VI
Mr. Polly's intercourse with all his fellow tradesmen was tarnished
sooner or later by some such adverse incident, until not a friend
remained to him, and loneliness made even the shop door terrible.
Shops bankrupted all about him and fresh people came and new
acquaintances sprang up, but sooner or later a discord was inevitable,
the tension under which these badly fed, poorly housed, bored and
bothered neighbours lived, made it inevitable. The mere fact that Mr.
Polly had to see them every day, that there was no getting away from
them, was in itself sufficient to make them almost unendurable to his
frettingly active mind.
Among other shopkeepers in the High Street there was Chuffles, the
grocer, a small, hairy, silently intent polygamist, who was given
rough music by the youth of the neighbourhood because of a scandal
about his wife's sister, and who was nevertheless totally
uninteresting, and Tonks, the second grocer, an old man with an older,
very enfeebled wife, both submerged by piety. Tonks went bankrupt, and
was succeeded by a branch of the National Provision Company, with a
young manager exactly like a fox, except that he barked. The toy and
sweetstuff shop was kept by an old woman of repellent manners, and so
was the little fish shop at the end of the street. The Berlin-wool
shop having gone bankrupt, became a newspaper shop, then fell to a
haberdasher in consumption, and finally to a stationer; the three
shops at the end of the street wallowed in and out of insolvency in
the hands of a bicycle repairer and dealer, a gramaphone dealer, a
tobacconist, a sixpenny-halfpenny bazaar-keeper, a shoemaker, a
greengrocer, and the exploiter of a cinematograph peep-show--but none
of them supplied friendship to Mr. Polly.
These adventurers in commerce were all more or less distraught souls,
driving without intelligible comment before the gale of fate. The two
milkmen of Fishbourne were brothers who had quarrelled about their
father's will, and started in opposition to each other; one was stone
deaf and no use to Mr. Polly, and the other was a sporting man with a
natural dread of epithet who sided with Hinks. So it was all about
him, on every hand it seemed were uncongenial people, uninteresting
people, or people who conceived the deepest distrust and hostility
towards him, a magic circle of suspicious, preoccupied and dehumanised
humanity. So the poison in his system poisoned the world without.
(But Boomer, the wine merchant, and Tashingford, the chemist, be it
noted, were fraught with pride, and held themselves to be a cut above
Mr. Polly. They never quarrelled with him, preferring to bear
themselves from the outset as though they had already done so.)
As his internal malady grew upon Mr. Polly and he became more and more
a battle-ground of fermenting foods and warring juices, he came to
hate the very sight, as people say, of every one of these neighbours.
There they were, every day and all the days, just the same, echoing
his own stagnation. They pained him all round the top and back of his
head; they made his legs and arms weary and spiritless. The air was
tasteless by reason of them. He lost his human kindliness.
In the afternoons he would hover in the shop bored to death with his
business and his home and Miriam, and yet afraid to go out because of
his inflamed and magnified dislike and dread of these neighbours. He
could not bring himself to go out and run the gauntlet of the
observant windows and the cold estranged eyes.
One of his last friendships was with Rusper, the ironmonger. Rusper
took over Worthington's shop about three years after Mr. Polly opened.
He was a tall, lean, nervous, convulsive man with an upturned,
back-thrown, oval head, who read newspapers and the _Review of
Reviews_ assiduously, had belonged to a Literary Society somewhere
once, and had some defect of the palate that at first gave his
lightest word a charm and interest for Mr. Polly. It caused a peculiar
clicking sound, as though he had something between a giggle and a
gas-meter at work in his neck.
His literary admirations were not precisely Mr. Polly's literary
admirations; he thought books were written to enshrine Great Thoughts,
and that art was pedagogy in fancy dress, he had no sense of phrase or
epithet or richness of texture, but still he knew there were books, he
did know there were books and he was full of large windy ideas of the
sort he called "Modern (kik) Thought," and seemed needlessly and
helplessly concerned about "(kik) the Welfare of the Race."
