The History of Mr. Polly

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.