CHAPTER III

CRACKJAW NAME FOR MR. WRIFORD

I

Stronger now. He was left very much alone by the other inmates of the convalescent ward, and that was what he wished. Strange folk themselves, some with odd ways, some with ugly, they accepted strangeness in others as a proper qualification for those greater comforts which made this department of the workhouse a place highly desirable. The one common sympathy among them was to present their several ailments as obstinately and as alarmingly as possible, and they respected the endeavour in one another. Except when order of dismissal and return to the workhouse came among them. The victim upon whom the blow fell would then most shamelessly round upon his mates in a manner that filled the ward with indignant alarm and protestation.

"Me quite strong!" the unhappy victim would cry. "What about old George there? He's stronger than me. What about old Tom? What about Mr. Harris? What about Captain Peter? Shamming! They're all shamming! Ask old George what he told me yesterday. Never felt better in his life, he told me. Ask old Tom. Can't get enough to eat 'e's that 'arty, he says. Me! It's a public scandal. It's a public scandal this ward is. Taking out a dying man, that's what you're doing, and leaving a pack of shammers! Look at Mr. Graggs there! Look at him. Ever see a sick man look like that? Public scandal! Public--"

Outraged victim led protesting away. Horrified convalescents dividing their energies between smiling wanly, as though at the point of death and therefore charitable to victim's ravings, and protesting volubly at his infamous aspersions.

Mr. Wriford, only wishing to be left alone, escaped these bitter attacks from injured victims just as for a long time he escaped from matron and doctors the form of attention which aroused alarm in the ward. He mixed with his fellow-convalescents not at all, and this aloofness, in a community where garrulity on the subject of aches and pains and bad weather and discontent with food was the established order, earned him in full the solitude which alone he desired. Its interruption was most endangered in those hours of wet days, and in the evenings, when, out of bed and dressed, the convalescents were cooped up within the ward. At the least there was always then the risk of being caught by the oldest sea-captain living with his ceaseless: "Matey! Matey, I've got me portograph in the Daily Mirror paper!" and sometimes the descent upon him of some other infirm old gentleman who, worsted and enraged in some battle of ailments with cronies, would espy Mr. Wriford seated remote and alone and bear down upon him with his cargo of ills.

II

To escape these attentions Mr. Wriford learnt to simulate absorption in one of the out-of-date illustrated weekly papers with which for its intellectual benefit the ward was supplied. No thought that these papers were once a part of his daily life, himself a very active factor in theirs, ever stirred him as he turned the pages or gazed with unseeing eyes upon them. His fingers turned the pages: his mind, in search of Was there some secret of happiness he had missed? revolved the leaves of retrospection that might disclose it--but never did. His head would bend intensely above a picture or a column of letterpress: his eyes, not what was printed saw, but saw himself as he had been, somehow missing--what?

Seclusion by this means for his searching after his problem brought him one day to an occurrence that did actually concentrate his attention on the printed page before his eyes--a page of illustrated matter that concerned himself. A new batch of weekly periodicals had been placed in the ward--dated some two months back. He took one from the batch, opened it at random, and seated himself, with eyes fixed listlessly upon it, as far as might be from the gossiping groups gathered about the fires at each end of the ward. Absorbed more deeply than usual in his thoughts, he carelessly allowed it to be apparent that the journal was not holding his attention. It lay upon his knee. His eyes wandered from its direction.

"Matey," said the oldest sea-captain living, suddenly springing upon him, "Matey, I got me portograph in the Daily Mirror paper. You ain't never 'ad a fair look at it, Matey."

"Not now," said Mr. Wriford. "I'm reading."

He took up the paper that had rested on his knees; but the oldest sea-captain living placed upon it his cherished cutting from the Daily Mirror paper. "Well, read that, Matey," said the oldest sea-captain living. "That's better than any bit you've got there. Look, Matey. Look what it says." He indicated with a trembling finger the smudged and thumbed lettering beneath the smudged picture and read aloud: "'One of the most remarkable men to be found in our workusses--those re--those rep--those reposetteries of strange 'uman flotsam---is Cap'n Henery Peters, the oldest sea-captain living.' That's me, Matey. See my face? 'Cap'n Henery--'"

"Yes," said Mr. Wriford. "Yes. That's fine," and took up the cutting and handed it back.

"You ain't finished reading of it," protested the oldest sea-captain living.

"I have. I read quicker than you. I'll read it again in a minute. I just want to finish this. I'm in the middle of it."

The oldest sea-captain living protested anew. "You wasn't reading when I come up to you. I saw you wasn't."

"I was thinking. I'd just stopped to think."

