The History of Mr Polly

The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business.

And meanwhile he got little exercise; indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods; he fattened and deteriorated physically, great moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly, one day it came to him – forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them  – that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope, and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey.

Auto Da Fé

As he was passing by the cathedral, warm, uncanny sounds reached his ears. He would have sung in the same key, had his voice, like his mood, been at his command. Suddenly a spot of dirt fell on him. Curious and startled, he looked up at the buttresses. Pigeons preened themselves and cooed, none was to blame for the dirt. For twenty years he had not heard these sounds; every day on his morning walk he passed this spot. Yet cooing was well known to him out of books. ‘Quite so!’ he said softly, and nodded as he always did when he found reality bearing out the printed original.

Auto Da Fé

‘How old are you?’
‘Nine and a bit.’
‘Which would you prefer, a piece of chocolate or a book?’
‘A book.’
‘Indeed? Splendid! So that’s your reason for standing here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you say so before?’
‘Father scolds me.’
‘Oh. And who is your father?’
‘Franz Metzger.’
‘Would you like to travel to a foreign country?’
‘Yes. To India. They have tigers there.’
‘And where else?’
‘To China. They’ve got a huge wall there.’
‘You’d like to scramble over it wouldn’t you?’
‘It’s much too thick and too high. Nobody can get over it. That’s why they built it.’
‘What a lot you know! You must have read a great deal already?’
‘Yes. I read all the time. Father takes my books away. I’d like to go to a Chinese school. They have forty thousand letters in their alphabet. You couldn’t get them all into one book.’
‘That’s only what you think.’