CHAPTER XLI. THE ENVOY

I.

THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTER IN THE STORY

If you (presuming you are of the sex that does such things)—if you had

gone into the Drapery Emporium—which is really only magnificent for

shop—of Messrs. Antrobus & Co.—a perfectly fictitious “Co.,” by the

bye—of Putney, on the 14th of August, 1895, had turned to the

right-hand side, where the blocks of white linen and piles of blankets

rise up to the rail from which the pink and blue prints depend, you

might have been served by the central figure of this story that is now

beginning. He would have come forward, bowing and swaying, he would

have extended two hands with largish knuckles and enormous cuffs over

the counter, and he would have asked you, protruding a pointed chin and

without the slightest anticipation of pleasure in his manner, what he

might have the pleasure of showing you. Under certain circumstances—as,

for instance, hats, baby linen, gloves, silks, lace, or curtains—he

would simply have bowed politely, and with a drooping expression, and

making a kind of circular sweep, invited you to “step this way,” and so

led you beyond his ken; but under other and happier

conditions,—huckaback, blankets, dimity, cretonne, linen, calico, are

cases in point,—he would have requested you to take a seat, emphasising

the hospitality by leaning over the counter and gripping a chair back

in a spasmodic manner, and so proceeded to obtain, unfold, and exhibit

his goods for your consideration. Under which happier circumstances you

might—if of an observing turn of mind and not too much of a housewife

to be inhuman—have given the central figure of this story less cursory

attention.

Now if you had noticed anything about him, it would have been chiefly

to notice how little he was noticeable. He wore the black morning coat,

the black tie, and the speckled grey nether parts (descending into

shadow and mystery below the counter) of his craft. He was of a pallid

complexion, hair of a kind of dirty fairness, greyish eyes, and a

skimpy, immature moustache under his peaked indeterminate nose. His

features were all small, but none ill-shaped. A rosette of pins

decorated the lappel of his coat. His remarks, you would observe, were

entirely what people used to call _cliché_, formulae not organic to the

occasion, but stereotyped ages ago and learnt years since by heart.

“This, madam,” he would say, “is selling very well.” “We are doing a

very good article at four three a yard.” “We could show you something

better, of course.” “No trouble, madam, I assure you.” Such were the

simple counters of his intercourse. So, I say, he would have presented

himself to your superficial observation. He would have danced about

behind the counter, have neatly refolded the goods he had shown you,

have put on one side those you selected, extracted a little book with a

carbon leaf and a tinfoil sheet from a fixture, made you out a little

bill in that weak flourishing hand peculiar to drapers, and have bawled

“Sayn!” Then a puffy little shop-walker would have come into view,

looked at the bill for a second, very hard (showing you a parting down

the middle of his head meanwhile), have scribbled a still more

flourishing J. M. all over the document, have asked you if there was

nothing more, have stood by you—supposing that you were paying

cash—until the central figure of this story reappeared with the change.

One glance more at him, and the puffy little shop-walker would have

been bowing you out, with fountains of civilities at work all about

you. And so the interview would have terminated.

But real literature, as distinguished from anecdote, does not concern

itself with superficial appearances alone. Literature is revelation.

Modern literature is indecorous revelation. It is the duty of the

earnest author to tell you what you would not have seen—even at the

cost of some blushes. And the thing that you would not have seen about

this young man, and the thing of the greatest moment to this story, the

thing that must be told if the book is to be written, was—let us face

it bravely—the Remarkable Condition of this Young Man’s Legs.

Let us approach the business with dispassionate explicitness. Let us

assume something of the scientific spirit, the hard, almost

professorial tone of the conscientious realist. Let us treat this young

man’s legs as a mere diagram, and indicate the points of interest with

the unemotional precision of a lecturer’s pointer. And so to our

revelation. On the internal aspect of the right ankle of this young man

you would have observed, ladies and gentlemen, a contusion and an

abrasion; on the internal aspect of the left ankle a contusion also; on

its external aspect a large yellowish bruise. On his left shin there

were two bruises, one a leaden yellow graduating here and there into

purple, and another, obviously of more recent date, of a blotchy

red—tumid and threatening. Proceeding up the left leg in a spiral

manner, an unnatural hardness and redness would have been discovered on

the upper aspect of the calf, and above the knee and on the inner side,

an extraordinary expanse of bruised surface, a kind of closely stippled

shading of contused points. The right leg would be found to be bruised

in a marvellous manner all about and under the knee, and particularly

on the interior aspect of the knee. So far we may proceed with our

details. Fired by these discoveries, an investigator might perhaps have

pursued his inquiries further—to bruises on the shoulders, elbows, and

even the finger joints, of the central figure of our story. He had

indeed been bumped and battered at an extraordinary number of points.

