wind was
bleak and that the officiating clergyman had a cold, and sniffed
between his sentences. The wonder of life! The wonder of everything!
What had he expected that this should all be so astoundingly
different.

He found his attention converging more and more upon the Larkins
cousins. The interest was reciprocal. They watched him with a kind of
suppressed excitement and became risible with his every word and
gesture. He was more and more aware of their personal quality. Annie
had blue eyes and a red, attractive mouth, a harsh voice and a habit
of extreme liveliness that even this occasion could not suppress;
Minnie was fond, extremely free about the touching of hands and
suchlike endearments; Miriam was quieter and regarded him earnestly.
Mrs. Larkins was very happy in her daughters, and they had the naïve
affectionateness of those who see few people and find a strange cousin
a wonderful outlet. Mr. Polly had never been very much kissed, and it
made his mind swim. He did not know for the life of him whether he
liked or disliked all or any of the Larkins cousins. It was rather
attractive to make them laugh; they laughed at anything.

There they were tugging at his mind, and the funeral tugging at his
mind, too, and the sense of himself as Chief Mourner in a brand new
silk hat with a broad mourning band. He watched the ceremony and
missed his responses, and strange feelings twisted at his
heartstrings.


V

Mr. Polly walked back to the house because he wanted to be alone.
Miriam and Minnie would have accompanied him, but finding Uncle
Pentstemon beside the Chief Mourner they went on in front.

"You're wise," said Uncle Pentstemon.

"Glad you think so," said Mr. Polly, rousing himself to talk.

"I likes a bit of walking before a meal," said Uncle Pentstemon, and
made a kind of large hiccup. "That sherry rises," he remarked.
"Grocer's stuff, I expect."

He went on to ask how much the funeral might be costing, and seemed
pleased to find Mr. Polly didn't know.

"In that case," he said impressively, "it's pretty certain to cost
more'n you expect, my boy."

He meditated for a time. "I've seen a mort of undertakers," he
declared; "a mort of undertakers."

The Larkins girls attracted his attention.

"Let's lodgin's and chars," he commented. "Leastways she goes out to
cook dinners. And look at 'em!

"Dressed up to the nines. If it ain't borryd clothes, that is. And
they goes out to work at a factory!"

"Did you know my father much, Uncle Pentstemon?" asked Mr. Polly.

"Couldn't stand Lizzie throwin' herself away like that," said Uncle
Pentstemon, and repeated his hiccup on a larger scale.

"That _weren't_ good sherry," said Uncle Pentstemon with the first
note of pathos Mr. Polly had detected in his quavering voice.

The funeral in the rather cold wind had proved wonderfully appetising,
and every eye brightened at the sight of the cold collation that was
now spread in the front room. Mrs. Johnson was very brisk, and Mr.
Polly, when he re-entered the house found everybody sitting down.
"Come along, Alfred," cried the hostess cheerfully. "We can't very
well begin without you. Have you got the bottled beer ready to open,
Betsy? Uncle, you'll have a drop of whiskey, I expect."

"Put it where I can mix for myself," said Uncle Pentstemon, placing
his hat very carefully out of harm's way on the bookcase.

There were two cold boiled chickens, which Johnson carved with great
care and justice, and a nice piece of ham, some brawn and a steak and
kidney pie, a large bowl of salad and several sorts of pickles, and
afterwards came cold apple tart, jam roll and a good piece of Stilton
cheese, lots of bottled beer, some lemonade for the ladies and milk
for Master Punt; a very bright and satisfying meal. Mr. Polly found
himself seated between Mrs. Punt, who was much preoccupied with Master
Punt's table manners, and one of Mrs. Johnson's school friends, who
was exchanging reminiscences of school days and news of how various
common friends had changed and married with Mrs. Johnson. Opposite him
was Miriam and another of the Johnson circle, and also he had brawn to
carve and there was hardly room for the helpful Betsy to pass behind
his chair, so that altogether his mind would have been amply
distracted from any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about
the education of the modern young woman had not sprung up between
Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs. Larkins and threatened for a time, in spite
of a word or so in season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony of
the sad occasion.

The general effect was after this fashion:

First an impression of Mrs. Punt on the right speaking in a refined
undertone: "You didn't, I suppose, Mr. Polly, think to '_ave_ your
poor dear father post-mortemed--"

Lady on the left side breaking in: "I was just reminding Grace of the
dear dead days beyond recall--"

Attempted reply to Mrs. Punt: "Didn't think of it for a moment. Can't
give you a piece of this brawn, can I?"

Fragment from the left: "Grace and Beauty they used to call us and we
used to sit at the same desk--"

Mrs. Punt, breaking out suddenly: "Don't _swaller_ your fork, Willy.
You see, Mr. Polly, I used to '_ave_ a young gentleman, a medical
student, lodging with me--"

Voice from down the table: "'Am, Alfred? I didn't give you very much."

Bessie became evident at the back of Mr. Polly's chair, struggling
wildly to get past. Mr. Polly did his best to be helpful. "Can you get
past? Lemme sit forward a bit. Urr-oo! Right O."

Lady to the left going on valiantly and speaking to everyone who cares
to listen, while Mrs. Johnson beams beside her: "There she used to sit
as bold as brass, and the fun she used to make of things no one
_could_ believe--knowing her now. She used to make faces at the
mistress through the--"

Mrs. Punt keeping steadily on: "The contents of the stummik at any
rate _ought_ to be examined."

Voice of Mr. Johnson. "Elfrid, pass the mustid down."

Miriam leaning across the table: "Elfrid!"

"Once she got us all kept in. The whole school!"

Miriam, more insistently: "Elfrid!"

Uncle Pentstemon, raising his voice defiantly: "Trounce 'er again I
would if she did as much now. That I would! Dratted mischief!"

Miriam, catching Mr. Polly's eye: "Elfrid! This lady knows Canterbury.
I been telling her you been there."

Mr. Polly: "Glad you know it."

The lady shouting: "I like it."

Mrs. Larkins, raising her voice: "I won't '_ave_ my girls spoken of,
not by nobody, old or young."

Pop! imperfectly located.

Mr. Johnson at large: "_Ain't_ the beer up! It's the 'eated room."

Bessie: "Scuse me, sir, passing so soon again, but--" Rest
inaudible. Mr. Polly, accommodating himself: "Urr-oo! Right? Right
O."

The knives and forks, probably by some secret common agreement, clash
and clatter together and drown every other sound.

"Nobody 'ad the least idea 'ow 'E died,--nobody.... Willie, don't
_golp_ so. You ain't in a 'urry, are you? You don't want to ketch a
train or anything,--golping like that!"

"D'you remember, Grace, 'ow one day we 'ad writing lesson...."

"Nicer girls no one ever 'ad--though I say it who shouldn't."

