Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The History of Mr. Polly
V
Mr. Polly found the plump woman in the big bricked kitchen lighting a fire for tea. He went to the root of the matter at once.
“I say,” he asked, “who’s Uncle Jim?”
The plump woman blanched and stood still for a moment. A stick fell out of the bundle in her hand unheeded.
“That little granddaughter of mine been saying things?” she asked faintly.
“Bits of things,” said Mr. Polly.
“Well, I suppose I must tell you sooner or later. He’s – . It’s Jim. He’s the Drorback to this place, that’s what he is. The Drorback. I hoped you mightn’t hear so soon… Very likely he’s gone.”
“She don’t seem to think so.”
“’E ’asn’t been near the place these two weeks and more,” said the plump woman.
“But who is he?”
“I suppose I got to tell you,” said the plump woman.
“She says he scoots people,” Mr. Polly remarked after a pause.
“He’s my own sister’s son.” The plump woman watched the crackling fire for a space. “I suppose I got to tell you,” she repeated.
She softened towards tears. “I try not to think of it, and night and day he’s haunting me. I try not to think of it. I’ve been for easy-going all my life. But I’m that worried and afraid, with death and ruin threatened and evil all about me! I don’t know what to do! My own sister’s son, and me a widow woman and ’elpless against his doin’s!”
She put down the sticks she held upon the fender, and felt for her handkerchief. She began to sob and talk quickly.
“I wouldn’t mind nothing else half so much if he’d leave that child alone. But he goes talking to her – if I leave her a moment he’s talking to her, teaching her words and giving her ideas!”
“That’s a Bit Thick,” said Mr. Polly.
“Thick!” cried the plump woman; “it’s ’orrible! And what am I to do? He’s been here three times now, six days and a week and a part of a week, and I pray to God night and day he may never come again. Praying! Back he’s come sure as fate. He takes my money and he takes my things. He won’t let no man stay here to protect me or do the boats or work the ferry. The ferry’s getting a scandal. They stand and shout and scream and use language… If I complain they’ll say I’m helpless to manage here, they’ll take away my license, out I shall go – and it’s all the living I can get – and he knows it, and he plays on it, and he don’t care. And here I am. I’d send the child away, but I got nowhere to send the child. I buys him off when it comes to that, and back he comes, worse than ever, prowling round and doing evil. And not a soul to help me. Not a soul! I just hoped there might be a day or so. Before he comes back again. I was just hoping – I’m the sort that hopes.”
Mr. Polly was reflecting on the flaws and drawbacks that seem to be inseparable from all the more agreeable things in life.
“Biggish sort of man, I expect?” asked Mr. Polly, trying to get the situation in all its bearings.
But the plump woman did not heed him. She was going on with her fire-making, and retailing in disconnected fragments the fearfulness of Uncle Jim.
“There was always something a bit wrong with him,” she said, “but nothing you mightn’t have hoped for, not till they took him and carried him off and reformed him…
“He was cruel to the hens and chickings, it’s true, and stuck a knife into another boy, but then I’ve seen him that nice to a cat, nobody could have been kinder. I’m sure he didn’t do no ’arm to that cat whatever anyone tries to make out of it. I’d never listen to that… It was that reformatory ruined him. They put him along of a lot of London boys full of ideas of wickedness, and because he didn’t mind pain – and he don’t, I will admit, try as I would – they made him think himself a hero. Them boys laughed at the teachers they set over them, laughed and mocked at them – and I don’t suppose they was the best teachers in the world; I don’t suppose, and I don’t suppose anyone sensible does suppose that everyone who goes to be a teacher or a chapl’in or a warder in a Reformatory Home goes and changes right away into an Angel of Grace from Heaven – and Oh, Lord! where was I?”
“What did they send him to the Reformatory for?”
“Playing truant and stealing. He stole right enough – stole the money from an old woman, and what was I to do when it came to the trial but say what I knew. And him like a viper a-looking at me – more like a viper than a human boy. He leans on the bar and looks at me. ’All right, Aunt Flo,’ he says, just that and nothing more. Time after time, I’ve dreamt of it, and now he’s come. ‘They’ve Reformed me,’ he says, ’and made me a devil, and devil I mean to be to you. So out with it,’ he says.”
“What did you give him last time?” asked Mr. Polly.
“Three golden pounds,” said the plump woman.
