The History of Mr. Polly

“Who was Miriam?” asked the fat woman.

“No one you know. But she used to go about with her brows knit trying not to do whatever she wanted to do – if ever she did want to do anything – ”

He lost himself.

“You can’t help being fat,” said the fat woman after a pause, trying to get up to his thoughts.

“You can’t,” said Mr. Polly.

“It helps and it hinders.”

“Like my upside down way of talking.”

“The magistrates wouldn’t ’ave kept on the license to me if I ’adn’t been fat…”

“Then what have we done,” said Mr. Polly, “to get an evening like this? Lord! look at it!” He sent his arm round the great curve of the sky.

“If I was a nigger or an Italian I should come out here and sing. I whistle sometimes, but bless you, it’s singing I’ve got in my mind. Sometimes I think I live for sunsets.”

“I don’t see that it does you any good always looking at sunsets like you do,” said the fat woman.

“Nor me. But I do. Sunsets and things I was made to like.”

“They don’t ’elp you,” said the fat woman thoughtfully.

“Who cares?” said Mr. Polly.

A deeper strain had come to the fat woman. “You got to die some day,” she said.

“Some things I can’t believe,” said Mr. Polly suddenly, “and one is your being a skeleton…” He pointed his hand towards the neighbour’s hedge. “Look at ’em – against the yellow – and they’re just stingin’ nettles. Nasty weeds – if you count things by their uses. And no help in the life hereafter. But just look at the look of them!”

“It isn’t only looks,” said the fat woman.

“Whenever there’s signs of a good sunset and I’m not too busy,” said Mr. Polly, “I’ll come and sit out here.”

The fat woman looked at him with eyes in which contentment struggled with some obscure reluctant protest, and at last turned them slowly to the black nettle pagodas against the golden sky.

“I wish we could,” she said.

“I will.”

The fat woman’s voice sank nearly to the inaudible.

“Not always,” she said.

Mr. Polly was some time before he replied. “Come here always when I’m a ghost,” he replied.

“Spoil the place for others,” said the fat woman, abandoning her moral solicitudes for a more congenial point of view.

“Not my sort of ghost wouldn’t,” said Mr. Polly, emerging from another long pause. “I’d be a sort of diaphalous feeling – just mellowish and warmish like…”

They said no more, but sat on in the warm twilight until at last they could scarcely distinguish each other’s faces. They were not so much thinking as lost in a smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted by.

“Time we was going in, O’ Party,” said Mr. Polly, standing up. “Supper to get. It’s as you say, we can’t sit here for ever.”