 CHAPTER 1 THE PRINCIPLE CHARACTER IN THE STORY If you, presuming you are of the sex that does such things, if you had gone into the drapery emporium, which is really only magnificent for shop, of Messer's entrebus and co, a perfectly fictitious co by the by, of Putney, on the 14th of August 1895, had turned to the right hand side, where the blocks of white linen and piles of blankets rise up to the rail from which the pink and blueprints depend, you might have been served by the central figure of this story that is now beginning. He would have come forward, bowing and swaying. He would have extended two hands with large-ish knuckles and enormous cuffs over the counter. He would have asked you, protruding a pointed chin, and without the slightest anticipation of pleasure in his manner, what he might have the pleasure of showing you. Under certain circumstances, as, for instance, hats, baby linen, gloves, silks, lace or curtains, he simply would have bowed politely, and with a drooping expression, and making a kind of circular sweep, invited you to step this way. And so, led you behind his ken. But under other happier conditions, Huckaback, Blanket's, Dimity, Cretone, linen, Calico, our cases in point, he would have requested you take a seat, emphasizing the hospitality by leaning over the counter and gripping a chair back in a spasmodic manner, and so proceeding to obtain unfold and exhibit his goods for your consideration. Under which happier circumstances you might, if of an observing turn of mind and not too much of a housewife to be inhuman, have given the central figure of this story less cursory attention. Now, if you had noticed anything about him, it would have been chiefly to notice how little he was noticeable. He wore the black morning coat, the black tie, and the speckled gray nether-parts descending into shadow and mystery below the counter of his craft. And he was of a pallid complexion, hair of a kind of dirty fairness, grayish eyes, and a skimpy, immature mustache under his peaked, indeterminate nose. His features were all small, but none ill-shaped. A rosette of pins decorated the lapel of his coat. His remarks you would have observed weren't entirely what people used to call cliché, formulae, not organic to the occasion, but serio-typed ages ago and learnt years since by heart. This, madam, he would say, is selling very well. We are doing a very good article of four-three a yard. We could show you something better, of course. No trouble, madam, I assure you. Such were the simple counters of his intercourse. So I say he would have presented himself to your superficial observation. He would have danced a boat behind the counter, have neatly refolded the goods he had shown you, have put on one side those you selected, extracted a little book with a carbon leaf and a tinfoil sheet from a fixture, made you out a little bill in that weak, flourishing hand peculiar to draper's, and have bought SINE. Then a puffy little chop-walker would have come into view, looking at the bill for a second very hard, showing you a parting down the middle of his head, meanwhile, have scribbled a still more flourishing, J.M., all over the document, have asked you, if there was nothing more, have stood by you, supposing that you were paying cash, until the central figure of this story reappeared with the change. One glance more at him, and the puffy little shop-walker would have been bowing you out, with fountains of civilities at work all about you, and so the interview would have been terminated. That real literature, as distinguished from anecdote, does not concern itself with superficial appearances alone. Literature is revelation. Modern literature is indecorous revelation. It is the duty of the earnest author to tell you what you would not have seen, even at the cost of some blushes. And the thing that you would not have seen about this young man, and the thing of the greatest moment to this story, the thing that must be told if the book is to be written, was, let us face it bravely, the remarkable condition of this young man's legs. Let us approach the business with dispassionate explicitness. Let us assume something of the scientific spirit, the hard, almost professional tone of the conscientious realist. Let us treat this young man's legs as a mere diagram, and indicate the points of interest were the unemotional precision of the lecture's pointers, and so to our revelation. On the internal aspect of the right ankle of this young man, you would have observed, ladies and gentlemen, a contusion and an abrasion. On the internal aspect of the left ankle, a contusion also. On its external aspect, a large yellowish bruise. On his left chin there were two bruises, one a leaden yellow graduating here and there into purple, and another, obviously of a more recent date, of a blotchy red, tumid and threatening. Proceeding up the left leg in a spiral manner, an unnatural hardness and reddish would have been discovered on the upper aspect of the calf, and above the knee and on the inner side an extraordinary expanse of bruised surface, a kind of closely stippled shading of contused points. The right leg would be found to be bruised in a marvelous manner all about and under the knee, and particularly on the interior aspect of the knee. So far we may proceed with our details. Fired by these discoveries, an investigator might perhaps have presumed his inquiries further to bruises on the shoulders, elbows, and even the finger joints of the central figure of our story. He had indeed been bumped and battered at an extraordinary number of points, but enough of realistic description is as good as a feast, and we have exhibited sufficient for our purpose. Even in literature one must know where to draw the line. Now, the reader may be inclined to wonder how a respectable young shopman would have gotten his legs and indeed himself generally into such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been sitting with his nether extremities in some complicated machinery, a threshing machine, say, or one of those haymaking furies. But Sherlock Holmes, now after a glorious career happily and decently dead, would have fancied nothing of the kind. He would have recognized at once that the bruises on the internal aspect of the leg, considered in the light of the distribution of the other abrasions and contusions, pointed unmistakably to the violent impact of the mounting beginner upon the bicycle saddle, and that the ruinous state of the right knee was equally eloquent of the concussions attended on that person's hasty, frequently causeless and invariably ill-conceived descents. One large bruise on the shin is even more characteristic of the Prentice cyclist, for upon every one of them waits the jest of the unexpected treadle. You try at least to walk your machine in an easy manner, and whack! You are rubbing your shin. So out of innocence we ripen. Two bruises on that place mark a certain want of aptitude in learning, such as one might expect in a person unused to muscular exercise. Blisters on the hands are eloquent of the nervous clutch of the wavering rider, and so forth, until Sherlock is presently explaining, by the help of the minor injuries, that the machine ridden is an old-fashioned affair with a fork instead of a diamond frame, a cushion tire, well worn on the hind wheel, and a gross weight on all of perhaps three and forty pounds. The revelation is made, behind the decorous figure of the attentive shopman that I had an honour of showing you at first, rises a vision of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a machine in a dark road, the road to be explicit, from Roehampton to Putney Hill. And with this vision is the sound of a heel, spurning the gravel, a gasping, a grunting, a shouting of, Steermann, steer, a wavering, unsteady flight, a spasmatic turning of the missile edifice of man and machine, and a collapse. Then you describe dimly through the dusk, the central figure of this story sitting by the roadside and rubbing his leg at some new place, and his friend, sympathetic, but by no means depressed, preparing the displacement of the handlebar. Thus, even in the shop assistant, does the warmth of manhood assert itself, and drive him against all the conditions of his calling, against the councils of prudence and the restrictions of his means, to seek the wholesome delight of exertion and danger and pain, and our first examination of the draper reveals beneath his draperies the man, to which initial fact, among others, we shall come again in the end. CHAPTER II But enough of these revelations. The central figure of our story is now going along behind the counter, a draper indeed, with your purchases in his arms, to the warehouse where the various articles you have selected will presently be packed by the senior porter and sent to you. Returning thence to his particular place, he seizes a folded piece of gangam, and gripping the corners of the folds in his hands begins to straighten them punctiliously. Near him is an apprentice, apprenticed to the same high calling of draper's assistant, a ruddy, red-haired lad in a very short, tailless black coat, and a very high collar who is deliberately unfolding and refolding some patterns of Cretan. By twenty-one, he too may be a full-blown assistant, even as Mr. Hoop driver. Prints depend from the brass rails above them. Behind are fixtures full of white packages of lino, hd, bk, and mal. You might imagine to see them that the two were both intent upon nothing the smoothness of textile and rectitude of fold. But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious time only four hours off now, when he will resume the tale of his bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long, long thoughts of boyhood, and his imagination rides cup up high through the chambers of his brain, seeking some nightly quest in honor of that fair lady, the last but one of the girl apprentices, to the dressmaking upstairs. He inclines, rather, to street fighting against revolutionaries, because then she could see him from the window. Jerking them back to the present comes the puffy little shopwalker with a paper in his hand. The apprentice becomes extremely active. The shopwalker eyes the goods in hands. Hoopdriver, he says, how's that line of G-S-E-Z-X ginghams? Hoopdriver returns from imaginary triumph over the uncertainties of dismounting. They're going fairly well, sir. But the larger cheek checks seem hanging. The shopwalker brings up parallel to the counter. Any particular time when you want your holidays, he asks. Hoopdriver pulls at his skimpy mustache. No, don't want them too late, sir, of course. How about this day week? Hoopdriver becomes rigidly meditative, gripping the corners of his gingham folds in his hands. His face is eloquent of conflicting considerations. Can he learn a dinner week? That's the question. Otherwise, Briggs will get next week, and he will have to wait until September when the weather is often uncertain. He is naturally of a sanguine disposition. All drapers have to be or else they could never have the faith they show in the beauty, washability, and unfading excellence of the goods they sell you. The decision comes at last. That'll do me very well, says Mr. Hoopdriver, terminating the pause. The die is cast, the shopwalker makes a note, and it goes on to Briggs in the dresses, the next in the strict scale of precedence of the drapery emporium. Mr. Hoopdriver, in alternating spasms, anon, straightens his gingham, and anon becomes meditative with his tongue in the hollow of his decaying wisdom-tooth. CHAPTER III At supper that night holiday talk held undisputed sway. Mr. Pritchard spoke of Scotland. Miss Isaacs clamored about the Betsy, why, co-ed. Mr. Judson displayed a proprietary interest in the Norfolk broads. I, said Hoopdriver, when the question came to him, why cycling, of course. You are never going to ride that dreadful machine of yours day after day, said Miss Howe, of the costume department. I am, said Hoopdriver, as calmly as possible, pulling at the insufficient moustache. I'm going for a cycling tour along the south coast. Well, all I hope, Mr. Hoopdriver, is that you'll get fine weather, said Miss Howe, and not come any nasty croppers. And don't forget some tincture of Arnica in your bag, said the junior apprentice in the very high collar. He had witnessed one of the lessons at the top of Putney Hill. You stow it, said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking hard and threateningly at the junior apprentice, and suddenly adding in a tone of bitter contempt, jam-pot. I'm getting