“‘That won’t last very long,’ he says. ’But there ain’t no hurry. I’ll be back in a week about.’ If I wasn’t one of the hoping sort – ”
She left the sentence unfinished.
Mr. Polly reflected. “What sort of a size is he?” he asked. “I’m not one of your Herculaceous sort, if you mean that. Nothing very wonderful bicepitally.”
“You’ll scoot,” said the plump woman with conviction rather than bitterness. “You’d better scoot now, and I’ll try and find some money for him to go away again when he comes. It ain’t reasonable to expect you to do anything but scoot. But I suppose it’s the way of a woman in trouble to try and get help from a man, and hope and hope. I’m the hoping sort.”
“How long’s he been about?” asked Mr. Polly, ignoring his own outlook.
“Three months it is come the seventh since he come in by that very back door – and I hadn’t set eyes on him for seven long years. He stood in the door watchin’ me, and suddenly he let off a yelp – like a dog, and there he was grinning at the fright he’d given me. ‘Good old Aunty Flo,’ he says, ‘ain’t you dee-lighted to see me?’ he says, ‘now I’m Reformed.’”
The plump lady went to the sink and filled the kettle.
“I never did like ’im,” she said, standing at the sink. “And seeing him there, with his teeth all black and broken – . P’raps I didn’t give him much of a welcome at first. Not what would have been kind to him. ‘Lord!’ I said, ‘it’s Jim.’”
“‘It’s Jim,’ he said. ‘Like a bad shillin’ – like a damned bad shilling. Jim and trouble. You 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 over-much. “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 listening. “I’ll make a mess of you,” he said in his hoarse whisper. “I’ll do you – injuries. I’ll ’urt you. I’ll kick you ugly, see? I’ll ’urt you in ’orrible ways – ’orrible, ugly ways…”
He scrutinised Mr. Polly’s face.
“You’ll cry,” he said, “to see yourself. See? Cry you will.”
“You got no right,” began Mr. Polly.
“Right!” His note was fierce. “Ain’t the old woman me aunt?”
He spoke still closer. “I’ll make a gory mess of you. I’ll cut bits orf you – ”
He receded a little. “I got no quarrel with you,” he said.
“It’s too late to go to-night,” said Mr. Polly.
“I’ll be round to-morrer – ’bout eleven. See? And if I finds you – ”
He produced a blood-curdling oath.
“H’m,” said Mr. Polly, trying to keep things light. “We’ll consider your suggestions.”
“You better,” said Uncle Jim, and suddenly, noiselessly, was going.
His whispering voice sank until Mr. Polly could hear only the dim fragments of sentences. “Orrible things to you – ’orrible things… Kick yer ugly… Cut yer – liver out… spread it all about, I will… Outing doos. See? I don’t care a dead rat one way or the uvver.”
And with a curious twisting gesture of the arm Uncle Jim receded until his face was a still, dim thing that watched, and the black shadows of the hedge seemed to have swallowed up his body altogether.
VII
Next morning about half-past ten Mr. Polly found himself seated under a clump of fir trees by the roadside and about three miles and a half from the Potwell Inn. He was by no means sure whether he was taking a walk to clear his mind or leaving that threat-marred Paradise for good and all. His reason pointed a lean, unhesitating finger along the latter course.
For after all, the thing was not his quarrel.
That agreeable plump woman, agreeable, motherly, comfortable as she might be, wasn’t his affair; that child with the mop of black hair who combined so magically the charm of mouse and butterfly and flitting bird, who was daintier than a flower and softer than a peach, was no concern of his. Good heavens! what were they to him? Nothing!..
Uncle Jim, of course, had a claim, a sort of claim.
If it came to duty and chucking up this attractive, indolent, observant, humorous, tramping life, there were those who had a right to him, a legitimate right, a prior claim on his protection and chivalry.
Why not listen to the call of duty and go back to Miriam now?..
He had had a very agreeable holiday…
And while Mr. Polly sat thinking these things as well as he could, he knew that if only he dared to look up the heavens had opened and the clear judgment on his case was written across the sky.
He knew – he knew now as much as a man can know of life. He knew he had to fight or perish.
Life had never been so clear to him before. It had always been a confused, entertaining spectacle, he had responded to this impulse and that, seeking agreeable and entertaining things, evading difficult and painful things. Such is the way of those who grow up to a life that has neither danger nor honour in its texture. He had been muddled and wrapped about and entangled like a creature born in the jungle who has never seen sea or sky. Now he had come out of it suddenly into a great exposed place. It was as if God and Heaven waited over him and all the earth was expectation.
