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The History of Mr. Polly

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Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks, and the Distributed Proofreading Team





The History of Mr. Polly

by

H. G. Wells



Chapter the First

Beginnings, and the Bazaar


I

"Hole!" said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly
increased emphasis: "'Ole!" He paused, and then broke out with one of
his private and peculiar idioms. "Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!"

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare looking fields, and
suffering acutely from indigestion.

He suffered from indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life,
but as he lacked introspection he projected the associated discomfort
upon the world. Every afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a
whole and every aspect of life that presented itself was "beastly."
And this afternoon, lured by the delusive blueness of a sky that was
blue because the wind was in the east, he had come out in the hope of
snatching something of the joyousness of spring. The mysterious
alchemy of mind and body refused, however, to permit any joyousness
whatever in the spring.

He had had a little difficulty in finding his cap before he came out.
He wanted his cap--the new golf cap--and Mrs. Polly must needs fish
out his old soft brown felt hat. "'_Ere's_ your 'at," she said in a
tone of insincere encouragement.

He had been routing among the piled newspapers under the kitchen
dresser, and had turned quite hopefully and taken the thing. He put it
on. But it didn't feel right. Nothing felt right. He put a trembling
hand upon the crown of the thing and pressed it on his head, and tried
it askew to the right and then askew to the left.

Then the full sense of the indignity offered him came home to him. The
hat masked the upper sinister quarter of his face, and he spoke with a
wrathful eye regarding his wife from under the brim. In a voice thick
with fury he said: "I s'pose you'd like me to wear that silly Mud Pie
for ever, eh? I tell you I won't. I'm sick of it. I'm pretty near sick
of everything, comes to that.... Hat!"

He clutched it with quivering fingers. "Hat!" he repeated. Then he
flung it to the ground, and kicked it with extraordinary fury across
the kitchen. It flew up against the door and dropped to the ground
with its ribbon band half off.

"Shan't go out!" he said, and sticking his hands into his jacket
pockets discovered the missing cap in the right one.

There was nothing for it but to go straight upstairs without a word,
and out, slamming the shop door hard.

"Beauty!" said Mrs. Polly at last to a tremendous silence, picking up
and dusting the rejected headdress. "Tantrums," she added. "I 'aven't
patience." And moving with the slow reluctance of a deeply offended
woman, she began to pile together the simple apparatus of their recent
meal, for transportation to the scullery sink.

The repast she had prepared for him did not seem to her to justify his
ingratitude. There had been the cold pork from Sunday and some nice
cold potatoes, and Rashdall's Mixed Pickles, of which he was
inordinately fond. He had eaten three gherkins, two onions, a small
cauliflower head and several capers with every appearance of appetite,
and indeed with avidity; and then there had been cold suet pudding to
follow, with treacle, and then a nice bit of cheese. It was the pale,
hard sort of cheese he liked; red cheese he declared was indigestible.
He had also had three big slices of greyish baker's bread, and had
drunk the best part of the jugful of beer.... But there seems to be no
pleasing some people.

"Tantrums!" said Mrs. Polly at the sink, struggling with the mustard
on his plate and expressing the only solution of the problem that
occurred to her.

And Mr. Polly sat on the stile and hated the whole scheme of
life--which was at once excessive and inadequate as a solution. He
hated Foxbourne, he hated Foxbourne High Street, he hated his shop and
his wife and his neighbours--every blessed neighbour--and with
indescribable bitterness he hated himself.

"Why did I ever get in this silly Hole?" he said. "Why did I ever?"

He sat on the stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with
impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted,
the sunlight metallic and the shadows mixed with blue-black ink.

To the moralist I know he might have served as a figure of sinful
discontent, but that is because it is the habit of moralists to ignore
material circumstances,--if indeed one may speak of a recent meal as a
circumstance,--with Mr. Polly _circum_. Drink, indeed, our teachers
will criticise nowadays both as regards quantity and quality, but
neither church nor state nor school will raise a warning finger
between a man and his hunger and his wife's catering. So on nearly
every day in his life Mr. Polly fell into a violent rage and hatred
against the outer world in the afternoon, and never suspected that it
was this inner world to which I am with such masterly delicacy
alluding, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the
things without. It is a pity that some human beings are not more
transparent. If Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent or even
passably translucent, then perhaps he might have realised from the
Laocoon struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so
much a human being as a civil war.

