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The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #1264 · 339,014 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: April 1, 1998 [eBook #1264]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1264

Credits: Dianne Bean


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHEELS OF CHANCE: A BICYCLING IDYLL ***
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE;
A BICYCLING IDYLL

By H.G. Wells

1896




To
MY DEAR MOTHER




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTER IN THE STORY
  CHAPTER II
  CHAPTER III
  CHAPTER IV. THE RIDING FORTH OF MR. HOOPDRIVER
  CHAPTER V. THE SHAMEFUL EPISODE OF THE YOUNG LADY IN GREY
  CHAPTER VI. ON THE ROAD TO RIPLEY
  CHAPTER VII.
  CHAPTER VIII.
  CHAPTER IX. HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WAS HAUNTED
  CHAPTER X. THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER’S HEART
  CHAPTER XI. OMISSIONS
  CHAPTER XII. THE DREAMS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER
  CHAPTER XIII. HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WENT TO HASLEMERE
  CHAPTER XIV. HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER REACHED MIDHURST
  CHAPTER XV. AN INTERLUDE
  CHAPTER XVI. OF THE ARTIFICIAL IN MAN, AND OF THE ZEITGEIST
  CHAPTER XVII. THE ENCOUNTER AT MIDHURST
  CHAPTER XVIII.
  CHAPTER XIX.
  CHAPTER XX. THE PURSUIT
  CHAPTER XXI. AT BOGNOR
  CHAPTER XXII.
  CHAPTER XXIII.
  CHAPTER XXIV. THE MOONLIGHT RIDE
  CHAPTER XXV.
  CHAPTER XXVI. THE SURBITON INTERLUDE
  CHAPTER XXVII. THE AWAKENING OF MR. HOOPDRIVER
  CHAPTER XXVIII. THE DEPARTURE FROM CHICHESTER
  CHAPTER XXIX. THE UNEXPECTED ANECDOTE OF THE LION
  CHAPTER XXX. THE RESCUE EXPEDITION
  CHAPTER XXXI.
  CHAPTER XXXII. MR. HOOPDRIVER, KNIGHT ERRANT
  CHAPTER XXXIII. THE ABASEMENT OF MR. HOOPDRIVER
  CHAPTER XXXIV.
  CHAPTER XXXV.
  CHAPTER XXXVI.
  CHAPTER XXXVII. IN THE NEW FOREST
  CHAPTER XXXVIII. AT THE RUFUS STONE
  CHAPTER XXXIX.
  CHAPTER XL.
  CHAPTER XLI. THE ENVOY




I.
THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTER IN THE STORY


If you (presuming you are of the sex that does such things)—if you had
gone into the Drapery Emporium—which is really only magnificent for
shop—of Messrs. Antrobus & Co.—a perfectly fictitious “Co.,” by the
bye—of Putney, on the 14th of August, 1895, had turned to the
right-hand side, where the blocks of white linen and piles of blankets
rise up to the rail from which the pink and blue prints depend, you
might have been served by the central figure of this story that is now
beginning. He would have come forward, bowing and swaying, he would
have extended two hands with largish knuckles and enormous cuffs over
the counter, and he would have asked you, protruding a pointed chin and
without the slightest anticipation of pleasure in his manner, what he
might have the pleasure of showing you. Under certain circumstances—as,
for instance, hats, baby linen, gloves, silks, lace, or curtains—he
would simply have bowed politely, and with a drooping expression, and
making a kind of circular sweep, invited you to “step this way,” and so
led you beyond his ken; but under other and happier
conditions,—huckaback, blankets, dimity, cretonne, linen, calico, are
cases in point,—he would have requested you to take a seat, emphasising
the hospitality by leaning over the counter and gripping a chair back
in a spasmodic manner, and so proceeded to obtain, unfold, and exhibit
his goods for your consideration. Under which happier circumstances you
might—if of an observing turn of mind and not too much of a housewife
to be inhuman—have given the central figure of this story less cursory
attention.

Now if you had noticed anything about him, it would have been chiefly
to notice how little he was noticeable. He wore the black morning coat,
the black tie, and the speckled grey nether parts (descending into
shadow and mystery below the counter) of his craft. He was of a pallid
complexion, hair of a kind of dirty fairness, greyish eyes, and a
skimpy, immature moustache under his peaked indeterminate nose. His
features were all small, but none ill-shaped. A rosette of pins
decorated the lappel of his coat. His remarks, you would observe, were
entirely what people used to call _cliché_, formulae not organic to the
occasion, but stereotyped ages ago and learnt years since by heart.
“This, madam,” he would say, “is selling very well.” “We are doing a
very good article at four three a yard.” “We could show you something
better, of course.” “No trouble, madam, I assure you.” Such were the
simple counters of his intercourse. So, I say, he would have presented
himself to your superficial observation. He would have danced about
behind the counter, have neatly refolded the goods he had shown you,
have put on one side those you selected, extracted a little book with a
carbon leaf and a tinfoil sheet from a fixture, made you out a little
bill in that weak flourishing hand peculiar to drapers, and have bawled
“Sayn!” Then a puffy little shop-walker would have come into view,
looked at the bill for a second, very hard (showing you a parting down
the middle of his head meanwhile), have scribbled a still more
flourishing J. M. all over the document, have asked you if there was
nothing more, have stood by you—supposing that you were paying
cash—until the central figure of this story reappeared with the change.
One glance more at him, and the puffy little shop-walker would have
been bowing you out, with fountains of civilities at work all about
you. And so the interview would have terminated.

But real literature, as distinguished from anecdote, does not concern
itself with superficial appearances alone. Literature is revelation.
Modern literature is indecorous revelation. It is the duty of the
earnest author to tell you what you would not have seen—even at the
cost of some blushes. And the thing that you would not have seen about
this young man, and the thing of the greatest moment to this story, the
thing that must be told if the book is to be written, was—let us face
it bravely—the Remarkable Condition of this Young Man’s Legs.

Let us approach the business with dispassionate explicitness. Let us
assume something of the scientific spirit, the hard, almost
professorial tone of the conscientious realist. Let us treat this young
man’s legs as a mere diagram, and indicate the points of interest with
the unemotional precision of a lecturer’s pointer. And so to our
revelation. On the internal aspect of the right ankle of this young man
you would have observed, ladies and gentlemen, a contusion and an
abrasion; on the internal aspect of the left ankle a contusion also; on
its external aspect a large yellowish bruise. On his left shin there
were two bruises, one a leaden yellow graduating here and there into
purple, and another, obviously of more recent date, of a blotchy
red—tumid and threatening. Proceeding up the left leg in a spiral
manner, an unnatural hardness and redness would have been discovered on
the upper aspect of the calf, and above the knee and on the inner side,
an extraordinary expanse of bruised surface, a kind of closely stippled
shading of contused points. The right leg would be found to be bruised
in a marvellous manner all about and under the knee, and particularly
on the interior aspect of the knee. So far we may proceed with our
details. Fired by these discoveries, an investigator might perhaps have
pursued his inquiries further—to bruises on the shoulders, elbows, and
even the finger joints, of the central figure of our story. He had
indeed been bumped and battered at an extraordinary number of points.
But enough of realistic description is as good as a feast, and we have
exhibited enough for our purpose. Even in literature one must know
where to draw the line.

Now the reader may be inclined to wonder how a respectable young
shopman should have got his legs, and indeed himself generally, into
such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been sitting
with his nether extremities in some complicated machinery, a
threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making furies. But Sherlock
Holmes (now happily dead) would have fancied nothing of the kind. He
would have recognised at once that the bruises on the internal aspect
of the left leg, considered in the light of the distribution of the
other abrasions and contusions, pointed unmistakably to the violent
impact of the Mounting Beginner upon the bicycling saddle, and that the
ruinous state of the right knee was equally eloquent of the concussions
attendant on that person’s hasty, frequently causeless, and invariably
ill-conceived descents. One large bruise on the shin is even more
characteristic of the ’prentice cyclist, for upon every one of them
waits the jest of the unexpected treadle. You try at least to walk your
machine in an easy manner, and whack!—you are rubbing your shin. So out
of innocence we ripen. _Two_ bruises on that place mark a certain want
of aptitude in learning, such as one might expect in a person unused to
muscular exercise. Blisters on the hands are eloquent of the nervous
clutch of the wavering rider. And so forth, until Sherlock is presently
explaining, by the help of the minor injuries, that the machine ridden
is an old-fashioned affair with a fork instead of the diamond frame, a
cushioned tire, well worn on the hind wheel, and a gross weight all on
of perhaps three-and-forty pounds.

The revelation is made. Behind the decorous figure of the attentive
shopman that I had the honour of showing you at first, rises a vision
of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a machine in a dark
road,—the road, to be explicit, from Roehampton to Putney Hill,—and
with this vision is the sound of a heel spurning the gravel, a gasping
and grunting, a shouting of “Steer, man, steer!” a wavering unsteady
flight, a spasmodic turning of the missile edifice of man and machine,
and a collapse. Then you descry dimly through the dusk the central
figure of this story sitting by the roadside and rubbing his leg at
some new place, and his friend, sympathetic (but by no means
depressed), repairing the displacement of the handle-bar.

Thus even in a shop assistant does the warmth of manhood assert itself,
and drive him against all the conditions of his calling, against the
counsels of prudence and the restrictions of his means, to seek the
wholesome delights of exertion and danger and pain. And our first
examination of the draper reveals beneath his draperies—the man! To
which initial fact (among others) we shall come again in the end.




II


But enough of these revelations. The central figure of our story is now
going along behind the counter, a draper indeed, with your purchases in
his arms, to the warehouse, where the various articles you have
selected will presently be packed by the senior porter and sent to you.
Returning thence to his particular place, he lays hands on a folded
piece of gingham, and gripping the corners of the folds in his hands,
begins to straighten them punctiliously. Near him is an apprentice,
apprenticed to the same high calling of draper’s assistant, a ruddy,
red-haired lad in a very short tailless black coat and a very high
collar, who is deliberately unfolding and refolding some patterns of
cretonne. By twenty-one he too may hope to be a full-blown assistant,
even as Mr. Hoopdriver. Prints depend from the brass rails above them,
behind are fixtures full of white packages containing, as inscriptions
testify, _Lino, Hd Bk_, and _Mull_. You might imagine to see them that
the two were both intent upon nothing but smoothness of textile and
rectitude of fold. But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the
mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious
time—only four hours off now—when he will resume the tale of his
bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long long thoughts
of boyhood, and his imagination rides _cap-à-pie_ through the chambers
of his brain, seeking some knightly quest in honour of that Fair Lady,
the last but one of the girl apprentices to the dress-making upstairs.
He inclines rather to street fighting against revolutionaries—because
then she could see him from the window.

Jerking them back to the present comes the puffy little shop-walker,
with a paper in his hand. The apprentice becomes extremely active. The
shopwalker eyes the goods in hand. “Hoopdriver,” he says, “how’s that
line of g-sez-x ginghams?”

Hoopdriver returns from an imaginary triumph over the uncertainties of
dismounting. “They’re going fairly well, sir. But the larger checks
seem hanging.”

The shop-walker brings up parallel to the counter. “Any particular time
when you want your holidays?” he asks.

Hoopdriver pulls at his skimpy moustache. “No—Don’t want them too late,
sir, of course.”

“How about this day week?”

Hoopdriver becomes rigidly meditative, gripping the corners of the
gingham folds in his hands. His face is eloquent of conflicting
considerations. Can he learn it in a week? That’s the question.
Otherwise Briggs will get next week, and he will have to wait until
September—when the weather is often uncertain. He is naturally of a
sanguine disposition. All drapers have to be, or else they could never
have the faith they show in the beauty, washability, and unfading
excellence of the goods they sell you. The decision comes at last.
“That’ll do me very well,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, terminating the pause.

The die is cast.

The shop-walker makes a note of it and goes on to Briggs in the
“dresses,” the next in the strict scale of precedence of the Drapery
Emporium. Mr. Hoopdriver in alternating spasms anon straightens his
gingham and anon becomes meditative, with his tongue in the hollow of
his decaying wisdom tooth.




III


At supper that night, holiday talk held undisputed sway. Mr. Pritchard
spoke of “Scotland,” Miss Isaacs clamoured of Bettws-y-Coed, Mr. Judson
displayed a proprietary interest in the Norfolk Broads. “_I?_” said
Hoopdriver when the question came to him. “Why, cycling, of course.”

“You’re never going to ride that dreadful machine of yours, day after
day?” said Miss Howe of the Costume Department.

“I am,” said Hoopdriver as calmly as possible, pulling at the
insufficient moustache. “I’m going for a Cycling Tour. Along the South
Coast.”

“Well, all I hope, Mr. Hoopdriver, is that you’ll get fine weather,”
said Miss Howe. “And not come any nasty croppers.”

“And done forget some tinscher of arnica in yer bag,” said the junior
apprentice in the very high collar. (He had witnessed one of the
lessons at the top of Putney Hill.)

“You stow it,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking hard and threateningly at
the junior apprentice, and suddenly adding in a tone of bitter
contempt,—“Jampot.”

“I’m getting fairly safe upon it now,” he told Miss Howe.

At other times Hoopdriver might have further resented the satirical
efforts of the apprentice, but his mind was too full of the projected
Tour to admit any petty delicacies of dignity. He left the supper table
early, so that he might put in a good hour at the desperate gymnastics
up the Roehampton Road before it would be time to come back for locking
up. When the gas was turned off for the night he was sitting on the
edge of his bed, rubbing arnica into his knee—a new and very big
place—and studying a Road Map of the South of England. Briggs of the
“dresses,” who shared the room with him, was sitting up in bed and
trying to smoke in the dark. Briggs had never been on a cycle in his
life, but he felt Hoopdriver’s inexperience and offered such advice as
occurred to him.

“Have the machine thoroughly well oiled,” said Briggs, “carry one or
two lemons with you, don’t tear yourself to death the first day, and
sit upright. Never lose control of the machine, and always sound the
bell on every possible opportunity. You mind those things, and nothing
very much can’t happen to you, Hoopdriver—you take my word.”

He would lapse into silence for a minute, save perhaps for a curse or
so at his pipe, and then break out with an entirely different set of
tips.

“Avoid running over dogs, Hoopdriver, whatever you do. It’s one of the
worst things you can do to run over a dog. Never let the machine
buckle—there was a man killed only the other day through his wheel
buckling—don’t scorch, don’t ride on the foot-path, keep your own side
of the road, and if you see a tramline, go round the corner at once,
and hurry off into the next county—and always light up before dark. You
mind just a few little things like that, Hoopdriver, and nothing much
can’t happen to you—you take my word.”

“Right you are!” said Hoopdriver. “Good-night, old man.”

“Good-night,” said Briggs, and there was silence for a space, save for
the succulent respiration of the pipe. Hoopdriver rode off into
Dreamland on his machine, and was scarcely there before he was pitched
back into the world of sense again.—Something—what was it?

“Never oil the steering. It’s fatal,” a voice that came from round a
fitful glow of light, was saying. “And clean the chain daily with
black-lead. You mind just a few little things like that—”

“Lord _love_ us!” said Hoopdriver, and pulled the bedclothes over his
ears.




IV.
THE RIDING FORTH OF MR. HOOPDRIVER


Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year
round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer
time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. All
the dreary, uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains
fall about your feet. All at once you are Lord of yourself, Lord of
every hour in the long, vacant day; you may go where you please, call
none Sir or Madame, have a lappel free of pins, doff your black morning
coat, and wear the colour of your heart, and be a Man. You grudge
sleep, you grudge eating, and drinking even, their intrusion on those
exquisite moments. There will be no more rising before breakfast in
casual old clothing, to go dusting and getting ready in a cheerless,
shutter-darkened, wrappered-up shop, no more imperious cries of,
“Forward, Hoopdriver,” no more hasty meals, and weary attendance on
fitful old women, for ten blessed days. The first morning is by far the
most glorious, for you hold your whole fortune in your hands.
Thereafter, every night, comes a pang, a spectre, that will not be
exorcised—the premonition of the return. The shadow of going back, of
being put in the cage again for another twelve months, lies blacker and
blacker across the sunlight. But on the first morning of the ten the
holiday has no past, and ten days seems as good as infinity.

And it was fine, full of a promise of glorious days, a deep blue sky
with dazzling piles of white cloud here and there, as though celestial
haymakers had been piling the swathes of last night’s clouds into cocks
for a coming cartage. There were thrushes in the Richmond Road, and a
lark on Putney Heath. The freshness of dew was in the air; dew or the
relics of an overnight shower glittered on the leaves and grass.
Hoopdriver had breakfasted early by Mrs. Gunn’s complaisance. He
wheeled his machine up Putney Hill, and his heart sang within him.
Halfway up, a dissipated-looking black cat rushed home across the road
and vanished under a gate. All the big red-brick houses behind the
variegated shrubs and trees had their blinds down still, and he would
not have changed places with a soul in any one of them for a hundred
pounds.

He had on his new brown cycling suit—a handsome Norfolk jacket thing
for 30/(sp.)—and his legs—those martyr legs—were more than consoled by
thick chequered stockings, “thin in the foot, thick in the leg,” for
all they had endured. A neat packet of American cloth behind the saddle
contained his change of raiment, and the bell and the handle-bar and
the hubs and lamp, albeit a trifle freckled by wear, glittered
blindingly in the rising sunlight. And at the top of the hill, after
only one unsuccessful attempt, which, somehow, terminated on the green,
Hoopdriver mounted, and with a stately and cautious restraint in his
pace, and a dignified curvature of path, began his great Cycling Tour
along the Southern Coast.

There is only one phrase to describe his course at this stage, and that
is—voluptuous curves. He did not ride fast, he did not ride straight,
an exacting critic might say he did not ride well—but he rode
generously, opulently, using the whole road and even nibbling at the
footpath. The excitement never flagged. So far he had never passed or
been passed by anything, but as yet the day was young and the road was
clear. He doubted his steering so much that, for the present, he had
resolved to dismount at the approach of anything else upon wheels. The
shadows of the trees lay very long and blue across the road, the
morning sunlight was like amber fire.

At the cross-roads at the top of West Hill, where the cattle trough
stands, he turned towards Kingston and set himself to scale the little
bit of ascent. An early heath-keeper, in his velveteen jacket,
marvelled at his efforts. And while he yet struggled, the head of a
carter rose over the brow.

At the sight of him Mr. Hoopdriver, according to his previous
determination, resolved to dismount. He tightened the brake, and the
machine stopped dead. He was trying to think what he did with his right
leg whilst getting off. He gripped the handles and released the brake,
standing on the left pedal and waving his right foot in the air.
Then—these things take so long in the telling—he found the machine was
falling over to the right. While he was deciding upon a plan of action,
gravitation appears to have been busy. He was still irresolute when he
found the machine on the ground, himself kneeling upon it, and a vague
feeling in his mind that again Providence had dealt harshly with his
shin. This happened when he was just level with the heath-keeper. The
man in the approaching cart stood up to see the ruins better.

“_That_ ain’t the way to get off,” said the heath-keeper.

Mr. Hoopdriver picked up the machine. The handle was twisted askew
again. He said something under his breath. He would have to unscrew the
beastly thing.

“_That_ ain’t the way to get off,” repeated the heath-keeper, after a
silence.

“_I_ know that,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, testily, determined to overlook
the new specimen on his shin at any cost. He unbuckled the wallet
behind the saddle, to get out a screw hammer.

“If you know it ain’t the way to get off—whaddyer do it for?” said the
heath-keeper, in a tone of friendly controversy.

Mr. Hoopdriver got out his screw hammer and went to the handle. He was
annoyed. “That’s my business, I suppose,” he said, fumbling with the
screw. The unusual exertion had made his hands shake frightfully.

The heath-keeper became meditative, and twisted his stick in his hands
behind his back. “You’ve broken yer ’andle, ain’t yer?” he said
presently. Just then the screw hammer slipped off the nut. Mr.
Hoopdriver used a nasty, low word.

“They’re trying things, them bicycles,” said the heath-keeper,
charitably. “Very trying.” Mr. Hoopdriver gave the nut a vicious turn
and suddenly stood up—he was holding the front wheel between his knees.
“I wish,” said he, with a catch in his voice, “I wish you’d leave off
staring at me.”

Then with the air of one who has delivered an ultimatum, he began
replacing the screw hammer in the wallet.

The heath-keeper never moved. Possibly he raised his eyebrows, and
certainly he stared harder than he did before. “You’re pretty
unsociable,” he said slowly, as Mr. Hoopdriver seized the handles and
stood ready to mount as soon as the cart had passed.

The indignation gathered slowly but surely. “Why don’t you ride on a
private road of your own if no one ain’t to speak to you?” asked the
heath-keeper, perceiving more and more clearly the bearing of the
matter. “Can’t no one make a passin’ remark to you, Touchy? Ain’t I
good enough to speak to you? Been struck wooden all of a sudden?”

Mr. Hoopdriver stared into the Immensity of the Future. He was rigid
with emotion. It was like abusing the Lions in Trafalgar Square. But
the heath-keeper felt his honour was at stake.

“Don’t you make no remarks to ’_im_,” said the keeper as the carter
came up broadside to them. “’E’s a bloomin’ dook, ’e is. ’E don’t
converse with no one under a earl. ’E’s off to Windsor, ’e is; that’s
why ’e’s stickin’ his be’ind out so haughty. Pride! Why, ’e’s got so
much of it, ’e has to carry some of it in that there bundle there, for
fear ’e’d bust if ’e didn’t ease hisself a bit—’_E_—”

But Mr. Hoopdriver heard no more. He was hopping vigorously along the
road, in a spasmodic attempt to remount. He missed the treadle once and
swore viciously, to the keeper’s immense delight. “Nar! Nar!” said the
heath-keeper.