But enough of realistic description is as good as a feast, and we have

exhibited enough for our purpose. Even in literature one must know

where to draw the line.

Now the reader may be inclined to wonder how a respectable young

shopman should have got his legs, and indeed himself generally, into

such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been sitting

with his nether extremities in some complicated machinery, a

threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making furies. But Sherlock

Holmes (now happily dead) would have fancied nothing of the kind. He

would have recognised at once that the bruises on the internal aspect

of the left leg, considered in the light of the distribution of the

other abrasions and contusions, pointed unmistakably to the violent

impact of the Mounting Beginner upon the bicycling saddle, and that the

ruinous state of the right knee was equally eloquent of the concussions

attendant on that person’s hasty, frequently causeless, and invariably

ill-conceived descents. One large bruise on the shin is even more

characteristic of the ’prentice cyclist, for upon every one of them

waits the jest of the unexpected treadle. You try at least to walk your

machine in an easy manner, and whack!—you are rubbing your shin. So out

of innocence we ripen. _Two_ bruises on that place mark a certain want

of aptitude in learning, such as one might expect in a person unused to

muscular exercise. Blisters on the hands are eloquent of the nervous

clutch of the wavering rider. And so forth, until Sherlock is presently

explaining, by the help of the minor injuries, that the machine ridden

is an old-fashioned affair with a fork instead of the diamond frame, a

cushioned tire, well worn on the hind wheel, and a gross weight all on

of perhaps three-and-forty pounds.

The revelation is made. Behind the decorous figure of the attentive

shopman that I had the honour of showing you at first, rises a vision

of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a machine in a dark

road,—the road, to be explicit, from Roehampton to Putney Hill,—and

with this vision is the sound of a heel spurning the gravel, a gasping

and grunting, a shouting of “Steer, man, steer!” a wavering unsteady

flight, a spasmodic turning of the missile edifice of man and machine,

and a collapse. Then you descry dimly through the dusk the central

figure of this story sitting by the roadside and rubbing his leg at

some new place, and his friend, sympathetic (but by no means

depressed), repairing the displacement of the handle-bar.

Thus even in a shop assistant does the warmth of manhood assert itself,

and drive him against all the conditions of his calling, against the

counsels of prudence and the restrictions of his means, to seek the

wholesome delights of exertion and danger and pain. And our first

examination of the draper reveals beneath his draperies—the man! To

which initial fact (among others) we shall come again in the end.

II

But enough of these revelations. The central figure of our story is now

going along behind the counter, a draper indeed, with your purchases in

his arms, to the warehouse, where the various articles you have

selected will presently be packed by the senior porter and sent to you.

Returning thence to his particular place, he lays hands on a folded

piece of gingham, and gripping the corners of the folds in his hands,

begins to straighten them punctiliously. Near him is an apprentice,

apprenticed to the same high calling of draper’s assistant, a ruddy,

red-haired lad in a very short tailless black coat and a very high

collar, who is deliberately unfolding and refolding some patterns of

cretonne. By twenty-one he too may hope to be a full-blown assistant,

even as Mr. Hoopdriver. Prints depend from the brass rails above them,

behind are fixtures full of white packages containing, as inscriptions

testify, _Lino, Hd Bk_, and _Mull_. You might imagine to see them that

the two were both intent upon nothing but smoothness of textile and

rectitude of fold. But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the

mechanical duties in hand. The assistant is dreaming of the delicious

time—only four hours off now—when he will resume the tale of his

bruises and abrasions. The apprentice is nearer the long long thoughts

of boyhood, and his imagination rides _cap-à-pie_ through the chambers

of his brain, seeking some knightly quest in honour of that Fair Lady,

the last but one of the girl apprentices to the dress-making upstairs.

He inclines rather to street fighting against revolutionaries—because

then she could see him from the window.

Jerking them back to the present comes the puffy little shop-walker,

with a paper in his hand. The apprentice becomes extremely active. The

shopwalker eyes the goods in hand. “Hoopdriver,” he says, “how’s that

line of g-sez-x ginghams?”

Hoopdriver returns from an imaginary triumph over the uncertainties of

dismounting. “They’re going fairly well, sir. But the larger checks

seem hanging.”

The shop-walker brings up parallel to the counter. “Any particular time

when you want your holidays?” he asks.

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

sir, of course.”

“How about this day week?”

Hoopdriver becomes rigidly meditative, gripping the corners of the

gingham folds in his hands. His face is eloquent of conflicting

considerations. Can he learn it in a week? That’s the question.

Otherwise Briggs will get next week, and he will have to wait until

September—when the weather is often uncertain. He is naturally of a

sanguine disposition. All drapers have to be, or else they could never

have the faith they show in the beauty, washability, and unfading

excellence of the goods they sell you. The decision comes at last.

“That’ll do me very well,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, terminating the pause.

