"Back to the collar, O" Man," Parsons would say. There is no satisfactory plural to O" Man, so he always used it in the singular.
"Don"t mention it," said Platt.
And once they got a boat for the whole summer day, and rowed up past the moored ironclads and the black old hulks and the various shipping of the harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky weedy wildernesses of the upper harbour. And Parsons and Mr.
Polly had a great dispute and quarrel that day as to how far a big gun could shoot.
The country over the hills behind Port Burdock is all that an old-fashioned, scarcely disturbed English country-side should be. In those days the bicycle was still rare and costly and the motor car had yet to come and stir up rural serenities. The Three Ps would take footpaths haphazard across fields, and plunge into unknown winding lanes between high hedges of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods.
About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a sterile ridge of very clean roads and red sand pits and pines and gorse and heather. The Three Ps could not afford to buy bicycles and they found boots the greatest item of their skimpy expenditure. They threw appearances to the winds at last and got ready-made workingmen"s hob-nails. There was much discussion and strong feeling over this step in the dormitory.
There is no country-side like the English country-side for those who have learnt to love it; its firm yet gentle lines of hill and dale, its ordered confusion of features, its deer parks and downland, its castles and stately houses, its hamlets and old churches, its farms and ricks and great barns and ancient trees, its pools and ponds and shining threads of rivers; its flower-starred hedgerows, its orchards and woodland patches, its village greens and kindly inns. Other country-sides have their pleasant aspects, but none such variety, none that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges--Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one"s memory. And there are the hills and fields of Virginia, like an England grown very big and slovenly, the woods and big river sweeps of Pennsylvania, the trim New England landscape, a little bleak and rather fine like the New England mind, and the wide rough country roads and hills and woodland of New York State. But none of these change scene and character in three miles of walking, nor have so mellow a sunlight nor so diversified a cloudland, nor confess the perpetual refreshment of the strong soft winds that blow from off the sea as our Mother England does.
It was good for the Three Ps to walk through such a land and forget for a time that indeed they had no footing in it all, that they were doomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopwalkers and department buyers and everything, and become just happy wanderers in a world of pleasant breezes and song birds and shady trees.
The arrival at the inn was a great affair. No one, they were convinced, would take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jolly old lady, or what Parsons called a "bit of character" drinking in the bar.
There would always be weighty enquiries as to what they could have, and it would work out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two pints of beer and two bottles of ginger beer foaming in a huge round-bellied jug.
The glorious moment of standing lordly in the inn doorway, and staring out at the world, the swinging sign, the geese upon the green, the duck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen smell of the bacon! The trotting of feet bearing the repast; the click and clatter as the tableware is finally arranged! A clean white cloth!
"Ready, Sir!" or "Ready, Gentlemen." Better hearing that than "Forward Polly! look sharp!"
The going in! The sitting down! The falling to!
"Bread, O" Man?"
"Right O! Don"t bag all the crust, O" Man."
Once a simple mannered girl in a pink print dress stayed and talked with them as they ate; led by the gallant Parsons they professed to be all desperately in love with her, and courted her to say which she preferred of them, it was so manifest she did prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples--and wished them to come again some day, and vanished, and reappeared looking after them as they turned the corner--waving a white handkerchief. All the rest of that day they disputed over the signs of her favour, and the next Sunday they went there again.
But she had vanished, and a mother of forbidding aspect afforded no explanations.
If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her spirit to attend to them?...
And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea.
Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles and coaly _defilements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an agreeable afternoon stillness.
"Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his big pipe.
It stuck in Mr. Polly"s memory.
V
Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative.
He specialised in slang and the disuse of English, and he played the role of an appreciative stimulant to Parsons. Words attracted him curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious p.r.o.nunciation of English and no confidence in himself. His schoolmaster indeed had been both unsound and variable. New words had terror and fascination for him; he did not acquire them, he could not avoid them, and so he plunged into them. His only rule was not to be misled by the spelling. That was no guide anyhow. He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and misp.r.o.nounced everything in order that he shouldn"t be suspected of ignorance, but whim.
"Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice."
"Eh?" said Platt.
"Eloquent Rapsodooce."
"Where?" asked Platt.
"In the warehouse, O" Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets.
Carlyle. He"s reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming!
Windmilling! Waw, waw! It"s a sight worth seeing. He"ll bark his blessed knuckles one of these days on the fixtures, O" Man."
He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture.
"So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not _under_ things articulariously He stands."
"I should laugh if the Governor dropped on him," said Platt. "He"d never hear him coming."
"The O" Man"s drunk with it--fair drunk," said Polly. "I never did.
It"s worse than when he got on to Raboloose."
Chapter the Second
The Dismissal of Parsons
I
Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed.
He got himself dismissed under circ.u.mstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly"s mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, trying to get the rights of the case.
Parsons" apprenticeship was over; he had reached the status of an Improver, and he dressed the window of the Manchester department. By all the standards available he dressed it very well. By his own standards he dressed it wonderfully. "Well, O" Man," he used to say, "there"s one thing about my position here,--I _can_ dress a window."
And when trouble was under discussion he would hold that "little Fluffums"--which was the apprentices" name for Mr. Garvace, the senior partner and managing director of the Bazaar--would think twice before he got rid of the only man in the place who could make a windowful of Manchester goods _tell_.
Then like many a fellow artist he fell a prey to theories.
"The art of window dressing is in its infancy, O" Man--in its blooming Infancy. All balance and stiffness like a blessed Egyptian picture. No Joy in it, no blooming Joy! Conventional. A shop window ought to get hold of people, _grip_ "em as they go along. It stands to reason.
Grip!"
His voice would sink to a kind of quiet bellow. "_Do_ they grip?"
Then after a pause, a savage roar; "_Naw_!"
"He"s got a Heavy on," said Mr. Polly. "Go it, O" Man; let"s have some more of it."
"Look at old Morrison"s dress-stuff windows! Tidy, tasteful, correct, I grant you, but Bleak!" He let out the word reinforced to a shout; "Bleak!"