In another moment Mr. Hoopdriver was up, and after one terrific lurch
of the machine, the heath-keeper dropped out of earshot. Mr. Hoopdriver
would have liked to look back at his enemy, but he usually twisted
round and upset if he tried that. He had to imagine the indignant
heath-keeper telling the carter all about it. He tried to infuse as
much disdain as possible into his retreating aspect.

He drove on his sinuous way down the dip by the new mere and up the
little rise to the crest of the hill that drops into Kingston Vale; and
so remarkable is the psychology of cycling, that he rode all the
straighter and easier because the emotions the heath-keeper had aroused
relieved his mind of the constant expectation of collapse that had
previously unnerved him. To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love
affair—chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the
thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

Now you may perhaps imagine that as he rode on, his feelings towards
the heath-keeper were either vindictive or remorseful,—vindictive for
the aggravation or remorseful for his own injudicious display of ill
temper. As a matter of fact, they were nothing of the sort. A sudden, a
wonderful gratitude, possessed him. The Glory of the Holidays had
resumed its sway with a sudden accession of splendour. At the crest of
the hill he put his feet upon the footrests, and now riding moderately
straight, went, with a palpitating brake, down that excellent descent.
A new delight was in his eyes, quite over and above the pleasure of
rushing through the keen, sweet, morning air. He reached out his thumb
and twanged his bell out of sheer happiness.

“‘He’s a bloomin’ Dook—he is!’” said Mr. Hoopdriver to himself, in a
soft undertone, as he went soaring down the hill, and again, “‘He’s a
bloomin’ Dook!”’ He opened his mouth in a silent laugh. It was having a
decent cut did it. His social superiority had been so evident that even
a man like that noticed it. No more Manchester Department for ten days!
Out of Manchester, a Man. The draper Hoopdriver, the Hand, had vanished
from existence. Instead was a gentleman, a man of pleasure, with a
five-pound note, two sovereigns, and some silver at various convenient
points of his person. At any rate as good as a Dook, if not precisely
in the peerage. Involuntarily at the thought of his funds Hoopdriver’s
right hand left the handle and sought his breast pocket, to be
immediately recalled by a violent swoop of the machine towards the
cemetery. Whirroo! Just missed that half-brick! Mischievous brutes
there were in the world to put such a thing in the road. Some blooming
’Arry or other! Ought to prosecute a few of these roughs, and the rest
would know better. That must be the buckle of the wallet was rattling
on the mud-guard. How cheerfully the wheels buzzed!

The cemetery was very silent and peaceful, but the Vale was waking, and
windows rattled and squeaked up, and a white dog came out of one of the
houses and yelped at him. He got off, rather breathless, at the foot of
Kingston Hill, and pushed up. Halfway up, an early milk chariot rattled
by him; two dirty men with bundles came hurrying down. Hoopdriver felt
sure they were burglars, carrying home the swag.

It was up Kingston Hill that he first noticed a peculiar feeling, a
slight tightness at his knees; but he noticed, too, at the top that he
rode straighter than he did before. The pleasure of riding straight
blotted out these first intimations of fatigue. A man on horseback
appeared; Hoopdriver, in a tumult of soul at his own temerity, passed
him. Then down the hill into Kingston, with the screw hammer, behind in
the wallet, rattling against the oil can. He passed, without
misadventure, a fruiterer’s van and a sluggish cartload of bricks. And
in Kingston Hoopdriver, with the most exquisite sensations, saw the
shutters half removed from a draper’s shop, and two yawning youths, in
dusty old black jackets and with dirty white comforters about their
necks, clearing up the planks and boxes and wrappers in the window,
preparatory to dressing it out. Even so had Hoopdriver been on the
previous day. But now, was he not a bloomin’ Dook, palpably in the
sight of common men? Then round the corner to the right—bell banged
furiously—and so along the road to Surbiton.

Whoop for Freedom and Adventure! Every now and then a house with an
expression of sleepy surprise would open its eye as he passed, and to
the right of him for a mile or so the weltering Thames flashed and
glittered. Talk of your _joie de vivre!_ Albeit with a certain cramping
sensation about the knees and calves slowly forcing itself upon his
attention.




V.
THE SHAMEFUL EPISODE OF THE YOUNG LADY IN GREY


Now you must understand that Mr. Hoopdriver was not one of your fast
young men. If he had been King Lemuel, he could not have profited more
by his mother’s instructions. He regarded the feminine sex as something
to bow to and smirk at from a safe distance. Years of the intimate
remoteness of a counter leave their mark upon a man. It was an
adventure for him to take one of the Young Ladies of the establishment
to church on a Sunday. Few modern young men could have merited less the
epithet “Dorg.” But I have thought at times that his machine may have
had something of the blade in its metal. Decidedly it was a machine
with a past. Mr. Hoopdriver had bought it second-hand from Hare’s in
Putney, and Hare said it had had several owners. Second-hand was
scarcely the word for it, and Hare was mildly puzzled that he should be
selling such an antiquity. He said it was perfectly sound, if a little
old-fashioned, but he was absolutely silent about its moral character.
It may even have begun its career with a poet, say, in his glorious
youth. It may have been the bicycle of a Really Bad Man. No one who has
ever ridden a cycle of any kind but will witness that the things are
unaccountably prone to pick up bad habits—and keep them.

It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent
emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an
absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver’s
experience went. It “showed off”—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a
track like one of Beardsley’s feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that
his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant.

The Young Lady in Grey was also riding a bicycle. She was dressed in a
beautiful bluish-gray, and the sun behind her drew her outline in gold
and left the rest in shadow. Hoopdriver was dimly aware that she was
young, rather slender, dark, and with a bright colour and bright eyes.
Strange doubts possessed him as to the nature of her nether costume. He
had heard of such things of course. French, perhaps. Her handles
glittered; a jet of sunlight splashed off her bell blindingly. She was
approaching the high road along an affluent from the villas of
Surbiton. The roads converged slantingly. She was travelling at about
the same pace as Mr. Hoopdriver. The appearances pointed to a meeting
at the fork of the roads.

Hoopdriver was seized with a horrible conflict of doubts. By contrast
with her he rode disgracefully. Had he not better get off at once and
pretend something was wrong with his treadle? Yet even the end of
getting off was an uncertainty. That last occasion on Putney Heath! On
the other hand, what would happen if he kept on? To go very slow seemed
the abnegation of his manhood. To crawl after a mere schoolgirl!
Besides, she was not riding very fast. On the other hand, to thrust
himself in front of her, consuming the road in his tendril-like
advance, seemed an incivility—greed. He would leave her such a very
little. His business training made him prone to bow and step aside. If
only one could take one’s hands off the handles, one might pass with a
silent elevation of the hat, of course. But even that was a little
suggestive of a funeral.

Meanwhile the roads converged. She was looking at him. She was flushed,
a little thin, and had very bright eyes. Her red lips fell apart. She
may have been riding hard, but it looked uncommonly like a faint smile.
And the things were—yes!—_rationals!_ Suddenly an impulse to bolt from
the situation became clamorous. Mr. Hoopdriver pedalled convulsively,
intending to pass her. He jerked against some tin thing on the road,
and it flew up between front wheel and mud-guard. He twisted round
towards her. Had the machine a devil?

At that supreme moment it came across him that he would have done wiser
to dismount. He gave a frantic ‘whoop’ and tried to get round, then, as
he seemed falling over, he pulled the handles straight again and to the
left by an instinctive motion, and shot behind her hind wheel, missing
her by a hair’s breadth. The pavement kerb awaited him. He tried to
recover, and found himself jumped up on the pavement and riding
squarely at a neat wooden paling. He struck this with a terrific impact
and shot forward off his saddle into a clumsy entanglement. Then he
began to tumble over sideways, and completed the entire figure in a
sitting position on the gravel, with his feet between the fork and the
stay of the machine. The concussion on the gravel shook his entire
being. He remained in that position, wishing that he had broken his
neck, wishing even more heartily that he had never been born. The glory
of life had departed. Bloomin’ Dook, indeed! These unwomanly women!

There was a soft whirr, the click of a brake, two footfalls, and the
Young Lady in Grey stood holding her machine. She had turned round and
come back to him. The warm sunlight now was in her face. “Are you
hurt?” she said. She had a pretty, clear, girlish voice. She was really
very young—quite a girl, in fact. And rode so well! It was a bitter
draught.

Mr. Hoopdriver stood up at once. “Not a bit,” he said, a little
ruefully. He became painfully aware that large patches of gravel
scarcely improve the appearance of a Norfolk suit. “I’m very sorry
indeed—”

“It’s my fault,” she said, interrupting and so saving him on the very
verge of calling her ‘Miss.’ (He knew ‘Miss’ was wrong, but it was
deep-seated habit with him.) “I tried to pass you on the wrong side.”
Her face and eyes seemed all alive. “It’s my place to be sorry.”

“But it was my steering—”

“I ought to have seen you were a Novice”—with a touch of superiority.
“But you rode so straight coming along there!”

She really was—dashed pretty. Mr. Hoopdriver’s feelings passed the
nadir. When he spoke again there was the faintest flavour of the
aristocratic in his voice.

“It’s my first ride, as a matter of fact. But that’s no excuse for my
ah! blundering—”

“Your finger’s bleeding,” she said, abruptly.

He saw his knuckle was barked. “I didn’t feel it,” he said, feeling
manly.

“You don’t at first. Have you any sticking-plaster? If not—” She
balanced her machine against herself. She had a little side pocket, and
she whipped out a small packet of sticking-plaster with a pair of
scissors in a sheath at the side, and cut off a generous portion. He
had a wild impulse to ask her to stick it on for him. Controlled.
“Thank you,” he said.

“Machine all right?” she asked, looking past him at the prostrate
vehicle, her hands on her handle-bar. For the first time Hoopdriver did
not feel proud of his machine.

He turned and began to pick up the fallen fabric. He looked over his
shoulder, and she was gone, turned his head over the other shoulder
down the road, and she was riding off. “_Orf!_” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“Well, I’m blowed!—Talk about Slap Up!” (His aristocratic refinement
rarely adorned his speech in his private soliloquies.) His mind was
whirling. One fact was clear. A most delightful and novel human being
had flashed across his horizon and was going out of his life again. The
Holiday madness was in his blood. She looked round!

At that he rushed his machine into the road, and began a hasty ascent.
Unsuccessful. Try again. Confound it, will he _never_ be able to get up
on the thing again? She will be round the corner in a minute. Once
more. Ah! Pedal! Wabble! No! Right this time! He gripped the handles
and put his head down. He would overtake her.

The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment
over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals
with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple
bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She
vanished round the corner. His effort was Titanic. What should he say
when he overtook her? That scarcely disturbed him at first. How fine
she had looked, flushed with the exertion of riding, breathing a little
fast, but elastic and active! Talk about your ladylike, homekeeping
girls with complexions like cold veal! But what should he say to her?
That was a bother. And he could not lift his cap without risking a
repetition of his previous ignominy. She was a real Young Lady. No
mistake about that! None of your blooming shop girls. (There is no
greater contempt in the world than that of shop men for shop girls,
unless it be that of shop girls for shop men.) Phew! This was work. A
certain numbness came and went at his knees.

“May I ask to whom I am indebted?” he panted to himself, trying it
over. That might do. Lucky he had a card case! A hundred a
shilling—while you wait. He was getting winded. The road was certainly
a bit uphill. He turned the corner and saw a long stretch of road, and
a grey dress vanishing. He set his teeth. Had he gained on her at all?
“Monkey on a gridiron!” yelped a small boy. Hoopdriver redoubled his
efforts. His breath became audible, his steering unsteady, his
pedalling positively ferocious. A drop of perspiration ran into his
eye, irritant as acid. The road really was uphill beyond dispute. All
his physiology began to cry out at him. A last tremendous effort
brought him to the corner and showed yet another extent of shady
roadway, empty save for a baker’s van. His front wheel suddenly
shrieked aloud. “Oh Lord!” said Hoopdriver, relaxing.

Anyhow she was not in sight. He got off unsteadily, and for a moment
his legs felt like wisps of cotton. He balanced his machine against the
grassy edge of the path and sat down panting. His hands were gnarled
with swollen veins and shaking palpably, his breath came viscid.

“I’m hardly in training yet,” he remarked. His legs had gone leaden. “I
don’t feel as though I’d had a mouthful of breakfast.” Presently he
slapped his side pocket and produced therefrom a brand-new cigarette
case and a packet of Vansittart’s Red Herring cigarettes. He filled the
case. Then his eye fell with a sudden approval on the ornamental
chequering of his new stockings. The expression in his eyes faded
slowly to abstract meditation.

“She _was_ a stunning girl,” he said. “I wonder if I shall ever set
eyes on her again. And she knew how to ride, too! Wonder what she
thought of me.”

The phrase ‘bloomin’ Dook’ floated into his mind with a certain flavour
of comfort.

He lit a cigarette, and sat smoking and meditating. He did not even
look up when vehicles passed. It was perhaps ten minutes before he
roused himself. “What rot it is! What’s the good of thinking such
things,” he said. “I’m only a blessed draper’s assistant.” (To be
exact, he did not say blessed. The service of a shop may polish a man’s
exterior ways, but the ’prentices’ dormitory is an indifferent school
for either manners or morals.) He stood up and began wheeling his
machine towards Esher. It was going to be a beautiful day, and the
hedges and trees and the open country were all glorious to his
town-tired eyes. But it was a little different from the elation of his
start.

“Look at the gentleman wizzer bicitle,” said a nursemaid on the path to
a personage in a perambulator. That healed him a little. “‘Gentleman
wizzer bicitle,’—‘bloomin’ Dook’—I can’t look so very seedy,” he said
to himself.

“I _wonder_—I should just like to know—”

There was something very comforting in the track of _her_ pneumatic
running straight and steady along the road before him. It must be hers.
No other pneumatic had been along the road that morning. It was just
possible, of course, that he might see her once more—coming back.
Should he try and say something smart? He speculated what manner of
girl she might be. Probably she was one of these here New Women. He had
a persuasion the cult had been maligned. Anyhow she was a Lady. And
rich people, too! Her machine couldn’t have cost much under twenty
pounds. His mind came round and dwelt some time on her visible self.
Rational dress didn’t look a bit unwomanly. However, he disdained to be
one of your fortune-hunters. Then his thoughts drove off at a tangent.
He would certainly have to get something to eat at the next public
house.




VI.
ON THE ROAD TO RIPLEY


In the fulness of time, Mr. Hoopdriver drew near the Marquis of Granby
at Esher, and as he came under the railway arch and saw the inn in
front of him, he mounted his machine again and rode bravely up to the
doorway. Burton and biscuit and cheese he had, which, indeed, is Burton
in its proper company; and as he was eating there came a middleaged man
in a drab cycling suit, very red and moist and angry in the face, and
asked bitterly for a lemon squash. And he sat down upon the seat in the
bar and mopped his face. But scarcely had he sat down before he got up
again and stared out of the doorway.

“Damn!” said he. Then, “Damned Fool!”

“Eigh?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking round suddenly with a piece of
cheese in his cheek.

The man in drab faced him. “I called myself a Damned Fool, sir. Have
you any objections?”

“Oh!—None. None,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “I thought you spoke to me. I
didn’t hear what you said.”

“To have a contemplative disposition and an energetic temperament, sir,
is hell. Hell, I tell you. A contemplative disposition and a phlegmatic
temperament, all very well. But energy and philosophy—!”

Mr. Hoopdriver looked as intelligent as he could, but said nothing.

“There’s no hurry, sir, none whatever. I came out for exercise, gentle
exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I
get on the accursed machine, than off I go hammer and tongs; I never
look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view, get
hot, juicy, red,—like a grilled chop. Here I am, sir. Come from
Guildford in something under the hour. _why_, sir?”

Mr. Hoopdriver shook his head.

“Because I’m a damned fool, sir. Because I’ve reservoirs and reservoirs
of muscular energy, and one or other of them is always leaking. It’s a
most interesting road, birds and trees, I’ve no doubt, and wayside
flowers, and there’s nothing I should enjoy more than watching them.
But I can’t. Get me on that machine, and I have to go. Get me on
anything, and I have to go. And I don’t want to go a bit. _Why_ should
a man rush about like a rocket, all pace and fizzle? Why? It makes me
furious. I can assure you, sir, I go scorching along the road, and
cursing aloud at myself for doing it. A quiet, dignified, philosophical
man, that’s what I am—at bottom; and here I am dancing with rage and
swearing like a drunken tinker at a perfect stranger—

“But my day’s wasted. I’ve lost all that country road, and now I’m on
the fringe of London. And I might have loitered all the morning! Ugh!
Thank Heaven, sir, you have not the irritable temperament, that you are
not goaded to madness by your endogenous sneers, by the eternal
wrangling of an uncomfortable soul and body. I tell you, I lead a cat
and dog life—But what _is_ the use of talking?—It’s all of a piece!”

He tossed his head with unspeakable self-disgust, pitched the lemon
squash into his mouth, paid for it, and without any further remark
strode to the door. Mr. Hoopdriver was still wondering what to say when
his interlocutor vanished. There was a noise of a foot spurning the
gravel, and when Mr. Hoopdriver reached the doorway, the man in drab
was a score of yards Londonward. He had already gathered pace. He
pedalled with ill-suppressed anger, and his head was going down. In
another moment he flew swiftly out of sight under the railway arch, and
Mr. Hoopdriver saw him no more.




VII.


After this whirlwind Mr. Hoopdriver paid his reckoning and—being now a
little rested about the muscles of the knees—resumed his saddle and
rode on in the direction of Ripley, along an excellent but undulating
road. He was pleased to find his command over his machine already
sensibly increased. He set himself little exercises as he went along
and performed them with variable success. There was, for instance,
steering in between a couple of stones, say a foot apart, a deed of
little difficulty as far as the front wheel is concerned. But the back
wheel, not being under the sway of the human eye, is apt to take a
vicious jump over the obstacle, which sends a violent concussion all
along the spine to the skull, and will even jerk a loosely fastened hat
over the eyes, and so lead to much confusion. And again, there was
taking the hand or hands off the handlebar, a thing simple in itself,
but complex in its consequences. This particularly was a feat Mr.
Hoopdriver desired to do, for several divergent reasons; but at present
it simply led to convulsive balancings and novel and inelegant modes of
dismounting.

The human nose is, at its best, a needless excrescence. There are those
who consider it ornamental, and would regard a face deprived of its
assistance with pity or derision; but it is doubtful whether our esteem
is dictated so much by a sense of its absolute beauty as by the
vitiating effect of a universally prevalent fashion. In the case of
bicycle students, as in the young of both sexes, its inutility is
aggravated by its persistent annoyance—it requires constant attention.
Until one can ride with one hand, and search for, secure, and use a
pocket handkerchief with the other, cycling is necessarily a constant
series of descents. Nothing can be further from the author’s ambition
than a wanton realism, but Mr. Hoopdriver’s nose is a plain and salient
fact, and face it we must. And, in addition to this inconvenience,
there are flies. Until the cyclist can steer with one hand, his face is
given over to Beelzebub. Contemplative flies stroll over it, and trifle
absently with its most sensitive surfaces. The only way to dislodge
them is to shake the head forcibly and to writhe one’s features
violently. This is not only a lengthy and frequently ineffectual
method, but one exceedingly terrifying to foot passengers. And again,
sometimes the beginner rides for a space with one eye closed by
perspiration, giving him a waggish air foreign to his mood and ill
calculated to overawe the impertinent. However, you will appreciate now
the motive of Mr. Hoopdriver’s experiments. He presently attained
sufficient dexterity to slap himself smartly and violently in the face
with his right hand, without certainly overturning the machine; but his
pocket handkerchief might have been in California for any good it was
to him while he was in the saddle.

Yet you must not think that because Mr. Hoopdriver was a little
uncomfortable, he was unhappy in the slightest degree. In the
background of his consciousness was the sense that about this time
Briggs would be half-way through his window dressing, and Gosling, the
apprentice, busy, with a chair turned down over the counter and his
ears very red, trying to roll a piece of huckaback—only those who have
rolled pieces of huckaback know quite how detestable huckaback is to
roll—and the shop would be dusty and, perhaps, the governor about and
snappy. And here was quiet and greenery, and one mucked about as the
desire took one, without a soul to see, and here was no wailing of
“Sayn,” no folding of remnants, no voice to shout, “Hoopdriver,
forward!” And once he almost ran over something wonderful, a little,
low, red beast with a yellowish tail, that went rushing across the road
before him. It was the first weasel he had ever seen in his cockney
life. There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him,
pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down,
lush meadows, where shining rivers wound their lazy way, villages with
square-towered, flint churches, and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns,
clean, white, country towns, long downhill stretches, where one might
ride at one’s ease (overlooking a jolt or so), and far away, at the end
of it all,—the sea.

What mattered a fly or so in the dawn of these delights? Perhaps he had
been dashed a minute by the shameful episode of the Young Lady in Grey,
and perhaps the memory of it was making itself a little lair in a
corner of his brain from which it could distress him in the retrospect
by suggesting that he looked like a fool; but for the present that
trouble was altogether in abeyance. The man in drab—evidently a
swell—had spoken to him as his equal, and the knees of his brown suit
and the chequered stockings were ever before his eyes. (Or, rather, you
could see the stockings by carrying the head a little to one side.) And
to feel, little by little, his mastery over this delightful,
treacherous machine, growing and growing! Every half-mile or so his
knees reasserted themselves, and he dismounted and sat awhile by the
roadside.

