The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Sandwiches, supplied in liberal manner by Mr. Master and not touched on the railway journey, sufficed Mr. Wriford's needs through the following day. He tramped aimlessly the greater part of the time. Evening again provided him with a bed by the roadside. It was the next morning, to which he awoke feeling cold and feeling ill, that aroused him to his first thoughts of his present situation. He clearly must do something; but he had only negative ideas as to what it should be. Negative, as that, in passing a farm, it crossed his mind to apply for work as had been the practice with Mr. Puddlebox. But he recalled the nature of that work and was at once informed that he was now completely unfitted for it. He had been very strong then. He felt very weak now. He had then been extraordinarily vigorous and violent in spirit, and his spirit's violence had led him to delight in exercising his body at manual labour. Now he felt very weary and submissive in mind; and that feeling of submission was reflected in extreme lassitude of his limbs. It came back to this—and at once he was returned again to his mental searching—that then there seemed object and relief in taxing himself arduously: now he had proved that trial and knew that no object lay beyond it, that no relief would ever now be contained in it. And in any event he was not capable of it: he was weak, weak; he felt very ill.

But something must be done. Let him determine how he stood; and with this thought he began for the thousandth time to rehearse his life as he had lived it. One of the lucky ones: he had been that: it had driven him into the river. One of the free: that also he now had been. Those months with Puddlebox he had cared for nothing and for nobody: recked nothing whether he lived or died. He had worked with his hands as in the London days he had imagined happiness lay in working. He had attained in brimming fulness all that in the London days he had madly desired. It had brought him where now he was—to knowledge that there was something in life he had missed, and to baffled, to bewildered ignorance what it might be or in what manner of living it might be found. Well, let him drag on. Just to drag on was now the best that he could do. Let life take him and do with him just whatsoever it pleased. Let him be lost, be lost, to all who knew him and to all and everything he knew. Let him a second time start life afresh, and this time not attack it as in the wild Puddlebox days he had attacked it, but be washed by it any whither it pleased, stranded somewhere and permitted to die perhaps, perhaps have disclosed to him, and be allowed to seize, whatever it might be that somehow, somehow, somewhere, somewhere, he had missed.

Thus, as aimlessly he wandered, his thoughts took the form of plans or resolutions, yet were not resolutions in any binding sense. They drifted formlessly through his mind as snatches of conversation, carried on in a crowded apartment, will drift through a mind pre-occupied with some idea; or they drifted through him as snow at its first fall will for long drift over and seem to leave untouched any stone that rises above the surface of the ground. He was preoccupied with his own ceaseless questioning. He was preoccupied with helpless and hopeless sense of helplessness and hopelessness. There was something that others found that gave them peace and gave them happiness, that he had missed, that he knew not where he had missed or where to begin to find.

All of plan or resolution that in any way settled upon this deeper brooding was that somehow he must find something to do. In the midst of his brooding he would jolt against realisation of that necessity, think aimlessly upon it for a little, then lose it again. Slowly it permeated his mind. Evening brought him to the outskirts of a small town; and at a house in a by-street where "Beds for Single Men" were offered, and where he listlessly turned in, the matter of being called upon for the price of a lodging shook him to greater concentration upon his resources. He found that, by Mr. Master's carelessness or kindness, he had been left with a trifle of change over the money given him to make his way across town when he broke his journey in London—elevenpence. He paid ninepence for his bed. In the morning there remained to him two coppers for food, and he knew himself faint with protracted fasting. In a street of dingy shops he turned into a coffee-house. "Shave?" said a man in soiled white overalls, and he realised that he had mistaken the door and stepped into a barber's adjoining the refreshment shop. He was unshaven, and any work that he could do would demand a reasonably decent appearance. "Attend to you in a moment," said the soiled overalls, and Mr. Wriford dropped into a chair to await his pleasure. The ragged fragment of a local newspaper lay on a table beside him, and he took it up with some vague idea of discovering employment among the advertisements. That portion of the paper was missing. His eye was attracted by an odd surname, "Pennyquick," and when the barber called him and was operating on him he found himself listlessly reflecting upon what he had read of an inquest following the sudden death of the assistant-master at Tower House School, chief evidence given by Mr. Pennyquick, headmaster.

A penny was the price of his shave. He took his penny that remained into the adjoining coffee-shop and obtained with it a large mug of cocoa. "Three ha'pence with a slice of bread and butter," said the woman at the counter, pushing the cocoa towards him. "Don't you want nothing to eat?"

Her tone and the look she gave him were kindly. "I want it," said Mr. Wriford significantly.

"You look like it," said the woman. "There!" and slid him a hunk of dry bread.

He tried to thank her. He felt strangely overcome by her kindness. Tears of weakness sprang to his eyes; but no words to his mouth. "That's all right," she said. "You're fair starved by the look of you."

He puzzled as he finished his meal, and as he wandered out and up the street again, to know why he had been so touched by the woman's action. He found himself feeling towards her that same swelling in his heart as when the oldest sea-captain living with stained lips had whispered: "Matey! Matey!"

Was there something in life that he had missed? What in the name of God had that to do with being given a piece of bread?