The H.G. Wells Reader (82 page)

He reflected that he might go on this way for four or five years, and then be scarcely worse off than he had been in his father's lifetime.

“Vile Business,” said Mr. Polly.

Then Romance appeared. Or to be exact, Romance became audible.

Romance began as a series of small but increasingly vigorous movements on the other side of the wall, then as a voice murmuring, then as a falling of little fragments on the hither side and as ten pink finger tips, scarcely apprehended before Romance became startling and emphatically a leg, remained for a time a fine, slender, actively struggling limb, brown stockinged and wearing a brown toe-worn shoe, and then—. A handsome red-haired girl wearing a short dress of blue linen was sitting astride the wall, panting, considerably disarranged by her climbing, and as yet unaware of Mr. Polly. . . .

His fine instincts made him turn his head away and assume an attitude of negligent contemplation, with his ears and mind alive to every sound behind him.

“Goodness!” said a voice with a sharp note of surprise.

Mr. Polly was on his feet in an instant. “Dear me! Can I be of any assistance?” he said with deferential gallantry.

“I don't know,” said the young lady, and regarded him calmly with clear blue eyes.

“I didn't know there was anyone here,” she added.

“Sorry,” said Mr. Polly, “if I am intrudaceous. I didn't know you didn't want me to be here.”

She reflected for a moment on the word.

“It isn't that,” she said, surveying him.

“I oughtn't to get over the wall,” she explained. “It's out of bounds. At least in term time. But this being holidays—”

Her manner placed the matter before him.

“Holidays is different,” said Mr. Polly.

“I don't want to actually break the rules,” she said.

“Leave them behind you,” said Mr. Polly with a catch of the breath, “where they are safe,” and marvelling at his own wit and daring, and indeed trembling within himself, he held out a hand for her.

She brought another brown leg from the unknown, and arranged her skirt with a dexterity altogether feminine. “I think I'll stay on the wall,” she decided. “So long as some of me's in bounds—”

She continued to regard him with eyes that presently joined dancing in an irresistible smile of satisfaction. Mr. Polly smiled in return.

“You bicycle?” she said.

Mr. Polly admitted the fact, and she said she did too.

“All
my
people are in India,” she explained. “It's beastly rot—I mean it's frightfully dull being left here alone.”

“All my people,” said Mr. Polly, “are in Heaven!”

“I say!”

“Fact!” said Mr. Polly. “Got nobody.”

“And that's why—” she checked her artless comment on his mourning. “I say,” she said in a sympathetic voice, “I am sorry. I really am. Was it a fire or a ship—or something?”

Her sympathy was very delightful. He shook his head. “The ordinary table of mortality,” he said. “First one and then another.”

Behind his outward melancholy, delight was dancing wildly. “Are you lonely?” asked the girl.

Mr. Polly nodded.

“I was just sitting there in melancholy rectrospectitiousness,” he said, indicating the logs, and again a swift thoughtfulness swept across her face.

“There's no harm in our talking,” she reflected.

“It's a kindness. Won't you get down?”

She reflected, and surveyed the turf below and the scene around him.

“I'll stay on the wall,” she said. “If only for bounds' sake.”

She certainly looked quite adorable on the wall. She had a fine neck and pointed chin that was particularly admirable from below, and pretty eyes and fine eyebrows are never so pretty as when they look down upon one. But no calculation of that sort, thank Heaven, was going on beneath her ruddy shock of hair.

“Let's talk,” she said, and for a time they were both tongue-tied.

Mr. Polly's literary proclivities had taught him that under such circumstances a strain of gallantry was demanded. And something in his blood repeated that lesson.

“You make me feel like one of those old knights,” he said. “Who rode about the country looking for dragons and beautiful maidens and chivalresque adventures.”

“Oh!” she said. “Why?”

“Beautiful maiden,” he said.

She flushed under her freckles with a quick bright flush those pretty red-haired people have. “Nonsense!” she said.

“You are. I'm not the first to tell you that. A beautiful maiden imprisoned in an enchanted school.”

“You wouldn't think it enchanted!”

“And here am I—clad in steel. Well, not exactly, but my fiery war horse is anyhow. Ready to absquatulate all the dragons and rescue you.”

She laughed, a jolly laugh that showed delightfully gleaming teeth. “I wish you could
see
the dragons,” she said with great enjoyment. Mr. Polly felt they were a sun's distance from the world of everyday.

“Fly with me!” he dared.

She stared for a moment, and then went off into peals of laughter. “You
are
funny!” she said. 'Why, I haven't known you five minutes.”

“One doesn't—in this medieval world. My mind is made up, anyhow.”

He was proud and pleased with his joke, and quick to change his key neatly. “I wish one could,” he said.

“I wonder if people ever did!”

“If there were people like you.”

“We don't even know each other's names,” she remarked with a descent to matters of fact.

“Yours is the prettiest name in the world.”

“How do you know?”

“It must be—anyhow.”

“It is rather pretty you know—it's Christabel.”

“What did I tell you?”

“And yours?”

“Poorer than I deserve. It's Alfred.”

“I can't call you Alfred.”

“Well, Polly.”

“It's a girl's name!”

For a moment he was out of tune. “I wish it was!” he said, and could have bitten out his tongue at the Larkins sound of it.

