The History of Mr. Polly

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.