It was an unfortunate excuse, arousing a fellow sympathy in the oldest sea-captain living. "Why, they do make you think, some of the words they writes, don't they?" said he. "Look at my bit--re--rep--reposetteries--there's one for yer. What's a re--rep--reposettery?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I don't neither, Matey," said the oldest sea-captain living, "an' I don't suppose that young chap as wrote it did." He pointed to the page upon which Mr. Wriford seemed to be engaged. "It's a cracker, Matey. You got some crackers there too by the look of it." He put his finger on a word of title lettering that ran in bold type across the top. "W-r-i-f-o-r-d," he spelt. "That's a crackjaw name for yer. What's it spell, Matey?"

But Mr. Wriford, attracted by the crackjaw name thus indicated, was now giving a real attention to the paper. The oldest sea-captain living concentrated upon his own beloved features in the Daily Mirror paper, and, engrossed upon them, drifted away.

Mr. Wriford read the headline, boldly printed:

"THE WRIFORD BOOM: ANOTHER BRILLIANT NOVEL."

It was a review--a remarkable eulogy--of the novel he had finished and deposited with his agent shortly before that sudden impulse on the Thames embankment. It was embellished with photographs of himself, with reproductions of the covers of his two earlier novels, with inscriptions announcing the prodigious number of editions into which they seemed to have gone, and with extracts of "exquisite" or "thought-provoking" or "witty" passages set in frames. Beneath that flaming "The Wriford Boom: Another Brilliant Novel" was a long sub-title in small black type epitomizing all that lay beneath it. Mr. Wriford read it curiously. In part it dealt with what was described in inverted commas as his "disappearance." Evidently much on that head was general knowledge. The writer scamped details leading up to his main point, the Wriford Boom and the contribution thereto of a brilliant new novel, with many a plausible "Of course." The mystery of the disappearance which was "of course" no longer a mystery; Mr. Wriford had "of course" been seen by a friend leaving Charing Cross by the Continental train a few days after his disappearance; later he had "of course" been seen in Paris, and he was now "of course" living somewhere on the Continent in complete seclusion. The writer contrasted this modest escape from lionisation with the conduct of other authors who "of course" need not be named, and proceeded to tremendous figures of book-sales, and of advance orders for the present volume, making his point finally with "A boom which, if started by the sensational 'disappearance,' has served to make almost every section of the general public share in the rare literary quality enjoyed by--comparatively speaking--the few who recognized Mr. Wriford's genius at the outset."

Mr. Wriford read it all curiously, with a sense of complete detachment. He looked at the photographs of himself, recalling the circumstances in which each had been taken and feeling himself somehow as unrecognisably different from them as the convalescent ward was different from the surroundings shown by the camera. He read the review of the new book, especially the passages quoted from it, recalling the thoughts with which each had been written and feeling them somehow to have belonged, not to himself, but to some other person who had communicated them to him and now had committed them to print. He reckoned idly and roughly the royalties that were represented by the prodigious figures of sales, and realised that a very great deal of money must be awaiting him in his agent's hands. But the thought of the money--the positive wealth to which it amounted--stirred him no more than the glowing terms of his appreciation in critical and popular opinion. It aroused only this thought: the memory that, in the days represented by those photographs, money then also had given him no smallest satisfaction. He had had no use for it. He had had no time to use it. So with success--no interest in it, no time to enjoy it; always driven, always driving to do something else, to catch up. Curious to think that once he would have sparkled over it, rejoiced in the money, thrilled in the triumph. Young Wriford would have--Young Wriford, that personality now immeasurably remote, whom once he had been. Why would Young Wriford have delighted? Ah, Young Wriford was happy. Why? What knew he, what possessed he, in those far distant years, that somehow had been lost, that he had thought, by breaking away and not caring for anything or anybody, to recover, that, now the experiment was over, showed itself more deeply lost than ever before? Where and how had that attribute of happiness--whatever it was--been dropped? ...

Lo, he was back again where the oldest sea-captain living had found him and had interrupted him, the paper fallen on his knees, his eyes gazing blankly before him: was there some secret of happiness he had missed?

As he mused he was again disturbed--this time by the Matron. It was a Board day, she told him, and he was to go before the guardians at once. The guardians were sitting late and had reached his case; ordinarily it would not have come up till next fortnight; after receiving the Medical Officer's report they attended personally to all convalescent ward cases.

The Matron gave Mr. Wriford this information as she conducted him to the Board-room door. "It'll be good-bye," she said, smiling at him kindly as she left him--he was different from the generality of her patients. "It'll be good-bye. You're passed out of the C. W."