The History of Mr. Polly

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.