 CHAPTER XVI of the artificial in man and of the zeitgeist. You have seen these two young people. But Chamel, by the by, is the man's name, and the girls is Jesse 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 toward Hazelmere. 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 pure blind people, has deduced a wonderful feature for the children of men. Man, he said, was nowadays a hairless creature by forty or fifty, and for hair we give him a wig. Shriveled, and we padded him. Toothless and low, 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 Complexions, too, were replaceable, spectacles superseded and inefficient eye-lens, and imperceptible false diaphragms or thrust into the failing ear. So he went over arenatobies until, at last, he had conjured up a weird thing of shreds and patches. A similar crumb, an artificial body of a man, but with 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 philloprogenitiveness, hunger and a taste for good living, a decent personal vanity, a healthy, satisfying cognacity, 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. Pedodogic 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 is-bin, they say, is dull past believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon, they interrupt, but this is-bin 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 over-soul, a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highways-feast, a 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 textbooks 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 Noveless, 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 precipitant, 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 oversole 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. Betchamel was to have helped her to obtain that in the most expeditious manner, and here he is beside her, talking at ignitical 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. CHAPTER 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. Warders, 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, R. Betchamel and Jesse 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 Chisester. In addition to which highways there is nothing for it but minor roadways to Petworth or Poulborough, and crosscuts Brightonward. And coming to Midhurst from the north, the Angel's entrance lies yawning to engulf your highly respectable cyclists. While Mrs. Warders, geneal 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. Betchamel 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 and haloed in cigarette smoke, and pass out of sight up the street. Incontinently a mass of cloudy uneasiness that had partially 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. Here 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 apologize. 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 nonetheless, since when have 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, or go back the way you came. Oh ho! 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 have 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 amourable phrase. You have 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 toward the grammar school. There was perhaps thirty-second silence. The other man stroked his mustache nervously. Mr. Hoopdriver's dramatic instincts were now fully awake. He did not quite understand in what role he was cast, but it was evidently something dark and mysterious. Dr. 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 meaningfully 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. Eh? And so saying he stowed it in his breeches pocket. Do you 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 realize. 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 amid hers they do not light the lamps in the summertime, or the one they were passing had betrayed him. As it was, he had to snatch suddenly at his mustache, and tug fiercely at it, to conceal the furious tumult of exaltation, the passion of laughter that came boiling up. Detective. Even in the shadow, Beckamel saw that the 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 Beckamel 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 Beckamel, appreciatively. Now here's the thing I want to put to you. The colonel 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? Beckamel 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 Beckamel. Well, Arstam, said Mr. Hoopdriver, his exaltation getting the better of him, and with a pretty conscious of repartee. Arstam both. Beckamel 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 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 detective office of his in London, Baker Street, in fact, really existed. With that the interview terminated. Beckamel 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 mutters of private inquiry and the like, returned with mystery even in his paces towards the town. Chapter 18. 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 gray. 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 10 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 kind of instinct, assumed the disguise of a cyclist, picked up the first old crock that 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. A abruptly came a wave of anger that surprised him, washed away the detective superstructure and left him playing 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. Bolong 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 couple stopping here. But there's a Mr. and Ms. Beaumont. She spelt it for precision. Sure you've got the names right, young man? Quite, said Mr. Hoopdriver. Beaumont there is. But no one of the name of... What was the name you gave? Bolong, said Mr. Hoopdriver. No, there ain't no Beaumont, said the barmaid, taking up a glass cloth and a drying tumbler and beginning to polish the ladder. 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 mid-hears tonight. Perhaps they'll come presently. Beaumont's here, but no Beaumont. Sure that Beaumont ain't the name? Certain, said Mr. Hoopdriver. It's curious the names being so alike, I thought perhaps. 