I
Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the "Joy de Vive" got through by them. Parsons had gone, he said, to London, and found a place as warehouseman in a cheap outfitting shop near St. Paul"s Churchyard, where references were not required. It became apparent as time pa.s.sed that new interests were absorbing him. He wrote of socialism and the rights of man, things that had no appeal for Mr. Polly. He felt strangers had got hold of his Parsons, were at work upon him, making him into someone else, something less picturesque.... Port Burdock became a dreariness full of faded memories of Parsons and work a bore. Platt revealed himself alone as a tiresome companion, obsessed by romantic ideas about intrigues and vices and "society women."
Mr. Polly"s depression manifested itself in a general slackness. A certain impatience in the manner of Mr. Garvace presently got upon his nerves. Relations were becoming strained. He asked for a rise of salary to test his position, and gave notice to leave when it was refused.
It took him two months to place himself in another situation, and during that time he had quite a disagreeable amount of loneliness, disappointment, anxiety and humiliation.
He went at first to stay with a married cousin who had a house at Easewood. His widowed father had recently given up the music and bicycle shop (with the post of organist at the parish church) that had sustained his home, and was living upon a small annuity as a guest with this cousin, and growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local pract.i.tioner diagnosed as imagination. He had aged with mysterious rapidity and become excessively irritable, but the cousin"s wife was a born manager, and contrived to get along with him. Our Mr. Polly"s status was that of a guest pure and simple, but after a fortnight of congested hospitality in which he wrote nearly a hundred letters beginning:
_Sir:_
_Referring to your advt. in the "Christian World" for an improver in Gents" outfitting I beg to submit myself for the situation. Have had six years" experience...._
and upset a bottle of ink over a toilet cover and the bedroom carpet, his cousin took him for a walk and pointed out the superior advantages of apartments in London from which to swoop upon the briefly yawning vacancy.
"Helpful," said Mr. Polly; "very helpful, O" Man indeed. I might have gone on there for weeks," and packed.
He got a room in an inst.i.tution that was partly a benevolent hostel for men in his circ.u.mstances and partly a high minded but forbidding coffee house and a centre for pleasant Sunday afternoons. Mr. Polly spent a critical but pleasant Sunday afternoon in a back seat, inventing such phrases as:
"Soulful Owner of the Exorbiant Largenial Development."--An Adam"s Apple being in question.
"Earnest Joy."
"Exultant, Urgent Loogoobuosity."
A manly young curate, marking and misunderstanding his preoccupied face and moving lips, came and sat by him and entered into conversation with the idea of making him feel more at home. The conversation was awkward and disconnected for a minute or so, and then suddenly a memory of the Port Burdock Bazaar occurred to Mr. Polly, and with a baffling whisper of "Lill" dog," and a rea.s.suring nod, he rose up and escaped, to wander out relieved and observant into the varied London streets.
He found the collection of men he found waiting about in wholesale establishments in Wood Street and St. Paul"s Churchyard (where they interview the buyers who have come up from the country) interesting and stimulating, but far too strongly charged with the suggestion of his own fate to be really joyful. There were men in all degrees between confidence and distress, and in every stage between extravagant smartness and the last stages of decay. There were sunny young men full of an abounding and elbowing energy, before whom the soul of Polly sank in hate and dismay. "Smart Juniors," said Polly to himself, "full of Smart Juniosity. The Shoveacious Cult." There were hungry looking individuals of thirty-five or so that he decided must be "Proletelerians"--he had often wanted to find someone who fitted that attractive word. Middle-aged men, "too Old at Forty," discoursed in the waiting-rooms on the outlook in the trade; it had never been so bad, they said, while Mr. Polly wondered if "De-juiced" was a permissible epithet. There were men with an overweening sense of their importance, manifestly annoyed and angry to find themselves still disengaged, and inclined to suspect a plot, and men so faint-hearted one was terrified to imagine their behaviour when it came to an interview. There was a fresh-faced young man with an unintelligent face who seemed to think himself equipped against the world beyond all misadventure by a collar of exceptional height, and another who introduced a note of gaiety by wearing a flannel shirt and a check suit of remarkable virulence. Every day Mr. Polly looked round to mark how many of the familiar faces had gone, and the deepening anxiety (reflecting his own) on the faces that remained, and every day some new type joined the drifting shoal. He realised how small a chance his poor letter from Easewood ran against this hungry cl.u.s.ter of compet.i.tors at the fountain head.
At the back of Mr. Polly"s mind while he made his observations was a disagreeable flavour of dentist"s parlour. At any moment his name might be shouted, and he might have to haul himself into the presence of some fresh specimen of employer, and to repeat once more his pa.s.sionate protestation of interest in the business, his possession of a capacity for zeal--zeal on behalf of anyone who would pay him a yearly salary of twenty-six pounds a year.
