The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Thus, thus with Mr. Wriford, and worse and worse, and worse and worse. Thus through the years and thus arrived where first we found him. Behold him now, ten years from when Young Wriford, just twenty, met Alice and the children at Liverpool and ardently and eagerly and fearlessly planned his tremendous plans. That boy is dead. Return to him, little over thirty, everywhere successful, one of the lucky ones, that is come out of the grave where Young Wriford lies. Worse and worse! There is nothing he touches but brings him success; there is no one he meets or who speaks of him but envies him; and successful, lucky, it is only by throwing himself desperately into his work that he can forget the intolerable misery that presses upon him, the desire to wave his arms and scream aloud: "You call me lucky! Oh, my God! Oh, can't anybody see I'm going out of my mind with all this? Oh, isn't there anybody who can understand me and help me? Oh, I say, I say, I say, this can't go on. This must stop. This must end."

X

You see, he can't get out of it. In these years his unceasing work, his harassing work, his fears of it breaking down and bringing all who are dependent upon him to misery, and all his distresses of mind between the one and the other—all this has killed outlets by which now he might escape from it and has chained him hand and foot and heart and mind in the midst of it. His nephews leave him one by one to go out into the world, successfully equipped and started by his efforts. He is always promising himself, as first Harold goes, and then Fred and then Dick, who has chosen for the Army and enters Sandhurst, that now he will be able to change his mode of life and seek the rest and peace he craves for. He never does. He never can.

He never can. There is always a point in his work on his paper or with his books first to be reached: and when it is reached, there is always another. Now, surely, with Dick soon going out to India, he might leave the Filmers. They are comfortably circumstanced on their own means; the house is his and costs them nothing. Surely now, he tells himself, he might break away and leave them: but he cries to himself that for this reason and for that he cannot—yet: and he cries to himself that if he could, he knows not how he could. Everything in life that might have attracted him is buried ten years' deep in Young Wriford's grave. Brida could rescue him, he believes, and he tries Brida on that afternoon which has been seen: ah, like all the rest, she laughs at him—one of the lucky ones!

He is chained to himself, to that poor, shrinking, hideous devil of a Mr. Wriford that he has been made: and this is the period of furious hatred of that self, of burying himself in his work to avoid it, of sitting and staring before him and imagining he sees it, of threatening it aloud with cries of: "Curse you! Curse you!" of scheming to lay violent hands upon it.

CHAPTER III
FIGURE OF WRIFORD

I

There comes that day when Mr. Wriford went to Brida in desperate search of some one who should understand him and give him peace. It is a week after Dick has been shipped to join his regiment in India, and after a week alone with the Filmers, and of knowing not, even now that his responsibilities are finally ended, how to get out of it all—yet. It was his press-night with The Week Reviewed, as he had told Brida, and Mr. Wriford, with two articles to write, called upon himself for the effort to write them and to get his paper away by midnight—the weekly effort to "pull through"—and somehow made it.

Press-nights nowadays were one long, desperate grip upon himself to keep himself going until, far distant in the night and through a hundred stresses of his brain, the goal of "pulled through" should be reached. A hundred stresses! He always told himself, as the contingencies of the night heaped before him, that this time he would shirk this one, delegate that one to a subordinate. He never did. Fleet Street said of The Week Reviewed—a new thing in journalism—that Mr. Wriford was "IT." Unique among politico-literary weeklies in that it went to press in one piece in one day, and thus from first page to last presented a balance of contents based upon the affairs of the immediate moment, unique in that it was illustrated, in that it had at its command all the resources of the Intelligence, in that its price was two-pence—unique in all this, it was said by those who knew that The Week Reviewed's very great success was more directly due to the fact that it was saturated and polished in every article, every headline, every caption, by Mr. Wriford's touch. He would never admit how much of it he actually wrote himself; it only was known to all who had a hand in the making of it that nothing of which they had knowledge went into the paper precisely in the form in which it first came beneath Mr. Wriford's consideration. Sometimes, in the case of articles written by outside contributors of standing, members of his staff would remonstrate with him in some apprehension at this mangling of a well-known writer's work.