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 benedict, 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 manor, too. She got off her machine and give it in to stick against the burb, and in she marched. I am my brother, she says, want to stop here tonight. My brother doesn't mind what kind of room he has, 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 he says, damn, just like that. I can fancy my brother letting me boss the show like that. I'd say you do, said Mr. Hoopdriver, if the truth was known. The barmaid looked down. She 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 sink sink. She'll be a nice little lot to marry, said the barmaid. She'll be wearing the, well, bedashes, as the saying is. I can't think what girls is coming to. This depreciation of the young lady in gray 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 them yourself before a couple years is out. Nice they'd look on my figure, said the barmaid with a titter. No, I eat one of your fashionable sort. Gracious, no. I should 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'd say I'm old fashioned, she said, and walked humming down the bar. Not to you, said Mr. Hoopdriver. He waited until he caught her eye, and then, with his native courtesy, smiled, raised his cap, and wished her good evening. 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. Someone up the street was learning the violin at rare intervals of a late-inhabitant hurried home, and woke the echoes. And a corncrate 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's a-viced. The rites 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 incidents of the railway bridge. Then we won't detain you. Thanks, said Mr. Hoopdriver aloud, in a strange, unnatural, contemptible voice, supposed to represent that of Beckhamon. Oh, the beggar! I'll be level with him yet. He's afraid of us detectives. That I'll swear. If Mrs. Werder should chance to be on the other side of the door with an earshot, well and good. For a space he meditated chest-eisements and revenges, physical impossibilities for the most part. Beckhamon staggering headlong from the impact of Mr. Hoopdriver's large but, to tell the truth, ill-supported fist. Beckhamon's five foot nine of height lifted from the ground and quivering under a vigorously applied or-swip. 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 gray again. She was a plucky one, too. He went over the incident the barmaid of the angel had described to him. His thought 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 wuffed a contemptuous laugh. He compared her color, her vigor, her voice with 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 nose 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 confidently 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, but then he remembered that he was a watcher, that tomorrow he must be busy. It would be a character to make notes, and he pulled out his little notebook. With that in hand he felt a thinking again. Would that chap tell her the texts 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 tomorrow these fugitives might rise early to escape. At that he thought of the time and found it was half past eleven. Lord, he said, 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 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. CHAPTER XX. THE PURSUIT And now to tell if Mr. Hoop-driver, 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 angelic front. Miss 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 up high, 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 reconnoiter the angel-yard in order to satisfy himself. There he found the oscler, brushing down the bicycles of the chase, and he returned, relieved, to Mrs. Wardor's premise. 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 onto the road and up after them in fine style. They went by the engine-house where the old stalks 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 closer 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 truck of her tire was milled like a shilling, and his was a checkered ribbon along the way. So they rode by Cobden's monument, and threw the prettiest of villages, until at last the downs rose steeply ahead. There they stopped the while at the only inn in the place, and Mr. Hoopdriver took up a position which commanded the indoor, and mopped his face and thirsted, and smoked 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, 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 he 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 an empty downland, perhaps for miles. He decided to return to the inn and snatch a hasty meal. At the end they gave him biscuits and cheese, and a misleading pewter measure of sturdy ale, pleasant under the pallet, 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 sunlight, 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 magnesium light, and his front wheel began an apparent 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 want to feel. The two black figures had vanished over the forehead of the hill. The tracks will 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 wheeled 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 corpses and cornfields, its ponds and streams, like jewelry of diamonds and silver glittering in the sun. The northdowns were hidden far away beyond the welled in heights, down below 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 puet 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 an unreasonable contentment. He let himself a cigarette and lounged more comfortably. Surely the Sussex ale is made of the waters of lathe and of poppies and pleasant dreams. Trousiness coiled insidiously about him. He awoke with a guilty start to find himself sprawling prone to the turf with his cap over one eye. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and realized 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 will 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. Track him, he said out loud. And decided, in the privacy of his own mind, that he had a wonderful instinct for spore. So he came past Goodwood Station and Lavend and approached Chichester towards four o'clock, and then came a terrible thing. In places the road became hard, in places where 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 the stone cross under the shadow of the cathedral the tracks vanished. Oh, crikey! said Mr. Hoopdriver, dismounting in dismay and standing agape. Dropped anything? said an inhabitant at the curb. Yes, said Mr. Hoopdriver, I've lost the spore, and walked upon his way, leaving the inhabitant marveling what part of a bicycle a spore 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 surging 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 passed. 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 an inquiry at various ins. 