Mrs. Johnson in a shrill clear hospitable voice: "Harold, won't Mrs.
Larkins '_ave_ a teeny bit more fowl?"

Mr. Polly rising to the situation. "Or some brawn, Mrs. Larkins?"
Catching Uncle Pentstemon's eye: "Can't send _you_ some brawn, sir?"

"Elfrid!"

Loud hiccup from Uncle Pentstemon, momentary consternation followed by
giggle from Annie.

The narration at Mr. Polly's elbow pursued a quiet but relentless
course. "Directly the new doctor came in he said: 'Everything must be
took out and put in spirits--everything.'"

Willie,--audible ingurgitation.

The narration on the left was flourishing up to a climax. "Ladies,"
she sez, "dip their pens _in_ their ink and keep their noses out of
it!"

"Elfrid!"--persuasively.

"Certain people may cast snacks at other people's daughters, never
having had any of their own, though two poor souls of wives dead and
buried through their goings on--"

Johnson ruling the storm: "We don't want old scores dug up on such a
day as this--"

"Old scores you may call them, but worth a dozen of them that put them
to their rest, poor dears."

"Elfrid!"--with a note of remonstrance.

"If you choke yourself, my lord, not another mouthful do you '_ave_.
No nice puddin'! Nothing!"

"And kept us in, she did, every afternoon for a week!"

It seemed to be the end, and Mr. Polly replied with an air of being
profoundly impressed: "Really!"

"Elfrid!"--a little disheartened.

"And then they 'ad it! They found he'd swallowed the very key to
unlock the drawer--"

"Then don't let people go casting snacks!"

"_Who's_ casting snacks!"

"Elfrid! This lady wants to _know_, '_ave_ the Prossers left
Canterbury?"

"No wish to make myself disagreeable, not to God's 'umblest worm--"

"Alf, you aren't very busy with that brawn up there!"

And so on for the hour.

The general effect upon Mr. Polly at the time was at once confusing
and exhilarating; but it led him to eat copiously and carelessly, and
long before the end, when after an hour and a quarter a movement took
the party, and it pushed away its cheese plates and rose sighing and
stretching from the remains of the repast, little streaks and bands of
dyspeptic irritation and melancholy were darkening the serenity of his
mind.

He stood between the mantel shelf and the window--the blinds were up
now--and the Larkins sisters clustered about him. He battled with the
oncoming depression and forced himself to be extremely facetious about
two noticeable rings on Annie's hand. "They ain't real," said Annie
coquettishly. "Got 'em out of a prize packet."

"Prize packet in trousers, I expect," said Mr. Polly, and awakened
inextinguishable laughter.

"Oh! the things you say!" said Minnie, slapping his shoulder.

Suddenly something he had quite extraordinarily forgotten came into
his head.

"Bless my heart!" he cried, suddenly serious.

"What's the matter?" asked Johnson.

"Ought to have gone back to shop--three days ago. They'll make no end
of a row!"

"Lor, you _are_ a Treat!" said cousin Annie, and screamed with
laughter at a delicious idea. "You'll get the Chuck," she said.

Mr. Polly made a convulsing grimace at her.

"I'll die!" she said. "I don't believe you care a bit!"

Feeling a little disorganized by her hilarity and a shocked expression
that had come to the face of cousin Miriam, he made some indistinct
excuse and went out through the back room and scullery into the little
garden. The cool air and a very slight drizzle of rain was a
relief--anyhow. But the black mood of the replete dyspeptic had come
upon him. His soul darkened hopelessly. He walked with his hands in
his pockets down the path between the rows of exceptionally cultured
peas and unreasonably, overwhelmingly, he was smitten by sorrow for
his father. The heady noise and muddle and confused excitement of the
feast passed from him like a curtain drawn away. He thought of that
hot and angry and struggling creature who had tugged and sworn so
foolishly at the sofa upon the twisted staircase, and who was now
lying still and hidden, at the bottom of a wall-sided oblong pit
beside the heaped gravel that would presently cover him. The stillness
of it! the wonder of it! the infinite reproach! Hatred for all these
people--all of them--possessed Mr. Polly's soul.

"Hen-witted gigglers," said Mr. Polly.

He went down to the fence, and stood with his hands on it staring away
at nothing. He stayed there for what seemed a long time. From the
house came a sound of raised voices that subsided, and then Mrs.
Johnson calling for Bessie.

"Gowlish gusto," said Mr. Polly. "Jumping it in. Funererial Games.
Don't hurt _him_ of course. Doesn't matter to _him_...."

Nobody missed Mr. Polly for a long time.

When at last he reappeared among them his eye was almost grim, but
nobody noticed his eye. They were looking at watches, and Johnson was
being omniscient about trains. They seemed to discover Mr. Polly
afresh just at the moment of parting, and said a number of more or
less appropriate things. But Uncle Pentstemon was far too worried
about his rush basket, which had been carelessly mislaid, he seemed to
think with larcenous intentions, to remember Mr. Polly at all. Mrs.
Johnson had tried to fob him off with a similar but inferior
basket,--his own had one handle mended with string according to a
method of peculiar virtue and inimitable distinction known only to
himself--and the old gentleman had taken her attempt as the gravest
reflection upon his years and intelligence. Mr. Polly was left very
largely to the Larkins trio. Cousin Minnie became shameless and kept
kissing him good-by--and then finding out it wasn't time to go.
Cousin Miriam seemed to think her silly, and caught Mr. Polly's eye
sympathetically. Cousin Annie ceased to giggle and lapsed into a
nearly sentimental state. She said with real feeling that she had
enjoyed the funeral more than words could tell.



Chapter the Fifth

Mr. Polly Takes a Vacation


I

Mr. Polly returned to Clapham from the funeral celebration prepared
for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit.

"You've merely anti-_separated_ me by a hair," he said politely.

And he told them in the dormitory that he meant to take a little
holiday before his next crib, though a certain inherited reticence
suppressed the fact of the legacy.

"You'll do that all right," said Ascough, the head of the boot shop.
"It's quite the fashion just at present. Six Weeks in Wonderful Wood
Street. They're running excursions...."

"A little holiday"; that was the form his sense of wealth took first,
that it made a little holiday possible. Holidays were his life, and
the rest merely adulterated living. And now he might take a little
holiday and have money for railway fares and money for meals and money
for inns. But--he wanted someone to take the holiday with.

For a time he cherished a design of hunting up Parsons, getting him to
throw up his situation, and going with him to Stratford-on-Avon and
Shrewsbury and the Welsh mountains and the Wye and a lot of places
like that, for a really gorgeous, careless, illimitable old holiday of
a month. But alas! Parsons had gone from the St. Paul's Churchyard
outfitter's long ago, and left no address.

