The History of Mr. Polly

“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.