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. How 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 the 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 the shoes, and fretting with disappointed pugnancy, 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 checkered, that even 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 Osler thought he was confoundedly imperious considering his machine. CHAPTER XXI AT Bognor That seductive gentleman, Beckamel, 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 over-soul can be, with Jesse. But either she was the profoundest of caquettes, or she had not the slightest element of passion, with a large pee, 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 pick-aunt 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 Junior Reviewers Club, was a paleolithic creature of simple tastes and violent methods. I'll be level with you yet. Ran like a plow through the soil of his thoughts. Then this infernal detective, Beckmell, 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 problematic. She was a woman of peculiar moral views, and she measured marital infidelity largely by its proximity to herself. Out of her sight, in more particularly, out of the sight of the other woman of her sect, vice of the recognized description was, perhaps, permissible to those contemptible weaklings, men, but this was evil on high roads. She was bound to make a fuss, and these fusses invariably took the final form of a tightness of money for Beckmell, 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 idol still had the front of the stage, that a cursed detective, it seemed, had been thrown off the scent, and that, at any rate, gave a knight'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 Viquana Hotel, Bognor, the crisis had come, and Jesse, 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 with 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 seven forty-two. I will appeal to the police. You don't know them. I will tell these hotel people. They will turn you out of the doors. You're in such a thoroughly false position now. They don't understand unconventiality 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 clergymen here. We use 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, Jesse. You, Kurt, she said, and suddenly put her hand to her breast. He thought she meant to faint, but she stood, with the color gone from her face. No, he said, I love you. Love, she said. Yes, love. There are ways yet, she said, after a pause. Not for you. You were 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, instead 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, Jesse. 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, Jesse. I should say they do, though. All that, and more, also in their hearts, were set on such a girl as yourself. Why should you be so difficult to me? Here am I, with my reputation, my career, at your feet. Look here, Jesse, on my honour. I will marry you. God forbid, she said so promptly, that she never learned 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 prenuptual settlement, he said, following that hint. He paused. You must be sensible. The things you're doing. Come out on the beach now. The beach here is splendid, and the moon soon will be high. I won't, she said, stamping her foot. Well, well. Oh, leave me alone. Let me think. Think, you 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 is Paris money. 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 around. She continued to stare out of the window. He stood, looking at her for a moment, with strange light in his eyes. He made a step towards her. I have you, he said. You were mine, nettle, 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 the battle was won. She heard the handle move, and the catch clicked as the door closed behind him. CHAPTER 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 had lost that spore in Chichester, he had been tormented by the most horrible visions of the shameful insults that may be happening. The strangeness of new surrounding 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 wrapped away from him, tangible wrong in a brown suit, and an unpleasant face floating him. Mr. Hoopdriver, for the time, was in the world of romance and a night 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 of his proper place, he was angry and adventurous. It was all about him, this vivid drama he had fallen into, and it was alluding 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 lighted at the coffee tavern even, nor when he made his hasty meal. As Beckamel crossed from the vicuon towards the Esplanade, Hoopdriver, disappointed and exasperated, came hurrying round the corner from the Temperance Hotel. At the sight of Beckamel, 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 Beckamel 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 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, 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 were 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 this scrape you're in. 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 the 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 out the bicycles into 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 Beckmell, 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 coachyard. 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 have been giving your machines a wipe-over, sir. said the man, recognizing 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 back 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 rapid thanks, and, incontinentally, had another inspiration. I say, he said again. Well, this is miles too big. The man let the lantern, brought it up to Mr. Hoopdriver, and put it down on the ground. Want a smaller screwdriver? he said. Hoopdriver had his handkerchief out and sneezed promptly. Achoo! 