The History of Mr. Polly

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.