It was at a charming little place between Esher and Cobham, where a
bridge crosses a stream, that Mr. Hoopdriver came across the other
cyclist in brown. It is well to notice the fact here, although the
interview was of the slightest, because it happened that subsequently
Hoopdriver saw a great deal more of this other man in brown. The other
cyclist in brown had a machine of dazzling newness, and a punctured
pneumatic lay across his knees. He was a man of thirty or more, with a
whitish face, an aquiline nose, a lank, flaxen moustache, and very fair
hair, and he scowled at the job before him. At the sight of him Mr.
Hoopdriver pulled himself together, and rode by with the air of one
born to the wheel. “A splendid morning,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “and a
fine surface.”

“The morning and you and the surface be everlastingly damned!” said the
other man in brown as Hoopdriver receded. Hoopdriver heard the mumble
and did not distinguish the words, and he felt a pleasing sense of
having duly asserted the wide sympathy that binds all cyclists
together, of having behaved himself as becomes one of the brotherhood
of the wheel. The other man in brown watched his receding aspect.
“Greasy proletarian,” said the other man in brown, feeling a prophetic
dislike. “Got a suit of brown, the very picture of this. One would
think his sole aim in life had been to caricature me. It’s Fortune’s
way with me. Look at his insteps on the treadles! Why does Heaven make
such men?”

And having lit a cigarette, the other man in brown returned to the
business in hand.

Mr. Hoopdriver worked up the hill towards Cobham to a point that he
felt sure was out of sight of the other man in brown, and then he
dismounted and pushed his machine; until the proximity of the village
and a proper pride drove him into the saddle again.




VIII.


Beyond Cobham came a delightful incident, delightful, that is, in its
beginning if a trifle indeterminate in the retrospect. It was perhaps
half-way between Cobham and Ripley. Mr. Hoopdriver dropped down a
little hill, where, unfenced from the road, fine mossy trees and
bracken lay on either side; and looking up he saw an open country
before him, covered with heather and set with pines, and a yellow road
running across it, and half a mile away perhaps, a little grey figure
by the wayside waving something white. “Never!” said Mr. Hoopdriver
with his hands tightening on the handles.

He resumed the treadles, staring away before him, jolted over a stone,
wabbled, recovered, and began riding faster at once, with his eyes
ahead. “It can’t be,” said Hoopdriver.

He rode his straightest, and kept his pedals spinning, albeit a limp
numbness had resumed possession of his legs. “It _can’t_ be,” he
repeated, feeling every moment more assured that it _was_. “Lord! I
don’t know even now,” said Mr. Hoopdriver (legs awhirling), and then,
“Blow my legs!”

But he kept on and drew nearer and nearer, breathing hard and gathering
flies like a flypaper. In the valley he was hidden. Then the road began
to rise, and the resistance of the pedals grew. As he crested the hill
he saw her, not a hundred yards away from him. “It’s her!” he said.
“It’s her—right enough. It’s the suit’s done it,”—which was truer even
than Mr. Hoopdriver thought. But now she was not waving her
handkerchief, she was not even looking at him. She was wheeling her
machine slowly along the road towards him, and admiring the pretty
wooded hills towards Weybridge. She might have been unaware of his
existence for all the recognition he got.

For a moment horrible doubts troubled Mr. Hoopdriver. Had that
handkerchief been a dream? Besides which he was deliquescent and
scarlet, and felt so. It must be her coquetry—the handkerchief was
indisputable. Should he ride up to her and get off, or get off and ride
up to her? It was as well she didn’t look, because he would certainly
capsize if he lifted his cap. Perhaps that was her consideration. Even
as he hesitated he was upon her. She must have heard his breathing. He
gripped the brake. Steady! His right leg waved in the air, and he came
down heavily and staggering, but erect. She turned her eyes upon him
with admirable surprise.

Mr. Hoopdriver tried to smile pleasantly, hold up his machine, raise
his cap, and bow gracefully. Indeed, he felt that he did as much. He
was a man singularly devoid of the minutiæ of self-consciousness, and
he was quite unaware of a tail of damp hair lying across his forehead,
and just clearing his eyes, and of the general disorder of his
coiffure. There was an interrogative pause.

“What can I have the pleasure—” began Mr. Hoopdriver, insinuatingly. “I
mean” (remembering his emancipation and abruptly assuming his most
aristocratic intonation), “can I be of any assistance to you?”

The Young Lady in Grey bit her lower lip and said very prettily, “None,
thank you.” She glanced away from him and made as if she would proceed.

“Oh!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, taken aback and suddenly crestfallen again.
It was so unexpected. He tried to grasp the situation. Was she
coquetting? Or had he—?

“Excuse me, one minute,” he said, as she began to wheel her machine
again.

“Yes?” she said, stopping and staring a little, with the colour in her
cheeks deepening.

“I should not have alighted if I had not—imagined that you—er, waved
something white—” He paused.

She looked at him doubtfully. He _had_ seen it! She decided that he was
not an unredeemed rough taking advantage of a mistake, but an innocent
soul meaning well while seeking happiness. “I _did_ wave my
handkerchief,” she said. “I’m very sorry. I am expecting—a friend, a
gentleman,”—she seemed to flush pink for a minute. “He is riding a
bicycle and dressed in—in brown; and at a distance, you know—”

“Oh, quite!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, bearing up in manly fashion against
his bitter disappointment. “Certainly.”

“I’m awfully sorry, you know. Troubling you to dismount, and all that.”

“No trouble. ’Ssure you,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, mechanically and bowing
over his saddle as if it was a counter. Somehow he could not find it in
his heart to tell her that the man was beyond there with a punctured
pneumatic. He looked back along the road and tried to think of
something else to say. But the gulf in the conversation widened rapidly
and hopelessly. “There’s nothing further,” began Mr. Hoopdriver
desperately, recurring to his stock of _clichés_.

“Nothing, thank you,” she said decisively. And immediately, “This _is_
the Ripley road?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Ripley is about two miles from here.
According to the mile-stones.”

“Thank you,” she said warmly. “Thank you so much. I felt sure there was
no mistake. And I really am awfully sorry—”

“Don’t mention it,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Don’t mention it.” He
hesitated and gripped his handles to mount. “It’s me,” he said, “ought
to be sorry.” Should he say it? Was it an impertinence? Anyhow!—“Not
being the other gentleman, you know.”

He tried a quietly insinuating smile that he knew for a grin even as he
smiled it; felt she disapproved—that she despised him, was overcome
with shame at her expression, turned his back upon her, and began (very
clumsily) to mount. He did so with a horrible swerve, and went
pedalling off, riding very badly, as he was only too painfully aware.
Nevertheless, thank Heaven for the mounting! He could not see her
because it was so dangerous for him to look round, but he could imagine
her indignant and pitiless. He felt an unspeakable idiot. One had to be
so careful what one said to Young Ladies, and he’d gone and treated her
just as though she was only a Larky Girl. It was unforgivable. He
always _was_ a fool. You could tell from her manner she didn’t think
him a gentleman. One glance, and she seemed to look clear through him
and all his presence. What rot it was venturing to speak to a girl like
that! With her education she was bound to see through him at once.

How nicely she spoke too! nice clear-cut words! She made him feel what
slush his own accent was. And that last silly remark. What was it? ‘Not
being the other gentleman, you know!’ No point in it. And
‘_gentleman!_’ What _could_ she be thinking of him?

But really the Young Lady in Grey had dismissed Hoopdriver from her
thoughts almost before he had vanished round the corner. She had
thought no ill of him. His manifest awe and admiration of her had given
her not an atom of offence. But for her just now there were weightier
things to think about, things that would affect all the rest of her
life. She continued slowly walking her machine Londonward. Presently
she stopped. “Oh! Why _doesn’t_ he come?” she said, and stamped her
foot petulantly. Then, as if in answer, coming down the hill among the
trees, appeared the other man in brown, dismounted and wheeling his
machine.




IX.
HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WAS HAUNTED


As Mr. Hoopdriver rode swaggering along the Ripley road, it came to
him, with an unwarrantable sense of comfort, that he had seen the last
of the Young Lady in Grey. But the ill-concealed bladery of the
machine, the present machinery of Fate, the _deus ex machina_, so to
speak, was against him. The bicycle, torn from this attractive young
woman, grew heavier and heavier, and continually more unsteady. It
seemed a choice between stopping at Ripley or dying in the flower of
his days. He went into the Unicorn, after propping his machine outside
the door, and, as he cooled down and smoked his Red Herring cigarette
while the cold meat was getting ready, he saw from the window the Young
Lady in Grey and the other man in brown, entering Ripley.

They filled him with apprehension by looking at the house which
sheltered him, but the sight of his bicycle, propped in a drunk and
incapable attitude against the doorway, humping its rackety mud-guard
and leering at them with its darkened lantern eye, drove them away—so
it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver—to the spacious swallow of the Golden
Dragon. The young lady was riding very slowly, but the other man in
brown had a bad puncture and was wheeling his machine. Mr. Hoopdriver
noted his flaxen moustache, his aquiline nose, his rather bent
shoulders, with a sudden, vivid dislike.

The maid at the Unicorn is naturally a pleasant girl, but she is jaded
by the incessant incidence of cyclists, and Hoopdriver’s mind, even as
he conversed with her in that cultivated voice of his—of the weather,
of the distance from London, and of the excellence of the Ripley
road—wandered to the incomparable freshness and brilliance of the Young
Lady in Grey. As he sat at meat he kept turning his head to the window
to see what signs there were of that person, but the face of the Golden
Dragon displayed no appreciation of the delightful morsel it had
swallowed. As an incidental consequence of this distraction, Mr.
Hoopdriver was for a minute greatly inconvenienced by a mouthful of
mustard. After he had called for his reckoning he went, his courage
being high with meat and mustard, to the door, intending to stand, with
his legs wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets, and stare boldly
across the road. But just then the other man in brown appeared in the
gateway of the Golden Dragon yard—it is one of those delightful inns
that date from the coaching days—wheeling his punctured machine. He was
taking it to Flambeau’s, the repairer’s. He looked up and saw
Hoopdriver, stared for a minute, and then scowled darkly.

But Hoopdriver remained stoutly in the doorway until the other man in
brown had disappeared into Flambeau’s. Then he glanced momentarily at
the Golden Dragon, puckered his mouth into a whistle of unconcern, and
proceeded to wheel his machine into the road until a sufficient margin
for mounting was secured.

Now, at that time, I say, Hoopdriver was rather desirous than not of
seeing no more of the Young Lady in Grey. The other man in brown he
guessed was her brother, albeit that person was of a pallid fairness,
differing essentially from her rich colouring; and, besides, he felt he
had made a hopeless fool of himself. But the afternoon was against him,
intolerably hot, especially on the top of his head, and the virtue had
gone out of his legs to digest his cold meat, and altogether his ride
to Guildford was exceedingly intermittent. At times he would walk, at
times lounge by the wayside, and every public house, in spite of Briggs
and a sentiment of economy, meant a lemonade and a dash of bitter. (For
that is the experience of all those who go on wheels, that drinking
begets thirst, even more than thirst begets drinking, until at last the
man who yields becomes a hell unto himself, a hell in which the fire
dieth not, and the thirst is not quenched.) Until a pennyworth of acrid
green apples turned the current that threatened to carry him away. Ever
and again a cycle, or a party of cyclists, would go by, with glittering
wheels and softly running chains, and on each occasion, to save his
self-respect, Mr. Hoopdriver descended and feigned some trouble with
his saddle. Each time he descended with less trepidation.

He did not reach Guildford until nearly four o’clock, and then he was
so much exhausted that he decided to put up there for the night, at the
Yellow Hammer Coffee Tavern. And after he had cooled a space and
refreshed himself with tea and bread and butter and jam,—the tea he
drank noisily out of the saucer,—he went out to loiter away the rest of
the afternoon. Guildford is an altogether charming old town, famous, so
he learnt from a Guide Book, as the scene of Master Tupper’s great
historical novel of Stephen Langton, and it has a delightful castle,
all set about with geraniums and brass plates commemorating the
gentlemen who put them up, and its Guildhall is a Tudor building, very
pleasant to see, and in the afternoon the shops are busy and the people
going to and fro make the pavements look bright and prosperous. It was
nice to peep in the windows and see the heads of the men and girls in
the drapers’ shops, busy as busy, serving away. The High Street runs
down at an angle of seventy degrees to the horizon (so it seemed to Mr.
Hoopdriver, whose feeling for gradients was unnaturally exalted), and
it brought his heart into his mouth to see a cyclist ride down it, like
a fly crawling down a window pane. The man hadn’t even a brake. He
visited the castle early in the evening and paid his twopence to ascend
the Keep.

At the top, from the cage, he looked down over the clustering red roofs
of the town and the tower of the church, and then going to the southern
side sat down and lit a Red Herring cigarette, and stared away south
over the old bramble-bearing, fern-beset ruin, at the waves of blue
upland that rose, one behind another, across the Weald, to the lazy
altitudes of Hindhead and Butser. His pale grey eyes were full of
complacency and pleasurable anticipation. Tomorrow he would go riding
across that wide valley.

He did not notice any one else had come up the Keep after him until he
heard a soft voice behind him saying: “Well, _Miss Beaumont_, here’s
the view.” Something in the accent pointed to a jest in the name.

“It’s a dear old town, brother George,” answered another voice that
sounded familiar enough, and turning his head, Mr. Hoopdriver saw the
other man in brown and the Young Lady in Grey, with their backs towards
him. She turned her smiling profile towards Hoopdriver. “Only, you
know, brothers don’t call their sisters—”

She glanced over her shoulder and saw Hoopdriver. “Damn!” said the
other man in brown, quite audibly, starting as he followed her glance.

Mr. Hoopdriver, with a fine air of indifference, resumed the Weald.
“Beautiful old town, isn’t it?” said the other man in brown, after a
quite perceptible pause.

“Isn’t it?” said the Young Lady in Grey.

Another pause began.

“Can’t get alone anywhere,” said the other man in brown, looking round.

Then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived clearly that he was in the way, and
decided to retreat. It was just his luck of course that he should
stumble at the head of the steps and vanish with indignity. This was
the third time that he’d seen _him_, and the fourth time _her_. And of
course he was too big a fat-head to raise his cap to her! He thought of
that at the foot of the Keep. Apparently they aimed at the South Coast
just as he did. He’d get up betimes the next day and hurry off to avoid
her—them, that is. It never occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver that Miss
Beaumont and her brother might do exactly the same thing, and that
evening, at least, the peculiarity of a brother calling his sister
“Miss Beaumont” did not recur to him. He was much too preoccupied with
an analysis of his own share of these encounters. He found it hard to
be altogether satisfied about the figure he had cut, revise his
memories as he would.

Once more quite unintentionally he stumbled upon these two people. It
was about seven o’clock. He stopped outside a linen draper’s and peered
over the goods in the window at the assistants in torment. He could
have spent a whole day happily at that. He told himself that he was
trying to see how they dressed out the brass lines over their counters,
in a purely professional spirit, but down at the very bottom of his
heart he knew better. The customers were a secondary consideration, and
it was only after the lapse of perhaps a minute that he perceived that
among them was—the Young Lady in Grey! He turned away from the window
at once, and saw the other man in brown standing at the edge of the
pavement and regarding him with a very curious expression of face.

There came into Mr. Hoopdriver’s head the curious problem whether he
was to be regarded as a nuisance haunting these people, or whether they
were to be regarded as a nuisance haunting him. He abandoned the
solution at last in despair, quite unable to decide upon the course he
should take at the next encounter, whether he should scowl savagely at
the couple or assume an attitude eloquent of apology and propitiation.




X.
THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER’S HEART


Mr. Hoopdriver was (in the days of this story) a poet, though he had
never written a line of verse. Or perhaps romancer will describe him
better. Like I know not how many of those who do the fetching and
carrying of life,—a great number of them certainly,—his real life was
absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as
such people do in Mr. Gissing’s novels, he would probably have come by
way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what
he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always
decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes, and poses,
deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions; his experiences
were mere material for a romantic superstructure. If some power had
given Hoopdriver the ‘giftie’ Burns invoked, ‘to see oursels as ithers
see us,’ he would probably have given it away to some one else at the
very earliest opportunity. His entire life, you must understand, was
not a continuous romance, but a series of short stories linked only by
the general resemblance of their hero, a brown-haired young fellow
commonly, with blue eyes and a fair moustache, graceful rather than
strong, sharp and resolute rather than clever (cp., as the scientific
books say, p. 2). Invariably this person possessed an iron will. The
stories fluctuated indefinitely. The smoking of a cigarette converted
Hoopdriver’s hero into something entirely worldly, subtly rakish, with
a humorous twinkle in the eye and some gallant sinning in the
background. You should have seen Mr. Hoopdriver promenading the
brilliant gardens at Earl’s Court on an early-closing night. His
meaning glances! (I dare not give the meaning.) Such an influence as
the eloquence of a revivalist preacher would suffice to divert the
story into absolutely different channels, make him a white-soured hero,
a man still pure, walking untainted and brave and helpful through miry
ways. The appearance of some daintily gloved frockcoated gentleman with
buttonhole and eyeglass complete, gallantly attendant in the rear of
customers, served again to start visions of a simplicity essentially
Cromwell-like, of sturdy plainness, of a strong, silent man going
righteously through the world. This day there had predominated a fine
leisurely person immaculately clothed, and riding on an unexceptional
machine, a mysterious person—quite unostentatious, but with accidental
self-revelation of something over the common, even a “bloomin’ Dook,”
it might be incognito, on the tour of the South Coast.

You must not think that there was any _telling_ of these stories of
this life-long series by Mr. Hoopdriver. He never dreamt that they were
known to a soul. If it were not for the trouble, I would, I think, go
back and rewrite this section from the beginning, expunging the
statements that Hoopdriver was a poet and a romancer, and saying
instead that he was a playwright and acted his own plays. He was not
only the sole performer, but the entire audience, and the entertainment
kept him almost continuously happy. Yet even that playwright comparison
scarcely expresses all the facts of the case. After all, very many of
his dreams never got acted at all, possibly indeed, most of them, the
dreams of a solitary walk for instance, or of a tramcar ride, the
dreams dreamt behind the counter while trade was slack and mechanical
foldings and rollings occupied his muscles. Most of them were little
dramatic situations, crucial dialogues, the return of Mr. Hoopdriver to
his native village, for instance, in a well-cut holiday suit and natty
gloves, the unheard asides of the rival neighbours, the delight of the
old ‘mater,’ the intelligence—“A ten-pound rise all at once from
Antrobus, mater. Whad d’yer think of that?” or again, the first
whispering of love, dainty and witty and tender, to the girl he served
a few days ago with sateen, or a gallant rescue of generalised beauty
in distress from truculent insult or ravening dog.

So many people do this—and you never suspect it. You see a tattered lad
selling matches in the street, and you think there is nothing between
him and the bleakness of immensity, between him and utter abasement,
but a few tattered rags and a feeble musculature. And all unseen by you
a host of heaven-sent fatuities swathes him about, even, maybe, as they
swathe you about. Many men have never seen their own profiles or the
backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has
been invented. They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate
scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so,
indeed, it is with all of us who go on living. Self-deception is the
anaesthetic of life, while God is carving out our beings.

But to return from this general vivisection to Mr. Hoopdriver’s
imaginings. You see now how external our view has been; we have had but
the slightest transitory glimpses of the drama within, of how the
things looked in the magic mirror of Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind. On the road
to Guildford and during his encounters with his haunting
fellow-cyclists the drama had presented chiefly the quiet gentleman to
whom we have alluded, but at Guildford, under more varied stimuli, he
burgeoned out more variously. There was the house agent’s window, for
instance, set him upon a charming little comedy. He would go in, make
inquires about that thirty-pound house, get the key possibly and go
over it—the thing would stimulate the clerk’s curiosity immensely. He
searched his mind for a reason for this proceeding and discovered that
he was a dynamiter needing privacy. Upon that theory he procured the
key, explored the house carefully, said darkly that it might suit his
special needs, but that there were _others_ to consult. The clerk,
however, did not understand the allusion, and merely pitied him as one
who had married young and paired himself to a stronger mind than his
own.

This proceeding in some occult way led to the purchase of a note-book
and pencil, and that started the conception of an artist taking notes.
That was a little game Mr. Hoopdriver had, in congenial company, played
in his still younger days—to the infinite annoyance of quite a number
of respectable excursionists at Hastings. In early days Mr. Hoopdriver
had been, as his mother proudly boasted, a ‘bit of a drawer,’ but a
conscientious and normally stupid schoolmaster perceived the incipient
talent and had nipped it in the bud by a series of lessons in art.
However, our principal character figured about quite happily in old
corners of Guildford, and once the other man in brown, looking out of
the bay window of the Earl of Kent, saw him standing in a corner by a
gateway, note-book in hand, busily sketching the Earl’s imposing
features. At which sight the other man in brown started back from the
centre of the window, so as to be hidden from him, and crouching
slightly, watched him intently through the interstices of the lace
curtains.




