The History of Mr. Polly

From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams.

“He don’t seem,” said Johnson, “to take a serious interest in anything.  That shop at the corner’s bound to be snapped up if he don’t look out.”

The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses.  All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below.  She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him—­with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age.

And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys—­they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy—­were brighter than a dying martyr’s vision of heaven.  Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life.  It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly’s nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl’s feet, and died, and never touched her.  And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss.  And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream….

And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall.

“Look here,” said Mr. Polly, “I’m wild for the love of you!  I can’t keep up this gesticulations game any more!  I’m not a Knight.  Treat me as a human man.  You may sit up there smiling, but I’d die in torments to have you mine for an hour.  I’m nobody and nothing.  But look here!  Will you wait for me for five years?  You’re just a girl yet, and it wouldn’t be hard.”

“Shut up!” said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand.

“I’ve always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work.  I’ve just woke up.  Wait till I’ve got a chance with the money I’ve got.”

“But you haven’t got much money!”

“I’ve got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance.  I’d find a chance.  I’ll do that anyhow.  I’ll go away.  I mean what I say—­I’ll stop trifling and shirking.  If I don’t come back it won’t matter.  If I do——­”

Her expression had become uneasy.  Suddenly she bent down towards him.

“Don’t!” she said in an undertone.

“Don’t—­what?”

“Don’t go on like this!  You’re different!  Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his—­what did you call it?” The ghost of a smile curved her face.  “Gurdrum!”

“But——!”

Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening.

A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself.

“Shut up, Rosie!” said a voice.

“I tell you I will see!  I can’t half hear.  Give me a leg up!”

“You Idiot!  He’ll see you.  You’re spoiling everything.”

The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly’s world.  He felt as people must feel who are going to faint.

“You’ve got someone—­” he said aghast.

She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly.  She addressed some unseen hearers.  “You filthy little Beasts!” she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished.  There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation.

For a couple of seconds he stood agape.

Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst sense of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall.

Romance and his goddess had vanished.

A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried:  “Mercy! mercy!  Ooo!  Christabel!”

“You idiot!” cried Christabel.  “You giggling Idiot!”

Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery.

Then the grip of Mr. Polly’s fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top.  Just for a moment he crouched against the wall.

He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down.

He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together.

“Fool,” he said at last; “you Blithering Fool!” and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises.

Afterwards he found his face was wet with blood—­which was none the less red stuff from the heart because it came from slight abrasions.