The History of Mr. Polly

Feeling recklessly secure behind his beard Mr. Polly surveyed the Fishbourne High Street once again.  The north side was much as he had known it except that Rusper had vanished.  A row of new shops replaced the destruction of the great fire.  Mantell and Throbson’s had risen again upon a more flamboyant pattern, and the new fire station was in the Swiss-Teutonic style and with much red paint.  Next door in the place of Rumbold’s was a branch of the Colonial Tea Company, and then a Salmon and Gluckstein Tobacco Shop, and then a little shop that displayed sweets and professed a “Tea Room Upstairs.”  He considered this as a possible place in which to prosecute enquiries about his lost wife, wavering a little between it and the God’s Providence Inn down the street.  Then his eye caught a name over the window, “Polly,” he read, “& Larkins!  Well, I’m—­astonished!”

A momentary faintness came upon him.  He walked past and down the street, returned and surveyed the shop again.

He saw a middle-aged, rather untidy woman standing behind the counter, who for an instant he thought might be Miriam terribly changed, and then recognised as his sister-in-law Annie, filled out and no longer hilarious.  She stared at him without a sign of recognition as he entered the shop.

“Can I have tea?” said Mr. Polly.

“Well,” said Annie, “you can.  But our Tea Room’s upstairs….  My sister’s been cleaning it out—­and it’s a bit upset.”

“It would be,” said Mr. Polly softly.

“I beg your pardon?” said Annie.

“I said I didn’t mind.  Up here?”

“I daresay there’ll be a table,” said Annie, and followed him up to a room whose conscientious disorder was intensely reminiscent of Miriam.

“Nothing like turning everything upside down when you’re cleaning,” said Mr. Polly cheerfully.

“It’s my sister’s way,” said Annie impartially.  “She’s gone out for a bit of air, but I daresay she’ll be back soon to finish.  It’s a nice light room when it’s tidy.  Can I put you a table over there?”

“Let me,” said Mr. Polly, and assisted.  He sat down by the open window and drummed on the table and meditated on his next step while Annie vanished to get his tea.  After all, things didn’t seem so bad with Miriam.  He tried over several gambits in imagination.

“Unusual name,” he said as Annie laid a cloth before him.  Annie looked interrogation.

“Polly.  Polly & Larkins.  Real, I suppose?”

“Polly’s my sister’s name.  She married a Mr. Polly.”

“Widow I presume?” said Mr. Polly.

“Yes.  This five years—­come October.”

“Lord!” said Mr. Polly in unfeigned surprise.

“Found drowned he was.  There was a lot of talk in the place.”

“Never heard of it,” said Mr. Polly.  “I’m a stranger—­rather.”

“In the Medway near Maidstone.  He must have been in the water for days.  Wouldn’t have known him, my sister wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been for the name sewn in his clothes.  All whitey and eat away he was.”

“Bless my heart!  Must have been rather a shock for her!”

“It was a shock,” said Annie, and added darkly:  “But sometimes a shock’s better than a long agony.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Polly.

He gazed with a rapt expression at the preparations before him.  “So I’m drowned,” something was saying inside him.  “Life insured?” he asked.

“We started the tea rooms with it,” said Annie.

Why, if things were like this, had remorse and anxiety for Miriam been implanted in his soul?  No shadow of an answer appeared.

“Marriage is a lottery,” said Mr. Polly.

“She found it so,” said Annie.  “Would you like some jam?”

“I’d like an egg,” said Mr. Polly.  “I’ll have two.  I’ve got a sort of feeling—.  As though I wanted keeping up….  Wasn’t particularly good sort, this Mr. Polly?”

“He was a wearing husband,” said Annie.  “I’ve often pitied my sister.  He was one of that sort—­”

“Dissolute?” suggested Mr. Polly faintly.

“No,” said Annie judiciously; “not exactly dissolute.  Feeble’s more the word.  Weak, ’E was.  Weak as water.  ’Ow long do you like your eggs boiled?”

“Four minutes exactly,” said Mr. Polly.

“One gets talking,” said Annie.

“One does,” said Mr.-Polly, and she left him to his thoughts.

What perplexed him was his recent remorse and tenderness for Miriam.  Now he was back in her atmosphere all that had vanished, and the old feeling of helpless antagonism returned.  He surveyed the piled furniture, the economically managed carpet, the unpleasing pictures on the wall.  Why had he felt remorse?  Why had he entertained this illusion of a helpless woman crying aloud in the pitiless darkness for him?  He peered into the unfathomable mysteries of the heart, and ducked back to a smaller issue. Was he feeble?

The eggs came up.  Nothing in Annie’s manner invited a resumption of the discussion.

“Business brisk?” he ventured to ask.

Annie reflected.  “It is,” she said, “and it isn’t.  It’s like that.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Polly, and squared himself to his egg.  “Was there an inquest on that chap?”

“What chap?”

“What was his name?—­Polly!”

“Of course.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“What you mean?”

Annie looked at him hard, and suddenly his soul was black with terror.

“Who else could it have been—­in the very cloes ’e wore?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Polly, and began his egg.  He was so agitated that he only realised its condition when he was half way through it and Annie safely downstairs.

“Lord!” he said, reaching out hastily for the pepper.  “One of
Miriam’s!  Management!  I haven’t tasted such an egg for five years…. 
Wonder where she gets them!  Picks them out, I suppose!”

He abandoned it for its fellow.

Except for a slight mustiness the second egg was very palatable indeed.  He was getting on to the bottom of it as Miriam came in.  He looked up.  “Nice afternoon,” he said at her stare, and perceived she knew him at once by the gesture and the voice.  She went white and shut the door behind her.  She looked as though she was going to faint.  Mr. Polly sprang up quickly and handed her a chair.  “My God!” she whispered, and crumpled up rather than sat down.

“It’s you” she said.

“No,” said Mr. Polly very earnestly.  “It isn’t.  It just looks like me.  That’s all.”

“I knew that man wasn’t you—­all along.  I tried to think it was.  I tried to think perhaps the water had altered your wrists and feet and the colour of your hair.”

“Ah!”

“I’d always feared you’d come back.”

Mr. Polly sat down by his egg.  “I haven’t come back,” he said very earnestly.  “Don’t you think it.”

“’Ow we’ll pay back the insurance now I don’t know.”  She was weeping.  She produced a handkerchief and covered her face.

“Look here, Miriam,” said Mr. Polly.  “I haven’t come back and I’m not coming back.  I’m—­I’m a Visitant from Another World.  You shut up about me and I’ll shut up about myself.  I came back because I thought you might be hard up or in trouble or some silly thing like that.  Now I see you again—­I’m satisfied.  I’m satisfied completely.  See?  I’m going to absquatulate, see?  Hey Presto right away.”

He turned to his tea for a moment, finished his cup noisily, stood up.

“Don’t you think you’re going to see me again,” he said, “for you ain’t.”

He moved to the door.

“That was a tasty egg,” he said, hovered for a second and vanished.

Annie was in the shop.

“The missus has had a bit of a shock,” he remarked.  “Got some sort of fancy about a ghost.  Can’t make it out quite.  So Long!”

And he had gone.