“I shan't forget it,” she remarked consolingly.

“I say,” she said in the pause that followed. “Why are you riding about the country on a bicycle?”

“I'm doing it because I like it.”

She sought to estimate his social status on her limited basis of experience. He stood leaning with one hand against the wall, looking up at her and tingling with daring thoughts. He was a littlish man, you must remember, but neither mean-looking nor unhandsome in those days, sunburnt by his holiday and now warmly flushed. He had an inspiration to simple speech that no practised trifler with love could have bettered. “There is love at first sight,” he said, and said it sincerely.

She stared at him with eyes round and big with excitement.

“I think,” she said slowly, and without any signs of fear or retreat, “I ought to get back over the wall.”

“It needn't matter to you,” he said. “I'm just a nobody. But I know you are the best and most beautiful thing I've ever spoken to.” His breath caught against something. “No harm in telling you that,” he said.

“I should have to go back if I thought you were serious,” she said after a pause, and they both smiled together.

After that they talked in a fragmentary way for some time. The blue eyes surveyed Mr. Polly with kindly curiosity from under a broad, finely modelled brow, much as an exceptionally intelligent cat might survey a new sort of dog. She meant to find out all about him. She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face.

“Boom!” came the sound of a gong.

“Lordy!” cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone.

Then her pink finger tips reappeared, and the top of her red hair. “Knight!” she cried from the other side of the wall. “Knight there!”

“Lady!” he answered.

“Come again to-morrow!”

“At your command. But—”

“Yes?”

“Just one finger.”

“What do you mean?”

“To kiss.”

The rustle of retreating footsteps and silence. . . .

But after he had waited next day for twenty minutes she reappeared, a little out of breath with the effort to surmount the wall—and head first this time. And it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanged memories that had filled the interval.

From first to last their acquaintance lasted ten days, but into that time Mr. Polly packed ten years of dreams.

“He don't seem,” said Johnson, “to take a serious interest in anything. That shop at the corner's bound to be snapped up if he don't look out.”

The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days; one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation, watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of encouragement into him—with that strange passive cruelty which is natural to her sex and age.

And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold of the daily life, whose joys—they were indeed but the merest remote glimpses of joy—were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven. Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish, but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to kiss. And she looked into his eyes and suddenly felt a perplexity, a curious swimming of the mind that made her recoil and stiffen, and wonder afterwards and dream. . . .

And then with some dim instinct of self-protection, she went and told her three best friends, great students of character all, of this remarkable phenomenon she had discovered on the other side of the wall.

“Look here,” said Mr. Polly, “I'm wild for the love of you! I can't keep up this gesticulatious game any more! I'm not a Knight. Treat me as a human man. You may sit up there smiling, but I'd die in torments to have you mine for an hour. I'm nobody
and nothing. But look here! Will you wait for me for five years? You're just a girl yet, and it wouldn't be hard.”

“Shut up!” said Christabel in an aside he did not hear, and something he did not see touched her hand.

“I've always been just dilletentytating about till now, but I could work. I've just woke up. Wait till I've got a chance with the money I've got.”

“But you haven't got much money!”

“I've got enough to take a chance with, some sort of a chance. I'd find a chance. I'll do that anyhow. I'll go away. I mean what I say—I'll stop trifling and shirking. If I don't come back it won't matter. If I do—”

Her expression had become uneasy. Suddenly she bent down towards him.

“Don't!” she said in an undertone.

“Don't—what?”

“Don't go on like this! You're different! Go on being the knight who wants to kiss my hand as his—what did you call it?” The ghost of a smile curved her face. “Gurdrum!”

“But—!”

Then through a pause they both stared at each other, listening.

A muffled tumult on the other side of the wall asserted itself.

“Shut up, Rosie!” said a voice.

“I tell you I will see! I can't half hear. Give me a leg up!”

“You Idiot! He'll see you. You're spoiling everything.”

The bottom dropped out of Mr. Polly's world. He felt as people must feel who are going to faint.

“You've got someone—” he said aghast.

She found life inexpressible to Mr. Polly. She addressed some unseen hearers. “You filthy little Beasts!” she cried with a sharp note of agony in her voice, and swung herself back over the wall and vanished. There was a squeal of pain and fear, and a swift, fierce altercation.

For a couple of second he stood agape.

Then a wild resolve to confirm his worst senses of what was on the other side of the wall made him seize a log, put it against the stones, clutch the parapet with insecure fingers, and lug himself to a momentary balance on the wall.

Romance and his goddess had vanished.

A red-haired girl with a pigtail was wringing the wrist of a schoolfellow who shrieked with pain and cried: “Mercy! mercy! Ooo! Christable!”

“You idiot!” cried Christabel. “You giggling Idiot!”

Two other young ladies made off through the beech trees from this outburst of savagery.

Then the grip of Mr. Polly's fingers gave, and he hit his chin against the stones and slipped clumsily to the ground again, scraping his cheek against the wall and hurting his shin against the log by which he had reached the top. Just for a moment he crouched against the wall.

He swore, staggered to the pile of logs and sat down.

He remained very still for some time, with his lips pressed together.

“Fool.” He said at last,' “you Blithering Fool!” and began to rub his shin as though he had just discovered its bruises.