“Not my business,” said Mr. Polly, speaking aloud. “Where the devil do I come in?”
And again, with something between a whine and a snarl in his voice, “not my blasted business!”
His mind seemed to have divided itself into several compartments, each with its own particular discussion busily in progress, and quite regardless of the others. One was busy with the detailed interpretation of the phrase “Kick you ugly.” There’s a sort of French wrestling in which you use and guard against feet. Watch the man’s eye, and as his foot comes up, grip and over he goes – at your mercy if you use the advantage right. But how do you use the advantage rightly?
When he thought of Uncle Jim the inside feeling of his body faded away rapidly to a blank discomfort…
“Old cadger! She hadn’t no business to drag me into her quarrels. Ought to go to the police and ask for help! Dragging me into a quarrel that don’t concern me.”
“Wish I’d never set eyes on the rotten inn!”
The reality of the case arched over him like the vault of the sky, as plain as the sweet blue heavens above and the wide spread of hill and valley about him. Man comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it, to face anything and dare anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And fear, and dulness and indolence and appetite, which indeed are no more than fear’s three crippled brothers who make ambushes and creep by night, are against him, to delay him, to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that quest. He had but to lift his eyes to see all that, as much a part of his world as the driving clouds and the bending grass, but he kept himself downcast, a grumbling, inglorious, dirty, fattish little tramp, full of dreads and quivering excuses.
“Why the hell was I ever born?” he said, with the truth almost winning him.
What do you do when a dirty man who smells, gets you down and under in the dirt and dust with a knee below your diaphragm and a large hairy hand squeezing your windpipe tighter and tighter in a quarrel that isn’t, properly speaking, yours?
“If I had a chance against him – ” protested Mr. Polly.
“It’s no Good, you see,” said Mr. Polly.
He stood up as though his decision was made, and was for an instant struck still by doubt.
There lay the road before him going this way to the east and that to the west.
Westward, one hour away now, was the Potwell Inn. Already things might be happening there…
Eastward was the wise man’s course, a road dipping between hedges to a hop garden and a wood and presently no doubt reaching an inn, a picturesque church, perhaps, a village and fresh company. 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! the fact remained, the figure went slinking – slinking was the only word for it – and would not go otherwise than slinking. He turned his eyes westward as if for an explanation, and if the figure was no longer ignoble, the prospect was appalling.
“One kick in the stummick would settle a chap like me,” said Mr. Polly.
“Oh, God!” cried Mr. Polly, and lifted his eyes to heaven, and said for the last time in that struggle, “It isn’t my affair!”
And so saying he turned his face towards the Potwell Inn.
He went back neither halting nor hastening in his pace after this last decision, but with a mind feverishly busy.
“If I get killed, I get killed, and if he gets killed I get hung. Don’t seem just somehow.
“Don’t suppose I shall frighten him off.”
VIII
The private war between Mr. Polly and Uncle Jim for the possession of the Potwell Inn fell naturally into three chief campaigns. There was first of all the great campaign which ended in the triumphant eviction of Uncle Jim from the inn premises, there came next after a brief interval the futile invasions of the premises by Uncle Jim that culminated in the Battle of the Dead Eel, and after some months of involuntary truce there was the last supreme conflict of the Night Surprise. Each of these campaigns merits a section to itself.
Mr. Polly re-entered the inn discreetly. He found the plump woman seated in her bar, her eyes a-stare, her face white and wet with tears. “O God!” she was saying over and over again. “O God!” The air was full of a spirituous reek, and on the sanded boards in front of the bar were the fragments of a broken bottle and an overturned glass.
She turned her despair at the sound of his entry, and despair gave place to astonishment.
“You come back!” she said.
“Ra-ther,” said Mr. Polly.
“He’s – he’s mad drunk and looking for her.”
“Where is she?”
“Locked upstairs.”
“Haven’t you sent to the police?”
“No one to send.”
“I’ll see to it,” said Mr. Polly. “Out this way?”
She nodded.
He went to the crinkly paned window and peered out. Uncle Jim was coming down the garden path towards the house, his hands in his pockets and singing hoarsely. Mr. Polly remembered afterwards with pride and amazement that he felt neither faint nor rigid. He glanced round him, seized a bottle of beer by the neck as an improvised club, and went out by the garden door. Uncle Jim stopped amazed. His brain did not instantly rise to the new posture of things. “You!” he cried, and stopped for a moment. “You —scoot!”