The die is cast.

The shop-walker makes a note of it and goes on to Briggs in the

“dresses,” the next in the strict scale of precedence of the Drapery

Emporium. Mr. Hoopdriver in alternating spasms anon straightens his

gingham and anon becomes meditative, with his tongue in the hollow of

his decaying wisdom tooth.

III

At supper that night, holiday talk held undisputed sway. Mr. Pritchard

spoke of “Scotland,” Miss Isaacs clamoured of Bettws-y-Coed, Mr. Judson

displayed a proprietary interest in the Norfolk Broads. “_I?_” said

Hoopdriver when the question came to him. “Why, cycling, of course.”

“You’re never going to ride that dreadful machine of yours, day after

day?” said Miss Howe of the Costume Department.

“I am,” said Hoopdriver as calmly as possible, pulling at the

insufficient moustache. “I’m going for a Cycling Tour. Along the South

Coast.”

“Well, all I hope, Mr. Hoopdriver, is that you’ll get fine weather,”

said Miss Howe. “And not come any nasty croppers.”

“And done forget some tinscher of arnica in yer bag,” said the junior

apprentice in the very high collar. (He had witnessed one of the

lessons at the top of Putney Hill.)

“You stow it,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking hard and threateningly at

the junior apprentice, and suddenly adding in a tone of bitter

contempt,—“Jampot.”

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

At other times Hoopdriver might have further resented the satirical

efforts of the apprentice, but his mind was too full of the projected

Tour to admit any petty delicacies of dignity. He left the supper table

early, so that he might put in a good hour at the desperate gymnastics

up the Roehampton Road before it would be time to come back for locking

up. When the gas was turned off for the night he was sitting on the

edge of his bed, rubbing arnica into his knee—a new and very big

place—and studying a Road Map of the South of England. Briggs of the

“dresses,” who shared the room with him, was sitting up in bed and

trying to smoke in the dark. Briggs had never been on a cycle in his

life, but he felt Hoopdriver’s inexperience and offered such advice as

occurred to him.

“Have the machine thoroughly well oiled,” said Briggs, “carry one or

two lemons with you, don’t tear yourself to death the first day, and

sit upright. Never lose control of the machine, and always sound the

bell on every possible opportunity. You mind those things, and nothing

very much can’t happen to you, Hoopdriver—you take my word.”

He would lapse into silence for a minute, save perhaps for a curse or

so at his pipe, and then break out with an entirely different set of

tips.

“Avoid running over dogs, Hoopdriver, whatever you do. It’s one of the

worst things you can do to run over a dog. Never let the machine

buckle—there was a man killed only the other day through his wheel

buckling—don’t scorch, don’t ride on the foot-path, keep your own side

of the road, and if you see a tramline, go round the corner at once,

and hurry off into the next county—and always light up before dark. You

mind just a few little things like that, Hoopdriver, and nothing much

can’t happen to you—you take my word.”

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

“Good-night,” said Briggs, and there was silence for a space, save for

the succulent respiration of the pipe. Hoopdriver rode off into

Dreamland on his machine, and was scarcely there before he was pitched

back into the world of sense again.—Something—what was it?

“Never oil the steering. It’s fatal,” a voice that came from round a

fitful glow of light, was saying. “And clean the chain daily with

black-lead. You mind just a few little things like that—”

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

ears.

IV.

THE RIDING FORTH OF MR. HOOPDRIVER

Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year

round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer

time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. All

the dreary, uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains

fall about your feet. All at once you are Lord of yourself, Lord of

every hour in the long, vacant day; you may go where you please, call

none Sir or Madame, have a lappel free of pins, doff your black morning

coat, and wear the colour of your heart, and be a Man. You grudge

sleep, you grudge eating, and drinking even, their intrusion on those

exquisite moments. There will be no more rising before breakfast in

casual old clothing, to go dusting and getting ready in a cheerless,

shutter-darkened, wrappered-up shop, no more imperious cries of,

“Forward, Hoopdriver,” no more hasty meals, and weary attendance on

fitful old women, for ten blessed days. The first morning is by far the

most glorious, for you hold your whole fortune in your hands.

Thereafter, every night, comes a pang, a spectre, that will not be

exorcised—the premonition of the return. The shadow of going back, of

being put in the cage again for another twelve months, lies blacker and

blacker across the sunlight. But on the first morning of the ten the

holiday has no past, and ten days seems as good as infinity.

And it was fine, full of a promise of glorious days, a deep blue sky

with dazzling piles of white cloud here and there, as though celestial

haymakers had been piling the swathes of last night’s clouds into cocks

for a coming cartage. There were thrushes in the Richmond Road, and a

lark on Putney Heath. The freshness of dew was in the air; dew or the

relics of an overnight shower glittered on the leaves and grass.

