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.