fairly safe upon it now, he told Miss Howe. At other times, Hoopdriver might have further resented the satirical efforts of the apprentice, but his mind was too full of the projected tour to admit any petty delicacies of dignity. He left the supper-table early so that he might put in a good hour at the desperate gymnastics upon Rohampton Road before it be the time to come back for the walking up. When the gas was turned off for the night, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, rubbing Arnica into his knee, a new and a very big place and studying a road map of the south of England. Briggs of the Dresses, who shared the room with them, was sitting up in bed and trying to smoke in the dark. Briggs had never been on a cycle in his life, but he felt Hoopdriver's inexperience and offered such advice as occurred to him. Have the machine thoroughly well-oiled, said Briggs. Carry one or two lemons with you, don't tear yourself to death the first day, and sit upright. Never lose control of the machine, and always sound the bell on every possible opportunity. You mind those things, and nothing very much can't happen to you, Hoopdriver, you take my word. He would lap and lapse into silence for a minute, save perhaps for a curse or so at his pipe, and then break out with an entirely different set of tips. Avoid running over dogs, Hoopdriver, whatever you do, it's one of the worst things you can do to run over a dog. Never let the machine buckle, though as a man killed only the other day through his wheel-buckling. Scorch, don't ride on the footpath, keep your own side of the road, and if you see a tram-line, go round the corner at once and hurry off into the next county, and always light up before the dark. You mind just a few little things like that, Hoopdriver, and nothing much can't happen to you, you take my word. Right you are, said Hoopdriver, good night, old man. Good night, said Briggs, and there was silence for a space, save some of the succulent respiration of the pipe. Hoopdriver rode off into dreamland on his machine, and was scarcely there before he was pitched back into the world of sense again. Something what was it? Never oil the steering, it's fatal, a voice that came from round a fitful glow of light was saying, and clean the chain daily with black lead, you mind just a few little things like that, Lord save us, said Hoopdriver, and pulled the bedcloths over his ears. CHAPTER IV THE RIDING FORTH OF MR. Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year round, say for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer time, know the exquisite sensations of the first holiday morning. All the dreary uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains fall about your feet, all at once you are Lord of yourself, Lord of every hour in the long vacant day. You may go where you please, call none, sir or madam, have a lapel free of pins, doff your black morning coat and wear the color of your heart, and be a man. You grudge sleep, you grudge eating and drinking even their intrusion on those exquisite moments. There will be no more rising before breakfast in casual old clothing to go dusting and getting ready in a cheerless, shudder-darkened, wrap-ered-up shop, no more imperious cries of forward Hoopdriver, no more hasty meals and weary attendance on fitful old women for ten blessed days. The first morning is by far the most glorious, for you hold your whole fortune in your hands, thereafter every night comes a pang, a specter that will not be exercised, the premonition of the return, the shadow of going back, of being put in the cage again for another twelve months, lies blacker and blacker across the sunlight. But on the first morning of the ten the holiday has no past, and ten days seems as good as infinity. And it was fine, full of a promise of glorious days, a deep blue sky with dazzling piles of white cloud here and there, as those celestial hay-makers had been piling the swads of last night's clouds into cocks for a coming cartage. There were threshes in the Richmond Road and a lark on Putney Heath. The freshness of dew was in the air. Dew or the relics of an overnight shower glittered on the leaves and grass. Hoop-driver had breakfasted early by Mrs. Gunn's complacence. He wheeled his machine up Putney Hill, and his heart sang within him. Halfway up, a dissipated-looking black cat rushed home across Thlealy Road and vanished under a gate. All the big red-brick houses behind the variegated shrubs and trees had their blinds down still, and he would not have changed places with a soul in any one of them for a hundred pounds. He had on his new brown cycling suit a handsome Norfolk jacket thing for thirty pounds, and his legs, those martyr legs, were more than consoled by thick-checkered stockings thin in the foot, thick in the leg, for all they had endured. A neat packet of American cloth behind the saddle contained his change of raiment, and the bell and the handle-bar and the hubs and lamp, albeit a trifle freckled by wear glittered blindingly in the rising sunlight, and at the top of the hill, after only one unsuccessful attempt which somehow terminated on the green, Hoop-driver mounted, and with a stately and cautious restraint in his pace, and a dignified curvature of path began his great cycling tour along the southern coast. There is only one phrase to describe his course at this stage, and that is voluptuous curves. He did not ride fast, he did not ride straight. An exacting critic might say he did not ride well, but he rode generously, opulently, using the whole road and even nibbling at the footpath. The excitement never flagged. So far he had never passed or been passed by anything, but as yet the day was young and the road was clear. He doubted his steering so much that for the present he had resolved to dismount at the approach of anything else upon wheels. The shadows of the trees lay very long and blue across the road. The morning sunlight was like amber fire. At the crossroads at the top of West Hill, where the cattle-trop stands, he turned towards Kingston and set himself to scale the little bit of ascent. An early Heathkeeper in his velveteen jacket marveled at his efforts, and while he yet struggled, the head of a carter rose over the brow. At the sight of him, Mr. Hoop driver, according to his previous determination, resolved to dismount. He tightened the brake and the machine stopped dead. He was trying to think what he did with his right leg while getting off. He gripped the handles and released the brake, standing on the left pedal and waving his right foot in the air. Then, these things take so long in the telling, he found the machine was falling over to the right, while he was deciding upon a plan of action, gravitation appears to have been busy. He was still irresolute when he found the machine on the ground, himself kneeling upon it, and a vague feeling in his mind that again Providence had dealt harshly with his shin. This happened when he was just leveled with the Heathkeeper. The man in the approaching cart stood up to see the ruins better. That ain't the way to get off, said the Heathkeeper. Mr. Hoop driver picked up the machine. The handle was twisted a skew again. He said something under his breath. He would have to unscrew the beastly thing. That ain't the way to get off, repeated the Heathkeeper after a silence. I know that, said Mr. Hoop driver, testily, determined to overlook the new specimen on his shin at any cost. He unbuckled the wallet behind the saddle to get out the screw hammer. If you know it ain't the way to get off, what do you do it for? He said the Heathkeeper in a tone of friendly controversy. Mr. Hoop driver got out his screw hammer and went to the handle. He was annoyed. That's my business, I suppose, he said, fumbling with the screw. The unusual exertion had made his hands shake frightfully. The Heathkeeper became meditative and twisted his stick in his hands behind his back. You've broken your handle, Ancher, he said presently. Just then the screw hammer slipped off the nut. Mr. Hoop driver used a nasty, low word. They're trying things, them bicycles, said the Heathkeeper charitably. Very trying. Mr. Hoop driver gave the nut a vicious turn and suddenly stood up. He was holding the front wheel between his knees. I wish, said he, with a catch in his voice. I wish you'd leave off staring at me. Then with the air of one who has delivered an ultimatum, he began replacing the screw hammer in the wallet. The Heathkeeper never moved. Possibly he raised his eyebrows and certainly he stared harder than he did before. You're pretty unsociable, he said slowly as Mr. Hoop driver seized the handles and stood ready to mount as soon as the cart had passed. The indignation gathered slowly but surely. Why don't you ride on a private road of your own if no one ain't to speak to you, asked the Heathkeeper perceiving more and more clearly the bearing of the matter. Can't no one make a pass and remark to you touchy? Can I good enough to speak to you? Ben struck wooden all of a sudden. Mr. Hoop driver stared into the immensity of the future. He was rigid with emotion. It was like abusing the lions in Trafalgar Square. But the Heathkeeper felt his honour was at stake. Don't you make no remarks to him, said the Keeper as the Carter came up broadside to them. He's a bloomin' dookie is. He don't converse with no one under a earl. He's off to whenzer he is. That's why he's stickin' his behind out so haughty. Pride, why he's got so much of it, he has to carry some of it in that there bundled there for varied bust if he didn't ease his self-abed. Eh? But Mr. Hoop driver heard no more. He was hopping vigorously along the road in a spasmodic attempt to remount. He missed the treadle once and swore viciously to the Keeper's immense delight. No, no, said the Heathkeeper. In another moment Mr. Hoop driver was up and after one terrific lurch of the machine, the Heathkeeper dropped out of earshot. Mr. Hoop driver would have liked to look back at his enemy, but he usually twisted round and upset if he tried that. He had to imagine the indignant Heathkeeper telling the Carter all about it. He tried to infuse as much disdain as possible into his retreating aspect. He drove on his sinuous way down the dip by the new mare and up the little rise to the crest of the hill that drops into Kingston Vale. And so remarkable is the psychology of cycling, that he wrote all the straighter and easier because the emotions the Heathkeeper had aroused relieved his mind of the constant expectation of collapse that had previously unnerved him. To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair. Chiefly, it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done. Doubt, and for the life of you, you cannot. Now you may perhaps imagine that as he wrote on, his feelings toward the Heathkeeper were either vindictive or remorseful, vindictive for the aggravation or remorseful for his own injudicious display of ill temper. As a matter of fact, they were nothing of the sort. A sudden, a wonderful gratitude possessed him. The glory of the holidays had resumed at Sway with a sudden accession of splendor. At the crest of the hill he put his feet upon the footrests, and now riding moderately straight went with a palpitating break down that excellent descent. A new delight was in his eyes, quite over and above the pleasure of rushing through the keen, sweet morning air. He reached out his thumb and twanged his bell out of sheer happiness. He's a blue-man-duke, he is, said Mr. Hoopdriver to himself in a soft undertone, as he went soaring down the hill. And again, he's a blue-man-duke. He opened his mouth in a silent laugh. It was having a decent cut did it. His social superiority had been so evident that even a man like that noticed it. No more Manchester department for ten days. Out of Manchester, a man, the draper Hoopdriver, the hand, had vanished from existence. Instead was a gentleman, a man of pleasure, with a five-pound note, two sovereigns, and some silver at various convenient points of his person, at any rate as good as a duke, if not precisely, in the peerage. Involuntarily, at the thought of his funds, Hoopdriver's right hand left the handle and sawed his breast pocket, to be immediately recalled by a violent swoop of the machine towards the cemetery. Hooroo! Just missed that half-brick! Mr. Fus Brutes there were in the world to put such a thing in the road. Some blue-man-ary or other ought to prosecute a few of these ruffs and the rest would know better. That must be the buckle of the wallet rattling on the mud-guard. How cheerfully the wheels buzzed! The cemetery was very silent and peaceful, but the veil was waking, and windows rattled and sweaked up, and a white dog came out of one of the houses and yelped at him. He got off rather breathless at the foot of Kingston Hill, and pushed up. Halfway up, an early milk-cherry it rattled by him. Two dirty men with bundles came hurrying down. Never felt sure they were burglars carrying home the swag. It was up Kingston Hill that he first noticed a peculiar feeling, a slight tightness at his knees, but he noticed too at the top that he rode straighter than he did before. The pleasure of riding straight blotted out these first intimations of fatigue. A man on horseback appeared. Hoop-driver, in a tumult of soul at his own temerity, passed him. Then down the hill into Kingston, with the screw-hammer behind in the wallet rattling against the oil can. He passed, without misadventure, a fruiterer's van and a sluggish cartload of bricks. And in Kingston, Hoop-driver, with the most exquisite sensations, saw the shutters half removed from a draper's shop, and two yawning youths in dusty old black jackets and with dirty white comforters about their necks, clearing up the planks and boxes and wrappers in the window, preparatory to dressing it out. Even so had Hoop-driver been on the previous day, but now, was he not a bloomin' duke, helpably in the sight of common men? Then round the corner to the right, bell-bang'd furiously, and sew along the road to Serbetton. Hoop-for-freedom and adventure! Every now and then a house with an expression of sleepy surprise would open its eye as he passed, and to the right of him for a mile or so the weltering timbs flashed and glittered, talk of your joy to verve, albeit with a certain cramping sensation about the knees and calves slowly forcing itself upon his attention. