The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

It seemed to him that Figure of Wriford turned upon him with flaming eyes and grinding teeth and for the first time spoke to him: "Why, to give you time to get away and hide—to save you, you filthy coward!"

Mr. Wriford cried: "Oh—oh!"

And at once a dramatic change of scene. In one sudden and tremendous bound the flaming wagoner hurled himself from the seat to the road, rushed bawling around his wagon on the opposite side from where Mr. Wriford trembled, came full beneath the hanging stern of Mr. Puddlebox, and discharged upon it a cut of his whip that made pretty caresses of his former efforts. "Now I've got you, my beauty!"

With a loud and exceeding bitter cry, the beauty released his hold. As thunders the mountain avalanche, so thundered he. As falls the stricken oak so, avalanched, the flaming wagoner fell beneath him.

There was a very loud crash of breaking bottles, and immediately upon the hot summer air a pungent reek of whisky. There were enormous convulsions of Mr. Puddlebox and the wagoner entwined in one great writhing double monster prone in the roadway, and from them a tremendous cloud of dust. There were thuds, oaths, yawps, yeeps, bellows, and with them the pleasant music of broken bottles jangling. The double monster came to its four knees and writhed there; very laboriously—as if it were a rheumatic giant—writhed to its four legs and there stood and writhed amain; divided suddenly, and there was an appalling wallop from one to the other, and Mr. Puddlebox went reeling, musically jangling, and the flaming wagoner, carried round by the wallop's impetus, came staggering sideways a pace towards Mr. Wriford.

Mr. Wriford put down his head and shut his eyes and rushed at him. Mr. Wriford, as he rushed, saw Figure of Wriford disappear as if swallowed. Mr. Wriford caught his foot in the wheel, was discharged like a butting ram at the backs of the flaming wagoner's knees, clutched, wrenched, was down with the bawling wagoner beating at his head, and then, clutching and struggling, was overturned beneath him. Mr. Wriford heard a yell, first of warning, then of triumph, from Mr. Puddlebox: "Keep out of it, loony! Well done, boy! Well done! Glumph him, boy! Glumph him!" There was a terrible run and kick from Mr. Puddlebox, and a terrible jerk and cry from the flaming wagoner, and in the next moment Mr. Wriford was on his feet and taking share, his eyes mostly shut, in a whirlwind, three-sided battle that spun up the road and down the road and across the road, and in which sometimes Mr. Wriford hit Mr. Puddlebox, and sometimes Mr. Puddlebox hit Mr. Wriford, and sometimes both hit the wagoner and sometimes by him were hit—a whirlwind, three-sided battle, in which, in short, by common intent of the three, the thing to do was simply to hit and to roar. Six arms whirling enormous thumps; six legs lashing tremendous kicks; the air and three bodies receiving them; one mouth bawling curses of the very pit of obscenity; another howling: "Glumph him, boy! Glumph him!" Mr. Wriford's mouth laughing with fierce, exultant, hysterical glee.

The sudden rush that had rid Mr. Wriford of Figure of Wriford had returned him, and returned him with recklessness a hundredfold, to the mood, reckless of what happened to him, that had first embarked him on the wagon. And more than that. Out of the clutch of cowardice and lusting into the lust of action! When swinging his legs over the tail-board of the wagon, he had but gleefully thought of how now he was free, of caring nothing what happened to him, of gleefully throwing himself into any mad adventure. He had but thought of it; now he was in it! in it! in it! and in it! became the slogan of his fighting as he fought. "In it!" and a blind whirling wallop at the flaming wagoner's flaming face. "In it!" and colliding heavily with one of Mr. Puddlebox's glumphing rushes, and laughing aloud. "In it!" and spun staggering with a thump of one of the wagoner's whirling sledge-hammers, and staggering but to come with a fierce glee "In it! In it!" once again. Out of the clutch of cowardice that had him a moment before—cowardice bested for the first time in all these years of its nightmare sovereignty: and at that thought "In it! in it! in it!" with fierce and fiercer lust and fierce and fiercer and fiercest exultation. "In it!" Ah!

This extraordinary battle—extraordinary for a shrinking, gentlemanly, refined, well-dressed, comfortably housed, afternoon-tea-drinking Londoner—raged, if it had any order at all, about the towering person of the liver-cutting wagoner, and now went bawling to its end.

For this gentleman would no sooner get the liver of one antagonist in his fiery clutches than the other would come at him like a runaway horse and require attention that resulted in the escape of the first. And now a liver, heavily embedded in the bulky waist of Mr. Puddlebox, came at him head down with a force and with a fortune of aim that not even a stouter man than the wagoner could have withstood.

A very terrible buffet had just been inflicted upon Mr. Puddlebox. A sledge-hammer wallop from the wagoner had caught him in the throat ("Ooop!") and remained there, squeezing ("Arrp!"). The other hand had then clawed him like a tiger's bite in close proximity to his coveted liver ("Arrp! Ooop!"); and the two hands had finally hurled him ten feet away to end in a most shattering fall ("UMP!"). This manoeuvre was carried out by the flaming wagoner from the side of the ditch to which repeated rushes had driven him, and now he turned and directed a stupendous kick at Mr. Wriford, who came fiercely on his left. Mr. Wriford twisted; the immense boot but scraped him.