“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 H...

“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 H...

Mr. Polly’s age was exactly thirty-five years and a half. He was a short, compact figure, and a little inclined to a localised embonpoint. His face was not unpleasing; the features fine, but a trifle ...

Mr. Polly was not naturally interested in hosiery and gentlemen’s outfitting. At times, indeed, he urged himself to a spurious curiosity about that trade, but presently something more congenial came a...

Jolly days of companionship they were for the incipient bankrupt on the stile to look back upon. The interminable working hours of the Bazaar had long since faded from his memory⁠—except for one or tw...

Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in his pockets looking quietly speculative. He specialised in slang an...

Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly’s mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, t...

Suddenly Parsons got himself dismissed. He got himself dismissed under circumstances of peculiar violence, that left a deep impression on Mr. Polly’s mind. He wondered about it for years afterwards, t...

Platt came to Polly, who was sorting up collar boxes. “O’ Man’s doing his Blooming Window.” “What window?” “What he said.” Polly remembered. He went on with his collar boxes with his eye on his senior...

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 d...

Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the Joy de Vive got through by them. Parsons had gone,...

Port Burdock was never the same place for Mr. Polly after Parsons had left it. There were no chest notes in his occasional letters, and little of the Joy de Vive got through by them. Parsons had gone,...

A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare v...

It was after Canterbury that the universe became really disagreeable to Mr. Polly. It was brought home to him, not so much vividly as with a harsh and ungainly insistence, that he was a failure in his...

Then a great change was brought about in the life of Mr. Polly by the death of his father. His father had died suddenly⁠—the local practitioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he suf...

Then a great change was brought about in the life of Mr. Polly by the death of his father. His father had died suddenly⁠—the local practitioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he suf...

Bereavement came to Mr. Polly before the realisation of opulence and its anxieties and responsibilities. That only dawned upon him on the morrow⁠—which chanced to be Sunday⁠—as he walked with Johnson ...

All the preparations for the funeral ran easily and happily under Mrs. Johnson’s skilful hands. On the eve of the sad event she produced a reserve of black sateen, the kitchen steps and a box of tin-t...

Things crowded upon Mr. Polly. Everyone, he noticed, took sherry with a solemn avidity, and a small portion even was administered sacramentally to the Punt boy. There followed a distribution of black ...

Mr. Polly walked back to the house because he wanted to be alone. Miriam and Minnie would have accompanied him, but finding Uncle Pentstemon beside the Chief Mourner they went on in front. “You’re wis...

Mr. Polly returned to Clapham from the funeral celebration prepared for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit. “You’ve merely anti-separated me by a hair,” he said politely. And he told th...

Mr. Polly returned to Clapham from the funeral celebration prepared for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit. “You’ve merely anti-separated me by a hair,” he said politely. And he told th...

Mr. Polly translated his restless craving for joy and leisure into Harold Johnsonese by saying that he meant to look about him for a bit before going into another situation. It was a decision Johnson ...

“You ain’t talkin’ of goin’!” cried Mrs. Larkins. “Supper at eight.” “Stay to supper with us, now you ’ave come over,” said Mrs. Larkins, with corroborating cries from Minnie. “ ’Ave a bit of a walk w...

It was past ten when Mr. Polly found himself riding back towards Easewood in a broad moonlight with a little Japanese lantern dangling from his handle bar and making a fiery circle of pinkish light on...

And now Mr. Polly began to lead a divided life. With the Johnsons he professed to be inclined, but not so conclusively inclined as to be inconvenient, to get a shop for himself, to be, to use the phra...

“Let’s talk,” she said, and for a time they were both tongue-tied. Mr. Polly’s literary proclivities had taught him that under such circumstances a strain of gallantry was demanded. And something in h...

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...

It is an illogical consequence of one human being’s ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage t...

It is an illogical consequence of one human being’s ill-treatment that we should fly immediately to another, but that is the way with us. It seemed to Mr. Polly that only a human touch could assuage t...

When, after imperceptible manoeuvres by Mrs. Larkins, he found himself starting circuitously through the inevitable recreation ground with Miriam to meet Annie, he found himself quite unable to avoid ...

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. You return from a ...

Mr. Polly’s marriage followed with a certain inevitableness. He tried to assure himself that he was acting upon his own forceful initiative, but at the back of his mind was the completest realisation ...

It was in the vestry that the force of Mr. Voules’ personality began to show at its true value. He seemed to open out and spread over things directly the restraints of the ceremony were at an end. “Ev...