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 The Shameful Episode of the Young Lady in Grey Now you must understand that Mr. Hoop-driver was not one of your fast young men. If he had been King Lemuel, he could not have profited more by his mother's instructions. He regarded the feminine sex as something to bow to and smirk at from a safe distance. Others of the intimate remoteness of a counter leave their mark upon a man. It was an adventure for him to take one of the young ladies of the establishment to church on a Sunday. Few modern young men could have merited less the epithet Dorg. But I have thought at times that his machine may have had something of the blade in its metal, decidedly it was a machine with a past. Mr. Hoop-driver had bought it, second hand, from Heirs in Putney, and Heirs said it had had several owners. Second hand was scarcely the word for it, and a lair was mildly puzzled that he should be selling such an antiquity. He said it was perfectly sound, if a little old-fashioned, but he was absolutely silent about its moral character. It may even have begun its career with a poet, say, in his glorious youth. It may have been the bicycle of a really bad man. No one who has ever ridden a cycle of any kind but will witness that the things are unaccountably prone to pick up bad habits and keep them. It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the young lady in gray appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented wobble, unprecedented so far as Hoop-driver's experience went. It showed off the most decadence and uosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley's feathers. He suddenly realized, too, that his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant. The young lady in gray was also riding a bicycle. She was dressed in a beautiful bluish gray, and the sun behind her drew her outline in gold and left the rest in shadow. Hoop-driver was dimly aware that she was young, rather slender, dark and with a bright color and bright eyes. Strange doubts possessed him as to the nature of her nether costume. He had heard of such things, of course. French, perhaps. Her handles glittered. A jet of sunlight splashed off her bell blindingly. She was approaching the high road along an affluent from the villas of Serbeton. Fee roads converged slantingly. She was traveling at about the same pace as Mr. Hoop-driver. The appearances pointed to a meeting at the fork of the roads. Hoop-driver was seized with a horrible conflict of doubts. By contrast with her he rode disgracefully. Had he not better get off at once and pretend something was wrong with his treadle, yet even the end of getting off was an uncertainty. That last occasion on Putney Heath. On the other hand what would happen if he kept on, to go very slow seemed the abnegation of his manhood, to crawl after a mere schoolgirl. Besides, she was not riding very fast. On the other hand, to thrust himself in front of her, roaming the road in his tendril like advance, seemed an incivility. Greed! He would leave her such a very little. His business training made him prone to bow and step aside. If only one could take one's hands off the handles, one might pass with a silent elevation of the hat, of course, but even that was a little suggestive of a funeral. Meanwhile the roads converged. She was looking at him. She was flushed, a little thin, and had very bright eyes. The tips fell apart. She may have been riding hard, but it looked uncommonly like a faint smile. And the things were, yes, rationals. Suddenly an impulse to bolt from the situation became clamorous. Mr. Hoopdriver peddled convulsively intending to pass her. He jerked against some tin thing in the road, and it flew up between front wheel and mudguard. He twisted round towards her, had the machine a devil. At that supreme moment it came across him that he would have done wiser to dismount. He gave a frantic whoop, and tried to get round. Then as he seemed falling over, he pulled the handle straight again into the left by an instinctive motion, and shot behind her hind wheel, missing her by a hair's breath. The pavement curb awaited him. He tried to recover and found himself jumped up on the pavement and riding squarely at a neat wooden pailing. He struck this with a terrific impact, and shot forward off his saddle into a clumsy entanglement. Then he began to tumble over sideways, and completed the entire figure in a sitting position on the gravel, with his feet between the fork and the stay of the machine. The concussion on the gravel shook his entire being. He remained in that position, wishing that he had broken his neck, wishing even more heartily that he had never been born. The glory of life had departed. Lumen duke indeed. These unwominly women. There was a software, the click of a break, two footfalls, and the young lady in gray stood holding her machine. She had turned round and come back to him. The warm sunlight now was in her face. Are you hurt? She said. She had a pretty, clear, girlish voice. She was really very young, quite a girl, in fact, and rode so well. It was a bitter draft. Mr. Hoopdriver stood up at once. Not a bid, he said, a little roofily. He became painfully aware that large patches of gravel scarcely improved the appearance of a Norfolk suit. I'm very sorry, indeed. It's my fault, she said, interrupting and so saving him on the very verge of calling her miss. He knew miss was wrong, but it was a deep-seated habit with him. I tried to pass you on the wrong side. Her face and eyes seemed all alive. It's my place to be sorry. But it was my steering. I ought to have seen you were a novice, with a touch of superiority. But you rode so straight coming along there. She really was dashed pretty. Mr. Hoopdriver's feelings passed the nadir. When he spoke again, there was the faintest flavor of the aristocratic in his voice. It's my first ride, as a matter of fact. But that's no excuse for my blundering. Your finger's bleeding, she said abruptly. He saw his knuckle was barked. I didn't feel it, he said, feeling manly. You don't at first. Have you any sticking plaster? If not, she balanced her machine against herself. She had a little side pocket, and she whipped out a small packet of sticking plaster with a pair of scissors and a sheath at the side and cut off a generous portion. He had a wild impulse to ask her to stick it on for him, controlled. Thank you, he said. Machine all right, she asked, looking past him at the prostrate vehicle, her hands on her handlebar. For the first time, Hoopdriver did not feel proud of his machine. He turned and began to pick up the fallen fabric. He looked over his shoulder, and she was gone, turned his head over the other shoulder, down the road, and she was riding off. Orph, said Mr. Hoopdriver, while I'm blowed. Talk about slap-up. His aristocratic refinement rarely adorned his speech in his private soliloquies. His mind was whirling. One fact was clear. A most delightful and novel human being had flashed across his horizon and was going out of his life again. The holiday madness was in his blood. She looked round. At that he rushed his machine into the road and began a hasty ascent. Unsuccessful. Try again. Khan found it. Will he never be able to get up on the thing again? She will be round the corner in a minute. Once more. Ah, pedal, wobble. No. Right this time, he gripped the handles and put his head down. He would overtake her. The situation was primordial. The man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilized superstructure, the draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So paleolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She vanished round the corner. His effort was titanic. What should he say when he overtook her? That scarcely disturbed him at first. How fine she had looked flushed with the exertion of riding, breathing a little fast, but elastic and active. Talk about your ladylike homekeeping girls with complexions like cold veal. But what should he say to her? That was a bother. And he could not lift his cap without risking a repetition of his previous ignominy. She was a real young lady. No mistake about that. None of your blooming shop girls. There is no greater contempt in the world than that of shop men for shop girls, unless it be that of shop girls for shop men. Phew, this was work. A certain numbness came and went at his knees. May I ask to whom I am indebted? He panted to himself, trying it over. That might do. Lucky he had a card case, a hundred a shilling while you wait. He was getting wended. The road was certainly a bit uphill. He turned the corner and saw a long stretch of road and a gray dress vanishing. He set his teeth. Had he gained on her at all? Monkey on a gridiron, yelped a small boy. Hoop driver redoubled his efforts. His breath became audible, his steering unsteady, his peddling positively ferocious. A drop of perspiration ran into his eye, irritant as acid. The road really was uphill, beyond dispute. All his physiology began to cry out at him. A last tremendous effort brought him to the corner and showed yet another extent of shady roadway, empty saved for a baker's van. His front wheel suddenly shrieked aloud. Oh Lord, said Hoop driver, relaxing. Anyhow she was not in sight. He got off unsteadily and for a moment his legs felt like wisps of cotton. He balanced his machine against the grassy edge of the path and sat down panting. His hands were gnarled with swollen veins and shaking palpably, his breath became viscid. I'm hardly in training yet, he remarked. His legs had gone leadden. I don't feel as though I'd had a mouthful of breakfast. Presently he slapped his side pocket and produced there from a brand new cigarette case and a packet of Vansedart's red herring cigarettes. He filled the case. Then his eye fell with a sudden approval on the ornamental checkering of his new stockings. The expression in his eyes faded slowly to abstract meditation. She was a stunning girl, he said. I wonder if I shall ever set eyes on her again. And she knew how to ride, too. Wonder what she thought of me. The phrase blue-man-duke floated into his mind with a certain flavor of comfort. He lit a cigarette and sat smoking and meditating. He did not even look up when vehicles passed. It was perhaps ten minutes before he roused himself. What rod it is? What's the good of thinking such things, he said? I'm only a blessed draper's assistant. To be exact, he did not say blessed. The service of a shop may polish a man's exterior ways, but the apprentice's dormitory is an indifferent school for either manners or morals. He stood up and began wheeling his machine towards Escher. It was going to be a beautiful day, and the hedges and trees in the open country were all glorious to his town-tired