The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

"Well, come on, let's make certain we deserve it," says Mr. Wriford, when the manifestations of joy have been sufficiently expressed. "Come along, Form Two, arithmetic. Let's see if we can't understand these frightful decimals. Clean the blackboard, Toovey. Abbot, you take Form Three behind the curtain and give them their dictation. Here's the book. Find an interesting bit and read it out loud first. Form One, you're algebra. You'd better take the next six examples. Cupper, you're in charge. Now then, Two, crowd around. Where's the chalk?"

II

This was the spirit of the lessons nowadays. Everybody worked. Nobody shirked. Interest, even excitement, was found under Mr. Wriford's guidance to lie in the hated lesson-books, and it was excitedly wrestled out of them. Some of the subjects, as Mr. Wriford taught them, were made exciting in themselves; the rest were somehow inspired with the feeling that the next chapter—the next chapter really is exciting once we can get to it. All the Tower House schoolbooks were horribly thumbed and inked and dog-eared in their first few pages—long indifferently laboured over, never understood, cordially loathed. Beyond lay virgin pages, clean, untouched, many sticking together as when fresh from the binder's press. "Look here," Mr. Wriford used to say, "these French grammars, they're all the same—all in a filthy state up to page thirty and rippingly clean beyond, just like a new story-book. Look here, let's pretend all that new part is a country we're going to emigrate into and explore, and that first of all we've got to toil over the Rocky Mountains of all this first muck. You half know it, you know. If we get through a good few pages every time we'll get there like lightning. Come on!"

They always "came on" responsive to this kind of call. The work in all the subjects belonged to the distant period of Mr. Wriford's own school-days. He had to get it up as it came. He brought to the boys the quite novel effect of a master learning with them as they learnt, and that produced the stimulus of following him in place of the grind of being driven. "My word, this is a teaser!" Mr. Wriford would say, frankly stumped by an arithmetical problem; and the delighted laugh that always greeted this was the impetus to an eager and intelligent following him when he would get it aright and demonstrate its processes. Wits were sharpened, perceptions stirred. Boyish high spirits, mental alertness, and vigorous young qualities were rescued from the dejection and apathy and slovenliness and ugliness that had threatened to submerge them: and Mr. Wriford finds himself infected and carried along by the moral quickening he has himself aroused.

III

He knows it. He feels it. He both knows and feels it because, whereas formerly he groped ever in darkness of spirit and beneath intolerable oppression of mind, now, when engaged in these occupations or when thinking upon them, he is lifted out of himself, and in the zest of their activities forgets the burden of his own tribulations. Thus what had been all darkness, all shrinking, all fears, becomes divided, as street lamps break the night, into periods of light while he is within the arc of these pursuits and into passages of the old gloom only between one day's leaving of the school and the next morning's return to it. Slowly from this he advances to stronger influence of the light, less frequent onset of the shadows. First by these lamps the measureless blackness of his way is broken. Gradually he is handed more quickly and more surely from lamp to lamp. Not often now, with their immense and crushing weight, their suffocating sense of numbing fear, those old and intolerable clouds of misery descend upon him; not often now those black abysses that yawned on every side about his feet; not often those entombing walls that towered every way about his soul. Sometimes they come. He, in the days of that nightmare hunted life in London, sometimes had known snatched intervals of relief—in companionship, in reading—in the midst of which there would strike down upon him the thought that this was but transitory, that presently it would end, that presently he would be returned to the strain, to the fears, to the darkness, to the panic bursting to get out of it. So now, sometimes, when his mind moved ever so little from its occupation with these new interests, he would be clutched as though immediately outside them clutching hands waited to drag him out and drag him down—clutched and engulfed and bound again in bonds of terror, as one whose pleasant slumber suddenly gives place to dreadful sense of falling. In the midst of his thoughts upon some aspect of work or play with his pupils, "This cannot go on always," he would think; "This will somehow come to an end sooner or later;" and immediately the waiting hands would up and snatch him down; immediately the fears oppress him; immediately the walls, the blackness come; and he would cry: "What then? Where then?" and grope again; and bruise once more himself on his despair; and plan to go away and abandon it all, so that at least he might of his own will leave these interests, not wait till suddenly they to their own end should come and he be driven from them.