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 what they got in the house, 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 toward the gate. A dark gray 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 Beckmills' 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 gray. For some moments the earth seemed alive with shouts of Stop them and the shadows with embuscades 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 Wagner, for the vicuna stands at the very westernmost extremity of the seafront, and riding on a fair wide road. End of Part Seven Part Eight Of The Wheels of Chance This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Wheels of Chance by H.G. Wells Chapter 23 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 governor, being out, they spent some more precious time wondering whatever was to be done, in which the two customers returning from outside joined the 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 Hoop Driver 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 austric in silence appeared Beckamel in the hall beyond the bar, walked with a resolute air to the foot of the staircase and passed out of sight. You can see the backward pitch of that exceptionally shaped cranium incredulous eyes stared into one and others 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 Osler, I'd swear. Well, that's Mr. Bolwant, said the barmaid. Anyhow, their conversation hung comatose in the air, switched up by Beckamel. They listened together, his feet stomped, turned, went out of the dining room, down the passage to the bedroom, stopped again. Poor chap, said the barmaid. She's a wicked woman. Shhh, said Stephen. After a pause, Beckamel 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. Beckamel looked up from a weak old newspaper, as, without knocking, Stephen entered. Beckamel's face suggested a different expectation. Big pardonser, said Stephen with a diplomatic cough. Well, said Beckamel, wondering suddenly if Jesse 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. Bolwant, 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 Beckamel was really startled. Another gentleman? 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. Beckamel stood with his eyes round and his knuckles on his hips. Stephen, watching him with immense enjoyment, speculated whether the abandoned husband would weep or curse or rush out of the office in furious pursuit. But as yet he seemed merely stunned. Brown clothes, he said, and farish? A little like yourself, sir, in the dark, the Osler, sir, Jim Duke. Beckamel laughed wryly. Then, with infinite fervor, he said, but let us put in blank cartridge. He said, I might have thought. He flung himself into the armchair. Damn her, said Beckamel, for all the world, like a common man. I'll chuck this infernal business. They've gone, eh? Yes, sir. Well, let him go, said Beckamel, making a memorable saying. Let him 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. 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 Beckamel. Damn you! Stephen's sympathies changed at once. Yes, sir, he murmured, fumbling for the door handle, and left the room marvelling. Beckamel, having in this way satisfied his senses of appearances, and comported himself as a pagan should, so soon as the waiter's footsteps had passed, vented the cream of his feelings into a stream of blasphemous indecency. Whether his wife or her stepmother had sent this detective, she had evidently gone off with him, and that little business was over. And he was here, stranded, and sold, and ass. 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 little figure in gray, 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 incontinentally sat down again with a concussion that stirred the bar below to its steps. He banged the arms of the chair with his fists, and swore again, of all the accursed fools that were ever spawned, he was chanting, I, Beckamel! When, with an abrupt tap and prompt opening of the door, Stephen entered with the bourbon. Chapter 24 The Moonlight Ride And so the twenty minutes' law passed into an infinity. We leave the wicked Beckamel clothing himself with cursing as 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 Chinchester, and Midhurst, and Hazelmere, and Guildford, and Ripley, and Putney, and follow this dear fool of a hoop driver of ours, and his young lady in grey, out upon the moonlit road. How they rode, how their hearts beat together, and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation in every noise pursuit. For all that flight Mr. Hoop Driver was in the world of romance. Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were not lit, hoop driver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion of a hero born. Had Beckamel arisen in the way with rapiers for a duel, hoop driver 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 lamp-lit, some white and sleeping in the moonlight, then between hedges over which they saw broad, lawn meadows shrouded in a low-lying mist. They scarcely heated, withered 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 the scape to give much thought to him, but after the first tumult of adventure, as flight passed into mere steady riding, his mind became an enormous appreciation of the position. The night was a warm white silence, safe for the subtle, running of their chains. He looked sideways at her, as she sat beside him with her ankle gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the road turned westward, and she was a dark gray 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 root, and their faint soul-piercing melodies. By the moonlight, every man, dull-cludd though he may be by day, takes something of the youth and strength of Edimon, 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 of 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 redded, white dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft gray silence with the glitter of a crystal grain set star-like in its silver here and there. Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the mother of the silence, she who has spiritualized the world, alone safe for two attendants 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 decision 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, gray beach to the right of them, and to the left a little white cottage, fast asleep inland of a sleeping fishing boat. Allo, said Mr. Hoopdriver, saw to Voko, 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 of bowing courtly. Where are we? Safe. But where? Chichester Harbour, he waved his arms 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 pace. Do you know, she said, I am not afraid of you. I am sure you are honest to me, and I don't even know your name. He was taken with a sudden shame of his homely patronemic. It's an ugly name, he said, but you are right in trusting me. I would, I would do anything for you. This, this is nothing. She caught at her breath. She did not care to ask why, but compared with Beckmo. 