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.