Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity.
The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully
disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food
had to be cooked and with a sound moralist's entire disregard of the
quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather
than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages clothed under
duress by a missionary with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt
to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her
husband's talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle
the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental
states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed
an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate excuse, that he was
lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read--an
indolent habit--and presently to seek company for talking. He began to
attend the bar parlour of the God's Providence Inn with some
frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards,
which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the
perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of
two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and
excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly's mind, which was
at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued.
It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting sense,
and Miriam did not conceal her opinion that he ought to bestir himself
and "do things," though what he was to do was hard to say. You see,
when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very
easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully
and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise.
You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place,
compelling them either by threats or importunity to buy flannel
trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always
easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the
right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was
pew opener and so forth, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and
his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife
while he went about the world winding clocks, but Mr. Polly had none
of these arts, and wouldn't, in spite of Miriam's quietly persistent
protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his
bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there
were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going
again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied
about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in
the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious
investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of
burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with
her.
The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he
got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful
circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the
routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it
with zest, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone or a
herring raw or charred, and coffee made Miriam's way and full of
little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the
standing, standing at the door saying "How do!" to passers-by, or
getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things
vanished as the auditorium of a theatre vanishes when the stage is
lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books
with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked
string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam.
There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful,
explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the
eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken,
incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with
all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was
full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled
at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a
piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces
buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human
memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments,"
and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island
of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea."
Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns
the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!
And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume
of the Travels of the _Abbés_ Hue and Gabet. He followed those two
sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded
(who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their
store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of
Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched to find the
other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read
Fenimore Cooper and "Tom Cringle's Log" side by side with Joseph
Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West
Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he
died. Conrad's prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to
define, a peculiar deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a
pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he
sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy's "A Sailor Tramp,"
all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more
understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through
Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation
and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some
reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to
Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas
until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his
insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should,
with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable
that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his
ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely
preferred any prose to any metrical writing.
A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's
Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing
descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that
he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they
occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this
joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he
discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost,
through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot
understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that
river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories
collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and
a number of paper-covered volumes, _Tales from Blackwood_, he had
acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite
considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and
in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked
about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of
sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and
refuge from the world of everyday!...
The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr.
Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a
book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business.
Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it
ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of
distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him
more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to
come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head.
Suddenly one day it came to him--forgetful of those books and all he
had lived and seen through them--that he had been in his shop for
exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life
during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in
apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and
mean in scope--and that it had brought him at last to an outlook
utterly hopeless and grey.