The History of Mr. Polly H. G. Wells (comprehension books TXT) 📖

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 medevial 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 littleish 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 tomorrow!”

“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 enchanted memories that had filled the interval.

VII

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