Mr. Polly tried to think he would be almost as happy wandering alone,
but he knew better. He had dreamt of casual encounters with
delightfully interesting people by the wayside--even romantic
encounters. Such things happened in Chaucer and "Bocashiew," they
happened with extreme facility in Mr. Richard Le Gallienne's very
detrimental book, _The Quest of the Golden Girl_, which he had read at
Canterbury, but he had no confidence they would happen in England--to
him.

When, a month later, he came out of the Clapham side door at last into
the bright sunshine of a fine London day, with a dazzling sense of
limitless freedom upon him, he did nothing more adventurous than order
the cabman to drive to Waterloo, and there take a ticket for Easewood.

He wanted--what _did_ he want most in life? I think his distinctive
craving is best expressed as fun--fun in companionship. He had already
spent a pound or two upon three select feasts to his fellow
assistants, sprat suppers they were, and there had been a great and
very successful Sunday pilgrimage to Richmond, by Wandsworth and
Wimbledon's open common, a trailing garrulous company walking about a
solemnly happy host, to wonderful cold meat and salad at the Roebuck,
a bowl of punch, punch! and a bill to correspond; but now it was a
weekday, and he went down to Easewood with his bag and portmanteau in
a solitary compartment, and looked out of the window upon a world in
which every possible congenial seemed either toiling in a situation
or else looking for one with a gnawing and hopelessly preoccupying
anxiety. He stared out of the window at the exploitation roads of
suburbs, and rows of houses all very much alike, either emphatically
and impatiently _to let_ or full of rather busy unsocial people.
Near Wimbledon he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly
gentlemen who, had they chosen, might have been gentlemen of grace
and leisure, addressing themselves to smite little hunted white balls
great distances with the utmost bitterness and dexterity. Mr. Polly
could not understand them.

Every road he remarked, as freshly as though he had never observed it
before, was bordered by inflexible palings or iron fences or severely
disciplined hedges. He wondered if perhaps abroad there might be
beautifully careless, unenclosed high roads. Perhaps after all the
best way of taking a holiday is to go abroad.

He was haunted by the memory of what was either a half-forgotten
picture or a dream; a carriage was drawn up by the wayside and four
beautiful people, two men and two women graciously dressed, were
dancing a formal ceremonious dance full of bows and curtseys, to the
music of a wandering fiddler they had encountered. They had been
driving one way and he walking another--a happy encounter with this
obvious result. They might have come straight out of happy Theleme,
whose motto is: "Do what thou wilt." The driver had taken his two
sleek horses out; they grazed unchallenged; and he sat on a stone
clapping time with his hands while the fiddler played. The shade of
the trees did not altogether shut out the sunshine, the grass in the
wood was lush and full of still daffodils, the turf they danced on was
starred with daisies.

Mr. Polly, dear heart! firmly believed that things like that could and
did happen--somewhere. Only it puzzled him that morning that he never
saw them happening. Perhaps they happened south of Guilford. Perhaps
they happened in Italy. Perhaps they ceased to happen a hundred years
ago. Perhaps they happened just round the corner--on weekdays when all
good Mr. Pollys are safely shut up in shops. And so dreaming of
delightful impossibilities until his heart ached for them, he was
rattled along in the suburban train to Johnson's discreet home and the
briskly stimulating welcome of Mrs. Johnson.


II

Mr. Polly translated his restless craving for joy and leisure into
Harold Johnsonese by saying that he meant to look about him for a bit
before going into another situation. It was a decision Johnson very
warmly approved. It was arranged that Mr. Polly should occupy his
former room and board with the Johnsons in consideration of a weekly
payment of eighteen shillings. And the next morning Mr. Polly went out
early and reappeared with a purchase, a safety bicycle, which he
proposed to study and master in the sandy lane below the Johnsons'
house. But over the struggles that preceded his mastery it is humane
to draw a veil.

And also Mr. Polly bought a number of books, Rabelais for his own, and
"The Arabian Nights," the works of Sterne, a pile of "Tales from
Blackwood," cheap in a second-hand bookshop, the plays of William
Shakespeare, a second-hand copy of Belloc's "Road to Rome," an odd
volume of "Purchas his Pilgrimes" and "The Life and Death of Jason."

"Better get yourself a good book on bookkeeping," said Johnson,
turning over perplexing pages.

A belated spring was now advancing with great strides to make up for
lost time. Sunshine and a stirring wind were poured out over the land,
fleets of towering clouds sailed upon urgent tremendous missions
across the blue seas of heaven, and presently Mr. Polly was riding a
little unstably along unfamiliar Surrey roads, wondering always what
was round the next corner, and marking the blackthorn and looking out
for the first white flower-buds of the may. He was perplexed and
distressed, as indeed are all right thinking souls, that there is no
may in early May.

He did not ride at the even pace sensible people use who have marked
out a journey from one place to another, and settled what time it will
take them. He rode at variable speeds, and always as though he was
looking for something that, missing, left life attractive still, but a
little wanting in significance. And sometimes he was so unreasonably
happy he had to whistle and sing, and sometimes he was incredibly, but
not at all painfully, sad. His indigestion vanished with air and
exercise, and it was quite pleasant in the evening to stroll about the
garden with Johnson and discuss plans for the future. Johnson was full
of ideas. Moreover, Mr. Polly had marked the road that led to Stamton,
that rising populous suburb; and as his bicycle legs grew strong his
wheel with a sort of inevitableness carried him towards the row of
houses in a back street in which his Larkins cousins made their home
together.

He was received with great enthusiasm.

The street was a dingy little street, a _cul-de-sac_ of very small
houses in a row, each with an almost flattened bow window and a
blistered brown door with a black knocker. He poised his bright new
bicycle against the window, and knocked and stood waiting, and felt
himself in his straw hat and black serge suit a very pleasant and
prosperous-looking figure. The door was opened by cousin Miriam. She
was wearing a bluish print dress that brought out a kind of sallow
warmth in her skin, and although it was nearly four o'clock in the
afternoon, her sleeves were tucked up, as if for some domestic work,
above the elbows, showing her rather slender but very shapely
yellowish arms. The loosely pinned bodice confessed a delicately
rounded neck.

For a moment she regarded him with suspicion and a faint hostility,
and then recognition dawned in her eyes.

"Why!" she said, "it's cousin Elfrid!"

"Thought I'd look you up," he said.

"Fancy! you coming to see us like this!" she answered.

They stood confronting one another for a moment, while Miriam
collected herself for the unexpected emergency.

"Explorations menanderings," said Mr. Polly, indicating the bicycle.

Miriam's face betrayed no appreciation of the remark.

"Wait a moment," she said, coming to a rapid decision, "and I'll tell
Ma."