eyes, but it was a little different from the elation of his start. Look at the gentleman with a bicotol, said a nurse made on the path to a personage in a perambulator. That healed him a little. Gentlemen was her bicotol. Blumen Duke. I can't look so very seedy, he said to himself. I wonder. I should just like to know. There was something very comforting in the track of her pneumatic running straight and steady along the road before him. It must be hers. No other pneumatic had been along the road that morning. It was just possible, of course, that he might see her once more, coming back. Should he try and say something smart? He speculated what manner of girl she might be. Probably she was one of these here new women. He had a persuasion the cult had been maligned. Anyhow, she was a lady. And rich people, too. Her machine couldn't have cost much under twenty pounds. His mind came round and dwelt some time on her visible self. Rational dress didn't look a bit unwominely, however he disdained to be one of your fortune-hunters. Then his thoughts drove off at a tangent. He would certainly have to get something to eat at the next public house. End of section two, Recording by Patty Cunningham. Part three 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 6. On the Road to Ripley. In the fullness of time, Mr. Hoopdriver drew near the Marquis of Granby at Escher, and as he came under the railway arch and saw the inn in front of him, he mounted his machine again and rode bravely up to the doorway. Burton and biscuit and cheese he had, which indeed is Burton in its proper company, and as he was eating there came a middle-aged man in a drab cycling suit, very red and moist and angry in the face, and asked bitterly for a lemon-squat. He sat down a seat in the bar and mopped his face, but scarcely had he sat down before he got up again and started out of the doorway. Damn! he said. Then, damn fool! I, said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking around suddenly with a piece of cheese in his cheek. The man in drab phased him. I called myself a damn fool, sir. Have you any objection? Oh, none, none, said Mr. Hoopdriver. I thought you spoke to me. I didn't hear what you said. To have a completed of disposition and an energetic temperament, sir, is hell. Hell, I tell you, a kind of play of disposition and a phlegmatic temperament all very well, but energy and philosophy? Mr. Hoopdriver looked as intelligent as he could, but said nothing. There's no hurry, sir. None whatever. I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanize. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go, hammer and tongs. I never look to right or left. Never noticed a flower, never saw a view, got hot, juicy, red, like a grilled chop. Here I am, sir, come from Guildford in something under an hour. Why, sir? Mr. Hoopdriver shook his head. Because I'm a damn fool, sir. Because I have reservoirs and reservoirs of muscular energy, and one or other of them is always leaking. It's a most interesting road, birds and trees, I've no doubt, and wayside flowers. And there's nothing I should enjoy more than watching them. But I can't. Get me on that machine, and I have to go. Get me on anything, and I have to go, and I don't want to go a bit. Why should a man rush about like a rocket, all pace and fizzle? Why, it makes me furious. I can assure you, sir. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it. A quiet, dignified, philosophical man, that's what I am, at bottom. And here I am dancing with rage, and swearing like a drunken tinker at a perfect stranger. But my way's wasted. I've lost all the country road, and now I'm on the fringe of London, and I might have loitered all the morning. Ugg! Thank heaven, sir, you have not the irritable temperament, that you are not goaded to madness by your endogenous sneers. By the eternal wrangling of an uncomfortable soul in body, I tell you, I lead a cat and dog life. But what is the use of talking? It's all of a peace. He tossed his head with unspeakable self-disgust, pitched the lemon squash into his mouth, paid for it, and without any further remark strode to the door. Mr. Hoopdriver was still wondering what to say when his interlocutor vanished. There was a noise of a foot, spurring the gravel, and when Mr. Hoopdriver reached the doorway, the man in drab was a score of yards Londonward. He had already gathered pace. He peddled with ill-suppressed anger, and his head was going down. In another moment he flew swiftly out of sight under the railway arch, and Mr. Hoopdriver saw him no more. After this whirlwind, Mr. Hoopdriver paid his reckoning, and being now a little rested about the muscles of the knees, resumed his saddle and rode off in the direction of Ripley, along an excellent but undulating road. He was pleased to find his command over his machine already sensibly increased. He set himself little exercises as he went along, and performed them with varying success. There was, for instance, steering in between a couple of stones, say a foot of part. A deed of little difficulty so far as the front wheel is concerned, but the back wheel, not being under the sway of the human eye, is apt to take a vicious jump over the obstacle, which sends a violent concussion all along the spine to the skull, and will even jerk a loose fastened hat over the eyes, and so lead too much confusion. And again there was taking the hand, or hands, off the handlebar, a sing in a dimple thing in itself, but complex in its consequences. This particularly was a feat Mr. Hoopdriver desired to do, for several divergent reasons. At present it simply led to convulsive balancing and novel, inelegant modes of dismounting. The human nose is at best a needless excrescence. There are those who consider it ornamental, and would regard a face deprived of its assistance with pity or derision, but it is doubtful whether are esteemed is dedicated so much by a sense of its absolute beauty as by the vitiating effect of a universally prevalent fashion. In the case of bicycle students, as the young of both sexes, its inutility is aggravated by its persistent annoyance, it requires constant attention. Until one can ride with one hand and search for, secure, and use a pocket handkerchief with the other, cycling is necessarily a constant series of descents. Nothing can be further from the author's ambition than a wanton realism, but Mr. Hoopdriver's nose is a plain and salient fact, and face it we must. And in addition to this inconvenience there are flies. Until the cyclist can steer with one hand his face is given over to Beaselbub. Contemplative flies stroll over it, a trifle absently, with its most sensitive surfaces. The only way to dislodge them is to shake the head forcibly and to writhe one's features violently. This is not only a lengthy and frequently ineffectual method, but one exceedingly terrifying to foot passengers. And again, sometimes the beginner rides for a space with one eye closed by perspiration, giving him a waggish air foreign to his mood, and ill calculated to overall the impertinent. However, you will appreciate now the motive of Mr. Hoopdriver's experiments. He presently attained sufficient dexterity to slap himself smartly and violently in the face with his right hand, without certainly overturning the machine. But his pocket handkerchief might have been in California for any good it was to him while he was in the saddle. Yet you must not think that because Mr. Hoopdriver was a little uncomfortable he was unhappy in the slightest degree. In the background of his consciousness was the sense that about this time Briggs would be half way through his window-dressing, and Gosling, the apprentice, busy with a chair turned over to the counter, and his ears very red, trying to roll a piece of huckaback. Only those who have rolled a piece of huckaback know quite how detestable huckaback is to roll, and the shop would be dusty. And perhaps the governor about and snappy, and here was quiet and greenery, and one mocked about as the desire took one, without a soul to see, and here was no wailing of sang, no folding of remnants, no voice to shout, Hoopdriver, forward! And once he almost ran over something wonderful, a little, low, red beast with the yellowish tail that went rushing across the road before him. It was the first weasel he had ever seen in his cockney life. There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him, Pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows, where shining rivers wound their lazy ways, with square-towered flint churches, and rabbling, cheap, and hardy inns, clean white country towns, long downhill stretches where one might ride at one's ease, overlooking a jolt or so, and far away at the end of it all, the sea. What mattered a fly or so in the dawn of these delights? Perhaps he had been dashed a minute by the shameful episode of the young lady in grey, and perhaps the memory of it was making itself a little air in a corner of his brain, from which it could distress him, in the retrospect by suggesting that he looked like a fool, but for the present that trouble was altogether in abeyance. The man in drab, evidently a swell, had spoken to him as his equal, and the knees of his brown suit, and the checkered stockings were ever before his eyes, or rather you could see the stockings by carrying the head a little to one side, and to feel, little by little, his mastery over this delightful treacherous machine growing and growing, every half mile or so his knees reasserted themselves, and he dismounted and sat awhile by the roadside. It was at a charming little place between Escher and Cobham, where a bridge crosses a stream that Mr. Hoopdriver came across the other cyclist in brown. It is well to notice the fact here, although the interview was of the slightest, because it happened that subsequently Hoopdriver saw a great deal more of this other man in brown. The other cyclist in brown had a machine of dazzling newness, and a punctured pneumatic lay across his knees. He was a man of thirty or more, with a whitish face, an aquiline nose, a lank, flaxen mustache, and very fair hair, and he scowled at the job before him. At the sight of him, Mr. Hoopdriver pulled himself together and rode by with the air of one borne to the wheel. A splendid morning, said Mr. Hoopdriver, a fine surface. The morning in you and the surface be everlastingly damned, said the other man in brown as Hoopdriver receded. Hoopdriver heard the mumble, and did not distinguish the words, and he felt a pleasing sense of having duly asserted the wide sympathy that by cyclists together, of having behaved himself, as becomes one of the brotherhood of the wheel. The other man in brown watched his receding aspect. Greasy proletarian, said the other man in brown, feeling a prophetic dislike. Got a suit of brown, the very picture of this. One would think his sole aim of in life had been to character me. It's fortune's way with me. Look at the insteps of the treadles. Why does heaven make such men? Having lit a cigarette, the other man in brown returned to the business in hand. Mr. Hoopdriver worked up the hill towards Cobham, to a point that he felt sure, was out of sight of the other man in brown, and then he dismounted and pushed his machine until the proximity of the village, and a proper pride drove him into the saddle again. CHAPTER VIII Beyond Cobham came a delightful incident, delightful, that is, in its beginning, if a trifle indeterminate in the retrospect. It was perhaps half way between Cobham and Ripley. Mr. Hoopdriver dropped down a little hill, where, unfenced from the road, fine mossy trees and bracken lay on either side, and looking up he saw an open country before him, covered with heather and set with pines and a yellow road running across it, and half a mile away, perhaps a little gray figure by the wayside waving something white. NEVER, said Mr. Hoopdriver with his hands tightening on the handles. He resumed the treadles, staring away before him, jolted over a stone, wabled, recovered, and began riding faster at once, with his eyes ahead. IT CAN'T BE, said Hoopdriver. He wrote his straightest and kept his pedals spinning, albeit a limp numbness had resumed possession of his legs. IT CAN'T BE! He repeated, feeling every moment more assured that it was. Lord, I don't know even now, said Mr. Hoopdriver, legs whirling, and then, BLOW MY LEGS! But he kept on, and drew nearer and nearer, breathing hard, and gathering flies like a flypaper. In the valley he was hidden. Then the road began to rise, and the resistance of the pedals grew. As he crested