“Your job,” said Mr. Polly, and advanced some paces.
Uncle Jim stood swaying with wrathful astonishment and then darted forward with clutching hands. Mr. Polly felt that if his antagonist closed he was lost, and smote with all his force at the ugly head before him. Smash went the bottle, and Uncle Jim staggered, half-stunned by the blow and blinded with beer.
The lapses and leaps of the human mind are for ever mysterious. Mr. Polly had never expected that bottle to break. In the instant he felt disarmed and helpless. Before him was Uncle Jim, infuriated and evidently still coming on, and for defence was nothing but the neck of a bottle.
For a time our Mr. Polly has figured heroic. Now comes the fall again; he sounded abject terror; he dropped that ineffectual scrap of glass and turned and fled round the corner of the house.
“Bolls!” came the thick voice of the enemy behind him as one who accepts a challenge, and bleeding, but indomitable, Uncle Jim entered the house.
“Bolls!” he said, surveying the bar. “Fightin’ with bolls! I’ll show ’im fightin’ with bolls!”
Uncle Jim had learnt all about fighting with bottles in the Reformatory Home. Regardless of his terror-stricken aunt he ranged among the bottled beer and succeeded after one or two failures in preparing two bottles to his satisfaction by knocking off the bottoms, and gripping them dagger-wise by the necks. So prepared, he went forth again to destroy Mr. Polly.
Mr. Polly, freed from the sense of urgent pursuit, had halted beyond the raspberry canes and rallied his courage. The sense of Uncle Jim victorious in the house restored his manhood. He went round by the outhouses to the riverside, seeking a weapon, and found an old paddle boat hook. With this he smote Uncle Jim as he emerged by the door of the tap. Uncle Jim, blaspheming dreadfully and with dire stabbing intimations in either hand, came through the splintering paddle like a circus rider through a paper hoop, and once more Mr. Polly dropped his weapon and fled.
A careless observer watching him sprint round and round the inn in front of the lumbering and reproachful pursuit of Uncle Jim might have formed an altogether erroneous estimate of the issue of the campaign. Certain compensating qualities of the very greatest military value were appearing in Mr. Polly even as he ran; if Uncle Jim had strength and brute courage and the rich toughening experience a Reformatory Home affords, Mr. Polly was nevertheless sober, more mobile and with a mind now stimulated to an almost incredible nimbleness. So that he not only gained on Uncle Jim, but thought what use he might make of this advantage. The word “strategious” flamed red across the tumult of his mind. As he came round the house for the third time, he darted suddenly into the yard, swung the door to behind himself and bolted it, seized the zinc pig’s pail that stood by the entrance to the kitchen and had it neatly and resonantly over Uncle Jim’s head as he came belatedly in round the outhouse on the other side. One of the splintered bottles jabbed Mr. Polly’s ear – at the time it seemed of no importance – and then Uncle Jim was down and writhing dangerously and noisily upon the yard tiles, with his head still in the pig pail and his bottles gone to splinters, and Mr. Polly was fastening the kitchen door against him.
“Can’t go on like this for ever,” said Mr. Polly, whooping for breath, and selecting a weapon from among the brooms that stood behind the kitchen door.
Uncle Jim was losing his head. He was up and kicking the door and bellowing unamiable proposals and invitations, so that a strategist emerging silently by the tap door could locate him without difficulty, steal upon him unawares and – !
But before that felling blow could be delivered Uncle Jim’s ear had caught a footfall, and he turned. Mr. Polly quailed and lowered his broom, – a fatal hesitation.
“Now I got you!” cried Uncle Jim, dancing forward in a disconcerting zigzag.
He rushed to close, and Mr. Polly stopped him neatly, as it were a miracle, with the head of the broom across his chest. Uncle Jim seized the broom with both hands. “Lea-go!” he said, and tugged. Mr. Polly shook his head, tugged, and showed pale, compressed lips. Both tugged. Then Uncle Jim tried to get round the end of the broom; Mr. Polly circled away. They began to circle about one another, both tugging hard, both intensely watchful of the slightest initiative on the part of the other. Mr. Polly wished brooms were longer, twelve or thirteen feet, for example; Uncle Jim was clearly for shortness in brooms. He wasted breath in saying what was to happen shortly, sanguinary, oriental soul-blenching things, when the broom no longer separated them. Mr. Polly thought he had never seen an uglier person. Suddenly Uncle Jim flashed into violent activity, but alcohol slows movement, and Mr. Polly was equal to him. Then Uncle Jim tried jerks, and for a terrible instant seemed to have the broom out of Mr. Polly’s hands. But Mr. Polly recovered it with the clutch of a drowning man. Then Uncle Jim drove suddenly at Mr. Polly’s midriff, but again Mr. Polly was ready and swept him round in a circle. Then suddenly a wild hope filled Mr. Polly. He saw the river was very near, the post to which the punt was tied not three yards away. With a wild yell, he sent the broom home into his antagonist’s ribs.
