Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on
the stile to look back upon.
The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from
his memory--except for one or two conspicuous rows and one or two
larks--but the rare Sundays and holidays shone out like diamonds among
pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies
reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old Parsons
bellowing an interpretation of life, gesticulating, appreciating and
making appreciate, expounding books, talking of that mystery of his,
the "Joy de Vive."
There were some particularly splendid walks on Bank holidays. The
Three Ps would start on Sunday morning early and find a room in some
modest inn and talk themselves asleep, and return singing through the
night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening.
They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English
country-side in which they had wandered, and see Port Burdock spread
out below, a network of interlacing street lamps and shifting tram
lights against the black, beacon-gemmed immensity of the harbour
waters.
"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 _défilements_ 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
rôle 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 pronunciation 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 mispronounced 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."