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 ascent 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 want 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 night errant. She spoke of Beckmo, as the illusion. Mr. Hoopdriver felt flattered, but he had no adequate answer. I am thinking, he said, full of rapture, of the 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 chitchester 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'm 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 the 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 Jesse. He looked into her eyes, and his excitement seemed arrested. Jesse, he repeated slowly. The mute emotion of his face affected her strangely. She had to speak. It's not such a 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. 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 detained. 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 Osler of the Red Hotel, for, chanced, he was one of those whom Mr. Hoopdriver had made inquiries in the afternoon. Wait to 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 divine. We've had supper, thanks, and we're tired, said Mr. Hoopdriver. I suppose you won't take anything, Jesse. The glory of having her, even as a sister, and to call her Jesse 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 have 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'll remember, with a vigil in a little sweet-stuff 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 half past eleven, and marched off with a fine sense of heroism, Bedward. End of part eight. Section 9 of The Wheels of Chance This is a LibriVox recording. All the LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells The Serbeton Interlude Chapter 26 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, they're head full of glowing nonsense, indeed, but the chorus 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 and chaperoned and abashed. Indeed, now she fancies she is safe. She is, if anything, a little proud of her own share in these transactions. Then this Mr. Hoop driver of yours, rose it idiot that he is, is an 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 moralizing novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course. For all Hoop driver knows or cares, he may be locked up the very first thing tomorrow morning for the rape of the cycle. Then in Bonnier, let alone that melancholy vestige, beckamel, with whom our dealings are, thank goodness, over, there is a coffee tavern with the steep Mr. Hoop driver 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 hay loft. Tomorrow he will be a mystery, and they will be looking for his body along the seafront. And so far we have never given a glance at the desolate home in Serbeton, 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 Plantagnet, the gifted authoress of that witty and daring book, A Soul Untrammelled, and quite an excellent woman in her way, only to such a crooked way. Her real name is Milton, she is a widow and a charming one, only ten years older than Jesse, and she is always careful to dedicate her more daring works to the sacred memory of my husband, to show that there is nothing personal, you know, in the matter. Considering her literary deputation, she was always speaking of herself, as one I martyred for truth, because the critics advertised her written indecorums in column monk slaves. Considering her literary reputation, I say, she was one of the most respectable women it is possible to imagine. She furnished correctly, she 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 Jesse she brought up so carefully that she never even let her read A Soul Untrammelled. Which therefore, naturally enough, Jesse did, and went on from that to a feast of advanced literature. Mrs. Milton not only brought up Jesse 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 Plantagnet adorned. Mrs. Milton knew Beckhammel'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 Jesse. 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 handsome 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 or wept more had Jesse been her own daughter. She showed the properest spirit, and she not only showed it, but felt it. Mrs. Milton, as a successful little authorist and still more successful widow of thirty-two, Thomas Plantagnet is a charming woman her reviewers used to write invariably, even if they spoke ill of her, found the steady growth of Jesse into womanhood and unmitigated nuisance and had been willing enough to keep her in the background. And Jesse, 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 whose decent penitentiaries of a once bohemian calling hummed with the business. Her men, as a charming literary lady she had, of course, an organised corpse, were immensely excited and were sympathetic, helpfully energetic, suggestive, alert, as their ideals of their various dispositions required them to be. Any news of Jesse was the pathetic opening of a dozen melancholy but instructing 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, wediff day that is, Thursday and Friday, nothing was heard of the fugitives. It was known that Jesse, wearing a patent costume with button-up skirts and mounting on a diamond frame safety with dunlaps 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 the brief note to her stepmother, her 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, witchery, a correspondent of hers, who had heard of her trouble among the first. He had been touring in Sussex, his snap-sup 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 tonight, 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 is dreadful. She looked into the fire that he 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 a 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, had he? 