Wonderful things must have been going on inside Mr. Polly. Oh!
wonderful things. It must have been like a badly managed industrial
city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence,
strikes, the forces of law and order doing their best, rushings to and
fro, upheavals, the _Marseillaise_, tumbrils, the rumble and the
thunder of the tumbrils....

I do not know why the east wind aggravates life to unhealthy people.
It made Mr. Polly's teeth seem loose in his head, and his skin feel
like a misfit, and his hair a dry, stringy exasperation....

Why cannot doctors give us an antidote to the east wind?

"Never have the sense to get your hair cut till it's too long," said
Mr. Polly catching sight of his shadow, "you blighted, degenerated
Paintbrush! Ugh!" and he flattened down the projecting tails with an
urgent hand.


II

Mr. Polly's age was exactly thirty-five years and a half. He was a
short, compact figure, and a little inclined to a localised
_embonpoint_. His face was not unpleasing; the features fine, but a
trifle too pointed about the nose to be classically perfect. The
corners of his sensitive mouth were depressed. His eyes were ruddy
brown and troubled, and the left one was round with more of wonder in
it than its fellow. His complexion was dull and yellowish. That, as I
have explained, on account of those civil disturbances. He was, in the
technical sense of the word, clean shaved, with a small sallow patch
under the right ear and a cut on the chin. His brow had the little
puckerings of a thoroughly discontented man, little wrinklings and
lumps, particularly over his right eye, and he sat with his hands in
his pockets, a little askew on the stile and swung one leg. "Hole!" he
repeated presently.

He broke into a quavering song. "Ro-o-o-tten Be-e-astly Silly Hole!"

His voice thickened with rage, and the rest of his discourse was
marred by an unfortunate choice of epithets.

He was dressed in a shabby black morning coat and vest; the braid that
bound these garments was a little loose in places; his collar was
chosen from stock and with projecting corners, technically a
"wing-poke"; that and his tie, which was new and loose and rich in
colouring, had been selected to encourage and stimulate customers--for
he dealt in gentlemen's outfitting. His golf cap, which was also from
stock and aslant over his eye, gave his misery a desperate touch. He
wore brown leather boots--because he hated the smell of blacking.

Perhaps after all it was not simply indigestion that troubled him.

Behind the superficialities of Mr. Polly's being, moved a larger and
vaguer distress. The elementary education he had acquired had left him
with the impression that arithmetic was a fluky science and best
avoided in practical affairs, but even the absence of book-keeping and
a total inability to distinguish between capital and interest could
not blind him for ever to the fact that the little shop in the High
Street was not paying. An absence of returns, a constriction of
credit, a depleted till, the most valiant resolves to keep smiling,
could not prevail for ever against these insistent phenomena. One
might bustle about in the morning before dinner, and in the afternoon
after tea and forget that huge dark cloud of insolvency that gathered
and spread in the background, but it was part of the desolation of
these afternoon periods, these grey spaces of time after meals, when
all one's courage had descended to the unseen battles of the pit, that
life seemed stripped to the bone and one saw with a hopeless
clearness.

Let me tell the history of Mr. Polly from the cradle to these present
difficulties.

"First the infant, mewling and puking in its nurse's arms."

There had been a time when two people had thought Mr. Polly the most
wonderful and adorable thing in the world, had kissed his toe-nails,
saying "myum, myum," and marvelled at the exquisite softness and
delicacy of his hair, had called to one another to remark the peculiar
distinction with which he bubbled, had disputed whether the sound he
had made was _just da da_, or truly and intentionally dadda, had
washed him in the utmost detail, and wrapped him up in soft, warm
blankets, and smothered him with kisses. A regal time that was, and
four and thirty years ago; and a merciful forgetfulness barred Mr.
Polly from ever bringing its careless luxury, its autocratic demands
and instant obedience, into contrast with his present condition of
life. These two people had worshipped him from the crown of his head
to the soles of his exquisite feet. And also they had fed him rather
unwisely, for no one had ever troubled to teach his mother anything
about the mysteries of a child's upbringing--though of course the
monthly nurse and her charwoman gave some valuable hints--and by his
fifth birthday the perfect rhythms of his nice new interior were
already darkened with perplexity ....