So sometimes these old tumults came upon him; yet came less frequently, and the less frequently they came were with less suffering escaped. Now, in their onsets, was for the first time a way of refuge from them. Where formerly he had been utterly abandoned to them, sinking more and more deeply within them at every cry of his despair, now was a knowledge that they could be lost; and quicker and more strongly a conscious grasp at what should lose them and draw him out from their oppression. At first with dreadful effort and often with defeat, gradually with less affliction and with more certain hold, he would attempt to turn his mind from these broodings and fasten it upon his enterprises in the school. There was to be thought out a way of helping Form Two to get the hang of parsing in their English grammar to-morrow; there was the idea of starting the young beggars in a daily class of drill and physical exercises; there was the plan of rummaging among Pennyquick's books to pick out a little library of light reading for the boys and to read to them himself for half an hour each day; there was the thought of how jolly nicely they had responded to his proposal to go through their play-boxes and pick out all the cheap trash he found they had been reading, and of the jokes they had had over the bonfire made from the collection; there was the thinking of other ways in which this complete confidence they gave him could be used for their own benefit; there was—there were a hundred of such preoccupations for his mind, any one of which, could he but fix tenaciously enough upon it, would draw him from the quicksands of his depression and set his feet where strongly they bore him.

IV

Thus came he gradually into a state in which the old depths of oppression troubled him no more; in which the apprehensive, hunted look went from his eyes; in which sometimes a smile was to be seen upon his face; and in which—to the observer—his outstanding attribute was just that he was very quiet, very reserved: gently responsive to advances from others but never of himself offering conversation. So may one newly convalescent after great illness be observed; and to this Mr. Wriford's case in these days may best be likened. As the convalescent, after long pains, deliriums, fevers, nights void of sleep, is carried to sit in the sunshine from the bed where these have been endured, so in this haven rested Mr. Wriford from his mind's distresses. There sits the patient, wan and weak, desirous only to enjoy the pleasant air, wanting no more than just to feed upon the smiling prospect his eyes that all the devils of his fevered brain have burned; silently acquiescent to ministrations of those who tend him. Here lived Mr. Wriford, quiet and reserved, no longer preyed upon by those fierce storms of hopeless misery such as, on the first night at the Bickers' table, had sent him torn and broken from the room; wearing a gentle aspect now in place of those contracted eyes, that knotted brow, born of the fever in his brain; hands no longer trembling; voice eased of its strained and rasping note that came of fear it should break out of his control and go in tears of his distress. There rests the convalescent's body, thin and enfeebled from its rackings on the bed. Here stayed Mr. Wriford, wanting only here to stay where refuge was from all the devils that had devoured him. There rests the patient, slowly replanning life that death had challenged, sickness shattered. Here lived he, quietly revolving what had brought him here and what should follow now.

Was there something in life that he had missed? Calmly now he could ask and search the question. Till now, since its first coming, it had been as a gnawing tumour, as an empoisoned wound within him—an inward fire, a pulsing abscess to relieve whose tortures he, as a wild beast thus maddened that turns its jaws upon its vitals, had bruised himself to madness in frantic goadings of his mind. Now he could review it calmly, almost dispassionately. The thing was out of him, no longer burning in his brain. Till now, he had thought upon it in frenzy of despair, now he could stand as it were away from it—turn it this way and that in examination with his hands, smile and shake his head in puzzlement, and put it aside to go to his duties with his boys, return and take it up and puzzle it again. Was there something in life that he had missed? Yes, there was something. He could unriddle it as far as that. He was at peace now, but there was nothing in that peace. Some attribute was missing. This was peace: but it was emptiness. This was quietness: but a thousand leagues remote from happiness. Happiness was an active thing, a stirring thing, a living thing, a warm thing, a pulsing thing. Barren here, cold here. Let the mind run, let the mind run about a thousand pleasures such as money could buy. They might be his for the asking. He had but to return to London, and they were his. Well, let the mind run. Back it would come disconsolate, empty-handed, with no treasures in its pack. Nothing attracted him. Ah, but somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, that thing was—the live thing, the stirring thing, the active thing, the warm thing. Something that he had missed in life: that was certain. Happiness its name: that was assured. Where? In what? How to be found? Only negative answers to these. Well, shake the head over it and put it away; smile and confess its bafflement. Here are things to be done. Do them and return to puzzle again in a little while.