Mr. Polly would dream about that (kik) at nights.
It seemed to that undesirable mind of his that Rusper's head was the
most egg-shaped head he had ever seen; the similarity weighed upon
him; and when he found an argument growing warm with Rusper he would
say: "Boil it some more, O' Man; boil it harder!" or "Six minutes at
least," allusions Rusper could never make head or tail of, and got at
last to disregard as a part of Mr. Polly's general eccentricity. For a
long time that little tendency threw no shadow over their intercourse,
but it contained within it the seeds of an ultimate disruption.
Often during the days of this friendship Mr. Polly would leave his
shop and walk over to Mr. Rusper's establishment, and stand in his
doorway and enquire: "Well, O' Man, how's the Mind of the Age
working?" and get quite an hour of it, and sometimes Mr. Rusper would
come into the outfitter's shop with "Heard the (kik) latest?" and
spend the rest of the morning.
Then Mr. Rusper married, and he married very inconsiderately a woman
who was totally uninteresting to Mr. Polly. A coolness grew between
them from the first intimation of her advent. Mr. Polly couldn't help
thinking when he saw her that she drew her hair back from her forehead
a great deal too tightly, and that her elbows were angular. His desire
not to mention these things in the apt terms that welled up so richly
in his mind, made him awkward in her presence, and that gave her an
impression that he was hiding some guilty secret from her. She decided
he must have a bad influence upon her husband, and she made it a point
to appear whenever she heard him talking to Rusper.
One day they became a little heated about the German peril.
"I lay (kik) they'll invade us," said Rusper.
"Not a bit of it. William's not the Zerxiacious sort."
"You'll see, O' Man."
"Just what I shan't do."
"Before (kik) five years are out."
"Not it."
"Yes."
"No."
"Yes."
"Oh! Boil it hard!" said Mr. Polly.
Then he looked up and saw Mrs. Rusper standing behind the counter half
hidden by a trophy of spades and garden shears and a knife-cleaning
machine, and by her expression he knew instantly that she understood.
The conversation paled and presently Mr. Polly withdrew.
After that, estrangement increased steadily.
Mr. Rusper ceased altogether to come over to the outfitter's, and Mr.
Polly called upon the ironmonger only with the completest air of
casuality. And everything they said to each other led now to flat
contradiction and raised voices. Rusper had been warned in vague and
alarming terms that Mr. Polly insulted and made game of him; he
couldn't discover exactly where; and so it appeared to him now that
every word of Mr. Polly's might be an insult meriting his resentment,
meriting it none the less because it was masked and cloaked.
Soon Mr. Polly's calls upon Mr. Rusper ceased also, and then Mr.
Rusper, pursuing incomprehensible lines of thought, became afflicted
with a specialised shortsightedness that applied only to Mr. Polly. He
would look in other directions when Mr. Polly appeared, and his large
oval face assumed an expression of conscious serenity and deliberate
happy unawareness that would have maddened a far less irritable person
than Mr. Polly. It evoked a strong desire to mock and ape, and
produced in his throat a cough of singular scornfulness, more
particularly when Mr. Rusper also assisted, with an assumed
unconsciousness that was all his own.
Then one day Mr. Polly had a bicycle accident.
His bicycle was now very old, and it is one of the concomitants of a
bicycle's senility that its free wheel should one day obstinately
cease to be free. It corresponds to that epoch in human decay when an
old gentleman loses an incisor tooth. It happened just as Mr. Polly
was approaching Mr. Rusper's shop, and the untoward chance of a motor
car trying to pass a waggon on the wrong side gave Mr. Polly no choice
but to get on to the pavement and dismount. He was always accustomed
to take his time and step off his left pedal at its lowest point, but
the jamming of the free wheel gear made that lowest moment a
transitory one, and the pedal was lifting his foot for another
revolution before he realised what had happened. Before he could
dismount according to his habit the pedal had to make a revolution,
and before it could make a revolution Mr. Polly found himself among
the various sonorous things with which Mr. Rusper adorned the front of
his shop, zinc dustbins, household pails, lawn mowers, rakes, spades
and all manner of clattering things. Before he got among them he had
one of those agonising moments of helpless wrath and suspense that
seem to last ages, in which one seems to perceive everything and think
of nothing but words that are better forgotten. He sent a column of
pails thundering across the doorway and dismounted with one foot in a
sanitary dustbin amidst an enormous uproar of falling ironmongery.