She closed the door on him abruptly, leaving him a little surprised in
the street. "Ma!" he heard her calling, and swift speech followed, the
import of which he didn't catch. Then she reappeared. It seemed but an
instant, but she was changed; the arms had vanished into sleeves, the
apron had gone, a certain pleasing disorder of the hair had been at
least reproved.

"I didn't mean to shut you out," she said, coming out upon the step.
"I just told Ma. How are you, Elfrid? You _are_ looking well. I didn't
know you rode a bicycle. Is it a new one?"

She leaned upon his bicycle. "Bright it is!" she said. "What a trouble
you must have to keep it clean!"

Mr. Polly was aware of a rustling transit along the passage, and of
the house suddenly full of hushed but strenuous movement.

"It's plated mostly," said Mr. Polly.

"What do you carry in that little bag thing?" she asked, and then
branched off to: "We're all in a mess to-day you know. It's my
cleaning up day to-day. I'm not a bit tidy I know, but I _do_ like to
'_ave_ a go in at things now and then. You got to take us as you find
us, Elfrid. Mercy we wasn't all out." She paused. She was talking
against time. "I _am_ glad to see you again," she repeated.

"Couldn't keep away," said Mr. Polly gallantly. "Had to come over and
see my pretty cousins again."

Miriam did not answer for a moment. She coloured deeply. "You _do say_
things!" she said.

She stared at Mr. Polly, and his unfortunate sense of fitness made him
nod his head towards her, regard her firmly with a round brown eye,
and add impressively: "I don't say _which_ of them."

Her answering expression made him realise for an instant the terrible
dangers he trifled with. Avidity flared up in her eyes. Minnie's voice
came happily to dissolve the situation.

"'Ello, Elfrid!" she said from the doorstep.

Her hair was just passably tidy, and she was a little effaced by a red
blouse, but there was no mistaking the genuine brightness of her
welcome.

He was to come in to tea, and Mrs. Larkins, exuberantly genial in a
floriferous but dingy flannel dressing gown, appeared to confirm that.
He brought in his bicycle and put it in the narrow, empty passage, and
everyone crowded into a small untidy kitchen, whose table had been
hastily cleared of the _débris_ of the midday repast.

"You must come in 'ere," said Mrs. Larkins, "for Miriam's turning out
the front room. I never did see such a girl for cleanin' up. Miriam's
'oliday's a scrub. You've caught us on the 'Op as the sayin' is, but
Welcome all the same. Pity Annie's at work to-day; she won't be 'ome
till seven."

Miriam put chairs and attended to the fire, Minnie edged up to Mr.
Polly and said: "I _am_ glad to see you again, Elfrid," with a warm
contiguous intimacy that betrayed a broken tooth. Mrs. Larkins got out
tea things, and descanted on the noble simplicity of their lives, and
how he "mustn't mind our simple ways." They enveloped Mr. Polly with a
geniality that intoxicated his amiable nature; he insisted upon
helping lay the things, and created enormous laughter by pretending
not to know where plates and knives and cups ought to go. "Who'm I
going to sit next?" he said, and developed voluminous amusement by
attempts to arrange the plates so that he could rub elbows with all
three. Mrs. Larkins had to sit down in the windsor chair by the
grandfather clock (which was dark with dirt and not going) to laugh at
her ease at his well-acted perplexity.

They got seated at last, and Mr. Polly struck a vein of humour in
telling them how he learnt to ride the bicycle. He found the mere
repetition of the word "wabble" sufficient to produce almost
inextinguishable mirth.

"No foreseeing little accidentulous misadventures," he said, "none
whatever."

(Giggle from Minnie.)

"Stout elderly gentleman--shirt sleeves--large straw wastepaper basket
sort of hat--starts to cross the road--going to the oil shop--prodic
refreshment of oil can--"

"Don't say you run 'im down," said Mrs. Larkins, gasping. "Don't say
you run 'im down, Elfrid!"

"Run 'im down! Not me, Madam. I never run anything down. Wabble. Ring
the bell. Wabble, wabble--"

(Laughter and tears.)

"No one's going to run him down. Hears the bell! Wabble. Gust of wind.
Off comes the hat smack into the wheel. Wabble. _Lord! what's_ going
to happen? Hat across the road, old gentleman after it, bell, shriek.
He ran into me. Didn't ring his bell, hadn't _got_ a bell--just ran
into me. Over I went clinging to his venerable head. Down he went with
me clinging to him. Oil can blump, blump into the road."

(Interlude while Minnie is attended to for crumb in the windpipe.)

"Well, what happened to the old man with the oil can?" said Mrs.
Larkins.

"We sat about among the debreece and had a bit of an argument. I told
him he oughtn't to come out wearing such a dangerous hat--flying at
things. Said if he couldn't control his hat he ought to leave it at
home. High old jawbacious argument we had, I tell you. 'I tell you,
sir--' 'I tell _you_, sir.' Waw-waw-waw. Infuriacious. But that's the
sort of thing that's constantly happening you know--on a bicycle.
People run into you, hens and cats and dogs and things. Everything
seems to have its mark on you; everything."

"_You_ never run into anything."

"Never. Swelpme," said Mr. Polly very solemnly.

"Never, 'E say!" squealed Minnie. "Hark at 'im!" and relapsed into a
condition that urgently demanded back thumping. "Don't be so silly,"
said Miriam, thumping hard.

Mr. Polly had never been such a social success before. They hung upon
his every word--and laughed. What a family they were for laughter! And
he loved laughter. The background he apprehended dimly; it was very
much the sort of background his life had always had. There was a
threadbare tablecloth on the table, and the slop basin and teapot did
not go with the cups and saucers, the plates were different again, the
knives worn down, the butter lived in a greenish glass dish of its
own. Behind was a dresser hung with spare and miscellaneous crockery,
with a workbox and an untidy work-basket, there was an ailing musk
plant in the window, and the tattered and blotched wallpaper was
covered by bright-coloured grocers' almanacs. Feminine wrappings hung
from pegs upon the door, and the floor was covered with a varied
collection of fragments of oilcloth. The Windsor chair he sat in was
unstable--which presently afforded material for humour. "Steady, old
nag," he said; "whoa, my friskiacious palfry!"

"The things he says! You never know what he won't say next!"


III

"You ain't talkin' of goin'!" cried Mrs. Larkins.

"Supper at eight."

"Stay to supper with _us_, now you '_ave_ come over," said Mrs.
Larkins, with corroborating cries from Minnie. "'Ave a bit of a walk
with the gals, and then come back to supper. You might all go and meet
Annie while I straighten up, and lay things out."

"You're not to go touching the front room mind," said Miriam.

"_Who's_ going to touch yer front room?" said Mrs. Larkins, apparently
forgetful for a moment of Mr. Polly.