XI.
OMISSIONS


Now the rest of the acts of Mr. Hoopdriver in Guildford, on the great
opening day of his holidays, are not to be detailed here. How he
wandered about the old town in the dusk, and up to the Hogsback to see
the little lamps below and the little stars above come out one after
another; how he returned through the yellow-lit streets to the Yellow
Hammer Coffee Tavern and supped bravely in the commercial room—a Man
among Men; how he joined in the talk about flying-machines and the
possibilities of electricity, witnessing that flying-machines were
“dead certain to come,” and that electricity was “wonderful,
wonderful”; how he went and watched the billiard playing and said,
“Left ’em” several times with an oracular air; how he fell a-yawning;
and how he got out his cycling map and studied it intently,—are things
that find no mention here. Nor will I enlarge upon his going into the
writing-room, and marking the road from London to Guildford with a
fine, bright line of the reddest of red ink. In his little cyclist
hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these
things—it is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce
it here to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying
fable written to while away an hour.

At last he fell a-yawning so much that very reluctantly indeed he set
about finishing this great and splendid day. (Alas! that all days must
end at last! ) He got his candle in the hall from a friendly
waiting-maid, and passed upward—whither a modest novelist, who writes
for the family circle, dare not follow. Yet I may tell you that he
knelt down at his bedside, happy and drowsy, and said, “Our Father
‘chartin’ heaven,” even as he had learnt it by rote from his mother
nearly twenty years ago. And anon when his breathing had become deep
and regular, we may creep into his bedroom and catch him at his dreams.
He is lying upon his left side, with his arm under the pillow. It is
dark, and he is hidden; but if you could have seen his face, sleeping
there in the darkness, I think you would have perceived, in spite of
that treasured, thin, and straggling moustache, in spite of your memory
of the coarse words he had used that day, that the man before you was,
after all, only a little child asleep.




XII.
THE DREAMS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER


In spite of the drawn blinds and the darkness, you have just seen Mr.
Hoopdriver’s face peaceful in its beauty sleep in the little, plain
bedroom at the very top of the Yellow Hammer Coffee Tavern at
Guildford. That was before midnight. As the night progressed he was
disturbed by dreams.

After your first day of cycling one dream is inevitable. A memory of
motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they
seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that
change and grow; you ride down steeples and staircases and over
precipices; you hover in horrible suspense over inhabited towns, vainly
seeking for a brake your hand cannot find, to save you from a headlong
fall; you plunge into weltering rivers, and rush helplessly at
monstrous obstacles. Anon Mr. Hoopdriver found himself riding out of
the darkness of non-existence, pedalling Ezekiel’s Wheels across the
Weald of Surrey, jolting over the hills and smashing villages in his
course, while the other man in brown cursed and swore at him and
shouted to stop his career. There was the Putney heath-keeper, too, and
the man in drab raging at him. He felt an awful fool, a—what was it?—a
juggins, ah!—a Juggernaut. The villages went off one after another with
a soft, squashing noise. He did not see the Young Lady in Grey, but he
knew she was looking at his back. He dared not look round. Where the
devil was the brake? It must have fallen off. And the bell? Right in
front of him was Guildford. He tried to shout and warn the town to get
out of the way, but his voice was gone as well. Nearer, nearer! it was
fearful! and in another moment the houses were cracking like nuts and
the blood of the inhabitants squirting this way and that. The streets
were black with people running. Right under his wheels he saw the Young
Lady in Grey. A feeling of horror came upon Mr. Hoopdriver; he flung
himself sideways to descend, forgetting how high he was, and forthwith
he began falling; falling, falling.

He woke up, turned over, saw the new moon on the window, wondered a
little, and went to sleep again.

This second dream went back into the first somehow, and the other man
in brown came threatening and shouting towards him. He grew uglier and
uglier as he approached, and his expression was intolerably evil. He
came and looked close into Mr. Hoopdriver’s eyes and then receded to an
incredible distance. His face seemed to be luminous. “_Miss Beaumont_,”
he said, and splashed up a spray of suspicion. Some one began letting
off fireworks, chiefly Catherine wheels, down the shop, though Mr.
Hoopdriver knew it was against the rules. For it seemed that the place
they were in was a vast shop, and then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived that
the other man in brown was the shop-walker, differing from most
shop-walkers in the fact that he was lit from within as a Chinese
lantern might be. And the customer Mr. Hoopdriver was going to serve
was the Young Lady in Grey. Curious he hadn’t noticed it before. She
was in grey as usual,—rationals,—and she had her bicycle leaning
against the counter. She smiled quite frankly at him, just as she had
done when she had apologised for stopping him. And her form, as she
leant towards him, was full of a sinuous grace he had never noticed
before. “What can I have the pleasure?” said Mr. Hoopdriver at once,
and she said, “The Ripley road.” So he got out the Ripley road and
unrolled it and showed it to her, and she said that would do very
nicely, and kept on looking at him and smiling, and he began measuring
off eight miles by means of the yard measure on the counter, eight
miles being a dress length, a rational dress length, that is; and then
the other man in brown came up and wanted to interfere, and said Mr.
Hoopdriver was a cad, besides measuring it off too slowly. And as Mr.
Hoopdriver began to measure faster, the other man in brown said the
Young Lady in Grey had been there long enough, and that he WAS her
brother, or else she would not be travelling with him, and he suddenly
whipped his arm about her waist and made off with her. It occurred to
Mr. Hoopdriver even at the moment that this was scarcely brotherly
behaviour. Of course it wasn’t! The sight of the other man gripping her
so familiarly enraged him frightfully; he leapt over the counter
forthwith and gave chase. They ran round the shop and up an iron
staircase into the Keep, and so out upon the Ripley road. For some time
they kept dodging in and out of a wayside hotel with two front doors
and an inn yard. The other man could not run very fast because he had
hold of the Young Lady in Grey, but Mr. Hoopdriver was hampered by the
absurd behaviour of his legs. They would not stretch out; they would
keep going round and round as if they were on the treadles of a wheel,
so that he made the smallest steps conceivable. This dream came to no
crisis. The chase seemed to last an interminable time, and all kinds of
people, heath-keepers, shopmen, policemen, the old man in the Keep, the
angry man in drab, the barmaid at the Unicorn, men with
flying-machines, people playing billiards in the doorways, silly,
headless figures, stupid cocks and hens encumbered with parcels and
umbrellas and waterproofs, people carrying bedroom candles, and
such-like riffraff, kept getting in his way and annoying him, although
he sounded his electric bell, and said, “Wonderful, wonderful!” at
every corner....




XIII.
HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WENT TO HASLEMERE


There was some little delay in getting Mr. Hoopdriver’s breakfast, so
that after all he was not free to start out of Guildford until just
upon the stroke of nine. He wheeled his machine from the High Street in
some perplexity. He did not know whether this young lady, who had
seized hold of his imagination so strongly, and her unfriendly and
possibly menacing brother, were ahead of him or even now breakfasting
somewhere in Guildford. In the former case he might loiter as he chose;
in the latter he must hurry, and possibly take refuge in branch roads.

It occurred to him as being in some obscure way strategic, that he
would leave Guildford not by the obvious Portsmouth road, but by the
road running through Shalford. Along this pleasant shady way he felt
sufficiently secure to resume his exercises in riding with one hand off
the handles, and in staring over his shoulder. He came over once or
twice, but fell on his foot each time, and perceived that he was
improving. Before he got to Bramley a specious byway snapped him up,
ran with him for half a mile or more, and dropped him as a terrier
drops a walkingstick, upon the Portsmouth again, a couple of miles from
Godalming. He entered Godalming on his feet, for the road through that
delightful town is beyond dispute the vilest in the world, a mere
tumult of road metal, a way of peaks and precipices, and, after a
successful experiment with cider at the Woolpack, he pushed on to
Milford.

All this time he was acutely aware of the existence of the Young Lady
in Grey and her companion in brown, as a child in the dark is of
Bogies. Sometimes he could hear their pneumatics stealing upon him from
behind, and looking round saw a long stretch of vacant road. Once he
saw far ahead of him a glittering wheel, but it proved to be a
workingman riding to destruction on a very tall ordinary. And he felt a
curious, vague uneasiness about that Young Lady in Grey, for which he
was altogether unable to account. Now that he was awake he had
forgotten that accentuated Miss Beaumont that had been quite clear in
his dream. But the curious dream conviction, that the girl was not
really the man’s sister, would not let itself be forgotten. Why, for
instance, should a man want to be alone with his sister on the top of a
tower? At Milford his bicycle made, so to speak, an ass of itself. A
finger-post suddenly jumped out at him, vainly indicating an abrupt
turn to the right, and Mr. Hoopdriver would have slowed up and read the
inscription, but no!—the bicycle would not let him. The road dropped a
little into Milford, and the thing shied, put down its head and bolted,
and Mr. Hoopdriver only thought of the brake when the fingerpost was
passed. Then to have recovered the point of intersection would have
meant dismounting. For as yet there was no road wide enough for Mr.
Hoopdriver to turn in. So he went on his way—or to be precise, he did
exactly the opposite thing. The road to the right was the Portsmouth
road, and this he was on went to Haslemere and Midhurst. By that error
it came about that he once more came upon his fellow travellers of
yesterday, coming on them suddenly, without the slightest preliminary
announcement and when they least expected it, under the Southwestern
Railway arch. “It’s horrible,” said a girlish voice; “it’s
brutal—cowardly—” And stopped.

His expression, as he shot out from the archway at them, may have been
something between a grin of recognition and a scowl of annoyance at
himself for the unintentional intrusion. But disconcerted as he was, he
was yet able to appreciate something of the peculiarity of their mutual
attitudes. The bicycles were lying by the roadside, and the two riders
stood face to face. The other man in brown’s attitude, as it flashed
upon Hoopdriver, was a deliberate pose; he twirled his moustache and
smiled faintly, and he was conscientiously looking amused. And the girl
stood rigid, her arms straight by her side, her handkerchief clenched
in her hand, and her face was flushed, with the faintest touch of red
upon her eyelids. She seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver’s sense to be indignant.
But that was the impression of a second. A mask of surprised
recognition fell across this revelation of emotion as she turned her
head towards him, and the pose of the other man in brown vanished too
in a momentary astonishment. And then he had passed them, and was
riding on towards Haslemere to make what he could of the swift picture
that had photographed itself on his brain.

“Rum,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “It’s _dashed_ rum!”

“They were having a row.”

“Smirking—” What he called the other man in brown need not trouble us.

“Annoying her!” That any human being should do that!

“_Why?_”

The impulse to interfere leapt suddenly into Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind. He
grasped his brake, descended, and stood looking hesitatingly back. They
still stood by the railway bridge, and it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver’s
fancy that she was stamping her foot. He hesitated, then turned his
bicycle round, mounted, and rode back towards them, gripping his
courage firmly lest it should slip away and leave him ridiculous. “I’ll
offer ’im a screw ’ammer,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. Then, with a wave of
fierce emotion, he saw that the girl was crying. In another moment they
heard him and turned in surprise. Certainly she had been crying; her
eyes were swimming in tears, and the other man in brown looked
exceedingly disconcerted. Mr. Hoopdriver descended and stood over his
machine.

“Nothing wrong, I hope?” he said, looking the other man in brown
squarely in the face. “No accident?”

“Nothing,” said the other man in brown shortly. “Nothing at all,
thanks.”

“But,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, with a great effort, “the young lady is
crying. I thought perhaps—”

The Young Lady in Grey started, gave Hoopdriver one swift glance, and
covered one eye with her handkerchief. “It’s this speck,” she said.
“This speck of dust in my eye.”

“This lady,” said the other man in brown, explaining, “has a gnat in
her eye.”

There was a pause. The young lady busied herself with her eye. “I
believe it’s out,” she said. The other man in brown made movements
indicating commiserating curiosity concerning the alleged fly. Mr.
Hoopdriver—the word is his own—stood flabber-gastered. He had all the
intuition of the simple-minded. He knew there was no fly. But the
ground was suddenly cut from his feet. There is a limit to
knighterrantry—dragons and false knights are all very well, but flies!
Fictitious flies! Whatever the trouble was, it was evidently not his
affair. He felt he had made a fool of himself again. He would have
mumbled some sort of apology; but the other man in brown gave him no
time, turned on him abruptly, even fiercely. “I hope,” he said, “that
your curiosity is satisfied?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Then we won’t detain you.”

And, ignominiously, Mr. Hoopdriver turned his machine about, struggled
upon it, and resumed the road southward. And when he learnt that he was
not on the Portsmouth road, it was impossible to turn and go back, for
that would be to face his shame again, and so he had to ride on by
Brook Street up the hill to Haslemere. And away to the right the
Portsmouth road mocked at him and made off to its fastnesses amid the
sunlit green and purple masses of Hindhead, where Mr. Grant Allen
writes his Hill Top Novels day by day.

The sun shone, and the wide blue hill views and pleasant valleys one
saw on either hand from the sandscarred roadway, even the sides of the
road itself set about with grey heather scrub and prickly masses of
gorse, and pine trees with their year’s growth still bright green,
against the darkened needles of the previous years, were fresh and
delightful to Mr. Hoopdriver’s eyes But the brightness of the day and
the day-old sense of freedom fought an uphill fight against his
intolerable vexation at that abominable encounter, and had still to win
it when he reached Haslemere. A great brown shadow, a monstrous hatred
of the other man in brown, possessed him. He had conceived the
brilliant idea of abandoning Portsmouth, or at least giving up the
straight way to his fellow-wayfarers, and of striking out boldly to the
left, eastward. He did not dare to stop at any of the inviting
public-houses in the main street of Haslemere, but turned up a side way
and found a little beer-shop, the Good Hope, wherein to refresh
himself. And there he ate and gossipped condescendingly with an aged
labourer, assuming the while for his own private enjoyment the
attributes of a Lost Heir, and afterwards mounted and rode on towards
Northchapel, a place which a number of finger-posts conspired to boom,
but which some insidious turning prevented him from attaining.




XIV.
HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER REACHED MIDHURST


It was one of my uncle’s profoundest remarks that human beings are the
only unreasonable creatures. This observation was so far justified by
Mr. Hoopdriver that, after spending the morning tortuously avoiding the
other man in brown and the Young Lady in Grey, he spent a considerable
part of the afternoon in thinking about the Young Lady in Grey, and
contemplating in an optimistic spirit the possibilities of seeing her
again. Memory and imagination played round her, so that his course was
largely determined by the windings of the road he traversed. Of one
general proposition he was absolutely convinced. “There’s something
Juicy wrong with ’em,” said he—once even aloud. But what it was he
could not imagine. He recapitulated the facts. “Miss Beaumont—brother
and sister—and the stoppage to quarrel and weep—” it was perplexing
material for a young man of small experience. There was no exertion he
hated so much as inference, and after a time he gave up any attempt to
get at the realities of the case, and let his imagination go free.
Should he ever see her again? Suppose he did—with that other chap not
about. The vision he found pleasantest was an encounter with her, an
unexpected encounter at the annual Dancing Class ‘Do’ at the Putney
Assembly Rooms. Somehow they would drift together, and he would dance
with her again and again. It was a pleasant vision, for you must
understand that Mr. Hoopdriver danced uncommonly well. Or again, in the
shop, a sudden radiance in the doorway, and she is bowed towards the
Manchester counter. And then to lean over that counter and murmur,
seemingly _àpropos_ of the goods under discussion, “I have not
forgotten that morning on the Portsmouth road,” and lower, “I never
shall forget.”

At Northchapel Mr. Hoopdriver consulted his map and took counsel and
weighed his course of action. Petworth seemed a possible resting-place,
or Pullborough; Midhurst seemed too near, and any place over the Downs
beyond, too far, and so he meandered towards Petworth, posing himself
perpetually and loitering, gathering wild flowers and wondering why
they had no names—for he had never heard of any—dropping them furtively
at the sight of a stranger, and generally ‘mucking about.’ There were
purple vetches in the hedges, meadowsweet, honeysuckle, belated
brambles—but the dog-roses had already gone; there were green and red
blackberries, stellarias, and dandelions, and in another place white
dead nettles, traveller’s-joy, clinging bedstraw, grasses flowering,
white campions, and ragged robins. One cornfield was glorious with
poppies, bright scarlet and purple white, and the blue corn-flowers
were beginning. In the lanes the trees met overhead, and the wisps of
hay still hung to the straggling hedges. In one of the main roads he
steered a perilous passage through a dozen surly dun oxen. Here and
there were little cottages, and picturesque beer-houses with the vivid
brewers’ boards of blue and scarlet, and once a broad green and a
church, and an expanse of some hundred houses or so. Then he came to a
pebbly rivulet that emerged between clumps of sedge loosestrife and
forget-me-nots under an arch of trees, and rippled across the road, and
there he dismounted, longing to take off shoes and stockings—those
stylish chequered stockings were now all dimmed with dust—and paddle
his lean legs in the chuckling cheerful water. But instead he sat in a
manly attitude, smoking a cigarette, for fear lest the Young Lady in
Grey should come glittering round the corner. For the flavour of the
Young Lady in Grey was present through it all, mixing with the flowers
and all the delight of it, a touch that made this second day quite
different from the first, an undertone of expectation, anxiety, and
something like regret that would not be ignored.

It was only late in the long evening that, quite abruptly, he began to
repent, vividly and decidedly, having fled these two people. He was
getting hungry, and that has a curious effect upon the emotional
colouring of our minds. The man was a sinister brute, Hoopdriver saw in
a flash of inspiration, and the girl—she was in some serious trouble.
And he who might have helped her had taken his first impulse as
decisive—and bolted. This new view of it depressed him dreadfully. What
might not be happening to her now? He thought again of her tears.
Surely it was merely his duty, seeing the trouble afoot, to keep his
eye upon it.

He began riding fast to get quit of such selfreproaches. He found
himself in a tortuous tangle of roads, and as the dusk was coming on,
emerged, not at Petworth but at Easebourne, a mile from Midhurst. “I’m
getting hungry,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, inquiring of a gamekeeper in
Easebourne village. “Midhurst a mile, and Petworth five!—Thenks, I’ll
take Midhurst.”

He came into Midhurst by the bridge at the watermill, and up the North
Street, and a little shop flourishing cheerfully, the cheerful sign of
a teapot, and exhibiting a brilliant array of tobaccos, sweets, and
children’s toys in the window, struck his fancy. A neat, bright-eyed
little old lady made him welcome, and he was presently supping
sumptuously on sausages and tea, with a visitors’ book full of the most
humorous and flattering remarks about the little old lady, in verse and
prose, propped up against his teapot as he ate. Regular good some of
the jokes were, and rhymes that read well—even with your mouth full of
sausage. Mr. Hoopdriver formed a vague idea of drawing “something”—for
his judgment on the little old lady was already formed. He pictured the
little old lady discovering it afterwards—“My gracious! One of them
_Punch_ men,” she would say. The room had a curtained recess and a
chest of drawers, for presently it was to be his bedroom, and the day
part of it was decorated with framed Oddfellows’ certificates and
giltbacked books and portraits, and kettle-holders, and all kinds of
beautiful things made out of wool; very comfortable it was indeed. The
window was lead framed and diamond paned, and through it one saw the
corner of the vicarage and a pleasant hill crest, in dusky silhouette
against the twilight sky. And after the sausages had ceased to be, he
lit a Red Herring cigarette and went swaggering out into the twilight
street. All shadowy blue between its dark brick houses, was the street,
with a bright yellow window here and there and splashes of green and
red where the chemist’s illumination fell across the road.




XV.
AN INTERLUDE


And now let us for a space leave Mr. Hoopdriver in the dusky Midhurst
North Street, and return to the two folks beside the railway bridge
between Milford and Haslemere. She was a girl of eighteen, dark, fine
featured, with bright eyes, and a rich, swift colour under her
warm-tinted skin. Her eyes were all the brighter for the tears that
swam in them. The man was thirty three or four, fair, with a longish
nose overhanging his sandy flaxen moustache, pale blue eyes, and a head
that struck out above and behind. He stood with his feet wide apart,
his hand on his hip, in an attitude that was equally suggestive of
defiance and aggression. They had watched Hoopdriver out of sight. The
unexpected interruption had stopped the flood of her tears. He tugged
his abundant moustache and regarded her calmly. She stood with face
averted, obstinately resolved not to speak first. “Your behaviour,” he
said at last, “makes you conspicuous.”

She turned upon him, her eyes and cheeks glowing, her hands clenched.
“You unspeakable _cad_,” she said, and choked, stamped her little foot,
and stood panting.

“Unspeakable cad! My dear girl! Possible I _am_ an unspeakable cad. Who
wouldn’t be—for you?”

“‘Dear girl!’ How _dare_ you speak to me like that? _You_—”

“I would do anything—”

“_Oh!_”

There was a moment’s pause. She looked squarely into his face, her eyes
alight with anger and contempt, and perhaps he flushed a little. He
stroked his moustache, and by an effort maintained his cynical calm.
“Let us be reasonable,” he said.

“Reasonable! That means all that is mean and cowardly and sensual in
the world.”

“You have always had it so—in your generalising way. But let us look at
the facts of the case—if that pleases you better.”

With an impatient gesture she motioned him to go on.

“Well,” he said,—“you’ve eloped.”

“I’ve left my home,” she corrected, with dignity. “I left my home
because it was unendurable. Because that woman—”

“Yes, yes. But the point is, you have eloped with me.”

“You came with me. You pretended to be my friend. Promised to help me
to earn a living by writing. It was you who said, why shouldn’t a man
and woman be friends? And now you dare—you dare—”

“Really, Jessie, this pose of yours, this injured innocence—”

“I will go back. I forbid you—I forbid you to stand in the way—”

“One moment. I have always thought that my little pupil was at least
clear-headed. You don’t know everything yet, you know. Listen to me for
a moment.”

“Haven’t I been listening? And you have only insulted me. You who dared
only to talk of friendship, who scarcely dared hint at anything
beyond.”

