The Clean HeartHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Science
The Clean Heart
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Authors -- Fiction; Happiness -- Fiction
He began to think of going home and began to think of the task of
taking down his coat from behind the door and of the task of getting
into it. He began to think of the paper that had just gone to press
and began in his mind to go slowly through it from the first page,
enumerating the title of each article and of each picture. Somewhere
after half-a-dozen pages he would lose the thread and find himself
miles away, occupied with some other matter; then he would start
again.
It was towards one o'clock when he realised that if he did not move,
he would miss a good train at Waterloo and have a long wait before
the next. He decided against the effort of taking down and getting
into his coat. He took up his hat and stick and left the building by
the trade entrance at the back, meeting no one. He followed his
usual habit of walking to Waterloo along the Embankment, and it was
nothing new to him--for a press-night--that occasionally he found he
could not keep a straight course on the pavement. Too many
cigarettes, he thought. He crossed to the river side, and when he
was a little way from Waterloo Bridge, a more violent swerve of his
unsteady legs scraped him roughly against the wall. He had no
control then, even over his limbs! and at that realisation he
stopped and laid his hands on the wall and looked across the river
and cried to himself that frequent cry of these days: "Wriford!
Wriford! Wriford!"
The wall was rough to his hands, and that produced the thought of how
soft his hands were--how contemptibly soft he was all over and all
through. "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!" cried Mr. Wriford to himself
and had a great surge through all his pulses that seemed--as
frequently in these days but now more violently, more completely than
ever before--to wash him asunder from himself, so that he was two
persons: one within his body that was the Wriford he knew and hated,
the other that was himself, his own, real self, and that cried to his
vile, his hateful body: "Wriford! Wriford! Wriford!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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