The Clean HeartHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Science
The Clean Heart
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Authors -- Fiction; Happiness -- Fiction
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.
"Well, what does it matter whom he is?" Mr. Wriford would cry. "I
don't mind people thinking things in the paper are rotten, if I've
passed them and thought them good. But I'm damned if I let things go
in that I know are rotten, just because they're written by some big
man. I don't mind my own judgment being blamed. But I'm not going
to hear criticism of anything in my paper and know that I made the
same criticism myself but let it go. Satisfy yourself! That's the
only rule to go by."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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