H G Wells Omnibus, page 88
I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular. There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly—I suppose he sees clearly—the big process that dooms millions of lives to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us no help, no hint, by which we may get that better “collective will and intelligence” which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort—with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours or mine.
IV.
I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosity she affords her children a variety of foods unparalleled in the world’s history, and including many condiments and preserved preparations novel to the human economy. And Miriam did the cooking. Mr. Polly’s system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions, such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, war and bloodshed throughout the world. So that Mr. Polly had been led into hatred and a series of disagreeable quarrels with his landlord, his wholesalers, and most of his neighbours.
Rumbold, the china dealer next door, seemed hostile from the first for no apparent reason, and always unpacked his crates with a full back to his new neighbour, and from the first Mr. Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it. But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it.
At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold.
“Ello!” said Rumbold, suddenly erect and turned about.
“Can’t we have some other point of view?” said Mr. Polly. “I’m tired of the end elevation.”
“Eh?” said Mr. Rumbold, frankly puzzled.
“Of all the vertebracious animals man alone raises his face to the sky, O’ Man. Well,—why invert it?”
Rumbold shook his head with a helpless expression.
“Don’t like so much Arreary Pensy.”
Rumbold distressed in utter obscurity.
“In fact, I’m sick of your turning your back on me, see?”
A great light shone on Rumbold. “That’s what you’re talking about!” he said.
“That’s it,” said Polly.
Rumbold scratched his ear with the three strawy jampots he held in his hand. “Way the wind blows, I expect,” he said. “But what’s the fuss?”
“No fuss!” said Mr. Polly. “Passing Remark. I don’t like it, O’ Man, that’s all.”
“Can’t help it, if the wind blows my stror,” said Mr. Rumbold, still far from clear about it… .
“It isn’t ordinary civility,” said Mr. Polly.
“Got to unpack ’ow it suits me. Can’t unpack with the stror blowing into one’s eyes.”
“Needn’t unpack like a pig rooting for truffles, need you?”
“Truffles?”
“Needn’t unpack like a pig.”
Mr. Rumbold apprehended something.
“Pig!” he said, impressed. “You calling me a pig?”
“It’s the side I seem to get of you.”
“’Ere,” said Mr. Rumbold, suddenly fierce and shouting and marking his point with gesticulated jampots, “you go indoors. I don’t want no row with you, and I don’t want you to row with me. I don’t know what you’re after, but I’m a peaceable man—teetotaller, too, and a good thing if you was. See? You go indoors!”
“You mean to say—I’m asking you civilly to stop unpacking—with your back to me.”
“Pig ain’t civil, and you ain’t sober. You go indoors and lemme go on unpacking. You—you’re excited.”
“D’you mean—!” Mr. Polly was foiled.
He perceived an immense solidity about Rumbold.
“Get back to your shop and lemme get on with my business,” said Mr. Rumbold. “Stop calling me pigs. See? Sweep your pavemint.”
“I came here to make a civil request.”
“You came ’ere to make a row. I don’t want no truck with you. See? I don’t like the looks of you. See? And I can’t stand ’ere all day arguing. See?”
Pause of mutual inspection.
It occurred to Mr. Polly that probably he was to some extent in the wrong.
Mr. Rumbold, blowing heavily, walked past him, deposited the jampots in his shop with an immense affectation that there was no Mr. Polly in the world, returned, turned a scornful back on Mr. Polly and dived to the interior of the crate. Mr. Polly stood baffled. Should he kick this solid mass before him? Should he administer a resounding kick?
No!
He plunged his hands deeply into his trowser pockets, began to whistle and returned to his own doorstep with an air of profound unconcern. There for a time, to the tune of “Men of Harlech,” he contemplated the receding possibility of kicking Mr. Rumbold hard. It would be splendid—and for the moment satisfying. But he decided not to do it. For indefinable reasons he could not do it. He went indoors and straightened up his dress ties very slowly and thoughtfully. Presently he went to the window and regarded Mr. Rumbold obliquely. Mr. Rumbold was still unpacking… .
Mr. Polly had no human intercourse thereafter with Rumbold for fifteen years. He kept up a Hate.
There was a time when it seemed as if Rumbold might go, but he had a meeting of his creditors and then went on unpacking as obtusely as ever.
V.
Hinks, the saddler, two shops further down the street, was a different case. Hinks was the aggressor—practically.
Hinks was a sporting man in his way, with that taste for checks in costume and tight trousers which is, under Providence, so mysteriously and invariably associated with equestrian proclivities. At first Mr. Polly took to him as a character, became frequent in the God’s Providence Inn under his guidance, stood and was stood drinks and concealed a great ignorance of horses until Hinks became urgent for him to play billiards or bet.
Then Mr. Polly took to evading him, and Hinks ceased to conceal his opinion that Mr. Polly was in reality a softish sort of flat.
He did not, however, discontinue conversation with Mr. Polly; he would come along to him whenever he appeared at his door, and converse about sport and women and fisticuffs and the pride of life with an air of extreme initiation, until Mr. Polly felt himself the faintest underdeveloped intimation of a man that had ever hovered on the verge of non-existence.
So he invented phrases for Hinks’ clothes and took Rusper, the ironmonger, into his confidence upon the weaknesses of Hinks. He called him the “Chequered Careerist,” and spoke of his patterned legs as “shivery shakys.” Good things of this sort are apt to get round to people.
He was standing at his door one day, feeling bored, when Hinks appeared down the street, stood still and regarded him with a strange malignant expression for a space.
Mr. Polly waved a hand in a rather belated salutation.
Mr. Hinks spat on the pavement and appeared to reflect. Then he came towards Mr. Polly portentously and paused, and spoke between his teeth in an earnest confidential tone.
“You been flapping your mouth about me, I’m told,” he said.
Mr. Polly felt suddenly spiritless. “Not that I know of,” he answered.
“Not that you know of, be blowed! You been flapping your mouth.”
“Don’t see it,” said Mr. Polly.
“Don’t see it, be blowed! You go flapping your silly mouth about me and I’ll give you a poke in the eye. See?”
Mr. Hinks regarded the effect of this coldly but firmly, and spat again.
“Understand me?” he enquired.
“Don’t recollect,” began Mr. Polly.
“Don’t recollect, be blowed! You flap your mouth a dam sight too much. This place gets more of your mouth than it wants… . Seen this?”
And Mr. Hinks, having displayed a freckled fist of extraordinary size and pugginess in an ostentatiously familiar manner to Mr. Polly’s close inspection by sight and smell, turned it about this way and that and shaken it gently for a moment or so, replaced it carefully in his pocket as if for future use, receded slowly and watchfully for a pace, and then turned away as if to other matters, and ceased to be even in outward seeming a friend… .
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.