His mother died when he was seven.

He began only to have distinctive memories of himself in the time when
his education had already begun.

I remember seeing a picture of Education--in some place. I think it
was Education, but quite conceivably it represented the Empire
teaching her Sons, and I have a strong impression that it was a wall
painting upon some public building in Manchester or Birmingham or
Glasgow, but very possibly I am mistaken about that. It represented a
glorious woman with a wise and fearless face stooping over her
children and pointing them to far horizons. The sky displayed the
pearly warmth of a summer dawn, and all the painting was marvellously
bright as if with the youth and hope of the delicately beautiful
children in the foreground. She was telling them, one felt, of the
great prospect of life that opened before them, of the spectacle of
the world, the splendours of sea and mountain they might travel and
see, the joys of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of
effort and the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to achieve.
Perhaps even she whispered of the warm triumphant mystery of love that
comes at last to those who have patience and unblemished hearts....
She was reminding them of their great heritage as English children,
rulers of more than one-fifth of mankind, of the obligation to do and
be the best that such a pride of empire entails, of their essential
nobility and knighthood and the restraints and the charities and the
disciplined strength that is becoming in knights and rulers....

The education of Mr. Polly did not follow this picture very closely.
He went for some time to a National School, which was run on severely
economical lines to keep down the rates by a largely untrained staff,
he was set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no one made
him understand, he was made to read the catechism and Bible with the
utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or
significance, and caused to imitate writing copies and drawing copies,
and given object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and potato
bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and taught various
other subjects his mind refused to entertain, and afterwards, when he
was about twelve, he was jerked by his parent to "finish off" in a
private school of dingy aspect and still dingier pretensions, where
there were no object lessons, and the studies of book-keeping and
French were pursued (but never effectually overtaken) under the
guidance of an elderly gentleman who wore a nondescript gown and took
snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing, and used a cane with
remarkable dexterity and gusto.

Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private
school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same
state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for
appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather
over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the
climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but
intemperate habits,--that is to say, it was in a thorough mess. The
nice little curiosities and willingnesses of a child were in a jumbled
and thwarted condition, hacked and cut about--the operators had left,
so to speak, all their sponges and ligatures in the mangled
confusion--and Mr. Polly had lost much of his natural confidence, so
far as figures and sciences and languages and the possibilities of
learning things were concerned. He thought of the present world no
longer as a wonderland of experiences, but as geography and history,
as the repeating of names that were hard to pronounce, and lists of
products and populations and heights and lengths, and as lists and
dates--oh! and boredom indescribable. He thought of religion as the
recital of more or less incomprehensible words that were hard to
remember, and of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the
nature of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and unknown
rules, that were always ruthlessly enforced, and with an infinite
capacity for punishment and, most horrible of all to think of!
limitless powers of espial. (So to the best of his ability he did not
think of that unrelenting eye.) He was uncertain about the spelling
and pronunciation of most of the words in our beautiful but abundant
and perplexing tongue,--that especially was a pity because words
attracted him, and under happier conditions he might have used them
well--he was always doubtful whether it was eight sevens or nine
eights that was sixty-three--(he knew no method for settling the
difficulty) and he thought the merit of a drawing consisted in the
care with which it was "lined in." "Lining in" bored him beyond
measure.

But the _indigestions_ of mind and body that were to play so large a
part in his subsequent career were still only beginning. His liver and
his gastric juice, his wonder and imagination kept up a fight against
the things that threatened to overwhelm soul and body together.
Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum he was still
intensely curious. He had cheerful phases of enterprise, and about
thirteen he suddenly discovered reading and its joys. He began to read
stories voraciously, and books of travel, provided they were also
adventurous. He got these chiefly from the local institute, and he
also "took in," irregularly but thoroughly, one of those inspiring
weeklies that dull people used to call "penny dreadfuls," admirable
weeklies crammed with imagination that the cheap boys' "comics" of
to-day have replaced. At fourteen, when he emerged from the valley of
the shadow of education, there survived something, indeed it survived
still, obscured and thwarted, at five and thirty, that pointed--not
with a visible and prevailing finger like the finger of that beautiful
woman in the picture, but pointed nevertheless--to the idea that there
was interest and happiness in the world. Deep in the being of Mr.
Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten
about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion
that over and above the things that are jolly and "bits of all right,"
there was beauty, there was delight, that somewhere--magically
inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere, were pure and easy and
joyous states of body and mind.

