The Clean Heart

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Mr. Wriford gained the other side of the road badly jarred as to his nerves but conscious only of this fresh outrage to his sensibilities. Was it that he looked a fool that he was treated with such contempt? Yes, that was it! Would that coarse brute have dared abuse in that way a man who looked as if he could hold his own? No, not he! Would a man who was a man and not a soft, contemptible beast have cried "Sorry. I'm awfully sorry"? No, no! A man who was a man had damned the fellow's eyes, shouted him down, threatened him for his blundering carelessness. He was hateful. He was vile. Now this—now this indignity, this new exhibition of his weakness, was going to rankle, gnaw him, gnaw him. There surged over Mr. Wriford again, standing on the kerb, the desire to wave his arms and cry aloud, as he had desired to wave and cry with Brida a few minutes before: "Oh! I say! I say! I say! This can't go on! This can't go on! This has got to stop! This has got to stop!" Habit checked the impulse. People were passing. People were staring at him. They had seen the incident, perhaps. They had witnessed his humiliation and were laughing at him. There was wrung out of Mr. Wriford's lips a bitter cry, a groan, that was articulate sound of his inward agony at himself. He turned in his own direction and began a swift walk that was the slowest pace to which habit could control the desire that consumed him to run, to run—by running to escape his thoughts, by running to shake off the inward mocking that mocked him as though with mocking all the street resounded. It appeared indeed to Mr. Wriford, as often in these days it appeared, that passers-by looked at him longer than commonly one meets a casual glance, and had in their eyes a grin as though they knew him for what he was and needs must grin at the sight of it. Mr. Wriford often turned to look after such folk to see if they were turned to laugh at him. He had not now gone a dozen furious paces, yet twice had wavered beneath glances directed at him, when there greeted him cheerily with "Hullo, Wriford! How goes it?" a healthy-looking gentleman who stopped before him and caused him to halt.

III

Mr. Wriford, desperate to be alone and to run, to run, said: "Hullo, I'm late getting to the office. I'm in a tearing hurry," and stared at the man, aware of another frequent symptom of these days: he could not recollect his name! He knew the man well. Scarcely a day passed but Mr. Wriford saw him. This was the literary editor of The Intelligence, the great daily newspaper with which The Week Reviewed was connected and in whose office it was housed. A nice man, and of congenial tastes; but a man whom at that moment Mr. Wriford felt himself hating venomously, and while he struggled, struggled for his name, experienced the conscious wish that the man might fall down dead and so let him be free, and so close those eyes of his that seemed to Mr. Wriford to be looking right inside him and to be grinning at what they saw. And Mr. Wriford found himself gone miles adrift among pictures of the scenes that would occur if the man did suddenly drop dead; found himself shaping the sentences that he would speak to the policeman who would come up, shaping the words with which, as he supposed would be his duty, he would go and break the news to the man's wife, whom he knew well, and whose shocked grief he found himself picturing—but whose name! Mr. Wriford came back to the original horror, to the fact of standing before this familiar—daily familiar—friend and having not the remotest glimmering of what his name might be....

"I'm off to-morrow for a month's holiday," the man was saying. "A rest cure. I've been needing it, my doctor says. You're looking fit, Wriford."

Habit helped Mr. Wriford to work up a smile. Just what he had been saying to Brida: "I'm so lucky! Other people have bad times!—others are ill!—breakdowns and God knows what!—but me!—I've all the luck!" Mr. Wriford worked up a smile. "Oh, good Lord, yes. I'm always fit. Sorry you're bad." What was his name?—his name! his name!

And the man went on: "You are so!—lucky beggar! When's your new book coming out? What, must you cut? Well, I'll see you again before I go. I'm looking in at the office to-night. I've left you a revised proof of that article of mine. That was a good suggestion of yours. One of the bright ones, you! So long!"

Mr. Wriford—one of the bright ones—shook hands with him; and knew as he did so, and from the man's slight surprise, that it was a stupid thing to do with a man he met every day of his life; and leaving him, became for some moments occupied with this new example of his stupidity; and then back to the distress that he could not, could not recollect his name; and furiously, then, to the agony of the cyclist humiliation; and in all the chaos of it got to a quiet street, and, hurrying at frantic pace, frantically at last did cry aloud: "Oh, I say! I say! I say! I say! This can't go on. This has got to stop! This has got to stop!" and found himself somehow arrived at the vast building of The Intelligence, and at the sight by habit called upon himself and steadied himself to enter.

IV

Called upon himself.... Steadied himself.... He would encounter here men whom he knew.... He must not let them see.... Called upon himself and passed up the stairs towards the landing that held the offices of his paper. There was a lift, but he did not use it. It would have entailed exchange of greeting with the lift-boy, and in these days Mr. Wriford had come to the pitch of shrinking from even the amount of conversation which that would have entailed. For the same reason he paused a full three minutes on his landing before turning along the corridor that approached his office. There were bantering voices which he recognised for those of friends, and he waited till the group dispersed and doors slammed. He hated meeting people, shrank from eyes that looked, not at him, but, as he felt, into him, and, as he believed, had a grin in the tail of them.

Doors slammed. Silence in the corridor. Mr. Wriford went swiftly to his room. The table was littered with proofs and letters. Mr. Wriford sat down heavily in his chair and took up the office telephone. There was one thing to straighten up before he got to work, and he spoke to the voice that answered him: "Do you know if the literary editor is in his room? The literary editor—Mr.—Mr.—?"