“But you took the hints, nevertheless. You knew. You _knew_. And you
did not mind. _Mind!_ You liked it. It was the fun of the whole thing
for you. That I loved you, and could not speak to you. You played with
it—”

“You have said all that before. Do you think that justifies you?”

“That isn’t all. I made up my mind—Well, to make the game more even.
And so I suggested to you and joined with you in this expedition of
yours, invented a sister at Midhurst—I tell you, I _haven’t_ a sister!
For one object—”

“Well?”

“To compromise you.”

She started. That was a new way of putting it. For half a minute
neither spoke. Then she began half defiantly: “Much I am compromised.
Of course—I have made a fool of myself—”

“My dear girl, you are still on the sunny side of eighteen, and you
know very little of this world. Less than you think. But you will
learn. Before you write all those novels we have talked about, you will
have to learn. And that’s one point—” He hesitated. “You started and
blushed when the man at breakfast called you Ma’am. You thought it a
funny mistake, but you did not say anything because he was young and
nervous—and besides, the thought of being my wife offended your
modesty. You didn’t care to notice it. But—you see; I gave your name as
_Mrs_. Beaumont.” He looked almost apologetic, in spite of his cynical
pose. “_Mrs_. Beaumont,” he repeated, pulling his flaxen moustache and
watching the effect.

She looked into his eyes speechless. “I am learning fast,” she said
slowly, at last.

He thought the time had come for an emotional attack. “Jessie,” he
said, with a sudden change of voice, “I know all this is mean, is
villanous. But do you think that I have done all this scheming, all
this subterfuge, for any other object—”

She did not seem to listen to his words. “I shall ride home,” she said
abruptly.

“To her?”

She winced.

“Just think,” said he, “what she could say to you after this.”

“Anyhow, I shall leave you now.”

“Yes? And go—”

“Go somewhere to earn my living, to be a free woman, to live without
conventionality—”

“My dear girl, do let us be cynical. You haven’t money and you haven’t
credit. No one would take you in. It’s one of two things: go back to
your stepmother, or—trust to me.”

“How _can_ I?”

“Then you must go back to her.” He paused momentarily, to let this
consideration have its proper weight. “Jessie, I did not mean to say
the things I did. Upon my honour, I lost my head when I spoke so. If
you will, forgive me. I am a man. I could not help myself. Forgive me,
and I promise you—”

“How can I trust you?”

“Try me. I can assure you—”

She regarded him distrustfully.

“At any rate, ride on with me now. Surely we have been in the shadow of
this horrible bridge long enough.”

“Oh! let me think,” she said, half turning from him and pressing her
hand to her brow.

“_Think!_ Look here, Jessie. It is ten o’clock. Shall we call a truce
until one?”

She hesitated, demanded a definition of the truce, and at last agreed.

They mounted, and rode on in silence, through the sunlight and the
heather. Both were extremely uncomfortable and disappointed. She was
pale, divided between fear and anger. She perceived she was in a
scrape, and tried in vain to think of a way of escape. Only one
tangible thing would keep in her mind, try as she would to ignore it.
That was the quite irrelevant fact that his head was singularly like an
albino cocoanut. He, too, felt thwarted. He felt that this romantic
business of seduction was, after all, unexpectedly tame. But this was
only the beginning. At any rate, every day she spent with him was a day
gained. Perhaps things looked worse than they were; that was some
consolation.




XVI.
OF THE ARTIFICIAL IN MAN, AND OF THE ZEITGEIST


You have seen these two young people—Bechamel, by-the-bye, is the man’s
name, and the girl’s is Jessie Milton—from the outside; you have heard
them talking; they ride now side by side (but not too close together,
and in an uneasy silence) towards Haslemere; and this chapter will
concern itself with those curious little council chambers inside their
skulls, where their motives are in session and their acts are
considered and passed.

But first a word concerning wigs and false teeth. Some jester,
enlarging upon the increase of bald heads and purblind people, has
deduced a wonderful future for the children of men. Man, he said, was
nowadays a hairless creature by forty or fifty, and for hair we gave
him a wig; shrivelled, and we padded him; toothless, and lo! false
teeth set in gold. Did he lose a limb, and a fine, new, artificial one
was at his disposal; get indigestion, and to hand was artificial
digestive fluid or bile or pancreatine, as the case might be.
Complexions, too, were replaceable, spectacles superseded an
inefficient eye-lens, and imperceptible false diaphragms were thrust
into the failing ear. So he went over our anatomies, until, at last, he
had conjured up a weird thing of shreds and patches, a simulacrum, an
artificial body of a man, with but a doubtful germ of living flesh
lurking somewhere in his recesses. To that, he held, we were coming.

How far such odd substitution for the body is possible need not concern
us now. But the devil, speaking by the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling,
hath it that in the case of one Tomlinson, the thing, so far as the
soul is concerned, has already been accomplished. Time was when men had
simple souls, desires as natural as their eyes, a little reasonable
philanthropy, a little reasonable philoprogenitiveness, hunger, and a
taste for good living, a decent, personal vanity, a healthy, satisfying
pugnacity, and so forth. But now we are taught and disciplined for
years and years, and thereafter we read and read for all the time some
strenuous, nerve-destroying business permits. Pedagogic hypnotists,
pulpit and platform hypnotists, book-writing hypnotists,
newspaper-writing hypnotists, are at us all. This sugar you are eating,
they tell us, is ink, and forthwith we reject it with infinite disgust.
This black draught of unrequited toil is True Happiness, and down it
goes with every symptom of pleasure. This Ibsen, they say, is dull past
believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon! they
interrupt, but this Ibsen is deep and delightful, and we vie with one
another in an excess of entertainment. And when we open the heads of
these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the
surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a
zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway’s feast of fine,
confused thinking. The girl is resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase
you may have heard before, and the man has a pretty perverted ambition
to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description. He is
hoping for the awakening of Passion in her, among other things. He
knows Passion ought to awaken, from the text-books he has studied. He
knows she admires his genius, but he is unaware that she does not
admire his head. He is quite a distinguished art critic in London, and
he met her at that celebrated lady novelist’s, her stepmother, and here
you have them well embarked upon the Adventure. Both are in the first
stage of repentance, which consists, as you have probably found for
yourself, in setting your teeth hard and saying’ “I _will_ go on.”

Things, you see, have jarred a little, and they ride on their way
together with a certain aloofness of manner that promises ill for the
orthodox development of the Adventure. He perceives he was too
precipitate. But he feels his honour is involved, and meditates the
development of a new attack. And the girl? She is unawakened. Her
motives are bookish, written by a haphazard syndicate of authors,
novelists, and biographers, on her white inexperience. An artificial
oversoul she is, that may presently break down and reveal a human being
beneath it. She is still in that schoolgirl phase when a talkative old
man is more interesting than a tongue-tied young one, and when to be an
eminent mathematician, say, or to edit a daily paper, seems as fine an
ambition as any girl need aspire to. Bechamel was to have helped her to
attain that in the most expeditious manner, and here he is beside her,
talking enigmatical phrases about passion, looking at her with the
oddest expression, and once, and that was his gravest offence, offering
to kiss her. At any rate he has apologised. She still scarcely
realises, you see, the scrape she has got into.




XVII.
THE ENCOUNTER AT MIDHURST


We left Mr. Hoopdriver at the door of the little tea, toy, and tobacco
shop. You must not think that a strain is put on coincidence when I
tell you that next door to Mrs. Wardor’s—that was the name of the
bright-eyed, little old lady with whom Mr. Hoopdriver had stopped—is
the Angel Hotel, and in the Angel Hotel, on the night that Mr.
Hoopdriver reached Midhurst, were ‘Mr.’ and ‘Miss’ Beaumont, our
Bechamel and Jessie Milton. Indeed, it was a highly probable thing; for
if one goes through Guildford, the choice of southward roads is
limited; you may go by Petersfield to Portsmouth, or by Midhurst to
Chichester, in addition to which highways there is nothing for it but
minor roadways to Petworth or Pulborough, and cross-cuts Brightonward.
And coming to Midhurst from the north, the Angel’s entrance lies
yawning to engulf your highly respectable cyclists, while Mrs. Wardor’s
genial teapot is equally attractive to those who weigh their means in
little scales. But to people unfamiliar with the Sussex roads—and such
were the three persons of this story—the convergence did not appear to
be so inevitable.

Bechamel, tightening his chain in the Angel yard after dinner, was the
first to be aware of their reunion. He saw Hoopdriver walk slowly
across the gateway, his head enhaloed in cigarette smoke, and pass out
of sight up the street. Incontinently a mass of cloudy uneasiness, that
had been partly dispelled during the day, reappeared and concentrated
rapidly into definite suspicion. He put his screw hammer into his
pocket and walked through the archway into the street, to settle the
business forthwith, for he prided himself on his decision. Hoopdriver
was merely promenading, and they met face to face.

At the sight of his adversary, something between disgust and laughter
seized Mr. Hoopdriver and for a moment destroyed his animosity. “’Ere
we are again!” he said, laughing insincerely in a sudden outbreak at
the perversity of chance.

The other man in brown stopped short in Mr. Hoopdriver’s way, staring.
Then his face assumed an expression of dangerous civility. “Is it any
information to you,” he said, with immense politeness, “when I remark
that you are following us?”

Mr. Hoopdriver, for some occult reason, resisted his characteristic
impulse to apologise. He wanted to annoy the other man in brown, and a
sentence that had come into his head in a previous rehearsal cropped up
appropriately. “Since when,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching his breath,
yet bringing the question out valiantly, nevertheless,—“since when ’ave
you purchased the county of Sussex?”

“May I point out,” said the other man in brown, “that I object—we
object not only to your proximity to us. To be frank—you appear to be
following us—with an object.”

“You can always,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “turn round if you don’t like
it, and go back the way you came.”

“Oh-o!” said the other man in brown. “_That’s_ it! I thought as much.”

“Did you?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, quite at sea, but rising pluckily to
the unknown occasion. What was the man driving at?

“I see,” said the other man. “I see. I half suspected—” His manner
changed abruptly to a quality suspiciously friendly. “Yes—a word with
you. You will, I hope, give me ten minutes.”

Wonderful things were dawning on Mr. Hoopdriver. What did the other man
take him for? Here at last was reality! He hesitated. Then he thought
of an admirable phrase. “You ’ave some communication—”

“We’ll call it a communication,” said the other man.

“I can spare you the ten minutes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, with dignity.

“This way, then,” said the other man in brown, and they walked slowly
down the North Street towards the Grammar School. There was, perhaps,
thirty seconds’ silence. The other man stroked his moustache nervously.
Mr. Hoopdriver’s dramatic instincts were now fully awake. He did not
quite understand in what _rôle_ he was cast, but it was evidently
something dark and mysterious. Doctor Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, and
Alexander Dumas were well within Mr. Hoopdriver’s range of reading, and
he had not read them for nothing.

“I will be perfectly frank with you,” said the other man in brown.

“Frankness is always the best course,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Well, then—who the devil set you on this business?”

“Set me _on_ this business?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupid. Who’s your employer? Who engaged you for
this job?”

“Well,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, confused. “No—I can’t say.”

“Quite sure?” The other man in brown glanced meaningly down at his
hand, and Mr. Hoopdriver, following him mechanically, saw a yellow
milled edge glittering in the twilight. Now your shop assistant is just
above the tip-receiving class, and only just above it—so that he is
acutely sensitive on the point.

Mr. Hoopdriver flushed hotly, and his eyes were angry as he met those
of the other man in brown. “Stow it!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, stopping and
facing the tempter.

“What!” said the other man in brown, surprised. “Eigh?” And so saying
he stowed it in his breeches pocket.

“D’yer think I’m to be bribed?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, whose imagination
was rapidly expanding the situation. “By Gosh! I’d follow you now—”

“My dear sir,” said the other man in brown, “I beg your pardon. I
misunderstood you. I really beg your pardon. Let us walk on. In your
profession—”

“What have you got to say against my profession?”

“Well, really, you know. There are detectives of an inferior
description—watchers. The whole class. Private Inquiry—I did not
realise—I really trust you will overlook what was, after all—you must
admit—a natural indiscretion. Men of honour are not so common in the
world—in any profession.”

It was lucky for Mr. Hoopdriver that in Midhurst they do not light the
lamps in the summer time, or the one they were passing had betrayed
him. As it was, he had to snatch suddenly at his moustache and tug
fiercely at it, to conceal the furious tumult of exultation, the
passion of laughter, that came boiling up. Detective! Even in the
shadow Bechamel saw that a laugh was stifled, but he put it down to the
fact that the phrase “men of honour” amused his interlocutor. “He’ll
come round yet,” said Bechamel to himself. “He’s simply holding out for
a fiver.” He coughed.

“I don’t see that it hurts you to tell me who your employer is.”

“Don’t you? I do.”

“Prompt,” said Bechamel, appreciatively. “Now here’s the thing I want
to put to you—the kernel of the whole business. You need not answer if
you don’t want to. There’s no harm done in my telling you what I want
to know. Are you employed to watch me—or Miss Milton?”

“I’m not the leaky sort,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, keeping the secret he
did not know with immense enjoyment. Miss Milton! That was her name.
Perhaps he’d tell some more. “It’s no good pumping. Is that all you’re
after?” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

Bechamel respected himself for his diplomatic gifts. He tried to catch
a remark by throwing out a confidence. “I take it there are two people
concerned in watching this affair.”

“Who’s the other?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, calmly, but controlling with
enormous internal tension his self-appreciation. “Who’s the other?” was
really brilliant, he thought.

“There’s my wife and _her_ stepmother.”

“And you want to know which it is?”

“Yes,” said Bechamel.

“Well—arst ’em!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, his exultation getting the better
of him, and with a pretty consciousness of repartee. “Arst ’em both.”

Bechamel turned impatiently. Then he made a last effort. “I’d give a
five-pound note to know just the precise state of affairs,” he said.

“I told you to stow that,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, in a threatening tone.
And added with perfect truth and a magnificent mystery, “You don’t
quite understand who you’re dealing with. But you will!” He spoke with
such conviction that he half believed that that defective office of his
in London—Baker Street, in fact—really existed.

With that the interview terminated. Bechamel went back to the Angel,
perturbed. “Hang detectives!” It wasn’t the kind of thing he had
anticipated at all. Hoopdriver, with round eyes and a wondering smile,
walked down to where the mill waters glittered in the moonlight, and
after meditating over the parapet of the bridge for a space, with
occasional murmurs of, “Private Inquiry” and the like, returned, with
mystery even in his paces, towards the town.




XVIII.


That glee which finds expression in raised eyebrows and long, low
whistling noises was upon Mr. Hoopdriver. For a space he forgot the
tears of the Young Lady in Grey. Here was a new game!—and a real one.
Mr. Hoopdriver as a Private Inquiry Agent, a Sherlock Holmes in fact,
keeping these two people ‘under observation.’ He walked slowly back
from the bridge until he was opposite the Angel, and stood for ten
minutes, perhaps, contemplating that establishment and enjoying all the
strange sensations of being this wonderful, this mysterious and
terrible thing. Everything fell into place in his scheme. He had, of
course, by a kind of instinct, assumed the disguise of a cyclist,
picked up the first old crock he came across as a means of pursuit. ‘No
expense was to be spared.’

Then he tried to understand what it was in particular that he was
observing. “My wife”—“_Her_ stepmother!” Then he remembered her
swimming eyes. Abruptly came a wave of anger that surprised him, washed
away the detective superstructure, and left him plain Mr. Hoopdriver.
This man in brown, with his confident manner, and his proffered half
sovereign (damn him!) was up to no good, else why should he object to
being watched? He was married! She was not his sister. He began to
understand. A horrible suspicion of the state of affairs came into Mr.
Hoopdriver’s head. Surely it had not come to _that_. He was a
detective!—he would find out. How was it to be done? He began to submit
sketches on approval to himself. It required an effort before he could
walk into the Angel bar. “A lemonade and bitter, please,” said Mr.
Hoopdriver.

He cleared his throat. “Are Mr. and Mrs. Bowlong stopping here?”

“What, a gentleman and a young lady—on bicycles?”

“Fairly young—a married couple.”

“No,” said the barmaid, a talkative person of ample dimensions.
“There’s no married couples stopping here. But there’s a Mr. and Miss
_Beaumont_.” She spelt it for precision. “Sure you’ve got the name
right, young man?”

“Quite,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Beaumont there is, but no one of the name of—What was the name you
gave?”

“Bowlong,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“No, there ain’t no Bowlong,” said the barmaid, taking up a glasscloth
and a drying tumbler and beginning to polish the latter. “First off, I
thought you might be asking for Beaumont—the names being similar. Were
you expecting them on bicycles?”

“Yes—they said they _might_ be in Midhurst tonight.”

“P’raps they’ll come presently. Beaumont’s here, but no Bowlong. Sure
that Beaumont ain’t the name?”

“Certain,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“It’s curious the names being so alike. I thought p’raps—”

And so they conversed at some length, Mr. Hoopdriver delighted to find
his horrible suspicion disposed of. The barmaid having listened awhile
at the staircase volunteered some particulars of the young couple
upstairs. Her modesty was much impressed by the young lady’s costume,
so she intimated, and Mr. Hoopdriver whispered the badinage natural to
the occasion, at which she was coquettishly shocked. “There’ll be no
knowing which is which, in a year or two,” said the barmaid. “And her
manner too! She got off her machine and give it ’im to stick up against
the kerb, and in she marched. ‘I and my brother,’ says she, ‘want to
stop here to-night. My brother doesn’t mind what kind of room ’e ’as,
but I want a room with a good view, if there’s one to be got,’ says
she. He comes hurrying in after and looks at her. ‘I’ve settled the
rooms,’ she says, and ’e says ‘damn!’ just like that. I can fancy my
brother letting me boss the show like that.”

“I dessay you do,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “if the truth was known.”

The barmaid looked down, smiled and shook her head, put down the
tumbler, polished, and took up another that had been draining, and
shook the drops of water into her little zinc sink.

“She’ll be a nice little lot to marry,” said the barmaid. “She’ll be
wearing the—well, b-dashes, as the sayin’ is. I can’t think what girls
is comin’ to.”

This depreciation of the Young Lady in Grey was hardly to Hoopdriver’s
taste.

“Fashion,” said he, taking up his change. “Fashion is all the go with
you ladies—and always was. You’ll be wearing ’em yourself before a
couple of years is out.”

“Nice they’d look on my figger,” said the barmaid, with a titter. “No—I
ain’t one of your fashionable sort. Gracious no! I shouldn’t feel as if
I’d anything on me, not more than if I’d forgot—Well, there! I’m
talking.” She put down the glass abruptly. “I dessay I’m old
fashioned,” she said, and walked humming down the bar.

“Not you,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. He waited until he caught her eye, then
with his native courtesy smiled, raised his cap, and wished her good
evening.




XIX.


Then Mr. Hoopdriver returned to the little room with the lead-framed
windows where he had dined, and where the bed was now comfortably made,
sat down on the box under the window, stared at the moon rising on the
shining vicarage roof, and tried to collect his thoughts. How they
whirled at first! It was past ten, and most of Midhurst was tucked away
in bed, some one up the street was learning the violin, at rare
intervals a belated inhabitant hurried home and woke the echoes, and a
corncrake kept up a busy churning in the vicarage garden. The sky was
deep blue, with a still luminous afterglow along the black edge of the
hill, and the white moon overhead, save for a couple of yellow stars,
had the sky to herself.

At first his thoughts were kinetic, of deeds and not relationships.
There was this malefactor, and his victim, and it had fallen on Mr.
Hoopdriver to take a hand in the game. _He_ was married. Did she know
he was married? Never for a moment did a thought of evil concerning her
cross Hoopdriver’s mind. Simple-minded people see questions of morals
so much better than superior persons—who have read and thought
themselves complex to impotence. He had heard her voice, seen the frank
light in her eyes, and she had been weeping—that sufficed. The rights
of the case he hadn’t properly grasped. But he would. And that
smirking—well, swine was the mildest for him. He recalled the
exceedingly unpleasant incident of the railway bridge. “Thin we won’t
detain yer, thenks,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, aloud, in a strange,
unnatural, contemptible voice, supposed to represent that of Bechamel.
“Oh, the _beggar!_ I’ll be level with him yet. He’s afraid of us
detectives—that I’ll _swear_.” (If Mrs. Wardor should chance to be on
the other side of the door within earshot, well and good.)

For a space he meditated chastisements and revenges, physical
impossibilities for the most part,—Bechamel staggering headlong from
the impact of Mr. Hoopdriver’s large, but, to tell the truth, ill
supported fist, Bechamel’s five feet nine of height lifted from the
ground and quivering under a vigorously applied horsewhip. So pleasant
was such dreaming, that Mr. Hoopdriver’s peaked face under the
moonlight was transfigured. One might have paired him with that
well-known and universally admired triumph, ‘The Soul’s Awakening,’ so
sweet was his ecstasy. And presently with his thirst for revenge
glutted by six or seven violent assaults, a duel and two vigorous
murders, his mind came round to the Young Lady in Grey again.

She was a plucky one too. He went over the incident the barmaid at the
Angel had described to him. His thoughts ceased to be a torrent,
smoothed down to a mirror in which she was reflected with infinite
clearness and detail. He’d never met anything like her before. Fancy
that bolster of a barmaid being dressed in that way! He whuffed a
contemptuous laugh. He compared her colour, her vigour, her voice, with
the Young Ladies in Business with whom his lot had been cast. Even in
tears she was beautiful, more beautiful indeed to him, for it made her
seem softer and weaker, more accessible. And such weeping as he had
seen before had been so much a matter of damp white faces, red noses,
and hair coming out of curl. Your draper’s assistant becomes something
of a judge of weeping, because weeping is the custom of all Young
Ladies in Business, when for any reason their services are dispensed
with. She could weep—and (by Gosh!) she could smile. _He_ knew that,
and reverting to acting abruptly, he smiled confidentially at the
puckered pallor of the moon.