Both girls dressed with some care while Mrs. Larkins sketched the
better side of their characters, and then the three young people went
out to see something of Stamton. In the streets their risible mood
gave way to a self-conscious propriety that was particularly evident
in Miriam's bearing. They took Mr. Polly to the Stamton Wreckeryation
ground--that at least was what they called it--with its handsome
custodian's cottage, its asphalt paths, its Jubilee drinking fountain,
its clumps of wallflower and daffodils, and so to the new cemetery and
a distant view of the Surrey hills, and round by the gasworks to the
canal to the factory, that presently disgorged a surprised and radiant
Annie.

"El-_lo_" said Annie.

It is very pleasant to every properly constituted mind to be a centre
of amiable interest for one's fellow creatures, and when one is a
young man conscious of becoming mourning and a certain wit, and the
fellow creatures are three young and ardent and sufficiently
expressive young women who dispute for the honour of walking by one's
side, one may be excused a secret exaltation. They did dispute.

"I'm going to '_ave_ 'im now," said Annie. "You two've been 'aving 'im
all the afternoon. Besides, I've got something to say to him."

She had something to say to him. It came presently. "I say," she said
abruptly. "I _did_ get them rings out of a prize packet."

"What rings?" asked Mr. Polly.

"What you saw at your poor father's funeral. You made out they meant
something. They didn't--straight."

"Then some people have been very remiss about their chances," said Mr.
Polly, understanding.

"They haven't had any chances," said Annie. "I don't believe in making
oneself too free with people."

"Nor me," said Mr. Polly.

"I may be a bit larky and cheerful in my manner," Annie admitted. "But
it don't _mean_ anything. I ain't that sort."

"Right O," said Mr. Polly.


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.



Chapter the Sixth

Miriam


I

It is an illogical consequence of one human being's ill-treatment that
we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It
seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage the smart of
his humiliation. Moreover it had for some undefined reason to be a
feminine touch, and the number of women in his world was limited.

He thought of the Larkins family--the Larkins whom he had not been
near now for ten long days. Healing people they seemed to him
now--healing, simple people. They had good hearts, and he had
neglected them for a mirage. If he rode over to them he would be able
to talk nonsense and laugh and forget the whirl of memories and
thoughts that was spinning round and round so unendurably in his
brain.

"Law!" said Mrs. Larkins, "come in! You're quite a stranger, Elfrid!"

"Been seeing to business," said the unveracious Polly.

"None of 'em ain't at 'ome, but Miriam's just out to do a bit of
shopping. Won't let me shop, she won't, because I'm so keerless. She's
a wonderful manager, that girl. Minnie's got some work at the carpet
place. 'Ope it won't make 'er ill again. She's a loving deliket sort,
is Minnie.... Come into the front parlour. It's a bit untidy, but you
got to take us as you find us. Wot you been doing to your face?"

"Bit of a scrase with the bicycle," said Mr. Polly.

"Trying to pass a carriage on the on side, and he drew up and ran me
against a wall."

Mrs. Larkins scrutinised it. "You ought to '_ave_ someone look after
your scrases," she said. "That's all red and rough. It ought to be
cold-creamed. Bring your bicycle into the passage and come in."

She "straightened up a bit," that is to say she increased the
dislocation of a number of scattered articles, put a workbasket on the
top of several books, swept two or three dogs'-eared numbers of the
_Lady's Own Novelist_ from the table into the broken armchair, and
proceeded to sketch together the tea-things with various such
interpolations as: "Law, if I ain't forgot the butter!" All the while
she talked of Annie's good spirits and cleverness with her millinery,
and of Minnie's affection and Miriam's relative love of order and
management. Mr. Polly stood by the window uneasily and thought how
good and sincere was the Larkins tone. It was well to be back again.

"You're a long time finding that shop of yours," said Mrs. Larkins.

"Don't do to be precipitous," said Mr. Polly.

"No," said Mrs. Larkins, "once you got it you got it. Like choosing a
'usband. You better see you got it good. I kept Larkins 'esitating two
years I did, until I felt sure of him. A 'ansom man 'e was as you can
see by the looks of the girls, but 'ansom is as 'ansom does. You'd
like a bit of jam to your tea, I expect? I 'ope they'll keep _their_
men waiting when the time comes. I tell them if they think of marrying
it only shows they don't know when they're well off. Here's Miriam!"

Miriam entered with several parcels in a net, and a peevish
expression. "Mother," she said, "you might '_ave_ prevented my going
out with the net with the broken handle. I've been cutting my fingers
with the string all the way 'ome." Then she discovered Mr. Polly and
her face brightened.

"Ello, Elfrid!" she said. "Where you been all this time?"

"Looking round," said Mr. Polly.

"Found a shop?"

"One or two likely ones. But it takes time."

"You've got the wrong cups, Mother."

She went into the kitchen, disposed of her purchases, and returned
with the right cups. "What you done to your face, Elfrid?" she asked,
and came and scrutinised his scratches. "All rough it is."

He repeated his story of the accident, and she was sympathetic in a
pleasant homely way.

"You are quiet to-day," she said as they sat down to tea.

"Meditatious," said Mr. Polly.

Quite by accident he touched her hand on the table, and she answered
his touch.

"Why not?" thought Mr. Polly, and looking up, caught Mrs. Larkins' eye
and flushed guiltily. But Mrs. Larkins, with unusual restraint, said
nothing. She merely made a grimace, enigmatical, but in its essence
friendly.

Presently Minnie came in with some vague grievance against the manager
of the carpet-making place about his method of estimating piece work.
Her account was redundant, defective and highly technical, but
redeemed by a certain earnestness. "I'm never within sixpence of what
I reckon to be," she said. "It's a bit too 'ot." Then Mr. Polly,
feeling that he was being conspicuously dull, launched into a
description of the shop he was looking for and the shops he had seen.
His mind warmed up as he talked.

"Found your tongue again," said Mrs. Larkins. He had. He began to
embroider the subject and work upon it. For the first time it assumed
picturesque and desirable qualities in his mind. It stimulated him to
see how readily and willingly they accepted his sketches. Bright ideas
appeared in his mind from nowhere. He was suddenly enthusiastic.

"When I get this shop of mine I shall have a cat. Must make a home for
a cat, you know."

"What, to catch the mice?" said Mrs. Larkins.

"No--sleep in the window. A venerable _signor_ of a cat. Tabby. Cat's
no good if it isn't tabby. Cat I'm going to have, and a canary! Didn't
think of that before, but a cat and a canary seem to go, you know.
Summer weather I shall sit at breakfast in the little room behind the
shop, sun streaming in the window to rights, cat on a chair, canary
singing and--Mrs. Polly...."

"Ello!" said Mrs. Larkins.

"Mrs. Polly frying an extra bit of bacon. Bacon singing, cat singing,
canary singing. Kettle singing. Mrs. Polly--"

"But who's Mrs. Polly going to be?" said Mrs. Larkins.