“Woosh!” he cried, as the resistance gave.
“Oh! Gaw!” said Uncle Jim, going backward helplessly, and Mr. Polly thrust hard and abandoned the broom to the enemy’s despairing clutch.
Splash! Uncle Jim was in the water and Mr. Polly had leapt like a cat aboard the ferry punt and grasped the pole.
Up came Uncle Jim spluttering and dripping. “You (unprofitable matter, and printing it would lead to a censorship of novels)! You know I got a weak chess!”
The pole took him in the throat and drove him backward and downwards.
“Lea go!” cried Uncle Jim, staggering and with real terror in his once awful eyes.
Splash! Down he fell backwards into a frothing mass of water with Mr. Polly jabbing at him. Under water he turned round and came up again as if in flight towards the middle of the river. Directly his head reappeared Mr. Polly had him between the shoulders and under again, bubbling thickly. A hand clutched and disappeared.
It was stupendous! Mr. Polly had discovered the heel of Achilles. Uncle Jim had no stomach for cold water. The broom floated away, pitching gently on the swell. Mr. Polly, infuriated with victory, thrust Uncle Jim under again, and drove the punt round on its chain in such a manner that when Uncle Jim came up for the fourth time – and now he was nearly out of his depth, too buoyed up to walk and apparently nearly helpless, – Mr. Polly, fortunately for them both, could not reach him. Uncle Jim made the clumsy gestures of those who struggle insecurely in the water. “Keep out,” said Mr. Polly. Uncle Jim with a great effort got a footing, emerged until his arm-pits were out of water, until his waistcoat buttons showed, one by one, till scarcely two remained, and made for the camp sheeting.
“Keep out!” cried Mr. Polly, and leapt off the punt and followed the movements of his victim along the shore.
“I tell you I got a weak chess,” said Uncle Jim, moistly. “This ain’t fair fightin’.”
“Keep out!” said Mr. Polly.
“This ain’t fair fightin’,” said Uncle Jim, almost weeping, and all his terrors had gone.
“Keep out!” said Mr. Polly, with an accurately poised pole.
“I tell you I got to land, you Fool,” said Uncle Jim, with a sort of despairing wrathfulness, and began moving down-stream.
“You keep out,” said Mr. Polly in parallel movement. “Don’t you ever land on this place again!..”
Slowly, argumentatively, and reluctantly, Uncle Jim waded down-stream. He tried threats, he tried persuasion, he even tried a belated note of pathos; Mr. Polly remained inexorable, if in secret a little perplexed as to the outcome of the situation. “This cold’s getting to my marrer!” said Uncle Jim.
“You want cooling. You keep out in it,” said Mr. Polly.
They came round the bend into sight of Nicholson’s ait, where the backwater runs down to the Potwell Mill. And there, after much parley and several feints, Uncle Jim made a desperate effort and struggled into clutch of the overhanging osiers on the island, and so got out of the water with the millstream between them. He emerged dripping and muddy and vindictive. “By Gaw!” he said. “I’ll skin you for this!”
“You keep off or I’ll do worse to you,” said Mr. Polly.
The spirit was out of Uncle Jim for the time, and he turned away to struggle through the osiers towards the mill, leaving a shining trail of water among the green-grey stems.
Mr. Polly returned slowly and thoughtfully to the inn, and suddenly his mind began to bubble with phrases. The plump woman stood at the top of the steps that led up to the inn door to greet him.
“Law!” she cried as he drew near, “’asn’t ’e killed you?”
“Do I look like it?” said Mr. Polly.
“But where’s Jim?”
“Gone off.”
“’E was mad drunk and dangerous!”
“I put him in the river,” said Mr. Polly. “That toned down his alcolaceous frenzy! I gave him a bit of a doing altogether.”
