The H.G. Wells Reader (99 page)

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 this 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 asked 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.”

Feeling recklessly secure behind his beard Mr. Polly surveyed the Fishbourne High Street once again. The north side was much as he had known it except that Rusper had vanished. A row of new shops replaced the destruction of the great fire. Mantell and Throbson's had risen again upon a more flamboyant pattern, and the new fire station was in the Swiss-Teutonic style and with much red paint. Next door in the place of Rumbold's was a branch of the Colonial Tea Company, and then a Salmon and Gluckstein Tobacco Shop, and then a little shop that displayed sweets and professed a “Tea Room Upstairs.” He considered this as a possible place in which to prosecute enquiries about his lost wife, wavering a little between it and the God's Providence Inn down the street. Then his eye caught a name over the window, “Polly,” he read, “& Larkins! Well, I'm—astonished!”

A momentary faintness came upon him. He walked past and down the street, returned and surveyed the shop again.

He saw a middle-aged, rather untidy woman standing behind the counter, whom for an instant he thought might be Miriam terribly changed, and then recognised as his sister-in-law Annie, filled out and no longer hilarious. She stared at him without a sign of recognition as he entered the shop.

“Can I have tea?” said Mr. Polly.

“Well,” said Annie, “you
can
. But our Tea Room's upstairs. . . . My sister's been cleaning it out—and it's a bit upset.”

“It would be,” said Mr. Polly softly.

“I beg your pardon?” said Annie.

“I said
I
didn't mind. Up here?”

“I daresay there'll be a table,” said Annie, and followed him up to a room whose conscientious disorder was intensely reminiscent of Miriam.

“Nothing like turning everything upside down when you're cleaning,” said Mr. Polly cheerfully.

“It's my sister's way,” said Annie impartially. “She's gone out for a bit of air, but I daresay she'll be back soon to finish. It's a nice light room when it's tidy. Can I put you a table over there?”

“Let
me
,” said Mr. Polly, and assisted.

He sat down by the open window and drummed on the table and meditated on his next step while Annie vanished to get his tea. After all, things didn't seem so bad with Miriam. He tried over several gambits in imagination.

“Unusual name,” he said as Annie laid a cloth before him.

Annie looked interrogation.

“Polly. Polly & Larkins. Real, I suppose?”

“Polly's my sister's name. She married a Mr. Polly.”

“Widow I presume?” said Mr. Polly.

“Yes. This five years—come October.”

“Lord!” said Mr. Polly in unfeigned surprise.

“Found drowned he was. There was a lot of talk in the place.”

“Never heard of it,” said Mr. Polly. “I'm a stranger—rather.”

“In the Medway near Maidstone. He must have been in the water for days. Wouldn't have known him, my sister wouldn't, if it hadn't been for the name sewn in his clothes. All whitey and eat away he was.”

“Bless my heart! Must have been rather a shock for her!”

“It
was
a shock,” said Annie, and added darkly: “But sometimes a shock's better than a long agony.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Polly.

He gazed with a rapt expression at the preparations before him. “So I'm drowned,” something was saying inside him. “Life insured?” he asked.

“We started the tea rooms with it,” said Annie.

Why, if things were like this, had remorse and anxiety for Miriam been implanted in his soul? No shadow of an answer appeared.

“Marriage is a lottery,” said Mr. Polly.

“
She
found it so,” said Annie. “Would you like some jam?”

“I'd like an egg,” said Mr. Polly. “I'll have two. I've got a sort of feeling—. As though I wanted keeping up. . . . Wasn't particularly good sort, this Mr. Polly?”

“He was a
wearing
husband,” said Annie. “I've often pitied my sister. He was one of that sort—”

“Dissolute?” suggested Mr. Polly faintly.

“No,” said Annie judiciously; “not exactly dissolute. Feeble's more the word. Weak, 'e was. Weak as water. 'Ow long do you like your eggs boiled?”

“Four minutes exactly,” said Mr. Polly.

“One gets talking,” said Annie.

“One does,” said Mr. Polly, and she left him to his thoughts.

What perplexed him was his recent remorse and tenderness for Miriam. Now he was back in her atmosphere all that had vanished, and the old feeling of helpless antagonism returned. He surveyed the piled furniture, the economically managed carpet, the unpleasing pictures on the wall. Why had he felt remorse? Why had he entertained this illusion of a helpless woman crying aloud in the pitiless darkness for
him? He peered into the unfathomable mysteries of the heart, and ducked back to a smaller issue. Was he feeble?

The eggs came up. Nothing in Annie's manner invited a resumption of the discussion.

“Business brisk?” He ventured to ask.

Annie reflected. “It is,' she said, “and it isn't. It's like that.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Polly, and squared himself to his egg. “Was there an inquest on that chap?”

“What chap?”

“What was his name?—Polly!”

“Of course.”

“You're sure it was him?”

“What you mean?”