the hill, he saw her, not a hundred yards away from him. IT'S HER, he said. IT'S HER! Right enough! IT'S THE SUITS, STUNNIT! Which was truer, even than Mr. Hoopdriver thought. But now she was not waving her handkerchief, she was not even looking at him. She was wheeling her machine slowly along the road towards him, and admiring the pretty wooden hills toward Weybridge. She might have been unaware of his existence for all the recognition he got. For a moment horrible doubts troubled Mr. Hoopdriver. Had that handkerchief been a dream? Besides which, he was delinquent and scarlet, and felt so. It must be her cockatry. The handkerchief was indisputable. Should he ride up to her and get off? Or get off and walk up to her? It was, as well, she didn't look, because he would certainly capsize if he lifted his cap. Perhaps that was her consideration. Even as he hesitated, he was upon her. She must have heard his breathing. He gripped the brake, steady. His right leg waved in the air, and he came down heavily and staggered, but erect. She turned her eyes upon him with admirable surprise. Mr. Hoopdriver tried to smile pleasantly, hold up his machine, raise his cap, and bow gracefully. Indeed he felt that he did as much. He was a man singularly devoid of the minute of self-consciousness, and he was quite unaware of a tail of damp hair lying across his forehead, and just clearing the eyes, and of the general disorder of his coiffure. There was an interrogative pause. What can I have the pleasure, began Mr. Hoopdriver insinuatingly? I mean, remembering his emancipation, and abruptly assuming his most aristocratic intonation. Can I be of any assistance to you? The young lady in gray bit her lower lip, and said very prettily, None, thank you. She glanced away from him, and made as if she would proceed. Oh! said Mr. Hoopdriver, taken aback, and suddenly crestfallen again. It was so unexpected. He tried to grasp the situation. Was she coquetting, or had he— Excuse me one minute, he said, as she began to wheel her machine again. Yes, she said, stopping and staring a little, with the color in her cheeks deepening. I should not have elated if I had not imagined that you waved something white, he paused. She looked at him doubtfully. He had seen it. She decided that he was not an unredeemable rough taking advantage of a mistake, but an innocent soul meaning well while seeking happiness. I did wave my handkerchief, she said. I'm very sorry. I'm expecting a friend, a gentleman. She seemed to flush pink for a moment. He is riding a bicycle and dressed in brown, and at a distance, you know. Oh! quite, said Mr. Hoopdriver, bearing up in a manly fashion against his bitter disappointment. Certainly. I'm awfully sorry, you know, troubling you to dismount and all that. No trouble, I assure you, said Mr. Hoopdriver mechanically, and bowing over his saddle as if it was a counter. Somehow he could not find it in his heart to tell her that the man was beyond there with a punctured pneumatic. He looked back along the road and tried to think of something else to say, but the gulf in the conversation widened rapidly and hopelessly. There's nothing further, began Mr. Hoopdriver desperately, recurring his stalk of cliches. Nothing, thank you, she said decisively, and immediately, this is Ripley Road. Certainly, said Mr. Hoopdriver, Ripley is about two miles from here according to the milestones. Thank you, she said warmly. Thank you so much. I felt sure there was no mistake, and I really am awfully sorry. Don't mention it, said Mr. Hoopdriver. Don't mention it. He hesitated and gripped his handles to mount. It's me, he said, ought to be sorry. Should he say it? Was it an impertinence? Anyhow, not being the other gentleman, you know. He tried a quietly insinuating smile that he knew for a grin even as he smiled. She disapproved, then she despised him, was overcome with shame at her expression, turned his back upon her, and began, very clumsily, to mount. He did so with a horrible swerve, and went peddling off, riding very badly, as he was only too painfully aware. Nevertheless, thank heaven for mounting. He could not see her because it was so dangerous for him to look round, but he could imagine her indignant and pitiless. He felt an unspeakable idiot. One had to be so careful what one said to young ladies, and he'd gone and treated her just as though she was only a larky girl. It was unforgivable. He always was a fool. You could tell from her manner she didn't think him a gentleman. One glance, and she seemed to look clear through him, and all his pretense. What rot it was venturing to speak to a girl like that. With her education she was bound to see through him at once. When nicely she spoke, too, nice, clear-cut words, she made him feel what slush his own accent was. And that last silly remark. What was it? Not being the other gentleman, you know. No point in it. And gentlemen, what could she be thinking of him? But really, the young lady in grey had dismissed Hooptreifer from her thoughts almost before he had vanished round the corner. She had thought no ill of him. His manifest awe and admiration of her had given her not an atom of offence. But for her, just now, there were weightier things to think about. Things that would affect all the rest of her life. She continued slowly, walking her machine, Londonward. Presently she stopped. Oh, why doesn't he come? She said, and stamped her foot petulantly. Then, as if in answer, coming down the hill among the trees, appeared the other man in brown, dismounted and wheeling his machine. End of Part Three. The Four 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, recording by Marianne Spiegel. The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells. Chapter Nine How Mr. Hooptreifer Was Haunted As Mr. Hooptreifer rode swaggeringly along the Ripley Road, it came to him with an unwarrantable sense of comfort that he had seen the last of the young lady in grey. But the ill-concealed bladerie of the machine, the present machinery of fate, the due machina, so to speak, was against him. The bicycle, torn from this attractive young woman, grew heavier and heavier and continually more unsteady. It seemed a choice between stopping at Ripley or dying in the flower of his days. He went into the unicorn after propping his machine outside the door, and as he cooled down and smoked his red-haired cigarette while the cold meat was getting ready, he saw from the window the young lady in grey and the other man in brown entering Ripley. They filled him with apprehension by looking at the house which sheltered him. But the sight of his bicycle, prompt in a drunk and incapable attitude against the doorway, humping its rackety mudguard and leering at them with its darkened lantern-eye, drove them away, so it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver, to the spacious swallow of the golden dragon. The young lady was riding very slowly, but the other man in brown had a bad puncture and was wheeling his machine. Mr. Hoopdriver noted his flex and mustache, his aquiline nose, his rather bent shoulders, with a sudden, vivid dislike. The maid at the unicorn is naturally a pleasant girl, but she is jaded by the incessant incidents of cyclists and Hoopdriver's mind, even as he conversed with her in that cultivated voice of his, of the weather, of the distance from London and of the excellence of the Ripley road, wandered to the incomparable freshness and brilliance of the young lady in grey. As he sat at meat he kept turning his head to the window to see what signs there were of that person, but the face of the golden dragon displayed no appreciation of the delightful morsel it had swallowed. As an incidental consequence of this distraction Mr. Hoopdriver was for a minute greatly inconvenienced by mouthful of mustard. After he had called for his reckoning he went, his courage being high with meat and mustard, to the door, intending to stand with his legs wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets, and stare boldly across the road. But just then the other man in brown appeared in the gateway of the golden dragon-yard, it is one of those delightful ends at date from the coaching days, wheeling his punctured machine. He was taking it to Flambeau's, the repairs. He looked up and saw Hoopdriver, stared for a minute, and then scowled darkly. But Hoopdriver remained stoutly in the doorway until the other man in brown had disappeared into Flambeau's. Then he glanced momentarily at the golden dragon, puckered his mouth into a whistle of unconcern, and proceeded to wheel his machine into the road until a sufficient margin for mounting was secured. Now, at that time, I say, Hoopdriver was rather desirous than not of seeing no more of the young lady in gray. The other man in brown, he guessed, was her brother, albeit that person was of a pallid fairness, differing essentially from her rich coloring, and, besides, he felt that he made a hopeless fool of himself. But the afternoon was against him, intolerably hot, especially on the top of his head, and the virtue had gone out of his legs to digest his cold meat, and altogether his ride to Guilford was exceedingly intermittent. At times he would walk, at times lounged by the wayside, and every public house, in spite of brigs and a sentiment of economy, meant a lemonade and a dash of bitter. For that is the experience of all those who go on wheels, that drinking begets thirst, even more than thirst begets drinking, until at last the man who yields becomes a hell unto himself, a hell in which the fire dieeth not, and the thirst is not quenched. Until a penny-worth of acrid green apples turned the current that threatened to carry him away, ever and again a cycle or a party of cyclists would go by with glittering wheels and softly running chains, and on each occasion, to save his self-respect, Mr. Hoopdriver descended and feigned some trouble with his saddle, every time he descended with less trepidation. He did not reach Guilford until nearly four o'clock, and then he was so much exhausted that he decided to put up there for the night at the Yellow Hammer coffee tavern. And after he had cooled the space and refreshed himself with tea and bread and butter and jam, the tea he drank noisily out of the saucer. He went out to loiter away the rest of the afternoon. Guilford is an altogether charming old town, famous, so he learnt from a guidebook, as the scene of Master Tupper's great historical novel of Stephen Langton. And it has a delightful castle, all set about with geraniums and brass plates commemorating the gentlemen who put them up. And its Guild Hall is a tutor building, very pleasant to see, and in the afternoon the shops are busy and the people going to and fro make the pavements look bright and prosperous. It was nice to peep in the windows and see the heads of the men and girls in the draper's shops, busy as busy, serving away. The high street runs down at an angle of seventy degrees to the horizon, so it seemed to Mr. Hoop Driver, whose feeling for gradients was unnaturally exalted. And it brought his heart into his mouth to see a cyclist ride down it, like a fly crawling down a window pane. The man hadn't even a break. He visited the castle early in the evening and paid his two pence to ascend the keep. At the top, from the cage, he looked down over the clustering red roofs of the town and the tower of the church, and then, going to the southern side, set down and lit a red-herring cigarette, and stared away south over the old, bramble-bearing, firm-bassette ruin. But the waves of blue upland that rose, one behind another, across the wailed, to the lazy altitudes of hind head and buster. His pale gray eyes were full of complacency and pleasurable anticipation. Tomorrow he would go riding across that wide valley. He did not notice anyone else had come up to the keep after him until he heard a soft voice behind him saying, Well, Miss Beaumont, here's the view. Something in the accent pointed to a jest in the name. It's a dear old town, Brother George, answered another voice that sounded familiar enough, and, turning his head, Mr. Hoop Driver saw the other man in brown and the young lady in gray, with their backs toward him. She turned her smiling profile toward Hoop Driver. Only, you know, brothers don't call their sisters. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Hoop Driver. Damn! said the other man in brown, quite audibly, starting as he followed her glance. Mr. Hoop Driver, with a fine air of indifference, resumed the wield. Beautiful old town, isn't it? said the other man in brown, after a quite perceptible pause. Isn't it? said the young lady in gray. Another pause began. Can't get alone anywhere, said the other man in brown, looking round. Then Mr. Hoop Driver perceived clearly that he was in the way, and decided to retreat. It was just his luck, of course, that he should stumble at the head of the steps and vanish with indignity. This was the third time that he'd seen him, and the fourth time her, and, of course, he was too big a fat head to raise his cap to her. He thought of that at the foot of the keep. Only they aimed at the south coast, just as he did. He'd get up at times the next day and hurry off to avoid her, them, that is. It never occurred to Mr. Hoop Driver that Miss Beaumont and her brother might do exactly the same thing. And that evening, at least, the peculiarity of a brother calling his sister Miss Beaumont did not recur to him. He was much too preoccupied with an analysis of his own share of these encounters. He found it hard to be altogether satisfied about the figure he had cut, revise his memories as he would. Once more, quite unintentionally, he stumbled upon these two people. It was about seven o'clock. He stopped outside a linen draper's and peered over the goods in the window at the assistance in torment. He could have spent a whole day happily at that. He told himself that he was trying to see how they dressed out the brass lines over their counters, in a purely professional spirit. But down at the very bottom of his heart he knew better. The customers were secondary consideration, and it was only after the lapse of perhaps a minute that he perceived that among them was the young lady in grey. He turned away from the window at once, and saw the other man in brown standing at the edge of the pavement and regarding him with a very curious expression aface. There came into Mr. Hoop Driver's head the curious problem whether he was to be regarded as a nuisance haunting these people or whether they were to be regarded as a nuisance haunting him. He abandoned the solution at last in despair, quite unable to decide upon the course he should take at the next encounter, whether he should scowl savagely at the couple or assume an attitude eloquent of apology and propitiation. CHAPTER X The Imaginings of Mr. Hoop Driver's Heart Mr. Hoop Driver was, in the days of this story, a poet, though he had never written a line of verse, or perhaps romancer will describe him better. Like I know not how many of those who do the fetching and caring of life, a great number of them certainly, his real life was absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as such people do in Mr. Gissing's novels, he would probably have come by way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes and poses, deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions. His experiences were mere material for a romantic superstructure. If some power had given Hoop Driver the gift he burns invoked to see ourselves as others see us, he would probably have given it away to someone else at the very earliest opportunity. His entire life, you must understand, was not a continuous romance, but a series of short stories, linked only by the general resemblance of their hero, a brown-haired young fellow commonly, with blue eyes and a fair mustache, graceful rather than strong, sharp and resolute rather than clever. CP, as the scientific books say, page two. Invariably this person possessed an iron will. The stories fluctuated indefinitely. The smoking of a cigarette converted Hoop Driver's hero into something entirely worldly, subtly rakeish, with a humorous twinkle in the eye and some gallant sinning in the background. You should have seen Mr. Hoop Driver promenading the brilliant gardens at Earl's Court on an early closing night. His meaning glances, I dare not give the meaning. Such an influence as the eloquence of a revivalist preacher would suffice to divert the story into absolutely different channels, make him a white-sourced hero, a man still pure, walking untainted and brave and helpful through myry ways, the appearance of some dangerly-gloved, frot-coated gentleman with buttonhole and eyeglasses complete, gallantly attendant in the rear of customers, served again to start visions of a simplicity, essentially chroma-like, of sturdy plainness, of a strong, silent man going righteously through the world. This day there had predominated a fine leisurely person, immaculately clothed, and riding on an unexceptional machine, a mysterious person, quite un- ostentatious, but with accidental self-revelation of something over the common, even a bloomin' duke it might be incognito on the tour of the South Coast. You must not think that there was any telling of these stories of this lifelong series by Mr. Hoop Driver. He never dreamt that they were known to a soul. If it were not for the trouble, I would, I think, go back and rewrite this section from the beginning, expunging the statement that Hoop Driver was a poet and a romancer, and saying instead that he was a playwright and acted his own plays. He was not only the sole performer, but the entire audience, and the entertainment kept him almost continuously happy. Yet even that playwright comparison scarcely expresses all the facts of the case. After all, very many of his dreams never got acted at all, possibly, indeed, most of them, the dreams of a solitary walk, for instance, or of a tram-car ride, the dreams dreamt behind the counter while trade was slack, and mechanical foldings and rollings occupied his muscles. Most of them were little dramatic situations, crucial dialogues, the return of Mr. Hoop Driver to his native village, for instance, in a well-cut holiday suit and natty gloves, the unheard asides of the rival neighbors, the delight of the old matter, the intelligence. A ten-pound rise all at once from Antrobus, matter, what do you think of that? Or, again, the first whispering of love, dainty and witty and tender to the girl he served a few days ago with Cetin, or gallant rescue of generalized beauty and distress from truculent insult or ravenous dog. So many people do this, and you never suspect it. You see a tattered lad selling matches in the street, and you think there is nothing between him and the bleakness of immensity, between him and utter abasement, but a few tattered rags and a feeble musculature. An all unseen by you a host of heaven, sent fatuities, swaths about him, even maybe as they swath you about. Many men have never seen their own profiles or the backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has been invented. They swath him about so thickly that the pricks of fate scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so indeed it is with all of us who go on living. Self-deception is the anesthetic of life, while God is carving out our beings. But to return from this general vivisection to Mr. Hoop Driver's imaginings. You see now how external our view has been. We have had but the slightest transitory glimpses of the drama within of how the things looked in the magic mirror of Mr. Hoop Driver's mind. On the road to Guildford, and during his encounters with his haunting fellow-cyclists, the drama had presented chiefly the quiet gentleman to whom we have alluded, but at Guildford, under more varied stimuli, he burgeoned out more variously. There was the house agent's window, for instance, set him upon a charming little comedy. He would go in, make inquiries about that thirty-pound house, get the key possibly, and go over it. The thing would stimulate the clerk's curiosity immensely. He searched his mind for a reason for this proceeding and discovered that he was a dynamiteer needing privacy. Upon that theory he procured the key, explored the house carefully, said darkly that it might suit his special needs, but that there were others to consult. The clerk, however, did not understand the illusion, and merely pitied him as one who had married young and paired himself to a stronger mind than his own. This proceeding, in some occult way, led to the purchase of a notebook and pencil, and that started the conception of an artist taking notes. That was a little game Mr. Hoopdriver had, in congenial company, played in his still-younger days, to the infinite annoyance of quite a number of respectable excursionists at Hastings. In early days Mr. Hoopdriver had been, as his mother proudly boasted, a bit of a drawer, but a conscientious and normally stupid schoolmaster perceived the insipid talent, and had nipped it in the bud by a series of lessons in art. However, our principal character figured about quite happily in old corners of Guildford, and once the other man in brown, looking out of the bay window of the Earl of Kent, saw him standing in a corner by a gateway, notebook in hand, busily sketching the Earl's imposing features. At which site the other man in brown started back from the centre of the window, so as to be hidden from him, and, crouching slightly, watched him intently through the intercercies in the lace curtains. CHAPTER XI. OMISSIONS Now the rest of the acts of Mr. Hoopdriver in Guildford, on the great opening day of his holidays, are not to be detailed here. How he wandered about the old town in the dusk, and up to the hogs back to see the little lamps below, and the little stars above come out one after another. How he returned through the yellow-lit streets to the yellow-hammered coffee tavern, and supped bravely in the commercial room a man among men. How he joined in the talk about flying machines and the possibilities of electricity, witnessing that flying machines were dead certain to come, and that electricity was wonderful, wonderful. How he went and watched the billiard playing, and said, left him, several times, with an oracular air. And how he felt a yawning, and how he got out his cycling map and studied it intently, are things that find no mention here. Nor will I enlarge upon his going into the writing room, and marking the road from London to Guildford with a fine bright line in the reddest of red ink. In his little cyclist's hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these things. It is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce it here, to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying fable written to while away an hour. At last he felt a yawning so much, that very reluctantly indeed he said about finishing this great and splendid day, a last that all days must end at last. He got his candle in the hall from a friendly waiting-maid, and passed upward, wither a modest novelist, who writes for the family circle, dare not follow. Yet I may tell you that he knelt down at his bedside, happy and drowsy, and said, Our Father chart in heaven, even as he had learnt it by rote from his mother nearly twenty years ago. And anon, when his breathing had come deep and regular, we may creep into his bedroom and catch him at his dreams. He is lying upon his left side, with his arm under the pillow. It is dark, and he is hidden, but if you could have seen his face sleeping there in the darkness, I think you would have perceived, in spite of the treasured, thin, straggling mustache, in spite of your memory of the coarse words he had used that day, that the man before you was, after all, only a little child asleep. CHAPTER 12 The Dreams of Mr. Hoop Driver In spite of the drawn blinds and the darkness, you have just seen Mr. Hoop Driver's face peaceful in its beauty-sleep in the little plain bedroom at the very top of the Yellow Hammer Coffee Tavern at Guildford. That was before midnight. As the night progressed he was disturbed by dreams. After your first day of cycling one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow. You ride down steeples, and staircases, and over precipice. You hover in horrible suspense over inhabited towns, vainly seeking for a break your hand cannot find, to save you from a headlong fall. You plunge into weltering rivers and rush helplessly at monstrous obstacles. A non-Mr. Hoop Driver found himself riding out of the darkness of nonexistence, peddling Ezekiel's wheels across the weld of Surrey, jolting over the hills and smashing villages in his course, while the other man in brown cursed and swore at him, and shouted to stop his career. There was the Putney Heathkeeper, too, and the man in drab, raging at him. He felt an awful fool. Uh, what is it? A juggins? A juggernaut. The villagers went off one after another with a soft, squashing noise. He did not see the young lady in gray, but he knew that she was looking at his back. He dared not look around. Where the devil was the break, it must