I
One summer afternoon about five years after his first coming to the
Potwell Inn Mr. Polly found himself sitting under the pollard willow
fishing for dace. It was a plumper, browner and healthier Mr. Polly
altogether than the miserable bankrupt with whose dyspeptic portrait
our novel opened. He was fat, but with a fatness more generally
diffused, and the lower part of his face was touched to gravity by a
small square beard. Also he was balder.
It was the first time he had found leisure to fish, though from the
very outset of his Potwell career he had promised himself abundant
indulgence in the pleasures of fishing. Fishing, as the golden page of
English literature testifies, is a meditative and retrospective
pursuit, and the varied page of memory, disregarded so long for sake
of the teeming duties I have already enumerated, began to unfold
itself to Mr. Polly's consideration. A speculation about Uncle Jim
died for want of material, and gave place to a reckoning of the years
and months that had passed since his coming to Potwell, and that to a
philosophical review of his life. He began to think about Miriam,
remotely and impersonally. He remembered many things that had been
neglected by his conscience during the busier times, as, for example,
that he had committed arson and deserted a wife. For the first time he
looked these long neglected facts in the face.
It is disagreeable to think one has committed Arson, because it is an
action that leads to jail. Otherwise I do not think there was a grain
of regret for that in Mr. Polly's composition. But deserting Miriam
was in a different category. Deserting Miriam was mean.
This is a history and not a glorification of Mr. Polly, and I tell of
things as they were with him. Apart from the disagreeable twinge
arising from the thought of what might happen if he was found out, he
had not the slightest remorse about that fire. Arson, after all, is an
artificial crime. Some crimes are crimes in themselves, would be
crimes without any law, the cruelties, mockery, the breaches of faith
that astonish and wound, but the burning of things is in itself
neither good nor bad. A large number of houses deserve to be burnt,
most modern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and
books--one might go on for some time with the list. If our community
was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most
of London and Chicago, for example, and build sane and beautiful
cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of rotten private
property. I have failed in presenting Mr. Polly altogether if I have
not made you see that he was in many respects an artless child of
Nature, far more untrained, undisciplined and spontaneous than an
ordinary savage. And he was really glad, for all that little drawback
of fear, that he had the courage to set fire to his house and fly and
come to the Potwell Inn.
But he was not glad he had left Miriam. He had seen Miriam cry once or
twice in his life, and it had always reduced him to abject
commiseration. He now imagined her crying. He perceived in a perplexed
way that he had made himself responsible for her life. He forgot how
she had spoilt his own. He had hitherto rested in the faith that she
had over a hundred pounds of insurance money, but now, with his eye
meditatively upon his float, he realised a hundred pounds does not
last for ever. His conviction of her incompetence was unflinching; she
was bound to have fooled it away somehow by this time. And then!
He saw her humping her shoulders and sniffing in a manner he had
always regarded as detestable at close quarters, but which now became
harrowingly pitiful.
"Damn!" said Mr. Polly, and down went his float and he flicked up a
victim to destruction and took it off the hook.
He compared his own comfort and health with Miriam's imagined
distress.
"Ought to have done something for herself," said Mr. Polly, rebaiting
his hook. "She was always talking of doing things. Why couldn't she?"
He watched the float oscillating gently towards quiescence.
"Silly to begin thinking about her," he said. "Damn silly!"
But once he had begun thinking about her he had to go on.
"Oh blow!" cried Mr. Polly presently, and pulled up his hook to find
another fish had just snatched at it in the last instant. His handling
must have made the poor thing feel itself unwelcome.
He gathered his things together and turned towards the house.
All the Potwell Inn betrayed his influence now, for here indeed he had
found his place in the world. It looked brighter, so bright indeed as
to be almost skittish, with the white and green paint he had lavished
upon it. Even the garden palings were striped white and green, and so
were the boats, for Mr. Polly was one of those who find a positive
sensuous pleasure in the laying on of paint. Left and right were two
large boards which had done much to enhance the inn's popularity with
the lighter-minded variety of pleasure-seekers. Both marked
innovations. One bore in large letters the single word "Museum," the
other was as plain and laconic with "Omlets!" The spelling of the
latter word was Mr. Polly's own, but when he had seen a whole boatload
of men, intent on Lammam for lunch, stop open-mouthed, and stare and
grin and come in and ask in a marked sarcastic manner for "omlets," he
perceived that his inaccuracy had done more for the place than his
utmost cunning could have contrived. In a year or so the inn was known
both up and down the river by its new name of "Omlets," and Mr. Polly,
after some secret irritation, smiled and was content. And the fat
woman's _omelettes_ were things to remember.
(You will note I have changed her epithet. Time works upon us all.)
She stood upon the steps as he came towards the house, and smiled at
him richly.
"Caught many?" she asked.
"Got an idea," said Mr. Polly. "Would it put you out very much if I
went off for a day or two for a bit of a holiday? There won't be much
doing now until Thursday."