"Figment of the imagination, ma'am," said Mr. Polly. "Put in to fill
up picture. No face to figure as yet. Still, that's how it will be, I
can assure you. I think I must have a bit of garden. Johnson's the man
for a garden of course," he said, going off at a tangent, "but I don't
mean a fierce sort of garden. Earnest industry. Anxious moments.
Fervous digging. Shan't go in for that sort of garden, ma'am. No! Too
much backache for me. My garden will be just a patch of 'sturtiums and
sweet pea. Red brick yard, clothes' line. Trellis put up in odd time.
Humorous wind vane. Creeper up the back of the house."

"Virginia creeper?" asked Miriam.

"Canary creeper," said Mr. Polly.

"You _will_ '_ave_ it nice," said Miriam, desirously.

"Rather," said Mr. Polly. "Ting-a-ling-a-ling. _Shop!_"

He straightened himself up and then they all laughed.

"Smart little shop," he said. "Counter. Desk. All complete. Umbrella
stand. Carpet on the floor. Cat asleep on the counter. Ties and hose
on a rail over the counter. All right."

"I wonder you don't set about it right off," said Miriam.

"Mean to get it exactly right, m'am," said Mr. Polly.

"Have to have a tomcat," said Mr. Polly, and paused for an expectant
moment. "Wouldn't do to open shop one morning, you know, and find the
window full of kittens. Can't sell kittens...."

When tea was over he was left alone with Minnie for a few minutes, and
an odd intimation of an incident occurred that left Mr. Polly rather
scared and shaken. A silence fell between them--an uneasy silence. He
sat with his elbows on the table looking at her. All the way from
Easewood to Stamton his erratic imagination had been running upon neat
ways of proposing marriage. I don't know why it should have done, but
it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite
aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary
force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the
gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think
how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise
Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea
things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share of clearing away.

"I like cats," said Minnie after a thoughtful pause. "I'm always
saying to mother, 'I wish we 'ad a cat.' But we couldn't '_ave_ a cat
'ere--not with no yard."

"Never had a cat myself," said Mr. Polly. "No!"

"I'm fond of them," said Minnie.

"I like the look of them," said Mr. Polly. "Can't exactly call myself
fond."

"I expect I shall get one some day. When about you get your shop."

"I shall have my shop all right before long," said Mr. Polly. "Trust
me. Canary bird and all."

She shook her head. "I shall get a cat first," she said. "You never
mean anything you say."

"Might get 'em together," said Mr. Polly, with his sense of a neat
thing outrunning his discretion.

"Why! 'ow d'you mean?" said Minnie, suddenly alert.

"Shop and cat thrown in," said Mr. Polly in spite of himself, and his
head swam and he broke out into a cold sweat as he said it.

He found her eyes fixed on him with an eager expression. "Mean to
say--" she began as if for verification. He sprang to his feet, and
turned to the window. "Little dog!" he said, and moved doorward
hastily. "Eating my bicycle tire, I believe," he explained. And so
escaped.

He saw his bicycle in the hall and cut it dead.

He heard Mrs. Larkins in the passage behind him as he opened the front
door.

He turned to her. "Thought my bicycle was on fire," he said. "Outside.
Funny fancy! All right, reely. Little dog outside.... Miriam ready?"

"What for?"

"To go and meet Annie."

Mrs. Larkins stared at him. "You're stopping for a bit of supper?"

"If I may," said Mr. Polly.

"You're a rum un," said Mrs. Larkins, and called: "Miriam!"

Minnie appeared at the door of the room looking infinitely perplexed.
"There ain't a little dog anywhere, Elfrid," she said.

Mr. Polly passed his hand over his brow. "I had a most curious
sensation. Felt exactly as though something was up somewhere. That's
why I said Little Dog. All right now."

He bent down and pinched his bicycle tire.

"You was saying something about a cat, Elfrid," said Minnie.

"Give you one," he answered without looking up. "The very day my shop
is opened."

He straightened himself up and smiled reassuringly. "Trust me," he
said.


II

When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself
starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with
Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid the topic
of the shop that had now taken such a grip upon him. A sense of danger
only increased the attraction. Minnie's persistent disposition to
accompany them had been crushed by a novel and violent and urgently
expressed desire on the part of Mrs. Larkins to see her do something
in the house sometimes....

"You really think you'll open a shop?" asked Miriam.

"I hate cribs," said Mr. Polly, adopting a moderate tone. "In a shop
there's this drawback and that, but one is one's own master."

"That wasn't all talk?"

"Not a bit of it."

"After all," he went on, "a little shop needn't be so bad."

"It's a 'ome," said Miriam.

"It's a home."

Pause.

"There's no need to keep accounts and that sort of thing if there's no
assistant. I daresay I could run a shop all right if I wasn't
interfered with."

"I should like to see you in your shop," said Miriam. "I expect you'd
keep everything tremendously neat."

The conversation flagged.

"Let's sit down on one of those seats over there," said Miriam. "Where
we can see those blue flowers."

They did as she suggested, and sat down in a corner where a triangular
bed of stock and delphinium brightened the asphalted traceries of the
Recreation Ground.

"I wonder what they call those flowers," she said. "I always like
them. They're handsome."

"Delphicums and larkspurs," said Mr. Polly. "They used to be in the
park at Port Burdock.

"Floriferous corner," he added approvingly.

He put an arm over the back of the seat, and assumed a more
comfortable attitude. He glanced at Miriam, who was sitting in a lax,
thoughtful pose with her eyes on the flowers. She was wearing her old
dress, she had not had time to change, and the blue tones of her old
dress brought out a certain warmth in her skin, and her pose
exaggerated whatever was feminine in her rather lean and insufficient
body, and rounded her flat chest delusively. A little line of light
lay along her profile. The afternoon was full of transfiguring
sunshine, children were playing noisily in the adjacent sandpit, some
Judas trees were brightly abloom in the villa gardens that bordered
the Recreation Ground, and all the place was bright with touches of
young summer colour. It all merged with the effect of Miriam in Mr.
Polly's mind.

Her thoughts found speech. "One did ought to be happy in a shop," she
said with a note of unusual softness in her voice.

It seemed to him that she was right. One did ought to be happy in a
shop. Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods
and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in
dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly
down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were,
that ended in one's being laughed at and made a mock of. There was no
mockery here.

"A shop's such a respectable thing to be," said Miriam thoughtfully.

"_I_ could be happy in a shop," he said.

His sense of effect made him pause.

"If I had the right company," he added.

She became very still.

Mr. Polly swerved a little from the conversational ice-run upon which
he had embarked.