It is difficult to say how long Mr. Hoopdriver’s pensiveness lasted. It
seemed a long time before his thoughts of action returned. Then he
remembered he was a ‘watcher’; that to-morrow he must be busy. It would
be in character to make notes, and he pulled out his little note-book.
With that in hand he fell a-thinking again. Would that chap tell her
the ’tecks were after them? If so, would she be as anxious to get away
as _he_ was? He must be on the alert. If possible he must speak to her.
Just a significant word, “Your friend—trust me!”—It occurred to him
that to-morrow these fugitives might rise early to escape. At that he
thought of the time and found it was half-past eleven. “Lord!” said he,
“I must see that I wake.” He yawned and rose. The blind was up, and he
pulled back the little chintz curtains to let the sunlight strike
across to the bed, hung his watch within good view of his pillow, on a
nail that supported a kettle-holder, and sat down on his bed to
undress. He lay awake for a little while thinking of the wonderful
possibilities of the morrow, and thence he passed gloriously into the
wonderland of dreams.




XX.
THE PURSUIT


And now to tell of Mr. Hoopdriver, rising with the sun, vigilant,
active, wonderful, the practicable half of the lead-framed window stuck
open, ears alert, an eye flickering incessantly in the corner panes, in
oblique glances at the Angel front. Mrs. Wardor wanted him to have his
breakfast downstairs in her kitchen, but that would have meant
abandoning the watch, and he held out strongly. The bicycle,
_cap-à-pie_, occupied, under protest, a strategic position in the shop.
He was expectant by six in the morning. By nine horrible fears
oppressed him that his quest had escaped him, and he had to reconnoitre
the Angel yard in order to satisfy himself. There he found the ostler
(How are the mighty fallen in these decadent days!) brushing down the
bicycles of the chase, and he returned relieved to Mrs. Wardor’s
premises. And about ten they emerged, and rode quietly up the North
Street. He watched them until they turned the corner of the post
office, and then out into the road and up after them in fine style!
They went by the engine-house where the old stocks and the whipping
posts are, and on to the Chichester road, and he followed gallantly. So
this great chase began.

They did not look round, and he kept them just within sight, getting
down if he chanced to draw closely upon them round a corner. By riding
vigorously he kept quite conveniently near them, for they made but
little hurry. He grew hot indeed, and his knees were a little stiff to
begin with, but that was all. There was little danger of losing them,
for a thin chalky dust lay upon the road, and the track of her tire was
milled like a shilling, and his was a chequered ribbon along the way.
So they rode by Cobden’s monument and through the prettiest of
villages, until at last the downs rose steeply ahead. There they
stopped awhile at the only inn in the place, and Mr. Hoopdriver took up
a position which commanded the inn door, and mopped his face and
thirsted and smoked a Red Herring cigarette. They remained in the inn
for some time. A number of chubby innocents returning home from school,
stopped and formed a line in front of him, and watched him quietly but
firmly for the space of ten minutes or so. “Go away,” said he, and they
only seemed quietly interested. He asked them all their names then, and
they answered indistinct murmurs. He gave it up at last and became
passive on his gate, and so at length they tired of him.

The couple under observation occupied the inn so long that Mr.
Hoopdriver at the thought of their possible employment hungered as well
as thirsted. Clearly, they were lunching. It was a cloudless day, and
the sun at the meridian beat down upon the top of Mr. Hoopdriver’s
head, a shower bath of sunshine, a huge jet of hot light. It made his
head swim. At last they emerged, and the other man in brown looked back
and saw him. They rode on to the foot of the down, and dismounting
began to push tediously up that long nearly vertical ascent of blinding
white road. Mr. Hoopdriver hesitated. It might take them twenty minutes
to mount that. Beyond was empty downland perhaps for miles. He decided
to return to the inn and snatch a hasty meal.

At the inn they gave him biscuits and cheese and a misleading pewter
measure of sturdy ale, pleasant under the palate, cool in the throat,
but leaden in the legs, of a hot afternoon. He felt a man of substance
as he emerged in the blinding sunshine, but even by the foot of the
down the sun was insisting again that his skull was too small for his
brains. The hill had gone steeper, the chalky road blazed like a
magnesium light, and his front wheel began an apparently incurable
squeaking. He felt as a man from Mars would feel if he were suddenly
transferred to this planet, about three times as heavy as he was wont
to feel. The two little black figures had vanished over the forehead of
the hill. “The tracks’ll be all right,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

That was a comforting reflection. It not only justified a slow progress
up the hill, but at the crest a sprawl on the turf beside the road, to
contemplate the Weald from the south. In a matter of two days he had
crossed that spacious valley, with its frozen surge of green hills, its
little villages and townships here and there, its copses and
cornfields, its ponds and streams like jewelery of diamonds and silver
glittering in the sun. The North Downs were hidden, far away beyond the
Wealden Heights. Down below was the little village of Cocking, and
half-way up the hill, a mile perhaps to the right, hung a flock of
sheep grazing together. Overhead an anxious peewit circled against the
blue, and every now and then emitted its feeble cry. Up here the heat
was tempered by a pleasant breeze. Mr. Hoopdriver was possessed by
unreasonable contentment; he lit himself a cigarette and lounged more
comfortably. Surely the Sussex ale is made of the waters of Lethe, of
poppies and pleasant dreams. Drowsiness coiled insidiously about him.

He awoke with a guilty start, to find himself sprawling prone on the
turf with his cap over one eye. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and
realised that he had slept. His head was still a trifle heavy. And the
chase? He jumped to his feet and stooped to pick up his overturned
machine. He whipped out his watch and saw that it was past two o’clock.
“Lord love us, fancy that!—But the tracks’ll be all right,” said Mr.
Hoopdriver, wheeling his machine back to the chalky road. “I must
scorch till I overtake them.”

He mounted and rode as rapidly as the heat and a lingering lassitude
permitted. Now and then he had to dismount to examine the surface where
the road forked. He enjoyed that rather. “Trackin’,” he said aloud, and
decided in the privacy of his own mind that he had a wonderful instinct
for ‘spoor.’ So he came past Goodwood station and Lavant, and
approached Chichester towards four o’clock. And then came a terrible
thing. In places the road became hard, in places were the crowded
indentations of a recent flock of sheep, and at last in the throat of
the town cobbles and the stony streets branching east, west, north, and
south, at a stone cross under the shadow of the cathedral the tracks
vanished. “O Cricky!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, dismounting in dismay and
standing agape. “Dropped anything?” said an inhabitant at the kerb.
“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “I’ve lost the spoor,” and walked upon his
way, leaving the inhabitant marvelling what part of a bicycle a spoor
might be. Mr. Hoopdriver, abandoning tracking, began asking people if
they had seen a Young Lady in Grey on a bicycle. Six casual people
hadn’t, and he began to feel the inquiry was conspicuous, and desisted.
But what was to be done?

Hoopdriver was hot, tired, and hungry, and full of the first gnawings
of a monstrous remorse. He decided to get himself some tea and meat,
and in the Royal George he meditated over the business in a melancholy
frame enough. They had passed out of his world—vanished, and all his
wonderful dreams of some vague, crucial interference collapsed like a
castle of cards. What a fool he had been not to stick to them like a
leech! He might have thought! But there!—what WAS the good of that sort
of thing now? He thought of her tears, of her helplessness, of the
bearing of the other man in brown, and his wrath and disappointment
surged higher. “What CAN I do?” said Mr. Hoopdriver aloud, bringing his
fist down beside the teapot.

What would Sherlock Holmes have done? Perhaps, after all, there might
be such things as clues in the world, albeit the age of miracles was
past. But to look for a clue in this intricate network of cobbled
streets, to examine every muddy interstice! There was a chance by
looking about and inquiry at the various inns. Upon that he began. But
of course they might have ridden straight through and scarcely a soul
have marked them. And then came a positively brilliant idea. “’Ow many
ways are there out of Chichester?” said Mr. Hoopdriver. It was really
equal to Sherlock Holmes—that. “If they’ve made tracks, I shall find
those tracks. If not—they’re in the town.” He was then in East Street,
and he started at once to make the circuit of the place, discovering
incidentally that Chichester is a walled city. In passing, he made
inquiries at the Black Swan, the Crown, and the Red Lion Hotel. At six
o’clock in the evening, he was walking downcast, intent, as one who had
dropped money, along the road towards Bognor, kicking up the dust with
his shoes and fretting with disappointed pugnacity. A thwarted,
crestfallen Hoopdriver it was, as you may well imagine. And then
suddenly there jumped upon his attention—a broad line ribbed like a
shilling, and close beside it one chequered, that ever and again split
into two. “Found!” said Mr. Hoopdriver and swung round on his heel at
once, and back to the Royal George, helter skelter, for the bicycle
they were minding for him. The ostler thought he was confoundedly
imperious, considering his machine.




XXI.
AT BOGNOR


That seductive gentleman, Bechamel, had been working up to a crisis. He
had started upon this elopement in a vein of fine romance, immensely
proud of his wickedness, and really as much in love as an artificial
oversoul can be, with Jessie. But either she was the profoundest of
coquettes or she had not the slightest element of Passion (with a large
P) in her composition. It warred with all his ideas of himself and the
feminine mind to think that under their flattering circumstances she
really could be so vitally deficient. He found her persistent coolness,
her more or less evident contempt for himself, exasperating in the
highest degree. He put it to himself that she was enough to provoke a
saint, and tried to think that was piquant and enjoyable, but the
blisters on his vanity asserted themselves. The fact is, he was, under
this standing irritation, getting down to the natural man in himself
for once, and the natural man in himself, in spite of Oxford and the
junior Reviewers’ Club, was a Palaeolithic creature of simple tastes
and violent methods. “I’ll be level with you yet,” ran like a plough
through the soil of his thoughts.

Then there was this infernal detective. Bechamel had told his wife he
was going to Davos to see Carter. To that he had fancied she was
reconciled, but how she would take this exploit was entirely
problematical. She was a woman of peculiar moral views, and she
measured marital infidelity largely by its proximity to herself. Out of
her sight, and more particularly out of the sight of the other women of
her set, vice of the recognised description was, perhaps, permissible
to those contemptible weaklings, men, but this was Evil on the High
Roads. She was bound to make a fuss, and these fusses invariably took
the final form of a tightness of money for Bechamel. Albeit, and he
felt it was heroic of him to resolve so, it was worth doing if it was
to be done. His imagination worked on a kind of matronly Valkyrie, and
the noise of pursuit and vengeance was in the air. The idyll still had
the front of the stage. That accursed detective, it seemed, had been
thrown off the scent, and that, at any rate, gave a night’s respite.
But things must be brought to an issue forthwith.

By eight o’clock in the evening, in a little dining-room in the Vicuna
Hotel, Bognor, the crisis had come, and Jessie, flushed and angry in
the face and with her heart sinking, faced him again for her last
struggle with him. He had tricked her this time, effectually, and luck
had been on his side. She was booked as Mrs. Beaumont. Save for her
refusal to enter their room, and her eccentricity of eating with
unwashed hands, she had so far kept up the appearances of things before
the waiter. But the dinner was grim enough. Now in turn she appealed to
his better nature and made extravagant statements of her plans to fool
him.

He was white and vicious by this time, and his anger quivered through
his pose of brilliant wickedness.

“I will go to the station,” she said. “I will go back—”

“The last train for anywhere leaves at 7.42.”

“I will appeal to the police—”

“You don’t know them.”

“I will tell these hotel people.”

“They will turn you out of doors. You’re in such a thoroughly false
position now. They don’t understand unconventionality, down here.”

She stamped her foot. “If I wander about the streets all night—” she
said.

“You who have never been out alone after dusk? Do you know what the
streets of a charming little holiday resort are like—”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I can go to the clergyman here.”

“He’s a charming man. Unmarried. And men are really more alike than you
think. And anyhow—”

“Well?”

“How _can_ you explain the last two nights to anyone now? The mischief
is done, Jessie.”

“You _cur_,” she said, and suddenly put her hand to her breast. He
thought she meant to faint, but she stood, with the colour gone from
her face.

“No,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love!” said she.

“Yes—love.”

“There are ways yet,” she said, after a pause.

“Not for you. You are too full of life and hope yet for, what is
it?—not the dark arch nor the black flowing river. Don’t you think of
it. You’ll only shirk it when the moment comes, and turn it all into
comedy.”

She turned round abruptly from him and stood looking out across the
parade at the shining sea over which the afterglow of day fled before
the rising moon. He maintained his attitude. The blinds were still up,
for she had told the waiter not to draw them. There was silence for
some moments.

At last he spoke in as persuasive a voice as he could summon. “Take it
sensibly, Jessie. Why should we, who have so much in common, quarrel
into melodrama? I swear I love you. You are all that is bright and
desirable to me. I am stronger than you, older; man to your woman. To
find _you_ too—conventional!”

She looked at him over her shoulder, and he noticed with a twinge of
delight how her little chin came out beneath the curve of her cheek.

“_Man!_” she said. “Man to _my_ woman! Do _men_ lie? Would a _man_ use
his five and thirty years’ experience to outwit a girl of seventeen?
Man to my woman indeed! That surely is the last insult!”

“Your repartee is admirable, Jessie. I should say they do, though—all
that and more also when their hearts were set on such a girl as
yourself. For God’s sake drop this shrewishness! Why should you be
so—difficult to me? Here am I with _my_ reputation, _my_ career, at
your feet. Look here, Jessie—on my honour, I will marry you—”

“God forbid,” she said, so promptly that she never learnt he had a
wife, even then. It occurred to him then for the first time, in the
flash of her retort, that she did not know he was married.

“’Tis only a pre-nuptial settlement,” he said, following that hint.

He paused.

“You must be sensible. The thing’s your own doing. Come out on the
beach now—the beach here is splendid, and the moon will soon be high.”

“_I won’t_” she said, stamping her foot.

“Well, well—”

“Oh! leave me alone. Let me think—”

“Think,” he said, “if you want to. It’s your cry always. But you can’t
save yourself by thinking, my dear girl. You can’t save yourself in any
way now. If saving it is—this parsimony—”

“Oh, go—go.”

“Very well. I will go. I will go and smoke a cigar. And think of you,
dear.... But do you think I should do all this if I did not care?”

“Go,” she whispered, without glancing round. She continued to stare out
of the window. He stood looking at her for a moment, with a strange
light in his eyes. He made a step towards her. “I _have_ you,” he said.
“You are mine. Netted—caught. But mine.” He would have gone up to her
and laid his hand upon her, but he did not dare to do that yet. “I have
you in my hand,” he said, “in my power. Do you hear—_Power!_”

She remained impassive. He stared at her for half a minute, and then,
with a superb gesture that was lost upon her, went to the door. Surely
the instinctive abasement of her sex before Strength was upon his side.
He told himself that his battle was won. She heard the handle move and
the catch click as the door closed behind him.




XXII.


And now without in the twilight behold Mr. Hoopdriver, his cheeks hot,
his eye bright! His brain is in a tumult. The nervous, obsequious
Hoopdriver, to whom I introduced you some days since, has undergone a
wonderful change. Ever since he lost that ‘spoor’ in Chichester, he has
been tormented by the most horrible visions of the shameful insults
that may be happening. The strangeness of new surroundings has been
working to strip off the habitual servile from him. Here was moonlight
rising over the memory of a red sunset, dark shadows and glowing orange
lamps, beauty somewhere mysteriously rapt away from him, tangible wrong
in a brown suit and an unpleasant face, flouting him. Mr. Hoopdriver
for the time, was in the world of Romance and Knight-errantry, divinely
forgetful of his social position or hers; forgetting, too, for the time
any of the wretched timidities that had tied him long since behind the
counter in his proper place. He was angry and adventurous. It was all
about him, this vivid drama he had fallen into, and it was eluding him.
He was far too grimly in earnest to pick up that lost thread and make a
play of it now. The man was living. He did not pose when he alighted at
the coffee tavern even, nor when he made his hasty meal.

As Bechamel crossed from the Vicuna towards the esplanade, Hoopdriver,
disappointed and exasperated, came hurrying round the corner from the
Temperance Hotel. At the sight of Bechamel, his heart jumped, and the
tension of his angry suspense exploded into, rather than gave place to,
an excited activity of mind. They were at the Vicuna, and she was there
now alone. It was the occasion he sought. But he would give Chance no
chance against him. He went back round the corner, sat down on the
seat, and watched Bechamel recede into the dimness up the esplanade,
before he got up and walked into the hotel entrance. “A lady cyclist in
grey,” he asked for, and followed boldly on the waiter’s heels. The
door of the dining-room was opening before he felt a qualm. And then
suddenly he was nearly minded to turn and run for it, and his features
seemed to him to be convulsed.

She turned with a start, and looked at him with something between
terror and hope in her eyes.

“Can I—have a few words—with you, alone?” said Mr. Hoopdriver,
controlling his breath with difficulty. She hesitated, and then
motioned the waiter to withdraw.

Mr. Hoopdriver watched the door shut. He had intended to step out into
the middle of the room, fold his arms and say, “You are in trouble. I
am a Friend. Trust me.” Instead of which he stood panting and then
spoke with sudden familiarity, hastily, guiltily: “Look here. I don’t
know what the juice is up, but I think there’s something wrong. Excuse
my intruding—if it isn’t so. I’ll do anything you like to help you out
of the scrape—if you’re in one. That’s my meaning, I believe. What can
I do? I would do anything to help you.”

Her brow puckered, as she watched him make, with infinite emotion, this
remarkable speech. “_You!_” she said. She was tumultuously weighing
possibilities in her mind, and he had scarcely ceased when she had made
her resolve.

She stepped a pace forward. “You are a gentleman,” she said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Can I trust you?”

She did not wait for his assurance. “I must leave this hotel at once.
Come here.”

She took his arm and led him to the window.

“You can just see the gate. It is still open. Through that are our
bicycles. Go down, get them out, and I will come down to you. Dare you?

“Get your bicycle out in the road?”

“Both. Mine alone is no good. At once. Dare you?”

“Which way?”

“Go out by the front door and round. I will follow in one minute.”

“Right!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, and went.

He had to get those bicycles. Had he been told to go out and kill
Bechamel he would have done it. His head was a maelstrom now. He walked
out of the hotel, along the front, and into the big, black-shadowed
coach yard. He looked round. There were no bicycles visible. Then a man
emerged from the dark, a short man in a short, black, shiny jacket.
Hoopdriver was caught. He made no attempt to turn and run for it. “I’ve
been giving your machines a wipe over, sir,” said the man, recognising
the suit, and touching his cap. Hoopdriver’s intelligence now was a
soaring eagle; he swooped on the situation at once. “That’s right,” he
said, and added, before the pause became marked, “Where is mine? I want
to look at the chain.”

The man led him into an open shed, and went fumbling for a lantern.
Hoopdriver moved the lady’s machine out of his way to the door, and
then laid hands on the man’s machine and wheeled it out of the shed
into the yard. The gate stood open and beyond was the pale road and a
clump of trees black in the twilight. He stooped and examined the chain
with trembling fingers. How was it to be done? Something behind the
gate seemed to flutter. The man must be got rid of anyhow.

“I say,” said Hoopdriver, with an inspiration, “can you get me a
screwdriver?”

The man simply walked across the shed, opened and shut a box, and came
up to the kneeling Hoopdriver with a screwdriver in his hand.
Hoopdriver felt himself a lost man. He took the screwdriver with a
tepid “Thanks,” and incontinently had another inspiration.

“I say,” he said again.

“Well?”

“This is miles too big.”

The man lit the lantern, brought it up to Hoopdriver and put it down on
the ground. “Want a smaller screwdriver?” he said.

Hoopdriver had his handkerchief out and sneezed a prompt _atichew_. It
is the orthodox thing when you wish to avoid recognition. “As small as
you have,” he said, out of his pocket handkerchief.

“I ain’t got none smaller than that,” said the ostler.

“Won’t do, really,” said Hoopdriver, still wallowing in his
handkerchief.

“I’ll see wot they got in the ’ouse, if you like, sir,” said the man.
“If you would,” said Hoopdriver. And as the man’s heavily nailed boots
went clattering down the yard, Hoopdriver stood up, took a noiseless
step to the lady’s machine, laid trembling hands on its handle and
saddle, and prepared for a rush.

The scullery door opened momentarily and sent a beam of warm, yellow
light up the road, shut again behind the man, and forthwith Hoopdriver
rushed the machines towards the gate. A dark grey form came fluttering
to meet him. “Give me this,” she said, “and bring yours.”

He passed the thing to her, touched her hand in the darkness, ran back,
seized Bechamel’s machine, and followed.

The yellow light of the scullery door suddenly flashed upon the cobbles
again. It was too late now to do anything but escape. He heard the
ostler shout behind him, and came into the road. She was up and dim
already. He got into the saddle without a blunder. In a moment the
ostler was in the gateway with a full-throated “_Hi!_! sir! That ain’t
allowed;” and Hoopdriver was overtaking the Young Lady in Grey. For
some moments the earth seemed alive with shouts of, “Stop ’em!” and the
shadows with ambuscades of police. The road swept round, and they were
riding out of sight of the hotel, and behind dark hedges, side by side.