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 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 Ridgery, 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 Ridgery. And young Phipps, a callow youth of few words, faultless collars, and fervent devotion, was also when rolled before the evening was out. They would score 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 words, sprang and opened it, proud to be first. She sorely troubled. Said Dangle to Ridgery, 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 leaping. For the present, therefore, we will not concern ourselves with the starting of the rescue party, nor with Mrs. Milton's simple, but becoming great dress, with the healthy Ridgery's Norfolk jacket and thick boots, with the slender Dangle's energetic bearing, nor with the wonderful checkerings 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 ratings at mid-hurst of Ridgery, Dangle and Phipps. How Ridgery 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 calo youth the world over. Mrs. Milton stopped at the angel, and was very sad and charming and intelligent, and Ridgery paid the bill. In the afternoon of Saturday, Chester was attained, but by that time are fugitives, as usually immediately here, the awakening of Mr. Hoop Driver. Mr. Hoop Driver stirred on his pillow, opened his eyes, and, staring unmeaningly, yawned. The bedclothes were soft and pleasant. He turned the peaked nose that overrides seen sufficient 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 intermediate brown hair appeared, and first one watery gray eye, a wandering, and then two. The bed upheaved, and you had him. The thin neck projecting abruptly from the clothes he held about him, his face tearing about the room. He held the clothes about him, I hope I may explain, because his night shirt was at Bourgnor 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 in-yard, the moonlight, abruptly he threw the clothes back and rose into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, without the noise of the charters 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 Hoop Driver, it wasn't a dream after all. I wonder what they charged for these Jews' rooms, said Mr. Hoop Driver, 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 Jews sold he must be feeling. It was a shave, too, in the coachyard. Suddenly he became silent, abruptly his eyebrows rose and his jaw fell. I say, said Mr. Hoop Driver. He had never thought of it before, perhaps you will understand the world he had been in overnight, but once these things clearer in the daylight, I'm hanged if I haven't been and stolen a blessed bicycle. Who cares, said Mr. Hoop Driver 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, heroines are of a more difficult growth than by moonlight. Everything had seemed exceptionally fine and brilliant, but quite natural the evening before. Mr. Hoop Driver reached out his hand, took his Norfolk jacket, laid it over his big 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. Hoop Driver, left. With the Norfolk jacket still on his knees, he plunged into another silent meditation. That wouldn't matter, he said. It's the bikes that bother. No good going back to Bonnier. Might set it back by carrier, of course. Thank him for the loan, having no further use. Mr. Hoop Driver chuckled and lapsed into the silent concoction of a delightfully impudent letter. Mr. J. Hoop Driver presents his compliments, but the grave note reasserted itself. Might trundle back there in an hour, of course, and exchange them. My old crock 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 night-errant. It complicates things so. His eye, wandering loosely, rested on the sponge-path. What the Jews do they want with cream-pants in a bedroom? Said Mr. Hoop Driver, ompassant. Best thing I can do is to get out of here as soon as possible, anyhow. I suppose she'll go home to her friends, that bicyclists are 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 Bonnier. Lot, he remarked, and whistled silently for a space. Rummy girl, profit and loss, profit, one sister with bicycle complete. What offers? Cheap for tooth and airbrush, vest, night-shirt, stockings, and sunrise. Make the best of it. And presently, when it came to hair-brushing, he had to smooth his troubles-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 unmeditating on his beauty. He considered himself three-quartered face, left and right. An expression of distaste crept over his features. Looking won't alter it, hoop driver, he remarked. You are 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 eyes still on the glass. If I had been exercised properly, if I had been fed reasonable, if I hadn't been shoved out of a silly school into a silly shop, but there the old folks did 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 hard. I wonder what Adam had think of me as a specimen. Civilisation, eh? Air 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 the suit does look, in the sunshine. No good, hoop driver. 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 bicycles to see to, to, my man. Forward, hoop driver, if you ain't a beauty, there'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. End of Section 9. Part 10 of The Wheels of Chance This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells Chapter 28 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, you know. His anxiety was obvious enough. Very well, she said, quit frequently. 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 ungaunt-litted fingertips pink and cool, and how decided she was. Breakfast was a nervous ceremony, conversation fraternal, but then the waiter overawed him, and he was caught by a multiplicity of forks. But she called him Chris. They discussed their route over his six-penny 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 Hoop Driver's determination to be quite the gentleman, the waiter and the chambermaid got half a crown each, the Osler of Florin. Holidays, said the Osler 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 curb. 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. Hoop Driver'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 Jesse. Well, the fact is, I'm worried just a little bit about this machine. Of course, she said, I had forgotten that. But where are we going? Just a turning or two more, if you don't mind, said Hoop Driver, just a mile or so. I have to think of you, you know. I should feel more easy. If we were locked up, you know, not that I should mind on my own account. They rode with a streaky, gray sea coming and going on their left hand. Every mile they put between themselves and Chichester, Mr. Hoop Driver felt a little less conscious 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 Isaac's and of Miss Howe's. Why, it's Mr. Hoop Driver, Miss Isaacs would say. Never, emphatically from Miss Howe. Then he played with Briggs, and then he tried G. V. in a shea. Vance introducing Em to her, my sister, Brodom. He was her brother, Chris. Chris what? Confound it. Harrington. Harrington, something like that. Have to keep off that topic till he could remember. Wish he had told her the truth now, almost. He glanced at her. She was riding with her eyes straight ahead of her, thinking. A little perplexed, she seemed. He noticed how well she rode, and that she rode with her lips closed, a thing he could never manage. Mr. Hoop Driver'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 