He would sneak out on moonless winter nights and stare up at the
stars, and afterwards find it difficult to tell his father where he
had been.

He would read tales about hunters and explorers, and imagine himself
riding mustangs as fleet as the wind across the prairies of Western
America, or coming as a conquering and adored white man into the
swarming villages of Central Africa. He shot bears with a revolver--a
cigarette in the other hand--and made a necklace of their teeth and
claws for the chief's beautiful young daughter. Also he killed a lion
with a pointed stake, stabbing through the beast's heart as it stood
over him.

He thought it would be splendid to be a diver and go down into the
dark green mysteries of the sea.

He led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts, and died on the
ramparts at the moment of victory. (His grave was watered by a
nation's tears.)

He rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten.

He was beloved by queens in barbaric lands, and reconciled whole
nations to the Christian faith.

He was martyred, and took it very calmly and beautifully--but only
once or twice after the Revivalist week. It did not become a habit
with him.

He explored the Amazon, and found, newly exposed by the fall of a
great tree, a rock of gold.

Engaged in these pursuits he would neglect the work immediately in
hand, sitting somewhat slackly on the form and projecting himself in a
manner tempting to a schoolmaster with a cane.... And twice he had
books confiscated.

Recalled to the realities of life, he would rub himself or sigh deeply
as the occasion required, and resume his attempts to write as good as
copperplate. He hated writing; the ink always crept up his fingers and
the smell of ink offended him. And he was filled with unexpressed
doubts. _Why_ should writing slope down from right to left? _Why_
should downstrokes be thick and upstrokes thin? _Why_ should the
handle of one's pen point over one's right shoulder?

His copy books towards the end foreshadowed his destiny and took the
form of commercial documents. "_Dear Sir_," they ran, "_Referring to
your esteemed order of the 26th ult., we beg to inform you_," and so
on.

The compression of Mr. Polly's mind and soul in the educational
institutions of his time, was terminated abruptly by his father
between his fourteenth and fifteenth birthday. His father--who had
long since forgotten the time when his son's little limbs seemed to
have come straight from God's hand, and when he had kissed five minute
toe-nails in a rapture of loving tenderness--remarked:

"It's time that dratted boy did something for a living."

And a month or so later Mr. Polly began that career in business that
led him at last to the sole proprietorship of a bankrupt outfitter's
shop--and to the stile on which he was sitting.


III

Mr. Polly was not naturally interested in hosiery and gentlemen's
outfitting. At times, indeed, he urged himself to a spurious curiosity
about that trade, but presently something more congenial came along
and checked the effort. He was apprenticed in one of those large,
rather low-class establishments which sell everything, from pianos and
furniture to books and millinery, a department store in fact, The Port
Burdock Drapery Bazaar at Port Burdock, one of the three townships
that are grouped around the Port Burdock naval dockyards. There he
remained six years. He spent most of the time inattentive to business,
in a sort of uncomfortable happiness, increasing his indigestion.

On the whole he preferred business to school; the hours were longer
but the tension was not nearly so great. The place was better aired,
you were not kept in for no reason at all, and the cane was not
employed. You watched the growth of your moustache with interest and
impatience, and mastered the beginnings of social intercourse. You
talked, and found there were things amusing to say. Also you had
regular pocket money, and a voice in the purchase of your clothes, and
presently a small salary. And there were girls. And friendship! In the
retrospect Port Burdock sparkled with the facets of quite a cluster of
remembered jolly times.

("Didn't save much money though," said Mr. Polly.)

