Chapter the Ninth
The Potwell Inn
I
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday
circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us
securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a
discovery. If the world does not please you _you can change it_.
Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.
You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something
appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter,
something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more
interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame
for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and
dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action
cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and
even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary
compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I
give these things as facts and information, and with no moral
intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed
indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general
air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood
there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.
He could, for example, "clear out."
It became a wonderful and alluring phrase to him: "clear out!"
Why had he never thought of clearing out before?
He was amazed and a little shocked at the unimaginative and
superfluous criminality in him that had turned old cramped and
stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and new beginnings. (I wish from the
bottom of my heart I could add that he was properly sorry.) But
something constricting and restrained seemed to have been destroyed by
that flare. _Fishbourne wasn't the world_. That was the new, the
essential fact of which he had lived so lamentably in ignorance.
Fishbourne as he had known it and hated it, so that he wanted to kill
himself to get out of it, _wasn't the world_.
The insurance money he was to receive made everything humane and
kindly and practicable. He would "clear out," with justice and
humanity. He would take exactly twenty-one pounds, and all the rest he
would leave to Miriam. That seemed to him absolutely fair. Without
him, she could do all sorts of things--all the sorts of things she was
constantly urging him to do.
And he would go off along the white road that led to Garchester, and
on to Crogate and so to Tunbridge Wells, where there was a Toad Rock
he had heard of, but never seen. (It seemed to him this must needs be
a marvel.) And so to other towns and cities. He would walk and loiter
by the way, and sleep in inns at night, and get an odd job here and
there and talk to strange people. Perhaps he would get quite a lot of
work and prosper, and if he did not do so he would lie down in front
of a train, or wait for a warm night, and then fall into some smooth,
broad river. Not so bad as sitting down to a dentist, not nearly so
bad. And he would never open a shop any more. Never!
So the possibilities of the future presented themselves to Mr. Polly
as he lay awake at nights.
It was springtime, and in the woods so soon as one got out of reach of
the sea wind, there would be anémones and primroses.