have fallen off. And the bell? Right in front of him was Guildford. He tried to shout and warn the town to get out of the way, but his voice was gone as well. Near, near, it was fearful, and in another moment the houses were cracking like nuts, and the blood of the inhabitants squirting this way and that. The streets were black with people running. Right under his wheels he saw the young lady in gray. A feeling of horror came upon Mr. Hoopdriver. He flung himself sideways to descend, forgetting how high he was, and forthwith he began falling, falling, falling. He woke up and turned over, saw the new moon in the window, wandered a little, and went to sleep again. This second dream went back into the first somehow, and the other man in brown came threatening and shouting toward him. He grew uglier and uglier as he approached, and his expression was intolerably evil. He came and looked close into Mr. Hoopdriver's eyes, and then receded to an incredible distance. His face seemed to be luminous. "'Miss Beaumont,' he said, and splashed up a spray of suspicion. Someone began letting off fireworks, chiefly, Catherine wheels, down the slope, though Mr. Hoopdriver knew it was against the rules. It seemed that the place they were in was a vast shop, and then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived that the other man in brown was the shop-walker, differing from most shop-walkers in the fact that he was lit from within, as a Chinese lantern might be. And the customer Mr. Hoopdriver was going to serve was the young lady in gray. Curious, he hadn't noticed it before. She was in gray, as usual, rationals, and she had her bicycle leaning against the counter. She smiled quite frankly at him, just as she had done when she had apologized for stopping him. And her form, as she lent toward him, was full of a sinuous grace that he had never noticed before. "'What can I have the pleasure?' said Mr. Hoopdriver at once, and she said, the Ripley Road. So he got out the Ripley Road and enrolled it, and showed it to her. And she said that would do very nicely, and kept on looking at him and smiling. And he began measuring off eight miles by means of the yard measure on the counter, eight miles being a dress-link, a rational dress-link, that is. And then the other man in brown came up and wanted to interfere, and said Mr. Hoopdriver was a cad, besides measuring it off too slowly. As Mr. Hoopdriver began to measure faster, the other man in brown said that the young lady in gray had been there long enough, and that he was her brother, or else she would not have been traveling with him. And he suddenly whipped his arm around her waist and made off with her. It occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver, even at the moment that this was scarcely brotherly behavior, of course it wasn't. The sight of the other man gripping her so familiarly enraged him frightfully. He leapt over the counter forthwith and gave chase. They ran round the shop and up an iron staircase into the keep, and so out upon the Ripley Road. For some time they kept dodging in and out of a wayside hotel with two front doors and an in-yard. The other man could not run very fast because he had hold of the young lady in gray, but Mr. Hoopdriver was hampered by the absurd behavior of his legs. They would not stretch out, they would keep going round and round as if they were on the treadles of a wheel, so that he made the smallest steps conceivable. This dream came to no crisis. The chase seemed to last an interminable time, and all kinds of people, heath-keepers, shopmen, policemen, the old man in the keep, the angry man in drab, the bar made at the unicorn, men with flying machines, people playing billiards in the doorways, silly headless figures, stupid cocks and hens encumbered with parcels and umbrellas and waterproofs, people carrying bedroom candles and such like riff-raff, kept getting in his way and annoying him. So he sounded his electric bell and said, wonderful, wonderful, at every corner. CHAPTER VIII. How Mr. Hoopdriver went to Hazelmere. There was some little delay in getting Mr. Hoopdriver's breakfast, so that after all he was not free to start out of Guilford until just upon the stroke of nine. He wheeled his machine from the high street in some perplexity. He did not know whether this young lady, who had seized hold of his imagination so strongly, and her unfriendly and possibly menacing brother, were ahead of him or even now breakfasting somewhere in Guilford. In the former case he might loiter as he chose, in the latter he must hurry and possibly take refuge in Branch Roads. It occurred to him, as being in some obscure way strategic, that he would leave Guilford not by the obvious Portsmouth Road, but by the road running through Shalford. Along this pleasant shady way he felt sufficiently secured to resume his exercises in riding with one hand off the handles and in steering over his shoulder. He came over once or twice, but fell on his foot each time and perceived that he was improving. Before he got to Bramley a spacious byway snapped him up, ran with him for half a mile or more, and dropped him as a terrier drops a walking stick upon the Portsmouth again a couple of miles from Godalming. He entered Godalming on his feet, for the road through that delightful town is beyond dispute the vilest in the world, a premier Talmud of road metal, a way of peaks and precipices, and, after a successful experiment with Cider at the Woolpack, he pushed on to Milford. All this time he was acutely aware of the existence of the young lady in grey and her companion in brown, as a child in the dark is of bogies. Sometimes he could hear their pneumatics stealing upon him from behind, and looking round saw a long stretch of vacant road. Once he saw far ahead of him a glittering wheel, but it proved to be a working man riding to destruction on a very tall ordinary, and he felt a curious, vague uneasiness about that young lady in grey, for which he was altogether unable to account. Now that he was awake he had forgotten that accentuated Miss Beaumont that had been quite clear in his dream, but the curious dream conviction that the girl was not really the man's sister would not let itself be forgotten. Why, for instance, should a man want to be alone with his sister at the top of a tower? At Milford his bicycle made, so to speak, an ass of itself. A finger-post suddenly jumped out at him, vainly indicating an abrupt turn to the right, and Mr. Hoopdriver would have slowed up and read the inscription, but no, the bicycle would not let him. The road dropped a little into Milford, and the thing shied, put down its head and bolted, and Mr. Hoopdriver only thought of the break when the finger-post was passed. Then to have recovered the point of intersection would have meant dismounting, for as yet there was no road wide enough for Mr. Hoopdriver to turn in, so he went on his way, or to be precise, he did exactly the opposite thing. The road to the right was the Portsmouth Road, and this he was on went to Hazelmere and Midhurst. By that air it came about that he once more came upon his fellow travelers of yesterday, coming on them suddenly, without the slightest preliminary announcement, and when they least expected it, under the south-western railway arch. It's horrible, said a girlish voice, it's brutal, cowardly, and stopped. His expression, as he shot out from the archway at them, may have been something between a grin of recognition and a scowl of annoyance at himself for the unintentional intrusion. But disconcerted as he was, he was yet able to appreciate something of the peculiarity of their mutual attitudes. The bicycles were lying by the roadside, and the two riders stood face to face. The other man in brown's attitude, as it flashed upon Hoopdriver, was a deliberate pose. He twirled his mustache and smiled faintly, and he was conscientiously looking amused. And the girl stood rigid, her arms straight by her side, her handkerchief clenched in her hand, and her face was flushed, with the faintest touch of red upon her eyelids. She seemed to Hoopdriver sense to be indignant. But that was the impression of a second. A mask of surprised recognition fell across this revelation of emotion as she turned her head towards him, and the pose of the other man in brown vanished too, in a momentary astonishment. And then he had passed them, and was riding on toward Hazelmere to make what he could of the swift picture that had photographed itself on his brain. Rum, said Mr. Hoopdriver, its dashed rum. They were having a row, smirking what he called the other man in brown mean not trouble us, annoying her that any human being should do that. Why? The impulse to interfere leapt suddenly into Mr. Hoopdriver's mind. He grasped his break, descended, and stood looking hesitatingly back. They still stood by the railway bridge, and it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver's fancy that she was stamping her foot. He hesitated, then turned his bicycle round, mounted and rode back toward them, gripping his courage firmly lest it should slip away and leave him ridiculous. I'll offer him a screw-ammer, said Mr. Hoopdriver. Then with a wave of fierce emotion he saw that the girl was crying. In another moment they heard him and turned in surprise. Certainly she had been crying. Her eyes were swimming in tears, and the other man in brown looked exceedingly disconcerted. Mr. Hoopdriver descended and stood over his machine. Nothing wrong, I hope, he said, looking the other man in brown squarely in the face. No accident? Nothing, said the other man in brown shortly. Nothing at all. But, said Mr. Hoopdriver, with great effort, the young lady is crying. I thought perhaps. The young lady in gray started, gave Hoopdriver one swift glance, and covered one eye with her handkerchief. It's this speck, she said, the speck of dust in my eye. This lady, said the other man in brown explaining, has a gnat in her eye. There was a pause. The young lady busied herself with her eye. I believe it's out, she said. The other man in brown made movements indicating commiserating curiosity concerning the alleged fly. Mr. Hoopdriver, the word is his own, stood flabbergasted. He had all the intuition of the simple-minded. He knew there was no fly, but the ground was suddenly cut from his feet. There is a limit to niterranty. Things in false nights are on very well, but flies, fictitious flies, whatever the trouble was, it was evidently not his affair. He felt he had made a fool of himself again. He would have mumbled some sort of apology, but the other man in brown gave him no time, turned on him abruptly, even fiercely. I hope, he said, that your curiosity is satisfied. Certainly, said Mr. Hoopdriver, then we won't detain you. And ignominimously Mr. Hoopdriver turned his machine about, struggled upon it, and resumed the road southward. And when he learned that he was not on the Portsmouth Road, it was impossible to turn and go back, for that would be to face his shame again. And so he had to ride on by Brook Street, up the hill to Hezlemere. And away to the right the Portsmouth Road mocked at him, and made off to its fastnesses amid the sunlit green and purple masses of hinthead, where Mr. Grant Allen writes his hilltop novels day by day. The sun shone, and the wide blue hill views and pleasant valleys one saw on either hand from the sans-garde roadway, even the sides of the road itself set about with gray heather scrub, and prickly masses of gorse, and pine trees with their years grow still bright green against the darkened needles of the previous years, were fresh and delightful to Mr. Hoopdriver's eyes. But the brightness of the day, and the day-old sense of freedom, fought an uphill fight against his intolerable vexation at that abominable encounter, and he had still to win it when he reached Hezlemere. A great brown shadow, a monstrous hatred of the other man in brown possessed him. He had conceived the brilliant idea of abandoning Portsmouth, or at least giving up the straight way to his fellow Wayfares, and of striking out boldly to the left, eastward. He did not dare to stop at any of the inviting public houses in the main street of Hezlemere, but turned up a sideway and found a little beer shop, the Good Hope, wherein to refresh himself. And there he ate, and gossiped condescendingly with an aged laborer, assuming the while for his own private enjoyment the attributes of a lost heir, and afterwards mounted in road on toward Northchapel, a place which a number of finger posts conspired to boom, but which some insidious turning prevented