THE VACANT CORNER
I
The morrow finds eager pupils awaiting Mr. Wriford, and eager work
and eager play, and again in the evening he is returning to the
plumber's shop occupied with the plans for the next day thrown up by
these new developments.
So it is also on the following day, and so the next, and so by day
and day and week and week. Interestedly and swiftly the time in
these preoccupations passes. He is quite surprised to find one
evening that weeks to the number of half the term have gone. Captain
of the School Abbot brings it to his notice; and on arrival at Tower
House next morning Mr. Wriford brings it, together with Abbot's
reason for mentioning it, to the notice of Mr. Pennyquick.
Mr. Wriford knocks on the study door, waits for the "One moment! One
moment!" which is called to him and which gives a chinking of glass
in suggestion of the fact that the Headmaster is putting away the
medicine bottles, exhibition of which, as an Open-air Man, is so
distasteful to him, and then enters to find the Open-air Man lying,
as usual, on the sofa, amidst an air that appears to have escaped
from beneath a cork rather than have come from the window.
Mr. Wriford expresses the hope that he is better, Mr. Pennyquick the
fear that he is not, and there is then brought forward the suggestion
advanced by Abbot.
"Thursday is half-term," says Mr. Wriford. "Do you think the boys
might have a holiday? They've been working very well."
"A whole holiday?" says Mr. Pennyquick doubtfully.
Mr. Wriford knows perfectly well the reason for the dubiety in the
Headmaster's voice. In these days he has taken the work of the
school entirely out of Mr. Pennyquick's hands. Mr. Pennyquick no
longer so much as reads roll-call and prayers. Abbot calls the roll
and is mighty proud of the duty; Mr. Wriford takes prayers. Mr.
Pennyquick perhaps twice in a week will tear himself from his sofa
and his medicines and suddenly burst upon the schoolroom, patrol a
few turns with loud and quite unnecessary "WORK UP'S!" and as
suddenly discharge himself again to his study.
The less frequently he appears, the more he shirks any scholastic
duties with the neglect they entail of nursing his distressing
ailments in the seclusion of his study. Thus it is the idea of
having the boys on his hands for a complete day that gives this doubt
to his tone when a whole holiday is projected, and Mr. Wriford, well
aware of it, quickly reassures him on the point.
"Well, I think they deserve a whole holiday," says Mr. Wriford. "Of
course I'd come up just the same and look after--"
"My dear fellow, a whole holiday by all means," Mr. Pennyquick breaks
in. "By all means. Splendid! They deserve it. You're doing
wonderfully with them, my dear fellow. My mother reports she has
never known them so happy or so well-behaved. No ragging in the
dormitories at night. Cold baths every morning at their own request.
Good God, do you know I'm so much a cold bath man myself that I take
one twice a day--twice a day winter and summer--when I'm fit. Clean
and smart and quiet at meals. Perfect silence in the schoolroom.
Keen, manly play in the field. Devoted to you. My dear fellow,
you're wonderful. Whole holiday? Whole holiday by all means. I was
going to suggest it myself."
"Thursday, then," says Mr. Wriford. "They'll be delighted. I
thought of playing cricket in the morning and then, if you agree,
asking Mrs. Pennyquick if she could fix us up some lunch and tea
things in hampers, and we'd go and picnic all the rest of the day at
Penrington woods and bathe in the river and that kind of thing."
The Headmaster thinks it splendid. "Splendid, my dear fellow.
Splendid. Certainly. I'll see to it myself. Cricket! Bathing!
Good God, you'll think it very weak of me, but I feel devilish near
crying when I think of a jolly day like that and me tied up here and
unable to share it. Cricket! Good God, why, when I was at Oxford I
made nine consecutive centuries for my college one year. It's a
fact. Nine absolutely--or was it ten? I must look it up. I believe
it was ten. Bathing! My dear fellow, a few years ago I thought
nothing of a couple of miles swim before breakfast--side-stroke,
breast-stroke, back-stroke; good God, I was an eel in the water, a
living eel. I'm an outdoor man, absolutely. Always have been.
That's the cruelty of it. Hullo, there's the bell. I shall take
prayers this morning, Wriford. I'm coming in all day for a real good
day's work with the dear fellows. I don't know what the doctor will
say, but I'm going to do it."
Mr. Wriford is at the door, and the Outdoor Man already stretching
down an arm to feel beneath the sofa. "Perhaps not prayers," says
the Outdoor Man. "You'd better not wait for me for prayers. I've
just my loathsome medicine to take. Take prayers for me for once,
like a good fellow, and I'll be with you in two minutes. Splendid.
You're wonderful. Two minutes. Damn."
There is the sound of a bottle upset beneath the sofa, and Mr.
