The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

CHAPTER II
IN A PARLOUR

I

Lights in all the windows and in the street lamps as Mr. Wriford regained the town. Night approaching—and he terrified of its approach. Little chill was in the air, yet as he walked he trembled and his teeth chattered. He was shaken and acutely distressed by revulsion of the effort to cling on and achieve his purpose against Mr. Pennyquick's domineering savagery. He was worse shaken and worse distressed by mounting continuance of the panic at his plight that had driven him to the interview. That plight and to what it might lead had suddenly been revealed to him as he walked away after the first rebuff. Now it utterly consumed him. He shrunk from the gaze of passers-by. He avoided with more than the fear of an evil-doer the police constables who here and there were to be seen. His urgent desire was concealment, to be left alone, to be quiet. His fear was to be apprehended, found destitute, questioned, interfered with. Questioning: that was his terror; solitude: that was his want. He wanted to hide. He wanted to hide from every sort of connection with what in two different phases he had lived through, and in each come only to misery. He told himself that if, in obedience to his bodily desires—his hunger, his extreme physical wretchedness—he were somehow to get in communication with London and enjoy the money and the place that waited him there—that would be the very quick of intolerable meeting with his old self again. Unthinkable that! If his bodily desires—his faintness, his extreme exhaustion—overcame him, there would be meeting the old life in guise of explanations, of dependence again in infirmary or workhouse. No, he must somehow be alone; he must somehow live where none should interfere with him and where he might on the one hand be occupied and on the other be able to sit aside from all who knew him or might bother him, and thus pursue his quest: was there some secret of happiness in life that he had missed? These bodily miseries would somehow, somewhere, be accommodated or would kill him: this mental searching—ever?

There was upon him accumulation of wretchedness such as in all his wretchedness of his accursed life he never had endured. At its worst in the old days, the days of being one of the lucky ones, there had shone like a lamp to one lost in darkness the belief that if he could get out of it all he would end it all. Ah, God, God, he had escaped it and was in worse condition for his escape! The belief had been tested—the belief was gone. In the wild Puddlebox days he had beaten off wretchedness with violence of his hands and of his body, believing that it ever could thus be beaten. God, it had beaten him, never again in that deluded spirit could be faced. In the infirmary he had begun his wondering after something in life that he had missed. Lo, here was he come out to find it, and Christ! it was not, and Christ! he might not now so much as sit and rest and ponder it.

He felt himself hunted. He felt every eye turned upon him within whose range he came; every hand tingling suddenly to clutch him and stop him; every voice about to cry: "Here, you! You, I say! What are you doing? Where do you live? Who are you?"

He felt himself staggering from his dreadful faintness and thereby conspicuous. Thrice as he stumbled round any corners that he met he found himself passing a constable who each time more closely stared. He took another turning. It showed him again that same policeman at the end of the street. He dared not turn back. That would be flight, his disordered mind told him, and he be followed. He dared not go on. There was a little shop against where he stood. Its lighted window displayed an array of gas-brackets, a variety of glass chimneys and globes for lamps and gas, some coils of lead piping, and in either corner a wash-basin fitted with taps. There was inscribed over this shop

HY. BICKERS, CERT. PLUMBER

and attached to a pendent gas bracket within the window was a card with the announcement:

LODGER TAKEN

Mr. Wriford made a great effort to steady himself; steadied his shaking hand to press down the latch; and to the very loud jangle of an overhead bell entered the tiny shop that the door disclosed.