Havent 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 ruff in a moving sketch of the return. The stepmother, rependent of her indescribable cruelties, would be present. Even these rich people have their troubles. Probably an ocular, too. That footman would announce, Mr, bother that name, and Miss Milton. Then, two women weeping together, and a nightly 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 widely. You may rely, said Mr. Hoopdriver, recovering from a violent wobble. I can assure you, I want to help you very much. Don't consider me at all. Least ways consider me entirely at your service. Nuisance not to be able to say this kind of thing right. You see, I'm so awkwardly situated. If I can only help you, you'll make me very happy. There was a pause, round a bend, in the road, That came upon a grassy space between the hedge and road, Set with yarrow and meadow-sweet, Where a felled tree lay upon 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, 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. 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 well 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 course. You'd be very silly, he said. 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 a time. I asked it a week ago, I asked it yesterday, and I ask it today. 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. A concert, or a novel. The wheels of the world go on turning, turning. It's horrible. I want to do a miracle, like Joshua, and stop the world until I have fought it out. At home, it's impossible. Mr. Hoopdriver stroked his mustache. It is so, he said, in a meditative tone. Things will go on. The faint breath of summer stirred the trees, and a bunch of dandelion, Puff lifted among the meadow-sweet, and struck and broke into a dozen separate threads against his knee. They flew on apart, and sank, as for 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 Serbetin, said the young lady in gray. A, said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching at his mustache. This was an expected development. I want to write, you see, said the young lady in gray, 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? Hmm, said Mr. Hoopdriver, very grave. I can't trouble you much more. You have come. You have whisked 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. Serbetin 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. With his skull he was doing some intricate arithmetic with five pounds, six, and two pence. In some vague way he inferred from all this that Jesse 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 were 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 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 shilling a day, that gives four days, say four thirty, is hun, and twenty, six quid, well, three days, say, four ten. You were 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? A. said Mr. Hoopdriver, faying 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 Havend, and stop, perhaps at Ferrum or Southampton, for the previous day, had tired 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 irrevolently, wouldn't look the same machine if I got a big old double heirloom instead of that little bell. Why? Just a thought, a pause. Very well then, Havend and lunch, said Jesse, rising. I wish somehow we could have managed it without stealing that machine, said Mr. Hoopdriver. Because it is stealing it. You know, come to think of it. Nonsense! If Mr. Beckmel 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 enameled gray? She looked over her shoulder at his gray face. Why try and hide it in that way? It was just a passing thought, said Mr. Hoopdriver eerily. As they were riding on to Havend, 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, and caution was chinking coins, and an agent prejudice in favor of property shook her head, something else was there too, shouting in his mind to drown all the saner considerations, the intoxicating thought of riding beside her all day, all tomorrow, perhaps for other days after that, of talking to her familiarly, being brother of all her slender strength and freshness of having a golden reel, a wonderful time beyond all his imaginings, his old familiar fancings gave place to anticipations, as impalpable and fluctuating and beautiful as the sunset of a summer day. At Havend he took an opportunity to purchase at a small hairdressers in the main street a toothbrush, a pair of nail scissors, and a little bottle of stuff to darken the mustache, an article the shopman introduced to his attention recommended highly and sold in the excitement of the occasion. Chapter 29 The Unexpected Anodote of the Lion They rode on to Kozhum and lunched lightly but expensively there. Jesse went out and posted her letter to her school mistress, then the green height of Portsdown Hill tempted them and leaving their machines in the village they clamored 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 White, like a blue cloud through the hot haze. Jesse, by some miracle, had become a skirted woman in the Kozhum Inn. Mr. Hoopdriver lounged gracefully on the turf, smoked a red herring cigarette, and lazily regarded the fortified town 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 land port suburbs, and the smoky cluster of the multitudinous houses. To the right, at the head of the harbour, shallows, the town of Portschester rose among the trees. Mr. Hoopdriver's anxiety receded to some remote corner of his brain, and that floored, half-voluntary imagining of his sharing the stage with the image of Jesse. He began to speculate on the impression he was creating. He took stock of his suit optimistically again, and reviewed with some complacence his actions for the last four days 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. He 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 Sivir Play, 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 class. His manners seemed to her good on the whole, but a trifle over respectful and out of fashion. He called her madame 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 simple-minded. She fancied, so much is there in a change of costume, that she had never met 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 as your service. Do you paint? Are you an artist? Well, judicious pause. I should hardly call myself an artist, you know. I do paint a little, and sketch, you know, skitty kind of things. He plucked and began to nibble a blade of grass. It