The History of Mr. Polly quotes

“Hole!” said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: “ ’Ole!”

He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. “Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!”

“Hole!” said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: “ ’Ole!” He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms. “Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a Hole!”

He was sitting on a stile between two threadbare looking fields, and suffering acutely from indigestion.

He suffered from indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life, but as he lacked introspection he projected the associated discomfort upon the world. Every afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a whole and every aspect of life that presented itself was “beastly.”

Polly fell into a violent rage and hatred against the outer world in the afternoon, and never suspected that it was this inner world to which I am with such masterly delicacy alluding, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the things without.

It is a pity that some human beings are not more transparent.

If Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent or even passably translucent, then perhaps he might have realised from the Laocoön struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so much a human being as a civil war.

I do not know why the east wind aggravates life to unhealthy people. It made Mr. Polly’s teeth seem loose in his head, and his skin feel like a misfit, and his hair a dry, stringy exasperation. …

Why cannot doctors give us an antidote to the east wind?

“Never have the sense to get your hair cut till it’s too long,” said Mr. Polly catching sight of his shadow, “you blighted, degenerated Paintbrush! Ugh!” and he flattened down the projecting tails with an urgent hand.

… survived something, indeed it survived still, obscured and thwarted, at five and thirty, that pointed—not with a visible and prevailing finger like the finger of that beautiful woman in the picture, but pointed nevertheless—to the idea that there was interest and happiness in the world.

Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and “bits of all right,” there was beauty, there was delight

, that somewhere—magically inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere, were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.

Polly, stepping over scattered pieces of Bolton sheeting, saw his transfigured friend with a dark cut, that was not at present bleeding, on the forehead, one arm held by Somerville and the other by Morrison.

“You⁠—you⁠—you⁠—you annoyed me,” said Parsons, sobbing for breath.

There are events that detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr.

Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly’s daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths and terrors.

Life was not altogether a lark.

The calling in of a policeman seemed at the moment a pantomime touch. But when it became manifest that Mr. Garvace was in a fury of vindictiveness, the affair took on a different complexion.

“I mean—he’s easily put out.”

“Then why can’t you say so?” said the presiding magistrate.

He came for his luggage while everyone was in the shop, and Garvace would not let him invade the business to say goodbye. When Mr.

She addressed sympathetic and considerate remarks about the deceased to Mr. Polly in notes of brisk encouragement. “He was really quite cheerful at the end,” she said several times, with congratulatory gusto, “quite cheerful.”

She made dying seem almost agreeable.

Both these people were resolved to treat Mr.

“A little holiday”; that was the form his sense of wealth took first, that it made a little holiday possible.

Holidays were his life, and the rest merely adulterated living.

And now he might take a little holiday and have money for railway fares and money for meals and money for inns. But—he wanted someone to take the holiday with.

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 it seemed to him she was lighter and more daring and altogether prettier than the dreams and enchanted 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.”

“You mean,” said Miriam, “you’re in love with me, Elfrid?”

What possible answer can a man give to such a question but “Yes!”

Regardless of the public park, the children in the sandpit and everyone, she bent forward and seized his shoulder and kissed him on the lips. Something lit up in Mr. Polly at the touch.

“Only mother,” said Miriam firmly.

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.

The rest of his costume, except for some bright yellow gloves, a grey and blue mixture tie, and that the broad crape hatband was changed for a livelier piece of silk, were the things he had worn at the funeral of his father.

So nearly akin are human joy and sorrow.

The Larkins sisters had done wonders with grey sateen. The idea of orange blossom and white veils had been abandoned reluctantly on account of the expense of cabs.

Voules, and nodded to her brightly like one who has always foretold a successful issue to things.

Mr. Polly felt then like a marionette that has just dropped off its wire.

But it was long before that release arrived.