The first apprentices' dormitory was a long bleak room with six beds,
six chests of drawers and looking glasses and a number of boxes of
wood or tin; it opened into a still longer and bleaker room of eight
beds, and this into a third apartment with yellow grained paper and
American cloth tables, which was the dining-room by day and the men's
sitting-and smoking-room after nine. Here Mr. Polly, who had been an
only child, first tasted the joys of social intercourse. At first
there were attempts to bully him on account of his refusal to consider
face washing a diurnal duty, but two fights with the apprentices next
above him, established a useful reputation for choler, and the
presence of girl apprentices in the shop somehow raised his standard
of cleanliness to a more acceptable level. He didn't of course have
very much to do with the feminine staff in his department, but he
spoke to them casually as he traversed foreign parts of the Bazaar, or
got out of their way politely, or helped them to lift down heavy
boxes, and on such occasions he felt their scrutiny. Except in the
course of business or at meal times the men and women of the
establishment had very little opportunity of meeting; the men were in
their rooms and the girls in theirs. Yet these feminine creatures, at
once so near and so remote, affected him profoundly. He would watch
them going to and fro, and marvel secretly at the beauty of their hair
or the roundness of their necks or the warm softness of their cheeks
or the delicacy of their hands. He would fall into passions for them
at dinner time, and try and show devotions by his manner of passing
the bread and margarine at tea. There was a very fair-haired,
fair-skinned apprentice in the adjacent haberdashery to whom he said
"good-morning" every morning, and for a period it seemed to him the
most significant event in his day. When she said, "I _do_ hope it will
be fine to-morrow," he felt it marked an epoch. He had had no sisters,
and was innately disposed to worship womankind. But he did not betray
as much to Platt and Parsons.

To Platt and Parsons he affected an attitude of seasoned depravity
towards womankind. Platt and Parsons were his contemporary apprentices
in departments of the drapery shop, and the three were drawn together
into a close friendship by the fact that all their names began with P.
They decided they were the Three Ps, and went about together of an
evening with the bearing of desperate dogs. Sometimes, when they had
money, they went into public houses and had drinks. Then they would
become more desperate than ever, and walk along the pavement under the
gas lamps arm in arm singing. Platt had a good tenor voice, and had
been in a church choir, and so he led the singing; Parsons had a
serviceable bellow, which roared and faded and roared again very
wonderfully; Mr. Polly's share was an extraordinary lowing noise, a
sort of flat recitative which he called "singing seconds." They would
have sung catches if they had known how to do it, but as it was they
sang melancholy music hall songs about dying soldiers and the old
folks far away.

They would sometimes go into the quieter residential quarters of Port
Burdock, where policemen and other obstacles were infrequent, and
really let their voices soar like hawks and feel very happy. The dogs
of the district would be stirred to hopeless emulation, and would keep
it up for long after the Three Ps had been swallowed up by the night.
One jealous brute of an Irish terrier made a gallant attempt to bite
Parsons, but was beaten by numbers and solidarity.

The Three Ps took the utmost interest in each other and found no other
company so good. They talked about everything in the world, and would
go on talking in their dormitory after the gas was out until the other
men were reduced to throwing boots; they skulked from their
departments in the slack hours of the afternoon to gossip in the
packing-room of the warehouse; on Sundays and Bank holidays they went
for long walks together, talking.

Platt was white-faced and dark, and disposed to undertones and mystery
and a curiosity about society and the _demi-monde_. He kept himself
_au courant_ by reading a penny paper of infinite suggestion called
_Modern Society_. Parsons was of an ampler build, already promising
fatness, with curly hair and a lot of rolling, rollicking, curly
features, and a large blob-shaped nose. He had a great memory and a
real interest in literature. He knew great portions of Shakespeare and
Milton by heart, and would recite them at the slightest provocation.
He read everything he could get hold of, and if he liked it he read it
aloud. It did not matter who else liked it. At first Mr. Polly was
disposed to be suspicious of this literature, but was carried away by
Parsons' enthusiasm. The Three Ps went to a performance of "Romeo and
Juliet" at the Port Burdock Theatre Royal, and hung over the gallery
fascinated. After that they made a sort of password of: "Do you bite
your thumbs at Us, Sir?"

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