The History of Mr. Polly, H. G. Wells [room on the broom read aloud TXT] 📗

nearly everything.”

“They’ll be looked after all right,” said Mr. Rumbold. “Never fear.”

Pause.

“I’m insured,” said Mr. Clamp, with unconcealed satisfaction. “Royal Salamander.”

“Same here,” said Mr. Wintershed.

“Mine’s the Glasgow Sun,” Mr. Hinks remarked. “Very good company.”

“You insured, Mr. Polly?”

“He deserves to be,” said Rumbold.

“Rather,” said Hinks. “Blowed if he don’t. Hard lines it would be⁠—if there wasn’t something for him.”

“Commercial and General,” answered Mr. Polly over his shoulder, still staring out of the window. “Oh! I’m all right.”

The topic dropped for a time, though manifestly it continued to exercise their minds.

“It’s cleared me out of a lot of old stock,” said Mr. Wintershed; “that’s one good thing.”

The remark was felt to be in rather questionable taste, and still more so was his next comment.

“Rusper’s a bit sick it didn’t reach ’im.”

Everyone looked uncomfortable, and no one was willing to point the reason why Rusper should be a bit sick.

“Rusper’s been playing a game of his own,” said Hinks. “Wonder what he thought he was up to! Sittin’ in the middle of the road with a pair of tweezers he was, and about a yard of wire⁠—mending somethin’. Wonder he warn’t run over by the Port Burdock engine.”

Presently a little chat sprang up upon the causes of fires, and Mr. Polly was moved to tell how it had happened for the one and twentieth time. His story had now become as circumstantial and exact as the evidence of a police witness. “Upset the lamp,” he said. “I’d just lighted it, I was going upstairs, and my foot slipped against where one of the treads was a bit rotten, and down I went. Thing was aflare in a moment!⁠ ⁠…”

He yawned at the end of the discussion, and moved doorward.

“So long,” said Mr. Polly.

“Good night,” said Mr. Rumbold. “You played a brave man’s part! If you don’t get a medal⁠—”

He left an eloquent pause.

“ ’Ear, ’ear!” said Mr. Wintershed and Mr. Clamp. “Goo’night, O’ Man,” said Mr. Hinks.

“Goo’night All,” said Mr. Polly.⁠ ⁠…

He went slowly upstairs. The vague perplexity common to popular heroes pervaded his mind. He entered the bedroom and turned up the electric light. It was quite a pleasant room, one of the best in the Temperance Hotel, with a nice clean flowered wallpaper, and a very large looking-glass. Miriam appeared to be asleep, and her shoulders were humped up under the clothes in a shapeless, forbidding lump that Mr. Polly had found utterly loathsome for fifteen years. He went softly over to the dressing-table and surveyed himself thoughtfully. Presently he hitched up the trousers. “Miles too big for me,” he remarked. “Funny not to have a pair of breeches of one’s own.⁠ ⁠… Like being born again. Naked came I into the world.⁠ ⁠…”

Miriam stirred and rolled over, and stared at him.

“Hello!” she said.

“Hello.”

“Come to bed?”

“It’s three.”

Pause, while Mr. Polly disrobed slowly.

“I been thinking,” said Miriam, “It isn’t going to be so bad after all. We shall get your insurance. We can easy begin all over again.”

“H’m,” said Mr. Polly.

She turned her face away from him and reflected.

“Get a better house,” said Miriam, regarding the wallpaper pattern. “I’ve always ’ated them stairs.”

Mr. Polly removed a boot.

“Choose a better position where there’s more doing,” murmured Miriam.⁠ ⁠…

“Not half so bad,” she whispered.⁠ ⁠…

“You wanted stirring up,” she said, half asleep.⁠ ⁠…

It dawned upon Mr. Polly for the first time that he had forgotten something.

He ought to have cut his throat!

The fact struck him as remarkable, but as now no longer of any particular urgency. It seemed a thing far off in the past, and he wondered why he had not thought of it before. Odd thing life is! If he had done it he would never have seen this clean and agreeable apartment with the electric light.⁠ ⁠… His thoughts wandered into a question of detail. Where could he have put the razor down? Somewhere in the little room behind the shop, he supposed, but he could not think where more precisely. Anyhow it didn’t matter now.

He undressed himself calmly, got into bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.

IX 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