was really not so much lying as his quick imagination that prompted him to add. In papers, you know, and all that. I see, said Jesse, looking at him thoughtfully. Artists were a very heterogeneous class, certainly, and genius had a trick of being a little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. I don't do much, you know. It's not your profession? Oh, no, said Hoopdriver, anxious now to hedge. I don't make a regular thing of it, you know. Just now and then, something comes into my head and down it goes. Oh, I'm not a regular artist. Then you don't practice any regular profession? Mr. Hoopdriver looked into her eyes and saw their quite unsuspicious regard. He had vague ideas of resuming the detective role. It's like this, he said, to gain time. I have a sort of profession. Only there's a kind of reason. Nothing much, you know. I beg your pardon for cross-examining you. No trouble, said Mr. Hoopdriver. Only I can't very well. I'll leave it to you, you know. I don't want to make any mystery of it so far as that goes. Should he plunge boldly and be a barrister? That, anyhow, was something pretty good, but she might know about the barristry. I think I could guess what you are. Well guess, said Mr. Hoopdriver. You come from one of the colonies. Dear me, said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. How did you find out that? The man was born in a London suburb, dear reader. I guessed, she said. He lifted his eyebrow as one astonished and clutched a new piece of grass. You were educated up-country. Goed again, said Hoopdriver, rolling over again upon his elbow. You're a clairvoyant. He bit at the grass, smiling. Which colony was it? That, I don't know. You must guess, said Hoopdriver. South Africa, she said. I strongly inclined to South Africa. South Africa is quite a large place, he said. But South Africa is right. You're warm, said Hoopdriver. Anyhow. And the while his imagination was eagerly exploring this new province. South Africa is right, she insisted. He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her eyes. What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive Shreiner, you know, the story of an African farm. Gregory Ross is so like you. I never read the story of an African farm, said Hoopdriver. I must. What's he like? You must read the book, but it's a wonderful place, with its mixture of races and its brand new civilization dulcing the old savagery. Were you near Kama? He was a long way off from your place, said Mr. Hoopdriver. We had a little ostrich farm, you know, just a few hundred of them, out Johannesburg way. On the Karoo, was it called? That's the term. Some of it was freehold, though. Luckily, we got along very well in the old days, but there's no ostriches on that farm now. He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the moment, but he stopped and left a little to the girl's imagination, besides which it had occurred to him with a kind of shock that he was lying. What becomes of the ostriches? We sold them off when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I have another cigarette? That was when I was a little chap, you know, that we had this ostrich farm. Did you have blacks and boars about you? Lots, said Mr. Hoopdriver, striking a match on his instep and beginning to feel hot at the new responsibility he had brought upon himself. How interesting! Do you know I've never been out of England, except to Paris and Mentone and Switzerland. One gets tired of traveling. Puff. After a bit, of course. You must tell me about your farm in southern Africa. It always stimulates my imagination to think of all the places I can fancy, all the tall ostriches being driven out by a black herd to graze, I suppose. How do ostriches feed? Well, said Hoopdriver, that's rather various. They have their fancies, you know, there's fruit, of course, and that kind of thing, and chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment. Did you ever see a lion? They weren't very common in our district, said Hoopdriver quite modestly, but once I've seen them, of course, once or twice. Fancy seeing a lion, weren't you frightened? Mr. Hoopdriver, now, was thoroughly sorry he had accepted that offer of South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the soland languidly, and he settled that fate of that lion in his mind. I scarcely had time, he said. It all happened in a minute. Go on, she said. I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted ostriches were. Did you eat ostriches, then? I did not know. Eat them, often. Very nice they are, too. Properly stuffed. Well, we, I, rather, was going across the paddock, and I saw something standing up in the moonlight and looking at me. Mr. Hoopdriver was in hot perspiration now. His inventions seemed to have gone limp. Luckily, I had my father's gun with me. I was scared, though, I can tell you. Puff. I just aimed at the end that I thought was the head, and let fly. Puff. And over it went, you know. Dead? As dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired, and I wasn't much over nine at the time, either. I should have screamed and run away. There are some things you can't run away from, said Mr. Hoopdriver, to run would have been death. I don't think I ever met a lion killer before, she remarked evidently with a heightened opinion of him. There was a pause. She seemed meditating, further questions. Mr. Hoopdriver drew his watch hastily. I say, said Mr. Hoopdriver, showing it to her, don't you think we ought to be getting on? His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his confusion to modesty. He rose with a lion, added to the burdens of his conscience, and held out his hand to assist her. They walked down into Causum again, resumed their machines, and went on at a leisurely pace along the northern shore of the big harbour. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no longer happy. This horrible, this fulsome lie stuck in his memory. Why had he done it? She did not ask for any more South African stories happily, at least until Porchester was reached, but talk instead of living one's own life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She talked wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver's mind fermenting. By the castle, Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in the little shore pool. At Faraham, they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards the hour of sunset under such invigorating circumstances as you shall in due course here. End of Part 10