Wriford hurries off to find Abbot already halfway through the roll,
then to take prayers, and then, amidst tremendous applause, to
announce a whole holiday for Thursday's half-term.
"Well, come on, let's make certain we deserve it," says Mr. Wriford,
when the manifestations of joy have been sufficiently expressed.
"Come along, Form Two, arithmetic. Let's see if we can't understand
these frightful decimals. Clean the blackboard, Toovey. Abbot, you
take Form Three behind the curtain and give them their dictation.
Here's the book. Find an interesting bit and read it out loud first.
Form One, you're algebra. You'd better take the next six examples.
Cupper, you're in charge. Now then, Two, crowd around. Where's the
chalk?"
II
This was the spirit of the lessons nowadays. Everybody worked.
Nobody shirked. Interest, even excitement, was found under Mr.
Wriford's guidance to lie in the hated lesson-books, and it was
excitedly wrestled out of them. Some of the subjects, as Mr. Wriford
taught them, were made exciting in themselves; the rest were somehow
inspired with the feeling that the next chapter--the next chapter
really is exciting once we can get to it. All the Tower House
schoolbooks were horribly thumbed and inked and dog-eared in their
first few pages--long indifferently laboured over, never understood,
cordially loathed. Beyond lay virgin pages, clean, untouched, many
sticking together as when fresh from the binder's press. "Look
here," Mr. Wriford used to say, "these French grammars, they're all
the same--all in a filthy state up to page thirty and rippingly clean
beyond, just like a new story-book. Look here, let's pretend all
that new part is a country we're going to emigrate into and explore,
and that first of all we've got to toil over the Rocky Mountains of
all this first muck. You half know it, you know. If we get through
a good few pages every time we'll get there like lightning. Come on!"
They always "came on" responsive to this kind of call. The work in
all the subjects belonged to the distant period of Mr. Wriford's own
school-days. He had to get it up as it came. He brought to the boys
the quite novel effect of a master learning with them as they learnt,
and that produced the stimulus of following him in place of the grind
of being driven. "My word, this is a teaser!" Mr. Wriford would say,
frankly stumped by an arithmetical problem; and the delighted laugh
that always greeted this was the impetus to an eager and intelligent
following him when he would get it aright and demonstrate its
processes. Wits were sharpened, perceptions stirred. Boyish high
spirits, mental alertness, and vigorous young qualities were rescued
from the dejection and apathy and slovenliness and ugliness that had
threatened to submerge them: and Mr. Wriford finds himself infected
and carried along by the moral quickening he has himself aroused.
III
He knows it. He feels it. He both knows and feels it because,
whereas formerly he groped ever in darkness of spirit and beneath
intolerable oppression of mind, now, when engaged in these
occupations or when thinking upon them, he is lifted out of himself,
and in the zest of their activities forgets the burden of his own
tribulations. Thus what had been all darkness, all shrinking, all
fears, becomes divided, as street lamps break the night, into periods
of light while he is within the arc of these pursuits and into
passages of the old gloom only between one day's leaving of the
school and the next morning's return to it. Slowly from this he
advances to stronger influence of the light, less frequent onset of
the shadows. First by these lamps the measureless blackness of his
way is broken. Gradually he is handed more quickly and more surely
from lamp to lamp. Not often now, with their immense and crushing
weight, their suffocating sense of numbing fear, those old and
intolerable clouds of misery descend upon him; not often now those
black abysses that yawned on every side about his feet; not often
those entombing walls that towered every way about his soul.
Sometimes they come. He, in the days of that nightmare hunted life
in London, sometimes had known snatched intervals of relief--in
companionship, in reading--in the midst of which there would strike
down upon him the thought that this was but transitory, that
presently it would end, that presently he would be returned to the
strain, to the fears, to the darkness, to the panic bursting to get
out of it. So now, sometimes, when his mind moved ever so little
from its occupation with these new interests, he would be clutched as
though immediately outside them clutching hands waited to drag him
out and drag him down--clutched and engulfed and bound again in bonds
of terror, as one whose pleasant slumber suddenly gives place to
dreadful sense of falling. In the midst of his thoughts upon some
aspect of work or play with his pupils, "This cannot go on always,"
he would think; "This will somehow come to an end sooner or later;"
and immediately the waiting hands would up and snatch him down;
immediately the fears oppress him; immediately the walls, the
blackness come; and he would cry: "What then? Where then?" and grope
again; and bruise once more himself on his despair; and plan to go
away and abandon it all, so that at least he might of his own will
leave these interests, not wait till suddenly they to their own end
should come and he be driven from them.