She was weeping with excitement as he overtook her. “Brave,” she said,
“brave!” and he ceased to feel like a hunted thief. He looked over his
shoulder and about him, and saw that they were already out of
Bognor—for the Vicuna stands at the very westernmost extremity of the
sea front—and riding on a fair wide road.




XXIII.


The ostler (being a fool) rushed violently down the road vociferating
after them. Then he returned panting to the Vicuna Hotel, and finding a
group of men outside the entrance, who wanted to know what was _up_,
stopped to give them the cream of the adventure. That gave the
fugitives five minutes. Then pushing breathlessly into the bar, he had
to make it clear to the barmaid what the matter was, and the ‘gov’nor’
being out, they spent some more precious time wondering ‘what—_ever_’
was to be done! in which the two customers returning from outside
joined with animation. There were also moral remarks and other
irrelevant contributions. There were conflicting ideas of telling the
police and pursuing the flying couple on a horse. That made ten
minutes. Then Stephen, the waiter, who had shown Hoopdriver up, came
down and lit wonderful lights and started quite a fresh discussion by
the simple question “_Which?_?” That turned ten minutes into a quarter
of an hour. And in the midst of this discussion, making a sudden and
awestricken silence, appeared Bechamel in the hall beyond the bar,
walked with a resolute air to the foot of the staircase, and passed out
of sight. You conceive the backward pitch of that exceptionally shaped
cranium? Incredulous eyes stared into one another’s in the bar, as his
paces, muffled by the stair carpet, went up to the landing, turned,
reached the passage and walked into the dining-room overhead.

“It wasn’t that one at all, miss,” said the ostler, “I’d _swear_.”

“Well, that’s Mr. Beaumont,” said the barmaid, “—anyhow.”

Their conversation hung comatose in the air, switched up by Bechamel.
They listened together. His feet stopped. Turned. Went out of the
diningroom. Down the passage to the bedroom. Stopped again.

“Poor chap!” said the barmaid. “She’s a wicked woman!”

“Sssh!” said Stephen.

After a pause Bechamel went back to the dining-room. They heard a chair
creak under him. Interlude of conversational eyebrows.

“I’m going up,” said Stephen, “to break the melancholy news to him.”

Bechamel looked up from a week-old newspaper as, without knocking,
Stephen entered. Bechamel’s face suggested a different expectation.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said Stephen, with a diplomatic cough.

“Well?” said Bechamel, wondering suddenly if Jessie had kept some of
her threats. If so, he was in for an explanation. But he had it ready.
She was a monomaniac. “Leave me alone with her,” he would say; “I know
how to calm her.”

“Mrs. Beaumont,” said Stephen.

“_Well?_”

“Has gone.”

He rose with a fine surprise. “Gone!” he said with a half laugh.

“Gone, sir. On her bicycle.”

“On her bicycle! Why?”

“She went, sir, with Another Gentleman.”

This time Bechamel was really startled. “An—other Gentlemen! _Who?_”

“Another gentleman in brown, sir. Went into the yard, sir, got out the
two bicycles, sir, and went off, sir—about twenty minutes ago.”

Bechamel stood with his eyes round and his knuckle on his hips.
Stephen, watching him with immense enjoyment, speculated whether this
abandoned husband would weep or curse, or rush off at once in furious
pursuit. But as yet he seemed merely stunned.

“Brown clothes?” he said. “And fairish?”

“A little like yourself, sir—in the dark. The ostler, sir, Jim Duke—”

Bechamel laughed awry. Then, with infinite fervour, he said—But let us
put in blank cartridge—he said, “———!”

“I might have thought!”

He flung himself into the armchair.

“Damn her,” said Bechamel, for all the world like a common man. “I’ll
chuck this infernal business! They’ve gone, eigh?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, let ’em GO,” said Bechamel, making a memorable saying. “Let ’em
GO. Who cares? And I wish him luck. And bring me some Bourbon as fast
as you can, there’s a good chap. I’ll take that, and then I’ll have
another look round Bognor before I turn in.”

Stephen was too surprised to say anything but “Bourbon, sir?”

“Go on,” said Bechamel. “Damn you!”

Stephen’s sympathies changed at once. “Yessir,” he murmured, fumbling
for the door handle, and left the room, marvelling. Bechamel, having in
this way satisfied his sense of appearances, and comported himself as a
Pagan should, so soon as the waiter’s footsteps had passed, vented the
cream of his feelings in a stream of blasphemous indecency. Whether his
wife or _her_ stepmother had sent the detective, _she_ had evidently
gone off with him, and that little business was over. And he was here,
stranded and sold, an ass, and as it were, the son of many generations
of asses. And his only ray of hope was that it seemed more probable,
after all, that the girl had escaped through her stepmother. In which
case the business might be hushed up yet, and the evil hour of
explanation with his wife indefinitely postponed. Then abruptly the
image of that lithe figure in grey knickerbockers went frisking across
his mind again, and he reverted to his blasphemies. He started up in a
gusty frenzy with a vague idea of pursuit, and incontinently sat down
again with a concussion that stirred the bar below to its depths. He
banged the arms of the chair with his fist, and swore again. “Of all
the accursed fools that were ever spawned,” he was chanting, “I,
Bechamel—” when with an abrupt tap and prompt opening of the door,
Stephen entered with the Bourbon.




XXIV.
THE MOONLIGHT RIDE


And so the twenty minutes’ law passed into an infinity. We leave the
wicked Bechamel clothing himself with cursing as with a garment,—the
wretched creature has already sufficiently sullied our modest but
truthful pages,—we leave the eager little group in the bar of the
Vicuna Hotel, we leave all Bognor as we have left all Chichester and
Midhurst and Haslemere and Guildford and Ripley and Putney, and follow
this dear fool of a Hoopdriver of ours and his Young Lady in Grey out
upon the moonlight road. How they rode! How their hearts beat together
and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation and
every noise pursuit! For all that flight Mr. Hoopdriver was in the
world of Romance. Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were
not lit, Hoopdriver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion
of a hero born. Had Bechamel arisen in the way with rapiers for a duel,
Hoopdriver had fought as one to whom Agincourt was a reality and
drapery a dream. It was Rescue, Elopement, Glory! And she by the side
of him! He had seen her face in shadow, with the morning sunlight
tangled in her hair, he had seen her sympathetic with that warm light
in her face, he had seen her troubled and her eyes bright with tears.
But what light is there lighting a face like hers, to compare with the
soft glamour of the midsummer moon?

The road turned northward, going round through the outskirts of Bognor,
in one place dark and heavy under a thick growth of trees, then amidst
villas again, some warm and lamplit, some white and sleeping in the
moonlight; then between hedges, over which they saw broad wan meadows
shrouded in a low-lying mist. They scarcely heeded whither they rode at
first, being only anxious to get away, turning once westward when the
spire of Chichester cathedral rose suddenly near them out of the dewy
night, pale and intricate and high. They rode, speaking little, just a
rare word now and then, at a turning, at a footfall, at a roughness in
the road.

She seemed to be too intent upon escape to give much thought to him,
but after the first tumult of the adventure, as flight passed into mere
steady riding his mind became an enormous appreciation of the position.
The night was a warm white silence save for the subtile running of
their chains. He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her
ankles gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the road turned westward,
and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and
now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly
over her hair and touched her brow and cheek.

There is a magic quality in moonshine; it touches all that is sweet and
beautiful, and the rest of the night is hidden. It has created the
fairies, whom the sunlight kills, and fairyland rises again in our
hearts at the sight of it, the voices of the filmy route, and their
faint, soul-piercing melodies. By the moonlight every man, dull clod
though he be by day, tastes something of Endymion, takes something of
the youth and strength of Endymion, and sees the dear white goddess
shining at him from his Lady’s eyes. The firm substantial daylight
things become ghostly and elusive, the hills beyond are a sea of
unsubstantial texture, the world a visible spirit, the spiritual within
us rises out of its darkness, loses something of its weight and body,
and swims up towards heaven. This road that was a mere rutted white
dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft grey silence,
with the glitter of a crystal grain set starlike in its silver here and
there. Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the
mother of the silence, she who has spiritualised the world, alone save
for two attendant steady shining stars. And in silence under her benign
influence, under the benediction of her light, rode our two wanderers
side by side through the transfigured and transfiguring night.

Nowhere was the moon shining quite so brightly as in Mr. Hoopdriver’s
skull. At the turnings of the road he made his decisions with an air of
profound promptitude (and quite haphazard). “The Right,” he would say.
Or again “The Left,” as one who knew. So it was that in the space of an
hour they came abruptly down a little lane, full tilt upon the sea.
Grey beach to the right of them and to the left, and a little white
cottage fast asleep inland of a sleeping fishing-boat. “Hullo!” said
Mr. Hoopdriver, _sotto voce_. They dismounted abruptly. Stunted oaks
and thorns rose out of the haze of moonlight that was tangled in the
hedge on either side.

“You are safe,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, sweeping off his cap with an air
and bowing courtly.

“Where are we?”

“_Safe_.”

“But _where?_”

“Chichester Harbour.” He waved his arm seaward as though it was a goal.

“Do you think they will follow us?”

“We have turned and turned again.”

It seemed to Hoopdriver that he heard her sob. She stood dimly there,
holding her machine, and he, holding his, could go no nearer to her to
see if she sobbed for weeping or for want of breath. “What are we to do
now?” her voice asked.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“I will do what has to be done.”

The two black figures in the broken light were silent for a space. “Do
you know,” she said, “I am not afraid of you. I am sure you are honest
to me. And I do not even know your name!”

He was taken with a sudden shame of his homely patronymic. “It’s an
ugly name,” he said. “But you are right in trusting me. I would—I would
do anything for you.... This is nothing.”

She caught at her breath. She did not care to ask why. But compared
with Bechamel!—“We take each other on trust,” she said. “Do you want to
know—how things are with me?”

“That man,” she went on, after the assent of his listening silence,
“promised to help and protect me. I was unhappy at home—never mind why.
A stepmother—Idle, unoccupied, hindered, cramped, that is enough,
perhaps. Then he came into my life, and talked to me of art and
literature, and set my brain on fire. I wanted to come out into the
world, to be a human being—not a thing in a hutch. And he—”

“I know,” said Hoopdriver.

“And now here I am—”

“I will do anything,” said Hoopdriver.

She thought. “You cannot imagine my stepmother. No! I could not
describe her—”

“I am entirely at your service. I will help you with all my power.”

“I have lost an Illusion and found a Knight-errant.” She spoke of
Bechamel as the Illusion.

Mr. Hoopdriver felt flattered. But he had no adequate answer.

“I’m thinking,” he said, full of a rapture of protective
responsibility, “what we had best be doing. You are tired, you know.
And we can’t wander all night—after the day we’ve had.”

“That was Chichester we were near?” she asked.

“If,” he meditated, with a tremble in his voice, “you would make _me_
your brother, _Miss Beaumont_.”

“Yes?”

“We could stop there together—”

She took a minute to answer. “I am going to light these lamps,” said
Hoopdriver. He bent down to his own, and struck a match on his shoe.
She looked at his face in its light, grave and intent. How could she
ever have thought him common or absurd?

“But you must tell me your name—brother,” she said,

“Er—Carrington,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, after a momentary pause. Who
would be Hoopdriver on a night like this?

“But the Christian name?”

“Christian name? _My_ Christian name. Well—Chris.” He snapped his lamp
and stood up. “If you will hold my machine, I will light yours,” he
said.

She came round obediently and took his machine, and for a moment they
stood face to face. “My name, brother Chris,” she said, “is Jessie.”

He looked into her eyes, and his excitement seemed arrested.
“_Jessie_,” he repeated slowly. The mute emotion of his face affected
her strangely. She had to speak. “It’s not such a very wonderful name,
is it?” she said, with a laugh to break the intensity.

He opened his mouth and shut it again, and, with a sudden wincing of
his features, abruptly turned and bent down to open the lantern in
front of her machine. She looked down at him, almost kneeling in front
of her, with an unreasonable approbation in her eyes. It was, as I have
indicated, the hour and season of the full moon.




XXV.


Mr. Hoopdriver conducted the rest of that night’s journey with the same
confident dignity as before, and it was chiefly by good luck and the
fact that most roads about a town converge thereupon, that Chichester
was at last attained. It seemed at first as though everyone had gone to
bed, but the Red Hotel still glowed yellow and warm. It was the first
time Hoopdriver had dared the mysteries of a ‘first-class’ hotel. But
that night he was in the mood to dare anything.

“So you found your Young Lady at last,” said the ostler of the Red
Hotel; for it chanced he was one of those of whom Hoopdriver had made
inquiries in the afternoon.

“Quite a misunderstanding,” said Hoopdriver, with splendid readiness.
“My sister had gone to Bognor. But I brought her back here. I’ve took a
fancy to this place. And the moonlight’s simply dee-vine.”

“We’ve had supper, thenks, and we’re tired,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “I
suppose you won’t take anything,—Jessie?”

The glory of having her, even as a sister! and to call her Jessie like
that! But he carried it off splendidly, as he felt himself bound to
admit. “Good-night, Sis,” he said, “and pleasant dreams. I’ll just ’ave
a look at this paper before I turn in.” But this was living indeed! he
told himself.

So gallantly did Mr. Hoopdriver comport himself up to the very edge of
the Most Wonderful Day of all. It had begun early, you will remember,
with a vigil in a little sweetstuff shop next door to the Angel at
Midhurst. But to think of all the things that had happened since then!
He caught himself in the middle of a yawn, pulled out his watch, saw
the time was halfpast eleven, and marched off, with a fine sense of
heroism, bedward.




XXVI.
THE SURBITON INTERLUDE


And here, thanks to the glorious institution of sleep, comes a break in
the narrative again. These absurd young people are safely tucked away
now, their heads full of glowing nonsense, indeed, but the course of
events at any rate is safe from any fresh developments through their
activities for the next eight hours or more. They are both sleeping
healthily you will perhaps be astonished to hear. Here is the girl—what
girls are coming to nowadays only Mrs. Lynn Linton can tell!—in company
with an absolute stranger, of low extraction and uncertain accent,
unchaperoned and unabashed; indeed, now she fancies she is safe, she
is, if anything, a little proud of her own share in these transactions.
Then this Mr. Hoopdriver of yours, roseate idiot that he is! is in
illegal possession of a stolen bicycle, a stolen young lady, and two
stolen names, established with them in an hotel that is quite beyond
his means, and immensely proud of himself in a somnolent way for these
incomparable follies. There are occasions when a moralising novelist
can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course. For
all Hoopdriver knows or cares he may be locked up the very first thing
to-morrow morning for the rape of the cycle. Then in Bognor, let alone
that melancholy vestige, Bechamel (with whom our dealings are, thank
Goodness! over), there is a Coffee Tavern with a steak Mr. Hoopdriver
ordered, done to a cinder long ago, his American-cloth parcel in a
bedroom, and his own proper bicycle, by way of guarantee, carefully
locked up in the hayloft. To-morrow he will be a Mystery, and they will
be looking for his body along the sea front. And so far we have never
given a glance at the desolate home in Surbiton, familiar to you no
doubt through the medium of illustrated interviews, where the unhappy
stepmother—

That stepmother, it must be explained, is quite well known to you. That
is a little surprise I have prepared for you. She is ‘Thomas
Plantagenet,’ the gifted authoress of that witty and daring book, “A
Soul Untrammelled,” and quite an excellent woman in her way,—only it is
such a crooked way. Her real name is Milton. She is a widow and a
charming one, only ten years older than Jessie, and she is always
careful to dedicate her more daring works to the ‘sacred memory of my
husband’ to show that there’s nothing personal, you know, in the
matter. Considering her literary reputation (she was always speaking of
herself as one ‘martyred for truth,’ because the critics advertised her
written indecorums in column long ‘slates’),—considering her literary
reputation, I say, she was one of the most respectable women it is
possible to imagine. She furnished correctly, dressed correctly, had
severe notions of whom she might meet, went to church, and even at
times took the sacrament in some esoteric spirit. And Jessie she
brought up so carefully that she never even let her read “A Soul
Untrammelled.” Which, therefore, naturally enough, Jessie did, and went
on from that to a feast of advanced literature. Mrs. Milton not only
brought up Jessie carefully, but very slowly, so that at seventeen she
was still a clever schoolgirl (as you have seen her) and quite in the
background of the little literary circle of unimportant celebrities
which ‘Thomas Plantagenet’ adorned. Mrs. Milton knew Bechamel’s
reputation of being a dangerous man; but then bad men are not bad
women, and she let him come to her house to show she was not afraid—she
took no account of Jessie. When the elopement came, therefore, it was a
double disappointment to her, for she perceived his hand by a kind of
instinct. She did the correct thing. The correct thing, as you know, is
to take hansom cabs, regardless of expense, and weep and say you do not
know _what_ to do, round the circle of your confidential friends. She
could not have ridden nor wept more had Jessie been her own
daughter—she showed the properest spirit. And she not only showed it,
but felt it.

Mrs. Milton, as a successful little authoress and still more successful
widow of thirty-two,—“Thomas Plantagenet is a charming woman,” her
reviewers used to write invariably, even if they spoke ill of
her,—found the steady growth of Jessie into womanhood an unmitigated
nuisance and had been willing enough to keep her in the background. And
Jessie—who had started this intercourse at fourteen with abstract
objections to stepmothers—had been active enough in resenting this.
Increasing rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until
they could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or the
cutting of a book with a sharpened knife. There is very little
deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness
gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it
shows a different nature. And when the disaster came, Mrs. Milton’s
remorse for their gradual loss of sympathy and her share in the losing
of it, was genuine enough.

You may imagine the comfort she got from her friends, and how West
Kensington and Notting Hill and Hampstead, the literary suburbs, those
decent penitentiaries of a once Bohemian calling, hummed with the
business, Her ‘Men’—as a charming literary lady she had, of course, an
organised corps—were immensely excited, and were sympathetic; helpfully
energetic, suggestive, alert, as their ideals of their various
dispositions required them to be. “Any news of Jessie?” was the
pathetic opening of a dozen melancholy but interesting conversations.
To her Men she was not perhaps so damp as she was to her women friends,
but in a quiet way she was even more touching. For three days,
Wednesday that is, Thursday, and Friday, nothing was heard of the
fugitives. It was known that Jessie, wearing a patent costume with
buttonup skirts, and mounted on a diamond frame safety with Dunlops,
and a loofah covered saddle, had ridden forth early in the morning,
taking with her about two pounds seven shillings in money, and a grey
touring case packed, and there, save for a brief note to her
stepmother,—a declaration of independence, it was said, an assertion of
her Ego containing extensive and very annoying quotations from “A Soul
Untrammelled,” and giving no definite intimation of her plans—knowledge
ceased. That note was shown to few, and then only in the strictest
confidence.

But on Friday evening late came a breathless Man Friend, Widgery, a
correspondent of hers, who had heard of her trouble among the first. He
had been touring in Sussex,—his knapsack was still on his back,—and he
testified hurriedly that at a place called Midhurst, in the bar of an
hotel called the Angel, he had heard from a barmaid a vivid account of
a Young Lady in Grey. Descriptions tallied. But who was the man in
brown? “The poor, misguided girl! I must go to her at once,” she said,
choking, and rising with her hand to her heart.

“It’s impossible to-night. There are no more trains. I looked on my
way.”

“A mother’s love,” she said. “I bear her _that_.”

“I know you do.” He spoke with feeling, for no one admired his
photographs of scenery more than Mrs. Milton. “It’s more than she
deserves.”

“Oh, don’t speak unkindly of her! She has been misled.”

It was really very friendly of him. He declared he was only sorry his
news ended there. Should he follow them, and bring her back? He had
come to her because he knew of her anxiety. “It is _good_ of you,” she
said, and quite instinctively took and pressed his hand. “And to think
of that poor girl—tonight! It’s dreadful.” She looked into the fire
that she had lit when he came in, the warm light fell upon her dark
purple dress, and left her features in a warm shadow. She looked such a
slight, frail thing to be troubled so. “We must follow her.” Her
resolution seemed magnificent. “I have no one to go with me.”

“He must marry her,” said the man.

“She has no friends. We have no one. After all—Two women.—So helpless.”

And this fair-haired little figure was the woman that people who knew
her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she
was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the unspeakable
pathos of her position.

“Mrs. Milton,” he said. “Hetty!”

She glanced at him. The overflow was imminent. “Not now,” she said,
“not now. I must find her first.”

“Yes,” he said with intense emotion. (He was one of those big, fat men
who feel deeply.) “But let me help you. At least let me help you.”

“But can you spare time?” she said. “For _me_.”

“For you—”

“But what can I do? what can _we_ do?”

“Go to Midhurst. Follow her on. Trace her. She was there on Thursday
night, last night. She cycled out of the town. Courage!” he said. “We
will save her yet!”

She put out her hand and pressed his again.

“Courage!” he repeated, finding it so well received.

There were alarms and excursions without. She turned her back to the
fire, and he sat down suddenly in the big armchair, which suited his
dimensions admirably. Then the door opened, and the girl showed in
Dangle, who looked curiously from one to the other. There was emotion
here, he had heard the armchair creaking, and Mrs. Milton, whose face
was flushed, displayed a suspicious alacrity to explain. “You, too,”
she said, “are one of my good friends. And we have news of her at
last.”

