III
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black—looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95–6 (varying at most to 93 ex. div.) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76½—78½.
It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet!
So, too, Mr. Polly’s happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery:
“298”
instead of the
“350”
he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence.
It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist.
“Going down a vortex!” he whispered.
By a characteristic feat of subtraction he decided that he must have spent sixty-two pounds.
“Funererial baked meats,” he said, recalling possible items.
The happy dream in which he had been living of long warm days, of open roads, of limitless unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world, that exacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet.
And also he had promised to marry Miriam, and on the whole rather wanted to.
He was distraught at supper. Afterwards, when Mrs. Johnson had gone to bed with a slight headache, he opened a conversation with Johnson.
“It’s about time, O’ Man, I saw about doing something,” he said. “Riding about and looking at shops, all very debonnairious, O’ Man, but it’s time I took one for keeps.”
“What did I tell you?” said Johnson.
“How do you think that corner shop of yours will figure out?” Mr. Polly asked.
“You’re really meaning it?”
“If it’s a practable proposition, O’ Man. Assuming it’s practable. What’s your idea of the figures?”
Johnson went to the chiffonier, got out a letter and tore off the back sheet. “Let’s figure it out,” he said with solemn satisfaction. “Let’s see the lowest you could do it on.”
He squared himself to the task, and Mr. Polly sat beside him like a pupil, watching the evolution of the grey, distasteful figures that were to dispose of his little hoard.
“What running expenses have we got to provide for?” said Johnson, wetting his pencil. “Let’s have them first. Rent? …”
At the end of an hour of hideous speculations, Johnson decided: “It’s close. But you’ll have a chance.”
“M’m,” said Mr. Polly. “What more does a brave man want?”
“One thing you can do quite easily. I’ve asked about it.”
“What’s that, O’ Man?” said Mr. Polly.
“Take the shop without the house above it.”
“I suppose I might put my head in to mind it,” said Mr. Polly, “and get a job with my body.”
“Not exactly that. But I thought you’d save a lot if you stayed on here—being all alone as you are.”
“Never thought of that, O’ Man,” said Mr. Polly, and reflected silently upon the needlessness of Miriam.
“We were talking of eighty pounds for stock,” said Johnson. “Of course seventy-five is five pounds less, isn’t it? Not much else we can cut.”
“No,” said Mr. Polly.
“It’s very interesting, all this,” said Johnson, folding up the half sheet of paper and unfolding it. “I wish sometimes I had a business of my own instead of a fixed salary. You’ll have to keep books of course.”
“One wants to know where one is.”
“I should do it all by double entry,” said Johnson. “A little troublesome at first, but far the best in the end.”
“Lemme see that paper,” said Mr. Polly, and took it with the feeling of a man who takes a nauseating medicine, and scrutinised his cousin’s neat figures with listless eyes.
“Well,” said Johnson, rising and stretching. “Bed! Better sleep on it, O’ Man.”
“Right O,” said Mr. Polly without moving, but indeed he could as well have slept upon a bed of thorns.
He had a dreadful night. It was like the end of the annual holiday, only infinitely worse. It was like a newly arrived prisoner’s backward glance at the trees and heather through the prison gates. He had to go back to harness, and he was as fitted to go in harness as the ordinary domestic cat. All night, Fate, with the quiet complacency, and indeed at times the very face and gestures of Johnson, guided him towards that undesired establishment at the corner near the station. “Oh Lord!” he cried, “I’d rather go back to cribs. I should keep my money anyhow.” Fate never winced.
“Run away to sea,” whispered Mr. Polly, but he knew he wasn’t man enough.
“Cut my blooming throat.”
Some braver strain urged him to think of Miriam, and for a little while he lay still. …
“Well, O’ Man?” said Johnson, when Mr. Polly came down to breakfast, and Mrs. Johnson looked up brightly. Mr. Polly had never felt breakfast so unattractive before.
“Just a day or so more, O’ Man—to turn it over in my mind,” he said.
“You’ll get the place snapped up,” said Johnson.
There were times in those last few days of coyness with his destiny when his engagement seemed the most negligible of circumstances, and times—and these happened for the most part at nights after Mrs. Johnson had indulged everybody in a Welsh rarebit—when it assumed so sinister and portentous an appearance as to make him think of suicide. And there were times too when he very distinctly desired to be married, now that the idea had got into his head, at any cost. Also he tried to recall all the circumstances of his proposal, time after time, and never quite succeeded in recalling what had brought the thing off. He went over to Stamton with a becoming frequency, and kissed all his cousins, and Miriam especially, a great deal, and found it very stirring and refreshing. They all appeared to know; and Minnie was tearful, but resigned. Mrs. Larkins met him, and indeed enveloped him, with unwonted warmth, and there was a big pot of household jam for tea. And he could not make up his mind to sign his name to anything about the shop, though it crawled nearer and nearer to him, though the project had materialised now to the extent of a draft agreement with the place for his signature indicated in pencil.
One morning, just after Mr. Johnson had gone to the station, Mr. Polly wheeled his bicycle out into the road, went up to his bedroom, packed his long white nightdress, a comb, and a toothbrush in a manner that was as offhand as he could make it, informed Mrs. Johnson, who was manifestly curious, that he was “off for a day or two to clear his head,” and fled forthright into the road, and mounting turned his wheel towards the tropics and the equator and the south coast of England, and indeed more particularly to where the little village of Fishbourne slumbers and sleeps.
When he returned four days later, he astonished Johnson beyond measure by remarking so soon as the shop project was reopened:
“I’ve took a little contraption at Fishbourne, O’ Man, that I fancy suits me better.”
He paused, and then added in a manner, if possible, even more offhand:
“Oh! and I’m going to have a bit of a nuptial over at Stamton with one of the Larkins cousins.”
“Nuptial!” said Johnson.
“Wedding bells, O’ Man. Benedictine collapse.”
On the whole Johnson showed great self-control. “It’s your own affair, O’ Man,” he said, when things had been more clearly explained, “and I hope you won’t feel sorry when it’s too late.”
But Mrs. Johnson was first of all angrily silent, and then reproachful. “I don’t see what we’ve done to be made fools of like this,” she said. “After all the trouble we’ve ’ad to make you comfortable and see after you. Out late and sitting up and everything. And then you go off as sly as sly without a word, and get a shop behind our backs as though you thought we meant to steal your money. I ’aven’t patience with such deceitfulness, and I didn’t think it of you, Elfrid. And now the letting season’s ’arf gone by, and what I shall do with that room of yours I’ve no idea. Frank is frank, and fair play fair play; so I was told any’ow when I was a girl. Just as long as it suits you to stay ’ere you stay ’ere, and then it’s off and no thank you whether we like it or not. Johnson’s too easy with you. ’E sits there and doesn’t say a word, and night after night ’e’s been addin’ and thinkin’ for you, instead of seeing to his own affairs—”
She paused for breath.
“Unfortunate amoor,” said Mr. Polly, apologetically and indistinctly. “Didn’t expect it myself.”