So sometimes these old tumults came upon him; yet came less
frequently, and the less frequently they came were with less
suffering escaped. Now, in their onsets, was for the first time a
way of refuge from them. Where formerly he had been utterly
abandoned to them, sinking more and more deeply within them at every
cry of his despair, now was a knowledge that they could be lost; and
quicker and more strongly a conscious grasp at what should lose them
and draw him out from their oppression. At first with dreadful
effort and often with defeat, gradually with less affliction and with
more certain hold, he would attempt to turn his mind from these
broodings and fasten it upon his enterprises in the school. There
was to be thought out a way of helping Form Two to get the hang of
parsing in their English grammar to-morrow; there was the idea of
starting the young beggars in a daily class of drill and physical
exercises; there was the plan of rummaging among Pennyquick's books
to pick out a little library of light reading for the boys and to
read to them himself for half an hour each day; there was the thought
of how jolly nicely they had responded to his proposal to go through
their play-boxes and pick out all the cheap trash he found they had
been reading, and of the jokes they had had over the bonfire made
from the collection; there was the thinking of other ways in which
this complete confidence they gave him could be used for their own
benefit; there was--there were a hundred of such preoccupations for
his mind, any one of which, could he but fix tenaciously enough upon
it, would draw him from the quicksands of his depression and set his
feet where strongly they bore him.
IV
Thus came he gradually into a state in which the old depths of
oppression troubled him no more; in which the apprehensive, hunted
look went from his eyes; in which sometimes a smile was to be seen
upon his face; and in which--to the observer--his outstanding
attribute was just that he was very quiet, very reserved: gently
responsive to advances from others but never of himself offering
conversation. So may one newly convalescent after great illness be
observed; and to this Mr. Wriford's case in these days may best be
likened. As the convalescent, after long pains, deliriums, fevers,
nights void of sleep, is carried to sit in the sunshine from the bed
where these have been endured, so in this haven rested Mr. Wriford
from his mind's distresses. There sits the patient, wan and weak,
desirous only to enjoy the pleasant air, wanting no more than just to
feed upon the smiling prospect his eyes that all the devils of his
fevered brain have burned; silently acquiescent to ministrations of
those who tend him. Here lived Mr. Wriford, quiet and reserved, no
longer preyed upon by those fierce storms of hopeless misery such as,
on the first night at the Bickers' table, had sent him torn and
broken from the room; wearing a gentle aspect now in place of those
contracted eyes, that knotted brow, born of the fever in his brain;
hands no longer trembling; voice eased of its strained and rasping
note that came of fear it should break out of his control and go in
tears of his distress. There rests the convalescent's body, thin and
enfeebled from its rackings on the bed. Here stayed Mr. Wriford,
wanting only here to stay where refuge was from all the devils that
had devoured him. There rests the patient, slowly replanning life
that death had challenged, sickness shattered. Here lived he,
quietly revolving what had brought him here and what should follow
now.
Was there something in life that he had missed? Calmly now he could
ask and search the question. Till now, since its first coming, it
had been as a gnawing tumour, as an empoisoned wound within him--an
inward fire, a pulsing abscess to relieve whose tortures he, as a
wild beast thus maddened that turns its jaws upon its vitals, had
bruised himself to madness in frantic goadings of his mind. Now he
could review it calmly, almost dispassionately. The thing was out of
him, no longer burning in his brain. Till now, he had thought upon
it in frenzy of despair, now he could stand as it were away from
it--turn it this way and that in examination with his hands, smile
and shake his head in puzzlement, and put it aside to go to his
duties with his boys, return and take it up and puzzle it again. Was
there something in life that he had missed? Yes, there was
something. He could unriddle it as far as that. He was at peace
now, but there was nothing in that peace. Some attribute was
missing. This was peace: but it was emptiness. This was quietness:
but a thousand leagues remote from happiness. Happiness was an
active thing, a stirring thing, a living thing, a warm thing, a
pulsing thing. Barren here, cold here. Let the mind run, let the
mind run about a thousand pleasures such as money could buy. They
might be his for the asking. He had but to return to London, and
they were his. Well, let the mind run. Back it would come
disconsolate, empty-handed, with no treasures in its pack. Nothing
attracted him. Ah, but somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, that thing
was--the live thing, the stirring thing, the active thing, the warm
thing. Something that he had missed in life: that was certain.
Happiness its name: that was assured. Where? In what? How to be
found? Only negative answers to these. Well, shake the head over it
and put it away; smile and confess its bafflement. Here are things
to be done. Do them and return to puzzle again in a little while.
So and in this wise quietly through the days--standing aside in this
retreat and looking at life as one that, furnishing a room, stands to
stare at a bare corner, and only knows something is wanted there, and
only knows that nothing of all he has will suit, and only turns away
but to return again and stare.