"Put all over the place!" he cried, and found Mr. Rusper emerging from
his shop with the large tranquillities of his countenance puckered to
anger, like the frowns in the brow of a reefing sail. He gesticulated
speechlessly for a moment.
"Kik--jer doing?" he said at last.
"Tin mantraps!" said Mr. Polly.
"Jer (kik) doing?"
"Dressing all over the pavement as though the blessed town belonged to
you! Ugh!"
And Mr. Polly in attempting a dignified movement realised his
entanglement with the dustbin for the first time. With a low
embittering expression he kicked his foot about in it for a moment
very noisily, and finally sent it thundering to the curb. On its way
it struck a pail or so. Then Mr. Polly picked up his bicycle and
proposed to resume his homeward way. But the hand of Mr. Rusper
arrested him.
"Put it (kik) all (kik kik) back (kik)."
"Put it (kik) back yourself."
"You got (kik) put it back."
"Get out of the (kik) way."
Mr. Rusper laid one hand on the bicycle handle, and the other gripped
Mr. Polly's collar urgently. Whereupon Mr. Polly said: "Leggo!" and
again, "D'you _hear_! Leggo!" and then drove his elbow with
considerable force into the region of Mr. Rusper's midriff. Whereupon
Mr. Rusper, with a loud impassioned cry, resembling "Woo kik" more
than any other combination of letters, released the bicycle handle,
seized Mr. Polly by the cap and hair and bore his head and shoulders
downward. Thereat Mr. Polly, emitting such words as everyone knows and
nobody prints, butted his utmost into the concavity of Mr. Rusper,
entwined a leg about him and after terrific moments of swaying
instability, fell headlong beneath him amidst the bicycles and pails.
There on the pavement these inexpert children of a pacific age,
untrained in arms and uninured to violence, abandoned themselves to
amateurish and absurd efforts to hurt and injure one another--of which
the most palpable consequences were dusty backs, ruffled hair and torn
and twisted collars. Mr. Polly, by accident, got his finger into Mr.
Rusper's mouth, and strove earnestly for some time to prolong that
aperture in the direction of Mr. Rusper's ear before it occurred to
Mr. Rusper to bite him (and even then he didn't bite very hard), while
Mr. Rusper concentrated his mind almost entirely on an effort to rub
Mr. Polly's face on the pavement. (And their positions bristled with
chances of the deadliest sort!) They didn't from first to last draw
blood.
Then it seemed to each of them that the other had become endowed with
many hands and several voices and great accessions of strength. They
submitted to fate and ceased to struggle. They found themselves torn
apart and held up by outwardly scandalised and inwardly delighted
neighbours, and invited to explain what it was all about.
"Got to (kik) puttem all back!" panted Mr. Rusper in the expert grasp
of Hinks. "Merely asked him to (kik) puttem all back."
Mr. Polly was under restraint of little Clamp, of the toy shop, who
was holding his hands in a complex and uncomfortable manner that he
afterwards explained to Wintershed was a combination of something
romantic called "Ju-jitsu" and something else still more romantic
called the "Police Grip."
"Pails," explained Mr. Polly in breathless fragments. "All over the
road. Pails. Bungs up the street with his pails. Look at them!"
"Deliber (kik) lib (kik) liberately rode into my goods (kik).
Constantly (kik) annoying me (kik)!" said Mr. Rusper....
They were both tremendously earnest and reasonable in their manner.
They wished everyone to regard them as responsible and intellectual
men acting for the love of right and the enduring good of the world.