"I'm not such a blooming Geezer," he said, "as not to be able to sell
goods a bit. One has to be nosy over one's buying of course. But I
shall do all right."

He stopped, and felt falling, falling through the aching silence that
followed.

"If you get the right company," said Miriam.

"I shall get that all right."

"You don't mean you've got someone--"

He found himself plunging.

"I've got someone in my eye, this minute," he said.

"Elfrid!" she said, turning on him. "You don't mean--"

Well, _did_ he mean? "I do!" he said.

"Not reely!" She clenched her hands to keep still.

He took the conclusive step.

"Well, you and me, Miriam, in a little shop--with a cat and a
canary--" He tried too late to get back to a hypothetical note. "Just
suppose it!"

"You mean," said Miriam, "you're in love with me, Elfrid?"

What possible answer can a man give to such a question but "Yes!"

Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and
everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on
the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch. He put an arm
about her and kissed her back, and felt an irrevocable act was sealed.
He had a curious feeling that it would be very satisfying to marry and
have a wife--only somehow he wished it wasn't Miriam. Her lips were
very pleasant to him, and the feel of her in his arm.

They recoiled a little from each other and sat for a moment, flushed
and awkwardly silent. His mind was altogether incapable of controlling
its confusion.

"I didn't dream," said Miriam, "you cared--. Sometimes I thought it
was Annie, sometimes Minnie--"

"Always liked you better than them," said Mr. Polly.

"I loved you, Elfrid," said Miriam, "since ever we met at your poor
father's funeral. Leastways I _would_ have done, if I had thought. You
didn't seem to mean anything you said.

"I _can't_ believe it!" she added.

"Nor I," said Mr. Polly.

"You mean to marry me and start that little shop--"

"Soon as ever I find it," said Mr. Polly.

"I had no more idea when I came out with you--"

"Nor me!"

"It's like a dream."

They said no more for a little while.

"I got to pinch myself to think it's real," said Miriam. "What they'll
do without me at 'ome I can't imagine. When I tell them--"

For the life of him Mr. Polly could not tell whether he was fullest of
tender anticipations or regretful panic.

"Mother's no good at managing--not a bit. Annie don't care for 'ouse
work and Minnie's got no 'ed for it. What they'll do without me I
can't imagine."

"They'll have to do without you," said Mr. Polly, sticking to his
guns.

A clock in the town began striking.

"Lor'!" said Miriam, "we shall miss Annie--sitting 'ere and
love-making!"

She rose and made as if to take Mr. Polly's arm. But Mr. Polly felt
that their condition must be nakedly exposed to the ridicule of the
world by such a linking, and evaded her movement.

Annie was already in sight before a flood of hesitation and terrors
assailed Mr. Polly.

"Don't tell anyone yet a bit," he said.

"Only mother," said Miriam firmly.


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.


V

It was in the vestry that the force of Mr. Voules' personality began
to show at its true value. He seemed to open out and spread over
things directly the restraints of the ceremony were at an end.

"Everything," he said to the clergyman, "excellent." He also shook
hands with Mrs. Larkins, who clung to him for a space, and kissed
Miriam on the cheek. "First kiss for me," he said, "anyhow."

He led Mr. Polly to the register by the arm, and then got chairs for
Mrs. Larkins and his wife. He then turned on Miriam. "Now, young
people," he said. "One! or _I_ shall again."

"That's right!" said Mr. Voules. "Same again, Miss."

Mr. Polly was overcome with modest confusion, and turning, found a
refuge from this publicity in the arms of Mrs. Larkins. Then in a
state of profuse moisture he was assaulted and kissed by Annie and
Minnie, who were immediately kissed upon some indistinctly stated
grounds by Mr. Voules, who then kissed the entirely impassive Mrs.
Voules and smacked his lips and remarked: "Home again safe and sound!"
Then with a strange harrowing cry Mrs. Larkins seized upon and bedewed
Miriam with kisses, Annie and Minnie kissed each other, and Johnson
went abruptly to the door of the vestry and stared into the church--no
doubt with ideas of sanctuary in his mind. "Like a bit of a kiss round
sometimes," said Mr. Voules, and made a kind of hissing noise with his
teeth, and suddenly smacked his hands together with great _éclat_
several times. Meanwhile the clergyman scratched his cheek with one
hand and fiddled the pen with the other and the verger coughed
protestingly.

"The dog cart's just outside," said Mr. Voules. "No walking home
to-day for the bride, Mam."

"Not going to drive us?" cried Annie.

"The happy pair, Miss. _Your_ turn soon."

"Get out!" said Annie. "I shan't marry--ever."

"You won't be able to help it. You'll have to do it--just to disperse
the crowd." Mr. Voules laid his hand on Mr. Polly's shoulder. "The
bridegroom gives his arm to the bride. Hands across and down the
middle. Prump. Prump, Perump-pump-pump-pump."

Mr. Polly found himself and the bride leading the way towards the
western door.

Mrs. Larkins passed close to Uncle Pentstemon, sobbing too earnestly
to be aware of him. "Such a goo-goo-goo-girl!" she sobbed.

"Didn't think _I'd_ come, did you?" said Uncle Pentstemon, but she
swept past him, too busy with the expression of her feelings to
observe him.

"She didn't think I'd come, I lay," said Uncle Pentstemon, a little
foiled, but effecting an auditory lodgment upon Johnson.

"I don't know," said Johnson uncomfortably.

"I suppose you were asked. How are you getting on?"

"I was _arst_," said Uncle Pentstemon, and brooded for a moment.

"I goes about seeing wonders," he added, and then in a sort of
enhanced undertone: "One of 'er girls gettin' married. That's what I
mean by wonders. Lord's goodness! Wow!"

"Nothing the matter?" asked Johnson.

"Got it in the back for a moment. Going to be a change of weather I
suppose," said Uncle Pentstemon. "I brought 'er a nice present, too,
what I got in this passel. Vallyble old tea caddy that uset' be my
mother's. What I kep' my baccy in for years and years--till the hinge
at the back got broke. It ain't been no use to me particular since, so
thinks I, drat it! I may as well give it 'er as not...."

Mr. Polly found himself emerging from the western door.

Outside, a crowd of half-a-dozen adults and about fifty children had
collected, and hailed the approach of the newly wedded couple with a
faint, indeterminate cheer. All the children were holding something in
little bags, and his attention was caught by the expression of
vindictive concentration upon the face of a small big-eared boy in the
foreground. He didn't for the moment realise what these things might
import. Then he received a stinging handful of rice in the ear, and a
great light shone.

"Not yet, you young fool!" he heard Mr. Voules saying behind him, and
then a second handful spoke against his hat.

"Not yet," said Mr. Voules with increasing emphasis, and Mr. Polly
became aware that he and Miriam were the focus of two crescents of
small boys, each with the light of massacre in his eyes and a grubby
fist clutching into a paper bag for rice; and that Mr. Voules was
warding off probable discharges with a large red hand.