Annie looked at him hard, and suddenly his soul was black with terror.

“Who else could it have been—in the very clothes 'e wore?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Polly, and began his egg. He was so agitated that he only realised its condition when he was half way through it and Annie safely downstairs.

“Lord!” he said, reaching out hastily for the pepper. “One of Miriam's! I haven't tasted such an egg for five years. . . . Wonder where she gets them! Picks them out, I suppose!”

He abandoned it for its fellow.

Except for a slight mustiness the second egg was very palatable indeed. He was getting on to the bottom of it as Miriam came in. He looked up. “Nice afternoon,” he said at her stare, and perceived she knew him at once by the gesture and the voice. She went white and shut the door behind her. She looked as though she was going to faint. Mr. Polly sprang up quickly and handed her a chair. “My God!” she whispered, and crumpled up rather than sat down.

“It's
you
,” she said.

“No,” said Mr. Polly very earnestly. “It isn't. It just looks like me. That's all.”

“I
knew
that man wasn't you—all along. I tried to think it was. I tried to think perhaps the water had altered your wrists and feet and the colour of your hair.”

“Ah.”

“I'd always feared you'd come back.”

Mr. Polly sat down by his egg. “I haven't come back,” he said very earnestly. “Don't you think it.”

“ 'Ow we'll pay back the insurance now I
don't
know.” She was weeping. She produced a handkerchief and covered her face.

“Look here, Miriam,” said Mr. Polly. “I haven't come back and I'm not coming back. I'm—I'm a Visitant from Another World. You shut up about me and I'll shut up about myself. I came back because I thought you might be hard up or in trouble or some silly thing like that. Now I see you again—I'm satisfied. I'm satisfied completely. See? I'm going to absquatulate, see? Hey Presto right away.”

He turned to his tea for a moment, finished his cup noisily, stood up.

“Don't you think you're going to see me again,” he said, “for you ain't.”

He moved to the door.

“That was a tasty egg,” he said, hovered for a second and vanished.

Annie was in the shop.

“The missus has had a bit of a shock,” he remarked. “Got some sort of fancy about a ghost. Can't make it out quite. So Long.”

And he had gone.

Mr. Polly sat beside the fat woman at one of the little green tables at the back of the Potwell Inn, and struggled with the mystery of life. It was one of those evenings, serenely luminous, amply and atmospherically still, when the river bend was at its best. A swan floated against the dark green masses of the further bank, the stream flowed broad and shining to its destiny, with scarce a ripple—except where the reeds came out from the headland—the three poplars rose clear and harmonious against a sky of green and yellow. And it was as if it was all securely within a great warm friendly globe of crystal sky. It was as safe and enclosed and fearless as a child that has still to be born. It was an evening full of the quality of tranquil, unqualified assurance. Mr. Polly's mind was filled with the persuasion that indeed all things whatsoever must needs be satisfying and complete. It was incredible that life had ever done more than seemed to jar, that there could be any shadow in life save such velvet softnesses as made the setting for that silent swan, or any murmur but the ripple of the water as it swirled round the chained and gently swaying punt. And the mind of Mr. Polly, exalted and made tender by this atmosphere, sought gently, but sought, to draw together the varied memories that came drifting, half submerged, across the circle of his mind.

He spoke in words that seemed like a bent and broken stick thrust suddenly into water, destroying the mirror of the shapes they sought. “Jim's not coming back again ever,” he said. “He got drowned five years ago.”

“Where?” asked the fat woman, surprised.

“Miles from her. In the Medway. Away in Kent.”

“Lor!” said the fat woman.

“It's right enough,” said Mr. Polly.

“How d'you know?”

“I went to my home.”

“Where?”

“Don't matter. I went and found out. He'd been in the water some days. He'd got my clothes and they'd said it was me.”

“They?”

“It don't matter. I'm not going back to them.”

The fat woman regarded him silently for some time. Her expression of scrutiny gave way to a quiet satisfaction. Then her brown eyes went to the river.

“Poor Jim” she said. “ 'E 'adn't much Tact—ever.”

She added mildly: “I can't 'ardly say I'm sorry.”

“Nor me,” said Mr. Polly, and got a step nearer the thought in him. “But it don't seem much good his having been alive, does it?”

“ 'E wasn't much good,” the fat woman admitted. “Ever.”

“I suppose there were things that were good to him,” Mr. Polly speculated. “They weren't
our
things.”

His hold slipped again. “I often wonder about life,” he said weakly.

He tried again. “One seems to start in life,” he said, “expecting something. And it doesn't happen. And it doesn't matter. One starts with ideas that things are good and things are bad—and it hasn't much relation to what
is
good and what
is
bad. I've always been the skeptaceous sort, and it's always seemed rot to me to pretend we know good from evil. It's just what I've
never
done. No Adam's apple stuck in
my
throat, ma'am. I don't own to it.”