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

all of you wanted me Reformed and now you got me Reformed. I’m a Reformatory Reformed Character, warranted all right and turned out as such. Ain’t you going to ask me in, Aunty dear?’

“ ‘Come in,’ I said, ‘I won’t have it said I wasn’t ready to be kind to you!’

“He comes in and shuts the door. Down he sits in that chair. ’I come to torment you!’ he says, ‘you Old Sumpthing!’ and begins at me.⁠ ⁠… No human being could ever have been called such things before. It made me cry out. ‘And now,’ he says, ’just to show I ain’t afraid of ’urting you,’ he says, and ups and twists my wrist.”

Mr. Polly gasped.

“I could stand even his vi’lence,” said the plump woman, “if it wasn’t for the child.”

Mr. Polly went to the kitchen window and surveyed his namesake, who was away up the garden path with her hands behind her back, and whisps of black hair in disorder about her little face, thinking, thinking profoundly, about ducklings.

“You two oughtn’t to be left,” he said.

The plump woman stared at his back with hard hope in her eyes.

“I don’t see that it’s my affair,” said Mr. Polly.

The plump woman resumed her business with the kettle.

“I’d like to have a look at him before I go,” said Mr. Polly, thinking aloud. And added, “somehow. Not my business, of course.”

“Lord!” he cried with a start at a noise in the bar, “who’s that?”

“Only a customer,” said the plump woman.

VI

Mr. Polly made no rash promises, and thought a great deal.

“It seems a good sort of crib,” he said, and added, “for a chap who’s looking for trouble.”

But he stayed on and did various things out of the list I have already given, and worked the ferry, and it was four days before he saw anything of Uncle Jim. And so resistent is the human mind to things not yet experienced that he could easily have believed in that time that there was no such person in the world as Uncle Jim. The plump woman, after her one outbreak of confidence, ignored the subject, and little Polly seemed to have exhausted her impressions in her first communication, and engaged her mind now with a simple directness in the study and subjugation of the new human being Heaven had sent into her world. The first unfavourable impression of his punting was soon effaced; he could nickname ducklings very amusingly, create boats out of wooden splinters, and stalk and fly from imaginary tigers in the orchard with a convincing earnestness that was surely beyond the power of any other human being. She conceded at last that he should be called Mr. Polly, in honour of her, Miss Polly, even as he desired.

Uncle Jim turned up in the twilight.

Uncle Jim appeared with none of the disruptive violence Mr. Polly had dreaded. He came quite softly. Mr. Polly was going down the lane behind the church that led to the Potwell Inn after posting a letter to the lime-juice people at the post-office. He was walking slowly, after his habit, and thinking discursively. With a sudden tightening of the muscles he became aware of a figure walking noiselessly beside him. His first impression was of a face singularly broad above and with a wide empty grin as its chief feature below, of a slouching body and dragging feet.

“Arf a mo’,” said the figure, as if in response to his start, and speaking in a hoarse whisper. “Arf a mo’, mister. You the noo bloke at the Potwell Inn?”

Mr. Polly felt evasive. “ ’Spose I am,” he replied hoarsely, and quickened his pace.

“Arf a mo’,” said Uncle Jim, taking his arm. “We ain’t doing a (sanguinary) Marathon. It ain’t a (decorated) cinder track. I want a word with you, mister. See?”

Mr. Polly wriggled his arm free and stopped. “What is it?” he asked, and faced the terror.

“I jest want a (decorated) word wiv you. See?⁠—just a friendly word or two. Just to clear up any blooming errors. That’s all I want. No need to be so (richly decorated) proud, if you are the noo bloke at Potwell Inn. Not a bit of it. See?”

Uncle Jim was certainly not a handsome person. He was short, shorter than Mr. Polly, with long arms and lean big hands, a thin and wiry neck stuck out of his grey flannel shirt and supported a big head that had something of the snake in the convergent lines of its broad knotty brow, meanly proportioned face and pointed chin. His almost toothless mouth seemed a cavern in the twilight. Some accident had left him with one small and active and one large and expressionless reddish eye, and wisps of straight hair strayed from under the blue cricket cap he wore pulled down obliquely over the latter. He spat between his teeth and wiped his mouth untidily with the soft side of his fist.

“You got to blurry well shift,” he said. “See?”

“Shift!” said Mr. Polly. “How?”

“ ’Cos the Potwell Inn’s my beat. See?”

Mr. Polly had never felt less witty. “How’s it your beat?” he asked.

Uncle Jim thrust his face forward and shook his open hand, bent like a claw, under Mr. Polly’s nose. “Not your blooming business,” he said. “You got to shift.”

“S’pose I don’t,” said Mr. Polly.

“You got to shift.”

The tone of Uncle Jim’s voice became urgent and confidential.

“You don’t know who you’re up against,” he said. “It’s a kindness I’m doing to warn you. See? I’m just one of those blokes who don’t stick at things, see? I don’t stick at nuffin’.”

Mr. Polly’s manner became detached and confidential⁠—as though the matter and the speaker interested him greatly, but didn’t concern him overmuch. “What do you think you’ll do?” he asked.

“If you don’t clear out?”

“Yes.”

“Gaw!” said Uncle Jim. “You’d better. ’Ere!”

He gripped Mr. Polly’s wrist with a grip of steel, and in an instant Mr. Polly understood the relative quality of their muscles. He breathed, an uninspiring breath, into Mr. Polly’s face.

“What won’t I do?” he said. “Once I start in on you.”

He paused, and the night about them seemed to be