They felt they must treat this business as a profound and publicly
significant affair. They wanted to explain and orate and show the
entire necessity of everything they had done. Mr. Polly was convinced
he had never been so absolutely correct in all his life as when he
planted his foot in the sanitary dustbin, and Mr. Rusper considered
his clutch at Mr. Polly's hair as the one faultless impulse in an
otherwise undistinguished career. But it was clear in their minds they
might easily become ridiculous if they were not careful, if for a
second they stepped over the edge of the high spirit and pitiless
dignity they had hitherto maintained. At any cost they perceived they
must not become ridiculous.
Mr. Chuffles, the scandalous grocer, joined the throng about the
principal combatants, mutely as became an outcast, and with a sad,
distressed helpful expression picked up Mr. Polly's bicycle. Gambell's
summer errand boy, moved by example, restored the dustbin and pails to
their self-respect.
"'_E_ ought--'_e_ ought (kik) pick them up," protested Mr. Rusper.
"What's it all about?" said Mr. Hinks for the third time, shaking Mr.
Rusper gently. "As 'e been calling you names?"
"Simply ran into his pails--as anyone might," said Mr. Polly, "and out
he comes and scrags me!"
"(Kik) Assault!" said Mr. Rusper.
"He assaulted _me_," said Mr. Polly.
"Jumped (kik) into my dus'bin!" said Mr. Rusper. "That assault? Or
isn't it?"
"You better drop it," said Mr. Hinks.
"Great pity they can't be'ave better, both of 'em," said Mr. Chuffles,
glad for once to find himself morally unassailable.
"Anyone see it begin?" said Mr. Wintershed.
"_I_ was in the shop," said Mrs. Rusper suddenly from the doorstep,
piercing the little group of men and boys with the sharp horror of an
unexpected woman's voice. "If a witness is wanted I suppose I've got a
tongue. I suppose I got a voice in seeing my own 'usband injured. My
husband went out and spoke to Mr. Polly, who was jumping off his
bicycle all among our pails and things, and immediately 'e butted him
in the stomach--immediately--most savagely--butted him. Just after his
dinner too and him far from strong. I could have screamed. But Rusper
caught hold of him right away, I will say that for Rusper...."
"I'm going," said Mr. Polly suddenly, releasing himself from the
Anglo-Japanese grip and holding out his hands for his bicycle.
"Teach you (kik) to leave things alone," said Mr. Rusper with an air
of one who has given a lesson.
The testimony of Mrs. Rusper continued relentlessly in the background.
"You'll hear of me through a summons," said Mr. Polly, preparing to
wheel his bicycle.
"(Kik) Me too," said Mr. Rusper.
Someone handed Mr. Polly a collar. "This yours?"
Mr. Polly investigated his neck. "I suppose it is. Anyone seen a tie?"
A small boy produced a grimy strip of spotted blue silk.
"Human life isn't safe with you," said Mr. Polly as a parting shot.
"(Kik) Yours isn't," said Mr. Rusper....
And they got small satisfaction out of the Bench, which refused
altogether to perceive the relentless correctitude of the behaviour of
either party, and reproved the eagerness of Mrs. Rusper--speaking to
her gently, firmly but exasperatingly as "My Good Woman" and telling
her to "Answer the Question! Answer the Question!"
"Seems a Pity," said the chairman, when binding them over to keep the
peace, "you can't behave like Respectable Tradesmen. Seems a Great
Pity. Bad Example to the Young and all that. Don't do any Good to the
town, don't do any Good to yourselves, don't do any manner of Good, to
have all the Tradesmen in the Place scrapping about the Pavement of an
Afternoon. Think we're letting you off very easily this time, and hope
it will be a Warning to you. Don't expect Men of your Position to come
up before us. Very Regrettable Affair. Eh?"
He addressed the latter enquiry to his two colleagues.
"Exactly, exactly," said the colleague to the right.
"Er--(kik)," said Mr. Rusper.