“We’ll get the stuff into the house before the old gal comes along,” said Mr. Voules, “if you’ll hold the hoss.” “How about the key?” asked Mr. Polly. “I got the key, coming.” And while Mr. Polly held...

The dingy little room was stuffy and crowded to its utmost limit, and Mr. Polly’s skies were dark with the sense of irreparable acts. Everybody seemed noisy and greedy and doing foolish things. Miriam...

At last it was time for the two young people to catch the train for Waterloo en route for Fishbourne. They had to hurry, and as a concluding glory of matrimony they travelled second-class, and were se...

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...

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...

Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because f...

I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a certain highbrowed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a golden pince-nez and writing for the most part in that beautiful room, the li...

I have hinted that our Mother England had equipped Mr. Polly for the management of his internal concerns no whit better than she had for the direction of his external affairs. With a careless generosi...

Hinks, the saddler, two shops further down the street, was a different case. Hinks was the aggressor⁠—practically. Hinks was a sporting man in his way, with that taste for checks in costume and tight ...

Mr. Polly’s intercourse with all his fellow tradesmen was tarnished sooner or later by some such adverse incident, until not a friend remained to him, and loneliness made even the shop door terrible. ...

But the disgust that overshadowed Mr. Polly’s being as he sat upon the stile, had other and profounder justification than his quarrel with Rusper and the indignity of appearing before the county bench...

Mr. Polly designed his suicide with considerable care, and a quite remarkable altruism. His passionate hatred for Miriam vanished directly the idea of getting away from her forever became clear in his...

Mr. Polly designed his suicide with considerable care, and a quite remarkable altruism. His passionate hatred for Miriam vanished directly the idea of getting away from her forever became clear in his...

For twenty minutes Mr. Polly busied himself about the house, making his preparations very neatly and methodically. He opened the attic windows in order to make sure of a good draught through the house...

That was the beginning of the great Fishbourne fire, which burnt its way sideways into Mr. Rusper’s piles of crates and straw, and backwards to the petrol and stabling of the Royal Fishbourne Hotel, a...

Her eyes had not deceived her. Two figures which had emerged from the upper staircase window of Mr. Rumbold’s and had got after a perilous paddle in his cistern, on to the fire station, were now slowl...

With the dusk and the arrival of some county constabulary, and first one and presently two other fire engines from Port Burdock and Hampstead-on-Sea, the local talent of Fishbourne found itself forced...

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 discove...

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 discove...

A month later a leisurely and dusty tramp, plump equatorially and slightly bald, with his hands in his pockets and his lips puckered to a contemplative whistle, strolled along the river bank between U...

It was about two o’clock in the afternoon one hot day in high May when Mr. Polly, unhurrying and serene, came to that broad bend of the river to which the little lawn and garden of the Potwell Inn run...

Mr. Polly was particularly charmed by the ducklings. They were piping about among the vegetables in the company of their foster mother, and as he and the plump woman came down the garden path the litt...

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 ...

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 th...

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...

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...

The next day was Wednesday and a slack day for the Potwell Inn. It was a hot, close day, full of the murmuring of bees. One or two people crossed by the ferry, an elaborately equipped fisherman stoppe...

There followed an anxious peace for three days, and then a rough man in a blue jersey, in the intervals of trying to choke himself with bread and cheese and pickled onions, broke out abruptly into inf...

Those three months passed all too quickly; months of sunshine and warmth, of varied novel exertion in the open air, of congenial experiences, of interest and wholesome food and successful digestion, m...

But Uncle Jim had gone altogether.⁠ ⁠… He did not return for some days. That perhaps was not very wonderful. But the days lengthened to weeks and the weeks to months and still Uncle Jim did not recur....

One summer afternoon about five years after his first coming to the Potwell Inn Mr. Polly found himself sitting under the pollard willow fishing for dace. It was a plumper, browner and healthier Mr. P...

One summer afternoon about five years after his first coming to the Potwell Inn Mr. Polly found himself sitting under the pollard willow fishing for dace. It was a plumper, browner and healthier Mr. P...

Feeling recklessly secure behind his beard Mr. Polly surveyed the Fishbourne High Street once again. The north side was much as he had known it except that Rusper had vanished. A row of new shops repl...

Mr. Polly sat beside the fat woman at one of the little green tables at the back of the Potwell Inn, and struggled with the mystery of life. It was one of those evenings, serenely luminous, amply and ...