him from attaining. CHAPTER XIV How Mr. Hoopdriver Reached Midhurst It was one of my uncle's profoundest remarks that human beings are the only unreasonable creatures. This observation was so far justified by Mr. Hoopdriver that, after spending the morning torturously avoiding the other man in brown and the young lady in gray, he spent a considerable part of the afternoon thinking about the young lady in gray, and contemplating in an optimistic spirit the possibilities of seeing her again. Memory and imagination played round her, so that his course was largely determined by the windings of the road he traversed. Of one general proposition he was absolutely convinced, there's something juicy wrong with them, said he, once even allowed. But what it was he could not imagine. He recapitulated the facts. Miss Beaumont, brother and sister, and the stoppage to quarrel and wheat, it was perplexed material for a young man of small experience. There was no exertion he hated so much as inference, and after a time he gave up any attempt to get at the realities of the case and let his imagination go free. Should he ever see her again? Suppose he did, with that other chap not about. The vision he found pleasantest was an encounter with her, an unexpected encounter at the annual dancing class, due at the Putney Assembly rooms. Somehow they would drift together, and he would dance with her again and again. It was a pleasant vision, for you must understand that Mr. Hoop Driver danced uncommonly well. Or again, in the shop, a sudden radiance in the doorway and she is bowed toward the Manchester counter, and then to lean over the counter in murmur, something apropos of the goods under discussion. I have not forgotten that morning on the Portsmouth Road, and lower, I shall never forget. At Northchapel, Mr. Hoop Driver consulted with his map and took counsel and weighed his course of action. Petworth seemed a possible resting place, or Pillsboro. Mitther seemed too near, at any place over the Downs beyond, too far, and so he meandered toward Petwell, posing himself perpetually and loitering, gathering wildflowers and wondering why they had no names, for he had never heard of any, dropping them furtively at the sight of a stranger and generally mucking about. There were purple vetches in the hedges, meadowsweet, honeysuckle, belated brambles, but the dog roses had already gone. There were green and red blackberries, stilarias and dandelions, and in another place white dead nettles, traveller's joy, green bedstraw, grasses flowering, white campions, and ragged robins. One cornfield was glorious with poppies, bright scarlet and purple white, and the blue comb-flowers were beginning. In the lanes the trees met overhead, and the wisps of hay still hung to the straggling hedges. In one of the main roads he steered a perilous passage through a dozen surly Dunn-Oxon. Here and there were little cottages, and picturesque beer-houses, with the vivid brewer's boards of blue and scarlet, and once a broad green, and a church, and an expanse of some hundred houses or so. Then he came to a pebbly rivulet that emerged between clumps of sedge, loose strife and forget-me-nots under an arch of trees, and rippled across the road, and there he dismounted, longing to take off shoes and stockings, though stylish checkered stockings were now all dimmed with dust, and paddle his lean legs in the chuckling, cheerful water. But instead he sat in a manly attitude, smoking a cigarette, for fear lest the young lady in gray should come glittering around the corner. For the flavor of the young lady in gray was pleasant through it all, mixing with the flowers and all the delight of it, a touch that made this second day quite different from the first, an undertone of expectation, anxiety, and something like regret that would not be ignored. It was only late in the long evening that, quite abruptly, he began to repent, vividly and decidedly, having fled these two people. He was getting hungry, and that has a curious effect upon the emotional coloring of our minds. The man was a sinister brute, hoop-driver saw in a flash of inspiration, and the girl, she was in some serious trouble. And he who might have helped her had taken his first impulse as decisive and bolted. His new view of it depressed him dreadfully. What might not be happening to her now? He thought again of her tears. Surely it was merely his duty, seeing the trouble afoot, to keep his eye upon it. He began writing fast to get rid of such self-repoaches. He found himself in a tortuous tangle of roads, and as the dusk was coming on, emerged, not in Petworth, but in Ellsbourne, a mile from Midhurst. I'm getting hungry, said Mr. Hoop-driver, inquiring of a game keeper in Eastbourne Village. Midhurst a mile, and Petworth five. Thanks, I'll take Midhurst. He came into Midhurst by the bridge of the water-mill, and up the North Street, and a little shop flourishing cheerfully, the cheerful sign of a teapot, and exhibiting a brilliant array of tobaccos, sweets, and children's toys in the window, struck his fancy. A neat, bright-eyed, little old lady made him welcome, and he was presently stepping sumptuously on sausages and tea, with a visitor's book full of the most humorous and flattering remarks about the little old lady, inverse and prose, propped up against his teapot as he ate. Regular goods some of the jokes were, and rhymes that read well, even with your mouth full of sausage. Mr. Hoop-driver formed a vague idea of drawing something, for his judgment on the little old lady was already formed, he pictured the little old lady discovering it afterwards. My gracious, one of them punchmen, she would say. The room had a curtain to recess and a chest of drawers, for presently it was to be his bedroom, and the day part of it was decorated with framed odd-fellow certificates, and guilt-backed books and portraits, and kettle-holders, and all kinds of beautiful things made out of wool. Very comfortable it was indeed. The window was lead-framed and diamond-pained, and through it once all the corner of the vicarage, and a pleasant hill-crest, in dusky silhouette against the twilight sky. And after the sausages had ceased to be, he led a red herring cigarette and went swaggering out into the twilight street. All shadowy blue between its dark brick houses was the street, with a bright yellow window here and there, and splashes of green and red, where the chemist's illumination fell across the road. After fifteen, and interlude, and now let us for space leave Mr. Hoop Driver in the dusky mid-hurst north street, and return to the two folks beside the railway bridge, between Milford and Hazelmere. She was a girl of eighteen, dark, fine-featured, with bright eyes and a rich, swift color under her warm-tinted skin. Her eyes were all the brighter for the tears that swam in them. The man was thirty-three, or four, fair, with a longish nose overhanging his sandy, flaxen mustache, pale blue eyes, and a head that stuck out above and behind. He stood with his feet wide apart, his hand on his hip, in an attitude that was equally suggestive of defiance and aggression. They had watched Hoop Driver out of sight. The unexpected interruption had stopped the flood of her tears. He tugged his abundant mustache and regarded her calmly. She stood with face averted, obstinately resolved not to speak first. �Your behavior,� he said at last, �makes you conspicuous.� She turned upon him, her eyes and cheeks glowing, her hands clenched. �You unspeakable cad,� she said, and choked, stamped her little foot and stood panting. �Unspeakable cad, my dear girl! People I am an unspeakable cad! Who wouldn't be, for you? Dear girl, how dare you speak to me like that, you! I would do anything.� �Oh!� there was a moment's pause. She looked squarely into his face, her eyes alight with anger and contempt, and perhaps he flushed a little. He stroked his mustache and by an effort maintained his cynical calm. �Let us be reasonable,� he said. �Reasonable! That means all that is mean and cowardly and sensual in the world. You have always had it so, in your generalizing way, but let us look at the facts of the case, if it pleases you better.� With an impatient gesture she motioned him to go on. �Well,� he said. �You've eloped.� �I've left my home,� she corrected with dignity. �I left my home because it was unendurable, because that woman.� �Yes, yes, but the point is you have eloped with me.� �You came with me. You pretended to be my friend, promised to help me to earn a living by writing. It was you who said, why shouldn't a man and woman be friends, and now you dare. You dare.� �Really, Jesse, this pose of yours, this injured innocence. I will go back. I forbid you. I forbid you to stand in the way. One moment. I have always thought that my little pupil was at least clear-headed. You don't know everything yet, you know. Listen to me for a moment. Haven't I been listening? And you have only insulted me, you who dared only to talk a friendship who scarcely dared hint at anything beyond. But you took the hints, nevertheless. You knew, you knew, and you did not mind. Mind you liked it. It was the fun of the whole thing for you, that I loved you and could not speak to you. You played with it. You have said all that before. Do you think that justifies you? That isn't all. I made up my mind, well, to make the game more even. And so I suggested to you, and joined with you, in this expedition of yours, invented a sister at Midhurst. I tell you, I haven't a sister. For one object, well, to compromise you. She started. That was a new way of putting it. For half a minute, neither spoke. Then she began half defiantly. Much I am compromised. Of course, I have made a fool of myself. My dear girl, you are still on the sunny side of 18. And you know very little of this world, less than you think. But you will learn. Before you write all those novels we have talked about, you will have to learn. And that's one point, he hesitated. You started and blushed when the man at breakfast called you ma'am. You thought it a funny mistake, but you did not say anything because he was young and nervous. And besides, the thought of being my wife offended your modesty. You didn't care to notice it. But, you see, I gave your name as Mrs. Beaumont. He looked almost apologetic, in spite of his cynical pose. Mrs. Beaumont. He repeated, pulling his flaxen mustache and watching the effect. She looked into his eyes, speechless. I am learning fast, she said slowly at last. He thought the time had come for an emotional attack. Jesse, he said with a sudden change of voice. I know all this is mean, is villainous. But do you think that I have done all this scheming, all this subterfuge, for any other object? She did not seem to listen to his words. I shall ride home, she said abruptly. To her? She winced. Just think, said he, what she would say to you after this. Anyhow, I shall leave you now. Yes, and go. Go somewhere to earn my living, to be a free woman, to live without conventionality. My dear girl, do let us be cynical. You haven't money, and you haven't credit. No one would take you in. It's one of two things. Go back to your step-mother, or trust me. How can I? Then you must go back to her. He paused momentarily to let this consideration have its proper weight. Jesse, I did not mean to say the things I did upon my honor. I lost my head when I spoke so. If you will, forgive me. I'm a man. I could not help myself. Forgive me, and I promise you. How can I trust you? Try me. I can assure you. She regarded him distrustfully. At any rate, ride on with me now. Surely we have been in the shadow of this horrible bridge long enough. Oh, let me think, she said, half turning from him and pressing her hand to her brow. Think! Look here, Jesse. It's ten o'clock. Shall we call it a truce until one? She hesitated. First definition of the truce, and at last agreed. They mounted and rode on in silence through the sunlight and the heather. Both were extremely uncomfortable and disappointed. She was pale, divided between fear and anger. She perceived she was in a scrape and tried in vain to think of a way of escape. Only one tangible thing would keep in her mind, try as she would to ignore it. That was the quite irrelevant fact that his head was singularly, like an albinole coconut. He too felt thwarted. He felt that this romantic business of seduction was, after all, unexpectedly tame. But this was only the beginning. At any rate, every day she spent with him was a day gained. Perhaps things looked worse than they were. That was some consolation. End of section five