The prospective employer would unfold his ideals of the employee. "I want a smart, willing young man, thoroughly willing--who won"t object to take trouble. I don"t want a slacker, the sort of fellow who has to be pushed up to his work and held there. I"ve got no use for him."
At the back of Mr. Polly"s mind, and quite beyond his control, the insubordinate phrasemaker would be proffering such combinations as "Chubby Chops," or "Chubby Charmer," as suitable for the gentleman, very much as a hat salesman proffers hats.
"I don"t think you"d find much slackness about _me_, sir," said Mr.
Polly brightly, trying to disregard his deeper self.
"I want a young man who means getting on."
"Exactly, sir. Excelsior."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said excelsior, sir. It"s a sort of motto of mine. From Longfellow.
Would you want me to serve through?"
The chubby gentleman explained and reverted to his ideals, with a faint air of suspicion. "Do _you_ mean getting on?" he asked.
"I hope so, sir," said Mr. Polly.
"Get on or get out, eh?"
Mr. Polly made a rapturous noise, nodded appreciation, and said indistinctly--"_Quite_ my style."
"Some of my people have been with me twenty years," said the employer.
"My Manchester buyer came to me as a boy of twelve. You"re a Christian?"
"Church of England," said Mr. Polly.
"H"m," said the employer a little checked. "For good all round business work I should have preferred a Baptist. Still--"
He studied Mr. Polly"s tie, which was severely neat and businesslike, as became an aspiring outfitter. Mr. Polly"s conception of his own pose and expression was rendered by that uncontrollable phrasemonger at the back as "Obsequies Deference."
"I am inclined," said the prospective employer in a conclusive manner, "to look up your reference."
Mr. Polly stood up abruptly.
"Thank you," said the employer and dismissed him.
"Chump chops! How about chump chops?" said the phrasemonger with an air of inspiration.
"I hope then to hear from you, sir," said Mr. Polly in his best salesman manner.
"If everything is satisfactory," said the prospective employer.
II
A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakespeare with gusto, and uses "Stertoraneous Shover" and "Smart Junior" as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary, or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and Hudibras and coa.r.s.e laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving and the memory of Charles the Second"s courtly days. His progress was necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was something in his eye employers did not like; he would have lost his places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally brilliant salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair window-dresser.
He went from situation to situation, he invented a great wealth of nicknames, he conceived enmities and made friends--but none so richly satisfying as Parsons. He was frequently but mildly and discursively in love, and sometimes he thought of that girl who had given him a yellow-green apple. He had an idea, amounting to a flattering certainty, whose youthful freshness it was had stirred her to self-forgetfulness. And sometimes he thought of Foxbourne sleeping prosperously in the sun. And he began to have moods of discomfort and la.s.situde and ill-temper due to the beginnings of indigestion.
Various forces and suggestions came into his life and swayed him for longer and shorter periods.
He went to Canterbury and came under the influence of Gothic architecture. There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the Gothic; in the middle ages he would no doubt have sat upon a scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too flattering portraits of church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he strolled, with his hands behind his back, along the cloisters behind the cathedral, and looked at the rich gra.s.s plot in the centre, he had the strangest sense of being at home--far more than he had ever been at home before. "Portly _capons_," he used to murmur to himself, under the impression that he was naming a characteristic type of medieval churchman.
He liked to sit in the nave during the service, and look through the great gates at the candles and choristers, and listen to the organ-sustained voices, but the transepts he never penetrated because of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even misp.r.o.nounceable words, to express. But some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cl.u.s.ter there so comfortably. Through green doors in high stone walls he caught glimpses of level lawns and blazing flower beds; mullioned windows revealed shaded reading lamps and disciplined shelves of brown bound books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pa.s.s him, "Portly capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress flit like a b.u.t.terfly across the cool still s.p.a.ces of the place.
Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine"s Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings.
He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, but he could not get on with Chaucer"s old-fashioned English; it fatigued his attention, and he would have given all the story telling very readily for a few adventures on the road. He wanted these nice people to live more and yarn less. He liked the Wife of Bath very much. He would have liked to have known that woman.
At Canterbury, too, he first to his knowledge saw Americans.
His shop did a good cla.s.s trade in Westgate Street, and he would see them go by on the way to stare at Chaucer"s "Chequers," and then turn down Mercery Lane to Prior Goldstone"s gate. It impressed him that they were always in a kind of quiet hurry, and very determined and methodical people,--much more so than any English he knew.
"Cultured Rapacicity," he tried.
"Vorocious Return to the Heritage."