The History of Mr. Polly

And now Mr. Polly began to lead a divided life.  With the Johnsons he professed to be inclined, but not so conclusively inclined as to be inconvenient, to get a shop for himself, to be, to use the phrase he preferred, “looking for an opening.”  He would ride off in the afternoon upon that research, remarking that he was going to “cast a strategetical eye” on Chertsey or Weybridge.  But if not all roads, still a great majority of them, led by however devious ways to Stamton, and to laughter and increasing familiarity.  Relations developed with Annie and Minnie and Miriam.  Their various characters were increasingly interesting.  The laughter became perceptibly less abundant, something of the fizz had gone from the first opening, still these visits remained wonderfully friendly and upholding.  Then back he would come to grave but evasive discussions with Johnson.

Johnson was really anxious to get Mr. Polly “into something.”  His was a reserved honest character, and he would really have preferred to see his lodger doing things for himself than receive his money for housekeeping.  He hated waste, anybody’s waste, much more than he desired profit.  But Mrs. Johnson was all for Mr. Polly’s loitering.  She seemed much the more human and likeable of the two to Mr. Polly.

He tried at times to work up enthusiasm for the various avenues to well-being his discussion with Johnson opened.  But they remained disheartening prospects.  He imagined himself wonderfully smartened up, acquiring style and value in a London shop, but the picture was stiff and unconvincing.  He tried to rouse himself to enthusiasm by the idea of his property increasing by leaps and bounds, by twenty pounds a year or so, let us say, each year, in a well-placed little shop, the corner shop Johnson favoured.  There was a certain picturesque interest in imagining cut-throat economies, but his heart told him there would be little in practising them.

And then it happened to Mr. Polly that real Romance came out of dreamland into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—­and left him.  She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of her retreating aspect.

It was all the more to Mr. Polly’s taste that the thing should happen as things happen in books.

In a resolute attempt not to get to Stamton that day, he had turned due southward from Easewood towards a country where the abundance of bracken jungles, lady’s smock, stitchwork, bluebells and grassy stretches by the wayside under shady trees does much to compensate the lighter type of mind for the absence of promising “openings.”  He turned aside from the road, wheeled his machine along a faintly marked attractive trail through bracken until he came to a heap of logs against a high old stone wall with a damaged coping and wallflower plants already gone to seed.  He sat down, balanced the straw hat on a convenient lump of wood, lit a cigarette, and abandoned himself to agreeable musings and the friendly observation of a cheerful little brown and grey bird his stillness presently encouraged to approach him.  “This is All Right,” said Mr. Polly softly to the little brown and grey bird.  “Business—­later.”

He reflected that he might go on this way for four or five years, and then be scarcely worse off than he had been in his father’s lifetime.

“Vile Business,” said Mr. Polly.

Then Romance appeared.  Or to be exact, Romance became audible.

Romance began as a series of small but increasingly vigorous movements on the other side of the wall, then as a voice murmuring, then as a falling of little fragments on the hither side and as ten pink finger tips, scarcely apprehended before Romance became startling and emphatically a leg, remained for a time a fine, slender, actively struggling limb, brown stockinged and wearing a brown toe-worn shoe, and then—.  A handsome red-haired girl wearing a short dress of blue linen was sitting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged by her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly….

His fine instincts made him turn his head away and assume an attitude of negligent contemplation, with his ears and mind alive to every sound behind him.

“Goodness!” said a voice with a sharp note of surprise.

Mr. Polly was on his feet in an instant.  “Dear me!  Can I be of any assistance?” he said with deferential gallantry.

“I don’t know,” said the young lady, and regarded him calmly with clear blue eyes.

“I didn’t know there was anyone here,” she added.

“Sorry,” said Mr. Polly, “if I am intrudaceous.  I didn’t know you didn’t want me to be here.”

She reflected for a moment on the word.  “It isn’t that,” she said, surveying him.

“I oughtn’t to get over the wall,” she explained.  “It’s out of bounds.  At least in term time.  But this being holidays—­”

Her manner placed the matter before him.

“Holidays is different,” said Mr. Polly.

“I don’t want to actually break the rules,” she said.

“Leave them behind you,” said Mr. Polly with a catch of the breath, “where they are safe”; and marvelling at his own wit and daring, and indeed trembling within himself, he held out a hand for her.

She brought another brown leg from the unknown, and arranged her skirt with a dexterity altogether feminine.  “I think I’ll stay on the wall,” she decided.  “So long as some of me’s in bounds—­”

She continued to regard him with eyes that presently joined dancing in an irresistible smile of satisfaction.  Mr. Polly smiled in return.

“You bicycle?” she said.

Mr. Polly admitted the fact, and she said she did too.

“All my people are in India,” she explained.  “It’s beastly rot—­I mean it’s frightfully dull being left here alone.”

“All my people,” said Mr. Polly, “are in Heaven!”

“I say!”

“Fact!” said Mr. Polly.  “Got nobody.”

“And that’s why—­” she checked her artless comment on his mourning.  “I say,” she said in a sympathetic voice, “I am sorry.  I really am.  Was it a fire or a ship—­or something?”

Her sympathy was very delightful.  He shook his head.  “The ordinary table of mortality,” he said.  “First one and then another.”

Behind his outward melancholy, delight was dancing wildly.  “Are you lonely?” asked the girl.

Mr. Polly nodded.

“I was just sitting there in melancholy rectrospectatiousness,” he said, indicating the logs, and again a swift thoughtfulness swept across her face.

“There’s no harm in our talking,” she reflected.

“It’s a kindness.  Won’t you get down?”

She reflected, and surveyed the turf below and the scene around and him.

“I’ll stay on the wall,” she said.  “If only for bounds’ sake.”

She certainly looked quite adorable on the wall.  She had a fine neck and pointed chin that was particularly admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine eyebrows are never so pretty as when they look down upon one.  But no calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was going on beneath her ruddy shock of hair.