The dog cart was in charge of a loafer, and the horse and the whip
were adorned with white favours, and the back seat was confused but
not untenable with hampers. "Up we go," said Mr. Voules, "old birds in
front and young ones behind." An ominous group of ill-restrained
rice-throwers followed them up as they mounted.

"Get your handkerchief for your face," said Mr. Polly to his bride,
and took the place next the pavement with considerable heroism, held
on, gripped his hat, shut his eyes and prepared for the worst. "Off!"
said Mr. Voules, and a concentrated fire came stinging Mr. Polly's
face.

The horse shied, and when the bridegroom could look at the world again
it was manifest the dog cart had just missed an electric tram by a
hairsbreadth, and far away outside the church railings the verger and
Johnson were battling with an active crowd of small boys for the life
of the rest of the Larkins family. Mrs. Punt and her son had escaped
across the road, the son trailing and stumbling at the end of a
remorseless arm, but Uncle Pentstemon, encumbered by the tea-caddy,
was the centre of a little circle of his own, and appeared to be
dratting them all very heartily. Remoter, a policeman approached with
an air of tranquil unconsciousness.

"Steady, you idiot. Stead-y!" cried Mr. Voules, and then over his
shoulder: "I brought that rice! I like old customs! Whoa! Stead-y."

The dog cart swerved violently, and then, evoking a shout of
groundless alarm from a cyclist, took a corner, and the rest of the
wedding party was hidden from Mr. Polly's eyes.


VI

"We'll get the stuff into the house before the old gal comes along,"
said Mr. Voules, "if you'll hold the hoss."

"How about the key?" asked Mr. Polly.

"I got the key, coming."

And while Mr. Polly held the sweating horse and dodged the foam that
dripped from its bit, the house absorbed Miriam and Mr. Voules
altogether. Mr. Voules carried in the various hampers he had brought
with him, and finally closed the door behind him.

For some time Mr. Polly remained alone with his charge in the little
blind alley outside the Larkins' house, while the neighbours
scrutinised him from behind their blinds. He reflected that he was a
married man, that he must look very like a fool, that the head of a
horse is a silly shape and its eye a bulger; he wondered what the
horse thought of him, and whether it really liked being held and
patted on the neck or whether it only submitted out of contempt. Did
it know he was married? Then he wondered if the clergyman had thought
him much of an ass, and then whether the individual lurking behind the
lace curtains of the front room next door was a man or a woman. A door
opened over the way, and an elderly gentleman in a kind of embroidered
fez appeared smoking a pipe with a quiet satisfied expression. He
regarded Mr. Polly for some time with mild but sustained curiosity.
Finally he called: "Hi!"

"Hullo!" said Mr. Polly.

"You needn't 'old that '_orse_," said the old gentleman.

"Spirited beast," said Mr. Polly. "And,"--with some faint analogy to
ginger beer in his mind--"he's up to-day."

"'E won't turn 'isself round," said the old gentleman, "anyow. And
there ain't no way through for 'im to go."

"_Verbum_ sap," said Mr. Polly, and abandoned the horse and turned, to
the door. It opened to him just as Mrs. Larkins on the arm of Johnson,
followed by Annie, Minnie, two friends, Mrs. Punt and her son and at a
slight distance Uncle Pentstemon, appeared round the corner.

"They're coming," he said to Miriam, and put an arm about her and gave
her a kiss.

She was kissing him back when they were startled violently by the
shying of two empty hampers into the passage. Then Mr. Voules appeared
holding a third.

"Here! you'll '_ave_ plenty of time for that presently," he said, "get
these hampers away before the old girl comes. I got a cold collation
here to make her sit up. My eye!"

Miriam took the hampers, and Mr. Polly under compulsion from Mr.
Voules went into the little front room. A profuse pie and a large ham
had been added to the modest provision of Mrs. Larkins, and a number
of select-looking bottles shouldered the bottle of sherry and the
bottle of port she had got to grace the feast. They certainly went
better with the iced wedding cake in the middle. Mrs. Voules, still
impassive, stood by the window regarding these things with a faint
approval.

"Makes it look a bit thicker, eh?" said Mr. Voules, and blew out both
his cheeks and smacked his hands together violently several times.
"Surprise the old girl no end."

He stood back and smiled and bowed with arms extended as the others
came clustering at the door.

"Why, _Un_-_clé_ Voules!" cried Annie, with a rising note.

It was his reward.

And then came a great wedging and squeezing and crowding into the
little room. Nearly everyone was hungry, and eyes brightened at the
sight of the pie and the ham and the convivial array of bottles. "Sit
down everyone," cried Mr. Voules, "leaning against anything counts as
sitting, and makes it easier to shake down the grub!"

The two friends from Miriam's place of business came into the room
among the first, and then wedged themselves so hopelessly against
Johnson in an attempt to get out again and take off their things
upstairs that they abandoned the attempt. Amid the struggle Mr. Polly
saw Uncle Pentstemon relieve himself of his parcel by giving it to the
bride. "Here!" he said and handed it to her. "Weddin' present," he
explained, and added with a confidential chuckle, "_I_ never thought
I'd '_ave_ to give you one--ever."

"Who says steak and kidney pie?" bawled Mr. Voules. "Who says steak
and kidney pie? You '_ave_ a drop of old Tommy, Martha. That's what
you want to steady you.... Sit down everyone and don't all speak at
once. Who says steak and kidney pie?..."

"Vocificeratious," whispered Mr. Polly. "Convivial vocificerations."

"Bit of 'am with it," shouted Mr. Voules, poising a slice of ham on
his knife. "Anyone '_ave_ a bit of 'am with it? Won't that little man
of yours, Mrs. Punt--won't 'e '_ave_ a bit of 'am?..."

"And now ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Voules, still standing and
dominating the crammed roomful, "now you got your plates filled and
something I can warrant you good in your glasses, wot about drinking
the 'ealth of the bride?"

"Eat a bit fust," said Uncle Pentstemon, speaking with his mouth full,
amidst murmurs of applause. "Eat a bit fust."

So they did, and the plates clattered and the glasses chinked.

Mr. Polly stood shoulder to shoulder with Johnson for a moment.

"In for it," said Mr. Polly cheeringly. "Cheer up, O' Man, and peck a
bit. No reason why _you_ shouldn't eat, you know."

The Punt boy stood on Mr. Polly's boots for a minute, struggling
violently against the compunction of Mrs. Punt's grip.

"Pie," said the Punt boy, "Pie!"

"You sit 'ere and '_ave_ 'am, my lord!" said Mrs. Punt, prevailing.
"Pie you can't '_ave_ and you won't."

"Lor ble

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