The History of Mr. Polly

Mr. Polly found the plump woman in the big bricked kitchen lighting a fire for tea.  He went to the root of the matter at once.

“I say,” he asked, “who’s Uncle Jim?”

The plump woman blanched and stood still for a moment.  A stick fell out of the bundle in her hand unheeded.

“That little granddaughter of mine been saying things?” she asked faintly.

“Bits of things,” said Mr. Polly.

“Well, I suppose I must tell you sooner or later.  He’s—.  It’s Jim.  He’s the Drorback to this place, that’s what he is.  The Drorback.  I hoped you mightn’t hear so soon….  Very likely he’s gone.”

“She don’t seem to think so.”

“’E ’asn’t been near the place these two weeks and more,” said the plump woman.

“But who is he?”

“I suppose I got to tell you,” said the plump woman.

“She says he scoots people,” Mr. Polly remarked after a pause.

“He’s my own sister’s son.”  The plump woman watched the crackling fire for a space.  “I suppose I got to tell you,” she repeated.

She softened towards tears.  “I try not to think of it, and night and day he’s haunting me.  I try not to think of it.  I’ve been for easy-going all my life.  But I’m that worried and afraid, with death and ruin threatened and evil all about me!  I don’t know what to do!  My own sister’s son, and me a widow woman and ’elpless against his doin’s!”

She put down the sticks she held upon the fender, and felt for her handkerchief.  She began to sob and talk quickly.

“I wouldn’t mind nothing else half so much if he’d leave that child alone.  But he goes talking to her—­if I leave her a moment he’s talking to her, teaching her words and giving her ideas!”

“That’s a Bit Thick,” said Mr. Polly.

“Thick!” cried the plump woman; “it’s ’orrible!  And what am I to do?  He’s been here three times now, six days and a week and a part of a week, and I pray to God night and day he may never come again.  Praying!  Back he’s come sure as fate.  He takes my money and he takes my things.  He won’t let no man stay here to protect me or do the boats or work the ferry.  The ferry’s getting a scandal.  They stand and shout and scream and use language….  If I complain they’ll say I’m helpless to manage here, they’ll take away my license, out I shall go—­and it’s all the living I can get—­and he knows it, and he plays on it, and he don’t care.  And here I am.  I’d send the child away, but I got nowhere to send the child.  I buys him off when it comes to that, and back he comes, worse than ever, prowling round and doing evil.  And not a soul to help me.  Not a soul!  I just hoped there might be a day or so.  Before he comes back again.  I was just hoping—­I’m the sort that hopes.”

Mr. Polly was reflecting on the flaws and drawbacks that seem to be inseparable from all the more agreeable things in life.

“Biggish sort of man, I expect?” asked Mr. Polly, trying to get the situation in all its bearings.

But the plump woman did not heed him.  She was going on with her fire-making, and retailing in disconnected fragments the fearfulness of Uncle Jim.

“There was always something a bit wrong with him,” she said, “but nothing you mightn’t have hoped for, not till they took him and carried him off and reformed him….

“He was cruel to the hens and chickings, it’s true, and stuck a knife into another boy, but then I’ve seen him that nice to a cat, nobody could have been kinder.  I’m sure he didn’t do no ’arm to that cat whatever anyone tries to make out of it.  I’d never listen to that….  It was that reformatory ruined him.  They put him along of a lot of London boys full of ideas of wickedness, and because he didn’t mind pain—­and he don’t, I will admit, try as I would—­they made him think himself a hero.  Them boys laughed at the teachers they set over them, laughed and mocked at them—­and I don’t suppose they was the best teachers in the world; I don’t suppose, and I don’t suppose anyone sensible does suppose that everyone who goes to be a teacher or a chapl’in or a warder in a Reformatory Home goes and changes right away into an Angel of Grace from Heaven—­and Oh, Lord! where was I?”

“What did they send him to the Reformatory for?”

“Playing truant and stealing.  He stole right enough—­stole the money from an old woman, and what was I to do when it came to the trial but say what I knew.  And him like a viper a-looking at me—­more like a viper than a human boy.  He leans on the bar and looks at me.  ’All right, Aunt Flo,’ he says, just that and nothing more.  Time after time, I’ve dreamt of it, and now he’s come.  ‘They’ve Reformed me,’ he says, ’and made me a devil, and devil I mean to be to you.  So out with it,’ he says.”

“What did you give him last time?” asked Mr. Polly.

“Three golden pounds,” said the plump woman.

“‘That won’t last very long,’ he says.  ’But there ain’t no hurry.  I’ll be back in a week about.’  If I wasn’t one of the hoping sort—­”

She left the sentence unfinished.

Mr. Polly reflected.  “What sort of a size is he?” he asked.  “I’m not one of your Herculaceous sort, if you mean that.  Nothing very wonderful bicepitally.”

“You’ll scoot,” said the plump woman with conviction rather than bitterness.  “You’d better scoot now, and I’ll try and find some money for him to go away again when he comes.  It ain’t reasonable to expect you to do anything but scoot.  But I suppose it’s the way of a woman in trouble to try and get help from a man, and hope and hope.  I’m the hoping sort.”

“How long’s he been about?” asked Mr. Polly, ignoring his own outlook.

“Three months it is come the seventh since he come in by that very back door—­and I hadn’t set eyes on him for seven long years.  He stood in the door watchin’ me, and suddenly he let off a yelp—­like a dog, and there he was grinning at the fright he’d given me.  ’Good old Aunty Flo,’ he says, ‘ain’t you dee-lighted to see me?’ he says, ’now I’m Reformed.’”

The plump lady went to the sink and filled the kettle.

“I never did like ’im,” she said, standing at the sink.  “And seeing him there, with his teeth all black and broken—.  P’raps I didn’t give him much of a welcome at first.  Not what would have been kind to him.  ‘Lord!’ I said, ‘it’s Jim.’”

“‘It’s Jim,’ he said.  ’Like a bad shillin’—­like a damned bad shilling.  Jim and trouble.  You all of you wanted me Reformed and now you got me Reformed.  I’m a Reformatory Reformed Character, warranted all right and turned out as such.  Ain’t you going to ask me in, Aunty dear?’

“‘Come in,’ I said, ’I won’t have it said I wasn’t ready to be kind to you!’

“He comes in and shuts the door.  Down he sits in that chair.  ’I come to torment you!’ he says, ‘you Old Sumpthing!’ and begins at me….  No human being could ever have been called such things before.  It made me cry out.  ‘And now,’ he says, ’just to show I ain’t afraid of ’urting you,’ he says, and ups and twists my wrist.”

Mr. Polly gasped.

“I could stand even his vi’lence,” said the plump woman, “if it wasn’t for the child.”

Mr. Polly went to the kitchen window and surveyed his namesake, who was away up the garden path with her hands behind her back, and whisps of black hair in disorder about her little face, thinking, thinking profoundly, about ducklings.

“You two oughtn’t to be left,” he said.

The plump woman stared at his back with hard hope in her eyes.

“I don’t see that it’s my affair,” said Mr. Polly.

The plump woman resumed her business with the kettle.

“I’d like to have a look at him before I go,” said Mr. Polly, thinking aloud.  And added, “somehow.  Not my business, of course.”

“Lord!” he cried with a start at a noise in the bar, “who’s that?”

“Only a customer,” said the plump woman.