It was decidedly an advantage to Widgery, but Dangle determined to show
himself a man of resource. In the end he, too, was accepted for the
Midhurst Expedition, to the intense disgust of Widgery; and young
Phipps, a callow youth of few words, faultless collars, and fervent
devotion, was also enrolled before the evening was out. They would
scour the country, all three of them. She appeared to brighten up a
little, but it was evident she was profoundly touched. She did not know
what she had done to merit such friends. Her voice broke a little, she
moved towards the door, and young Phipps, who was a youth of action
rather than of words, sprang and opened it—proud to be first.

“She is sorely troubled,” said Dangle to Widgery. “We must do what we
can for her.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” said Dangle. “So subtle, so intricate, so
many faceted. She feels this deeply.”

Young Phipps said nothing, but he felt the more.

And yet they say the age of chivalry is dead!

But this is only an Interlude, introduced to give our wanderers time to
refresh themselves by good, honest sleeping. For the present,
therefore, we will not concern ourselves with the starting of the
Rescue Party, nor with Mrs. Milton’s simple but becoming grey dress,
with the healthy Widgery’s Norfolk jacket and thick boots, with the
slender Dangle’s energetic bearing, nor with the wonderful chequerings
that set off the legs of the golf-suited Phipps. They are after us. In
a little while they will be upon us. You must imagine as you best can
the competitive raidings at Midhurst of Widgery, Dangle, and Phipps.
How Widgery was great at questions, and Dangle good at inference, and
Phipps so conspicuously inferior in everything that he felt it, and
sulked with Mrs. Milton most of the day, after the manner of your
callow youth the whole world over. Mrs. Milton stopped at the Angel and
was very sad and charming and intelligent, and Widgery paid the bill in
the afternoon of Saturday, Chichester was attained. But by that time
our fugitives—As you shall immediately hear.




XXVII.
THE AWAKENING OF MR. HOOPDRIVER


Mr. Hoopdriver stirred on his pillow, opened his eyes, and, staring
unmeaningly, yawned. The bedclothes were soft and pleasant. He turned
the peaked nose that overrides the insufficient moustache, up to the
ceiling, a pinkish projection over the billow of white. You might see
it wrinkle as he yawned again, and then became quiet. So matters
remained for a space. Very slowly recollection returned to him. Then a
shock of indeterminate brown hair appeared, and first one watery grey
eye a-wondering, and then two; the bed upheaved, and you had him, his
thin neck projecting abruptly from the clothes he held about him, his
face staring about the room. He held the clothes about him, I hope I
may explain, because his night-shirt was at Bognor in an American-cloth
packet, derelict. He yawned a third time, rubbed his eyes, smacked his
lips. He was recalling almost everything now. The pursuit, the hotel,
the tremulous daring of his entry, the swift adventure of the inn yard,
the moonlight—Abruptly he threw the clothes back and rose into a
sitting position on the edge of the bed. Without was the noise of
shutters being unfastened and doors unlocked, and the passing of hoofs
and wheels in the street. He looked at his watch. Half-past six. He
surveyed the sumptuous room again.

“Lord!” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “It wasn’t a dream, after all.”

“I wonder what they charge for these Juicèd rooms!” said Mr.
Hoopdriver, nursing one rosy foot.

He became meditative, tugging at his insufficient moustache. Suddenly
he gave vent to a noiseless laugh. “What a rush it was! Rushed in and
off with his girl right under his nose. Planned it well too. Talk of
highway robbery! Talk of brigands! Up and off! How juicèd _sold_ he
must be feeling! It was a shave too—in the coach yard!”

Suddenly he became silent. Abruptly his eyebrows rose and his jaw fell.
“I sa-a-ay!” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

He had never thought of it before. Perhaps you will understand the
whirl he had been in overnight. But one sees things clearer in the
daylight. “I’m hanged if I haven’t been and stolen a blessed bicycle.”

“Who cares?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, presently, and his face supplied the
answer.

Then he thought of the Young Lady in Grey again, and tried to put a
more heroic complexion on the business. But of an early morning, on an
empty stomach (as with characteristic coarseness, medical men put it)
heroics are of a more difficult growth than by moonlight. Everything
had seemed exceptionally fine and brilliant, but quite natural, the
evening before.

Mr. Hoopdriver reached out his hand, took his Norfolk jacket, laid it
over his knees, and took out the money from the little ticket pocket.
“Fourteen and six-half,” he said, holding the coins in his left hand
and stroking his chin with his right. He verified, by patting, the
presence of a pocketbook in the breast pocket. “Five, fourteen,
six-half,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Left.”

With the Norfolk jacket still on his knees, he plunged into another
silent meditation. “That wouldn’t matter,” he said. “It’s the bike’s
the bother.

“No good going back to Bognor.

“Might send it back by carrier, of course. Thanking him for the loan.
Having no further use—” Mr. Hoopdriver chuckled and lapsed into the
silent concoction of a delightfully impudent letter. “Mr. J. Hoopdriver
presents his compliments.” But the grave note reasserted itself.

“Might trundle back there in an hour, of course, and exchange them.
_My_ old crock’s so blessed shabby. He’s sure to be spiteful too. Have
me run in, perhaps. Then she’d be in just the same old fix, only worse.
You see, I’m her Knight-errant. It complicates things so.”

His eye, wandering loosely, rested on the sponge bath. “What the juice
do they want with cream pans in a bedroom?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, _en
passant_.

“Best thing we can do is to set out of here as soon as possible,
anyhow. I suppose she’ll go home to her friends. That bicycle is a
juicy nuisance, anyhow. Juicy nuisance!”

He jumped to his feet with a sudden awakening of energy, to proceed
with his toilet. Then with a certain horror he remembered that the
simple necessaries of that process were at Bognor! “Lord!” he remarked,
and whistled silently for a space. “Rummy go! profit and loss; profit,
one sister with bicycle complete, wot offers?—cheap for tooth and ’air
brush, vests, night-shirt, stockings, and sundries.

“Make the best of it,” and presently, when it came to hair-brushing, he
had to smooth his troubled locks with his hands. It was a poor result.
“Sneak out and get a shave, I suppose, and buy a brush and so on. Chink
again! Beard don’t show much.”

He ran his hand over his chin, looked at himself steadfastly for some
time, and curled his insufficient moustache up with some care. Then he
fell a-meditating on his beauty. He considered himself, three-quarter
face, left and right. An expression of distaste crept over his
features. “Looking won’t alter it, Hoopdriver,” he remarked. “You’re a
weedy customer, my man. Shoulders narrow. Skimpy, anyhow.”

He put his knuckles on the toilet table and regarded himself with his
chin lifted in the air. “Good Lord!” he said. “_What_ a neck! Wonder
why I got such a thundering lump there.”

He sat down on the bed, his eye still on the glass. “If I’d been
exercised properly, if I’d been fed reasonable, if I hadn’t been shoved
out of a silly school into a silly shop—But there! the old folks didn’t
know no better. The schoolmaster ought to have. But he didn’t, poor old
fool!—Still, when it comes to meeting a girl like this—It’s ’_ard_.

“I wonder what Adam’d think of me—as a specimen. Civilisation, eigh?
Heir of the ages! I’m nothing. I know nothing. I can’t do
anything—sketch a bit. Why wasn’t I made an artist?

“Beastly cheap, after all, this suit does look, in the sunshine.”

“No good, Hoopdriver. Anyhow, you don’t tell yourself any lies about
it. Lovers ain’t your game,—anyway. But there’s other things yet. You
can help the young lady, and you will—I suppose she’ll be going
home—And that business of the bicycle’s to see to, too, my man.
_Forward_, Hoopdriver! If you ain’t a beauty, that’s no reason why you
should stop and be copped, is it?”

And having got back in this way to a gloomy kind of self-satisfaction,
he had another attempt at his hair preparatory to leaving his room and
hurrying on breakfast, for an early departure. While breakfast was
preparing he wandered out into South Street and refurnished himself
with the elements of luggage again. “No expense to be spared,” he
murmured, disgorging the half-sovereign.




XXVIII.
THE DEPARTURE FROM CHICHESTER


He caused his ‘sister’ to be called repeatedly, and when she came down,
explained with a humorous smile his legal relationship to the bicycle
in the yard. “Might be disagreeable, y’ know.” His anxiety was obvious
enough. “Very well,” she said (quite friendly); “hurry breakfast, and
we’ll ride out. I want to talk things over with you.” The girl seemed
more beautiful than ever after the night’s sleep; her hair in comely
dark waves from her forehead, her ungauntleted finger-tips pink and
cool. And how decided she was! Breakfast was a nervous ceremony,
conversation fraternal but thin; the waiter overawed him, and he was
cowed by a multiplicity of forks. But she called him “Chris.” They
discussed their route over his sixpenny county map for the sake of
talking, but avoided a decision in the presence of the attendant. The
five-pound note was changed for the bill, and through Hoopdriver’s
determination to be quite the gentleman, the waiter and chambermaid got
half a crown each and the ostler a florin. “’Olidays,” said the ostler
to himself, without gratitude. The public mounting of the bicycles in
the street was a moment of trepidation. A policeman actually stopped
and watched them from the opposite kerb. Suppose him to come across and
ask: “Is that your bicycle, sir?” Fight? Or drop it and run? It was a
time of bewildering apprehension, too, going through the streets of the
town, so that a milk cart barely escaped destruction under Mr.
Hoopdriver’s chancy wheel. That recalled him to a sense of erratic
steering, and he pulled himself together. In the lanes he breathed
freer, and a less formal conversation presently began.

“You’ve ridden out of Chichester in a great hurry,” said Jessie.

“Well, the fact of it is, I’m worried, just a little bit. About this
machine.”

“Of course,” she said. “I had forgotten that. But where are we going?”

“Jest a turning or two more, if you don’t mind,” said Hoopdriver.

“Jest a mile or so. I have to think of you, you know. I should feel
more easy. If we was locked up, you know—Not that I should mind on my
own account—”

They rode with a streaky, grey sea coming and going on their left hand.
Every mile they put between themselves and Chichester Mr. Hoopdriver
felt a little less conscience-stricken, and a little more of the
gallant desperado. Here he was riding on a splendid machine with a
Slap-up girl beside him. What would they think of it in the Emporium if
any of them were to see him? He imagined in detail the astonishment of
Miss Isaacs and of Miss Howe. “Why! It’s Mr. Hoopdriver,” Miss Isaacs
would say. “_Never!_” emphatically from Miss Howe. Then he played with
Briggs, and then tried the ‘G.V.’ in a shay. “Fancy introducing ’em to
her—My sister _pro tem_.” He was her brother Chris—Chris what?—Confound
it! Harringon, Hartington—something like that. Have to keep off that
topic until he could remember. Wish he’d told her the truth now—almost.
He glanced at her. She was riding with her eyes straight ahead of her.
Thinking. A little perplexed, perhaps, she seemed. He noticed how well
she rode and that she rode with her lips closed—a thing he could never
manage.

Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind came round to the future. What was she going to
do? What were they both going to do? His thoughts took a graver colour.
He had rescued her. This was fine, manly rescue work he was engaged
upon. She ought to go home, in spite of that stepmother. He must insist
gravely but firmly upon that. She was the spirited sort, of course, but
still—Wonder if she had any money? Wonder what the second-class fare
from Havant to London is? Of course he would have to pay that—it was
the regular thing, he being a gentleman. Then should he take her home?
He began to rough in a moving sketch of the return. The stepmother,
repentant of her indescribable cruelties, would be present,—even these
rich people have their troubles,—probably an uncle or two. The footman
would announce, Mr.—(bother that name!) and Miss Milton. Then two women
weeping together, and a knightly figure in the background dressed in a
handsome Norfolk jacket, still conspicuously new. He would conceal his
feeling until the very end. Then, leaving, he would pause in the
doorway in such an attitude as Mr. George Alexander might assume, and
say, slowly and dwindlingly: “Be kind to her—_be_ kind to her,” and so
depart, heartbroken to the meanest intelligence. But that was a matter
for the future. He would have to begin discussing the return soon.
There was no traffic along the road, and he came up beside her (he had
fallen behind in his musing). She began to talk. “Mr. Denison,” she
began, and then, doubtfully, “That _is_ your name? I’m very stupid—”

“It is,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. (Denison, was it? Denison, Denison,
Denison. What was she saying?)

“I wonder how far you are willing to help me?” Confoundedly hard to
answer a question like that on the spur of the moment, without steering
wildly. “You may rely—” said Mr. Hoopdriver, recovering from a violent
wabble. “I can assure you—I want to help you very much. Don’t consider
me at all. Leastways, consider me entirely at your service.” (Nuisance
not to be able to say this kind of thing right.)

“You see, I am so awkwardly situated.”

“If I can only help you—you will make me very happy—” There was a
pause. Round a bend in the road they came upon a grassy space between
hedge and road, set with yarrow and meadowsweet, where a felled tree
lay among the green. There she dismounted, and propping her machine
against a stone, sat down. “Here, we can talk,” she said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, expectant.

She answered after a little while, sitting, elbow on knee, with her
chin in her hand, and looking straight in front of her. “I don’t know—I
am resolved to Live my Own Life.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Naturally.”

“I want to Live, and I want to see what life means. I want to learn.
Everyone is hurrying me, everything is hurrying me; I want time to
think.”

Mr. Hoopdriver was puzzled, but admiring. It was wonderful how clear
and ready her words were. But then one might speak well with a throat
and lips like that. He knew he was inadequate, but he tried to meet the
occasion. “If you let them rush you into anything you might repent of,
of course you’d be very silly.”

“Don’t _you_ want to learn?” she asked.

“I was wondering only this morning,” he began, and stopped.

She was too intent upon her own thoughts to notice this insufficiency.
“I find myself in life, and it terrifies me. I seem to be like a little
speck, whirling on a wheel, suddenly caught up. ‘What am I here for?’ I
ask. Simply to be here at a time—I asked it a week ago, I asked it
yesterday, and I ask it to-day. And little things happen and the days
pass. My stepmother takes me shopping, people come to tea, there is a
new play to pass the time, or a concert, or a novel. The wheels of the
world go on turning, turning. It is horrible. I want to do a miracle
like Joshua and stop the whirl until I have fought it out. At home—It’s
impossible.”

Mr. Hoopdriver stroked his moustache. “It _is_ so,” he said in a
meditative tone. “Things _will_ go on,” he said. The faint breath of
summer stirred the trees, and a bunch of dandelion puff lifted among
the meadowsweet and struck and broke into a dozen separate threads
against his knee. They flew on apart, and sank, as the breeze fell,
among the grass: some to germinate, some to perish. His eye followed
them until they had vanished.

“I can’t go back to Surbiton,” said the Young Lady in Grey.

“_Eigh?_” said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching at his moustache. This was an
unexpected development.

“I want to write, you see,” said the Young Lady in Grey, “to write
Books and alter things. To do Good. I want to lead a Free Life and Own
myself. I can’t go back. I want to obtain a position as a journalist. I
have been told—But I know no one to help me at once. No one that I
could go to. There is one person—She was a mistress at my school. If I
could write to her—But then, how could I get her answer?”

“H’mp,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, very grave.

“I can’t trouble you much more. You have come—you have risked things—”

“That don’t count,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “It’s double pay to let me do
it, so to speak.”

“It is good of you to say that. Surbiton is so Conventional. I am
resolved to be Unconventional—at any cost. But we are so hampered. If I
could only burgeon out of all that hinders me! I want to struggle, to
take my place in the world. I want to be my own mistress, to shape my
own career. But my stepmother objects so. She does as she likes
herself, and is strict with me to ease her conscience. And if I go back
now, go back owning myself beaten—” She left the rest to his
imagination.

“I see that,” agreed Mr. Hoopdriver. He _must_ help her. Within his
skull he was doing some intricate arithmetic with five pounds six and
twopence. In some vague way he inferred from all this that Jessie was
trying to escape from an undesirable marriage, but was saying these
things out of modesty. His circle of ideas was so limited.

“You know, Mr.—I’ve forgotten your name again.”

Mr. Hoopdriver seemed lost in abstraction. “You can’t go back of
course, quite like that,” he said thoughtfully. His ears waxed suddenly
red and his cheeks flushed.

“But what _is_ your name?”

“Name!” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Why!—Benson, of course.”

“Mr. Benson—yes it’s really very stupid of me. But I can never remember
names. I must make a note on my cuff.” She clicked a little silver
pencil and wrote the name down. “If I could write to my friend. I
believe she would be able to help me to an independent life. I could
write to her—or telegraph. Write, I think. I could scarcely explain in
a telegram. I know she would help me.”

Clearly there was only one course open to a gentleman under the
circumstances. “In that case,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “if you don’t mind
trusting yourself to a stranger, we might continue as we are perhaps.
For a day or so. Until you heard.” (Suppose thirty shillings a day,
that gives four days, say four thirties is hun’ and twenty, six
quid,—well, three days, say; four ten.)

“You are very good to me.”

His expression was eloquent.

“Very well, then, and thank you. It’s wonderful—it’s more than I
deserve that you—” She dropped the theme abruptly. “What was our bill
at Chichester?”

“Eigh?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, feigning a certain stupidity. There was a
brief discussion. Secretly he was delighted at her insistence in
paying. She carried her point. Their talk came round to their immediate
plans for the day. They decided to ride easily, through Havant, and
stop, perhaps, at Fareham or Southampton. For the previous day had
tried them both. Holding the map extended on his knee, Mr. Hoopdriver’s
eye fell by chance on the bicycle at his feet. “That bicycle,” he
remarked, quite irrelevantly, “wouldn’t look the same machine if I got
a big, double Elarum instead of that little bell.”

“Why?”

“Jest a thought.” A pause.

“Very well, then,—Havant and lunch,” said Jessie, rising.

“I wish, somehow, we could have managed it without stealing that
machine,” said Hoopdriver. “Because it IS stealing it, you know, come
to think of it.”

“Nonsense. If Mr. Bechamel troubles you—I will tell the whole world—if
need be.”

“I believe you would,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, admiring her. “You’re
plucky enough—goodness knows.”

Discovering suddenly that she was standing, he, too, rose and picked up
her machine. She took it and wheeled it into the road. Then he took his
own. He paused, regarding it. “I say!” said he. “How’d this bike look,
now, if it was enamelled grey?” She looked over her shoulder at his
grave face. “Why try and hide it in that way?”

“It was jest a passing thought,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, airily. “Didn’t
_mean_ anything, you know.”

As they were riding on to Havant it occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver in a
transitory manner that the interview had been quite other than his
expectation. But that was the way with everything in Mr. Hoopdriver’s
experience. And though his Wisdom looked grave within him, and Caution
was chinking coins, and an ancient prejudice in favour of Property
shook her head, something else was there too, shouting in his mind to
drown all these saner considerations, the intoxicating thought of
riding beside Her all to-day, all to-morrow, perhaps for other days
after that. Of talking to her familiarly, being brother of all her
slender strength and freshness, of having a golden, real, and wonderful
time beyond all his imaginings. His old familiar fancyings gave place
to anticipations as impalpable and fluctuating and beautiful as the
sunset of a summer day.

At Havant he took an opportunity to purchase, at a small hairdresser’s
in the main street, a toothbrush, a pair of nail scissors, and a little
bottle of stuff to darken the moustache, an article the shopman
introduced to his attention, recommended highly, and sold in the
excitement of the occasion.




XXIX.
THE UNEXPECTED ANECDOTE OF THE LION


They rode on to Cosham and lunched lightly but expensively there.
Jessie went out and posted her letter to her school friend. Then the
green height of Portsdown Hill tempted them, and leaving their machines
in the village they clambered up the slope to the silent red-brick fort
that crowned it. Thence they had a view of Portsmouth and its cluster
of sister towns, the crowded narrows of the harbour, the Solent and the
Isle of Wight like a blue cloud through the hot haze. Jessie by some
miracle had become a skirted woman in the Cosham inn. Mr. Hoopdriver
lounged gracefully on the turf, smoked a Red Herring cigarette, and
lazily regarded the fortified towns that spread like a map away there,
the inner line of defence like toy fortifications, a mile off perhaps;
and beyond that a few little fields and then the beginnings of Landport
suburb and the smoky cluster of the multitudinous houses. To the right
at the head of the harbour shallows the town of Porchester rose among
the trees. Mr. Hoopdriver’s anxiety receded to some remote corner of
his brain and that florid half-voluntary imagination of his shared the
stage with the image of Jessie. He began to speculate on the impression
he was creating. He took stock of his suit in a more optimistic spirit,
and reviewed, with some complacency, his actions for the last four and
twenty hours. Then he was dashed at the thought of her infinite
perfections.

She had been observing him quietly, rather more closely during the last
hour or so. She did not look at him directly because he seemed always
looking at her. Her own troubles had quieted down a little, and her
curiosity about the chivalrous, worshipping, but singular gentleman in
brown, was awakening. She had recalled, too, the curious incident of
their first encounter. She found him hard to explain to herself. You
must understand that her knowledge of the world was rather less than
nothing, having been obtained entirely from books. You must not take a
certain ignorance for foolishness.

She had begun with a few experiments. He did not know French except
‘_sivverplay_,’ a phrase he seemed to regard as a very good light table
joke in itself. His English was uncertain, but not such as books
informed her distinguished the lower classes. His manners seemed to her
good on the whole, but a trifle over-respectful and out of fashion. He
called her ‘Madam’ once. He seemed a person of means and leisure, but
he knew nothing of recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he
spend his time? He was certainly chivalrous, and a trifle simpleminded.
She fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had
never met with such a man before. What _could_ he be?

“Mr. Benson,” she said, breaking a silence devoted to landscape.

He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles.

“At your service.”

“Do you paint? Are you an artist?”

“Well.” Judicious pause. “I should hardly call myself a Nartist, you
know. I _do_ paint a little. 

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