II
A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and
nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a
lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins
of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and
Shakespeare with gusto, and uses "Stertoraneous Shover" and "Smart
Junior" as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a
great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt
always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred
of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of
ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary,
or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and
Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving
and the memory of Charles the Second's courtly days. His progress was
necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was
something in his eye employers did not like; he would have lost his
places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally brilliant
salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair
window-dresser.
He went from situation to situation, he invented a great wealth of
nicknames, he conceived enmities and made friends--but none so richly
satisfying as Parsons. He was frequently but mildly and discursively
in love, and sometimes he thought of that girl who had given him a
yellow-green apple. He had an idea, amounting to a flattering
certainty, whose youthful freshness it was had stirred her to
self-forgetfulness. And sometimes he thought of Foxbourne sleeping
prosperously in the sun. And he began to have moods of discomfort and
lassitude and ill-temper due to the beginnings of indigestion.
Various forces and suggestions came into his life and swayed him for
longer and shorter periods.
He went to Canterbury and came under the influence of Gothic
architecture. There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the
Gothic; in the middle ages he would no doubt have sat upon a
scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too flattering
portraits of church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he
strolled, with his hands behind his back, along the cloisters behind
the cathedral, and looked at the rich grass plot in the centre, he had
the strangest sense of being at home--far more than he had ever been
at home before. "Portly _capóns_," he used to murmur to himself, under
the impression that he was naming a characteristic type of medieval
churchman.
He liked to sit in the nave during the service, and look through the
great gates at the candles and choristers, and listen to the
organ-sustained voices, but the transepts he never penetrated because
of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the
fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he
had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But some of the
smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious
urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He
wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived
in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cluster there so
comfortably. Through green doors in high stone walls he caught
glimpses of level lawns and blazing flower beds; mullioned windows
revealed shaded reading lamps and disciplined shelves of brown bound
books. Now and then a dignitary in gaiters would pass him, "Portly
capon," or a drift of white-robed choir boys cross a distant arcade
and vanish in a doorway, or the pink and cream of some girlish dress
flit like a butterfly across the cool still spaces of the place.
Particularly he responded to the ruined arches of the Benedictine's
Infirmary and the view of Bell Harry tower from the school buildings.
He was stirred to read the Canterbury Tales, but he could not get on
with Chaucer's old-fashioned English; it fatigued his attention, and
he would have given all the story telling very readily for a few
adventures on the road. He wanted these nice people to live more and
yarn less. He liked the Wife of Bath very much. He would have liked to
have known that woman.
At Canterbury, too, he first to his knowledge saw Americans.
His shop did a good class trade in Westgate Street, and he would see
them go by on the way to stare at Chaucer's "Chequers," and then turn
down Mercery Lane to Prior Goldstone's gate. It impressed him that
they were always in a kind of quiet hurry, and very determined and
methodical people,--much more so than any English he knew.
"Cultured Rapacicity," he tried.
"Vorocious Return to the Heritage."
He would expound them incidentally to his attendant apprentices. He
had overheard a little lady putting her view to a friend near the
Christchurch gate. The accent and intonation had hung in his memory,
and he would reproduce them more or less accurately. "Now does this
Marlowe monument really and truly _matter_?" he had heard the little
lady enquire. "We've no time for side shows and second rate stunts,
Mamie. We want just the Big Simple Things of the place, just the Broad
Elemental Canterbury praposition. What is it saying to us? I want to
get right hold of that, and then have tea in the very room that
Chaucer did, and hustle to get that four-eighteen train back to
London."
He would go over these precious phrases, finding them full of an
indescribable flavour. "Just the Broad Elemental Canterbury
praposition," he would repeat....
He would try to imagine Parsons confronted with Americans. For his own
part he knew himself to be altogether inadequate....
Canterbury was the most congenial situation Mr. Polly ever found
during these wander years, albeit a very desert so far as
companionship went.
