The History of Mr. PollyWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The History of Mr. Polly
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Life change events -- Fiction
"Some things I can't believe," said Mr. Polly suddenly, "and one is
your being a skeleton...." He pointed his hand towards the neighbour's
hedge. "Look at 'em--against the yellow--and they're just stingin'
nettles. Nasty weeds--if you count things by their uses. And no help
in the life hereafter. But just look at the look of them!"
"It isn't only looks," said the fat woman.
"Whenever there's signs of a good sunset and I'm not too busy," said
Mr. Polly, "I'll come and sit out here."
The fat woman looked at him with eyes in which contentment struggled
with some obscure reluctant protest, and at last turned them slowly to
the black nettle pagodas against the golden sky.
"I wish we could," she said.
"I will."
The fat woman's voice sank nearly to the inaudible.
"Not always," she said.
Mr. Polly was some time before he replied. "Come here always when I'm
a ghost," he replied.
"Spoil the place for others," said the fat woman, abandoning her moral
solicitudes for a more congenial point of view.
"Not my sort of ghost wouldn't," said Mr. Polly, emerging from another
long pause. "I'd be a sort of diaphalous feeling--just mellowish and
warmish like...."
They said no more, but sat on in the warm twilight until at last they
could scarcely distinguish each other's faces. They were not so much
thinking as lost in a smooth, still quiet of the mind. A bat flitted
by.
"Time we was going in, O' Party," said Mr. Polly, standing up. "Supper
to get. It's as you say, we can't sit here for ever."
The End
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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