“I’d liefer ’ave a lump-about like that other gal. I would indeed. I lay I’d make ’er stop laughing after a bit for all ’er airs. And mind where her clumsy great feet went. …

“A man’s got to tackle ’em, whatever they be,”

said Uncle Pentstemon, summing up the shrewd observation of an old-world life time. “Good or bad,” said Uncle Pentstemon raising his voice fearlessly, “a man’s got to tackle ’em.”

For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne.

Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash.

But now Mr. Polly had good looks no more, he was as I have described him in the beginning of this story, thirty-seven and fattish in a not very healthy way, dull and yellowish about the complexion, and with discontented wrinklings round his eyes.

With La Perouse he linked The Island Nights Entertainments, and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the “Island of Voices” something poured over the stabber’s hands “like warm tea.”

Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!

And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the Abbés Hue and Gabet.

He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world.

Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!

…

Polly resented and hated that uncivil breadth of expressionless humanity, wanted to prod it, kick it, satirise it.

But you cannot satirise a hack, if you have no friend to nudge while you do it.

At last Mr. Polly could stand it no longer. He approached and prodded Rumbold.

He found it quite interesting elaborating his plan. His countenance became less miserable and his pace quickened.

There is nothing so good in all the world for melancholia as walking, and the exercise of the imagination in planning something presently to be done, and soon the wrathful wretchedness had vanished from Mr. Polly’s face.

He would have to do the thing secretly and elaborately, because otherwise there might be difficulties about the life insurance. He began to scheme how he could circumvent that difficulty. …

And as he did so a thin tall red flame came up through the hole in the stairs he had made and stood still, quite still as it seemed, and looked at him.

It was a strange-looking flame, a flattish salmon colour, redly streaked. It was so queer and quiet mannered that the sight of it held Mr. Polly agape.

“Whuff!” went the can of paraffin below, and boiled over with stinking white fire. At the outbreak the salmon-coloured flames shivered and ducked and then doubled and vanished, and instantly all the staircase was noisily ablaze.

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!

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 …

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.

he talked to tramps and wayside labourers, he snoozed under hedges by day and in outhouses and hayricks at night, and once, but only once, he slept in a casual ward.

He felt as the etiolated grass and daisies must do when you move the garden roller away to a new place.

He gathered a quantity of strange and interesting memories.

They smiled like old friends.

Whatever the truth may be about love, there is certainly such a thing as friendship at first sight.

They liked each other’s voices, they liked each other’s way of smiling and speaking.

“It’s all right if you haven’t been to prison,” said the plump woman. “

It isn’t what a man’s happened to do makes ’im bad. We all happen to do things at times. It’s bringing it home to him, and spoiling his self-respect does the mischief.

You don’t look a wrong ’un. ’Ave you been to prison?”

Mr. Polly had never been near young ducklings before, and their extreme blondness and the delicate completeness of their feet and beaks filled him with admiration.

It is open to question whether there is anything more friendly in the world than a very young duckling.

It was with the utmost difficulty that he tore himself away to practise punting, with the plump woman coaching from the bank.

The wise man’s course. Mr. Polly saw himself going along it, and tried to see himself going along it with all the self-applause a wise man feels. But somehow it wouldn’t come like that. The wise man fell short of happiness for all his wisdom.

The wise man had a paunch and round shoulders and red ears and excuses.

It was a pleasant road, and why the wise man should not go along it merry and singing, full of summer happiness, was a miracle to Mr. Polly’s mind, but confound it!

It is disagreeable to think one has committed arson, because it is an action that leads to jail. Otherwise I do not think there was a grain of regret for that in Mr. Polly’s composition. But deserting Miriam was in a different category.

Deserting Miriam was mean.

This is a history and not a glorification of Mr. Polly, and I tell of things as they were with him.

Polly, and I tell of things as they were with him. Apart from the disagreeable twinge arising from the thought of what might happen if he was found out, he had not the slightest remorse about that fire.

Arson, after all, is an artificial crime.

Some crimes are crimes in themselves, would be crimes without any law, the cruelties, mockery, the breaches of faith that astonish and wound, but the burning of things is in itself neither good nor bad.