I
Mr. Polly returned to Clapham from the funeral celebration prepared
for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit.
"You've merely anti-_separated_ me by a hair," he said politely.
And he told them in the dormitory that he meant to take a little
holiday before his next crib, though a certain inherited reticence
suppressed the fact of the legacy.
"You'll do that all right," said Ascough, the head of the boot shop.
"It's quite the fashion just at present. Six Weeks in Wonderful Wood
Street. They're running excursions...."
"A little holiday"; that was the form his sense of wealth took first,
that it made a little holiday possible. Holidays were his life, and
the rest merely adulterated living. And now he might take a little
holiday and have money for railway fares and money for meals and money
for inns. But--he wanted someone to take the holiday with.
For a time he cherished a design of hunting up Parsons, getting him to
throw up his situation, and going with him to Stratford-on-Avon and
Shrewsbury and the Welsh mountains and the Wye and a lot of places
like that, for a really gorgeous, careless, illimitable old holiday of
a month. But alas! Parsons had gone from the St. Paul's Churchyard
outfitter's long ago, and left no address.
Mr. Polly tried to think he would be almost as happy wandering alone,
but he knew better. He had dreamt of casual encounters with
delightfully interesting people by the wayside--even romantic
encounters. Such things happened in Chaucer and "Bocashiew," they
happened with extreme facility in Mr. Richard Le Gallienne's very
detrimental book, _The Quest of the Golden Girl_, which he had read at
Canterbury, but he had no confidence they would happen in England--to
him.
When, a month later, he came out of the Clapham side door at last into
the bright sunshine of a fine London day, with a dazzling sense of
limitless freedom upon him, he did nothing more adventurous than order
the cabman to drive to Waterloo, and there take a ticket for Easewood.
He wanted--what _did_ he want most in life? I think his distinctive
craving is best expressed as fun--fun in companionship. He had already
spent a pound or two upon three select feasts to his fellow
assistants, sprat suppers they were, and there had been a great and
very successful Sunday pilgrimage to Richmond, by Wandsworth and
Wimbledon's open common, a trailing garrulous company walking about a
solemnly happy host, to wonderful cold meat and salad at the Roebuck,
a bowl of punch, punch! and a bill to correspond; but now it was a
weekday, and he went down to Easewood with his bag and portmanteau in
a solitary compartment, and looked out of the window upon a world in
which every possible congenial seemed either toiling in a situation
or else looking for one with a gnawing and hopelessly preoccupying
anxiety. He stared out of the window at the exploitation roads of
suburbs, and rows of houses all very much alike, either emphatically
and impatiently _to let_ or full of rather busy unsocial people.
Near Wimbledon he had a glimpse of golf links, and saw two elderly
gentlemen who, had they chosen, might have been gentlemen of grace
and leisure, addressing themselves to smite little hunted white balls
great distances with the utmost bitterness and dexterity. Mr. Polly
could not understand them.
Every road he remarked, as freshly as though he had never observed it
before, was bordered by inflexible palings or iron fences or severely
disciplined hedges. He wondered if perhaps abroad there might be
beautifully careless, unenclosed high roads. Perhaps after all the
best way of taking a holiday is to go abroad.
He was haunted by the memory of what was either a half-forgotten
picture or a dream; a carriage was drawn up by the wayside and four
beautiful people, two men and two women graciously dressed, were
dancing a formal ceremonious dance full of bows and curtseys, to the
music of a wandering fiddler they had encountered. They had been
driving one way and he walking another--a happy encounter with this
obvious result. They might have come straight out of happy Theleme,
whose motto is: "Do what thou wilt." The driver had taken his two
sleek horses out; they grazed unchallenged; and he sat on a stone
clapping time with his hands while the fiddler played. The shade of
the trees did not altogether shut out the sunshine, the grass in the
wood was lush and full of still daffodils, the turf they danced on was
starred with daisies.
Mr. Polly, dear heart! firmly believed that things like that could and
did happen--somewhere. Only it puzzled him that morning that he never
saw them happening. Perhaps they happened south of Guilford. Perhaps
they happened in Italy. Perhaps they ceased to happen a hundred years
ago. Perhaps they happened just round the corner--on weekdays when all
good Mr. Pollys are safely shut up in shops. And so dreaming of
delightful impossibilities until his heart ached for them, he was
rattled along in the suburban train to Johnson's discreet home and the
briskly stimulating welcome of Mrs. Johnson.