The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells (online e reader TXT) 📕

He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner’s backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at times the very face and gestures of Johnson, guided him towards that undesired establishment at the corner near the station. “Oh Lord!” he cried, “I’d rather go back to cribs. I should keep my money anyhow.” Fate never winced.

“Run away to sea,” whispered Mr. Polly, but he knew he wasn’t man enough.

“Cut my blooming throat.”

Some braver strain urged him to think of Miriam, and for a little while he lay still.⁠ ⁠…

“Well, O’ Man?” said Johnson, when Mr. Polly came down to breakfast, and Mrs. Johnson looked up brightly. Mr. Polly had never felt breakfast so unattractive before.

“Just a day or so more, O’ Man⁠—to turn it over in my mind,” he said.

“You’ll get the place snapped up,” said Johnson.

There were times in those last few days of coyness with his destiny when his engagement seemed the most negligible of circumstances, and times⁠—and these happened for the most part at nights after Mrs. Johnson had indulged everybody in a Welsh rarebit⁠—when it assumed so sinister and portentous an appearance as to make him think of suicide. And there were times too when he very distinctly desired to be married, now that the idea had got into his head, at any cost. Also he tried to recall all the circumstances of his proposal, time after time, and never quite succeeded in recalling what had brought the thing off. He went over to Stamton with a becoming frequency, and kissed all his cousins, and Miriam especially, a great deal, and found it very stirring and refreshing. They all appeared to know; and Minnie was tearful, but resigned. Mrs. Larkins met him, and indeed enveloped him, with unwonted warmth, and there was a big pot of household jam for tea. And he could not make up his mind to sign his name to anything about the shop, though it crawled nearer and nearer to him, though the project had materialised now to the extent of a draft agreement with the place for his signature indicated in pencil.

One morning, just after Mr. Johnson had gone to the station, Mr. Polly wheeled his bicycle out into the road, went up to his bedroom, packed his long white nightdress, a comb, and a toothbrush in a manner that was as offhand as he could make it, informed Mrs. Johnson, who was manifestly curious, that he was “off for a day or two to clear his head,” and fled forthright into the road, and mounting turned his wheel towards the tropics and the equator and the south coast of England, and indeed more particularly to where the little village of Fishbourne slumbers and sleeps.

When he returned four days later, he astonished Johnson beyond measure by remarking so soon as the shop project was reopened:

“I’ve took a little contraption at Fishbourne, O’ Man, that I fancy suits me better.”

He paused, and then added in a manner, if possible, even more offhand:

“Oh! and I’m going to have a bit of a nuptial over at Stamton with one of the Larkins cousins.”

“Nuptial!” said Johnson.

“Wedding bells, O’ Man. Benedictine collapse.”

On the whole Johnson showed great self-control. “It’s your own affair, O’ Man,” he said, when things had been more clearly explained, “and I hope you won’t feel sorry when it’s too late.”

But Mrs. Johnson was first of all angrily silent, and then reproachful. “I don’t see what we’ve done to be made fools of like this,” she said. “After all the trouble we’ve ’ad to make you comfortable and see after you. Out late and sitting up and everything. And then you go off as sly as sly without a word, and get a shop behind our backs as though you thought we meant to steal your money. I ’aven’t patience with such deceitfulness, and I didn’t think it of you, Elfrid. And now the letting season’s ’arf gone by, and what I shall do with that room of yours I’ve no idea. Frank is frank, and fair play fair play; so I was told any’ow when I was a girl. Just as long as it suits you to stay ’ere you stay ’ere, and then it’s off and no thank you whether we like it or not. Johnson’s too easy with you. ’E sits there and doesn’t say a word, and night after night ’e’s been addin’ and thinkin’ for you, instead of seeing to his own affairs⁠—”

She paused for breath.

“Unfortunate amoor,” said Mr. Polly, apologetically and indistinctly. “Didn’t expect it myself.”

Mr. Polly’s marriage followed with a certain inevitableness.

He tried to assure himself that he was acting upon his own forceful initiative, but at the back of his mind was the completest realisation of his powerlessness to resist the gigantic social forces he had set in motion. He had got to marry under the will of society, even as in times past it has been appointed for other sunny souls under the will of society that they should be led out by serious and unavoidable fellow-creatures and ceremoniously drowned or burnt or hung. He would have preferred infinitely a more observant and less conspicuous role, but the choice was no longer open to him. He did his best to play his part, and he procured some particularly neat check trousers to do it in. The rest of his costume, except for some bright yellow gloves, a grey and blue mixture tie, and that the broad crape hatband was changed for a livelier piece of silk, were the things he had worn at the funeral of his father. So nearly akin are human joy and sorrow.

The Larkins sisters had done wonders with grey sateen. The idea of