Hoopdriver had breakfasted early by Mrs. Gunn’s complaisance. He

wheeled his machine up Putney Hill, and his heart sang within him.

Halfway up, a dissipated-looking black cat rushed home across the road

and vanished under a gate. All the big red-brick houses behind the

variegated shrubs and trees had their blinds down still, and he would

not have changed places with a soul in any one of them for a hundred

pounds.

He had on his new brown cycling suit—a handsome Norfolk jacket thing

for 30/(sp.)—and his legs—those martyr legs—were more than consoled by

thick chequered stockings, “thin in the foot, thick in the leg,” for

all they had endured. A neat packet of American cloth behind the saddle

contained his change of raiment, and the bell and the handle-bar and

the hubs and lamp, albeit a trifle freckled by wear, glittered

blindingly in the rising sunlight. And at the top of the hill, after

only one unsuccessful attempt, which, somehow, terminated on the green,

Hoopdriver mounted, and with a stately and cautious restraint in his

pace, and a dignified curvature of path, began his great Cycling Tour

along the Southern Coast.

There is only one phrase to describe his course at this stage, and that

is—voluptuous curves. He did not ride fast, he did not ride straight,

an exacting critic might say he did not ride well—but he rode

generously, opulently, using the whole road and even nibbling at the

footpath. The excitement never flagged. So far he had never passed or

been passed by anything, but as yet the day was young and the road was

clear. He doubted his steering so much that, for the present, he had

resolved to dismount at the approach of anything else upon wheels. The

shadows of the trees lay very long and blue across the road, the

morning sunlight was like amber fire.

At the cross-roads at the top of West Hill, where the cattle trough

stands, he turned towards Kingston and set himself to scale the little

bit of ascent. An early heath-keeper, in his velveteen jacket,

marvelled at his efforts. And while he yet struggled, the head of a

carter rose over the brow.

At the sight of him Mr. Hoopdriver, according to his previous

determination, resolved to dismount. He tightened the brake, and the

machine stopped dead. He was trying to think what he did with his right

leg whilst getting off. He gripped the handles and released the brake,

standing on the left pedal and waving his right foot in the air.

Then—these things take so long in the telling—he found the machine was

falling over to the right. While he was deciding upon a plan of action,

gravitation appears to have been busy. He was still irresolute when he

found the machine on the ground, himself kneeling upon it, and a vague

feeling in his mind that again Providence had dealt harshly with his

shin. This happened when he was just level with the heath-keeper. The

man in the approaching cart stood up to see the ruins better.

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

Mr. Hoopdriver picked up the machine. The handle was twisted askew

again. He said something under his breath. He would have to unscrew the

beastly thing.

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

silence.

“_I_ know that,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, testily, determined to overlook

the new specimen on his shin at any cost. He unbuckled the wallet

behind the saddle, to get out a screw hammer.

“If you know it ain’t the way to get off—whaddyer do it for?” said the

heath-keeper, in a tone of friendly controversy.

Mr. Hoopdriver got out his screw hammer and went to the handle. He was

annoyed. “That’s my business, I suppose,” he said, fumbling with the

screw. The unusual exertion had made his hands shake frightfully.

The heath-keeper became meditative, and twisted his stick in his hands

behind his back. “You’ve broken yer ’andle, ain’t yer?” he said

presently. Just then the screw hammer slipped off the nut. Mr.

Hoopdriver used a nasty, low word.

“They’re trying things, them bicycles,” said the heath-keeper,

charitably. “Very trying.” Mr. Hoopdriver gave the nut a vicious turn

and suddenly stood up—he was holding the front wheel between his knees.

“I wish,” said he, with a catch in his voice, “I wish you’d leave off

staring at me.”

Then with the air of one who has delivered an ultimatum, he began

replacing the screw hammer in the wallet.

The heath-keeper never moved. Possibly he raised his eyebrows, and

certainly he stared harder than he did before. “You’re pretty

unsociable,” he said slowly, as Mr. Hoopdriver seized the handles and

stood ready to mount as soon as the cart had passed.

The indignation gathered slowly but surely. “Why don’t you ride on a

private road of your own if no one ain’t to speak to you?” asked the

heath-keeper, perceiving more and more clearly the bearing of the

matter. “Can’t no one make a passin’ remark to you, Touchy? Ain’t I

good enough to speak to you? Been struck wooden all of a sudden?”

Mr. Hoopdriver stared into the Immensity of the Future. He was rigid

with emotion. It was like abusing the Lions in Trafalgar Square. But

the heath-keeper felt his honour was at stake.

“Don’t you make no remarks to ’_im_,” said the keeper as the carter

came up broadside to them. “’E’s a bloomin’ dook, ’e is. ’E don’t

converse with no one under a earl. ’E’s off to Windsor, ’e is; that’s

why ’e’s stickin’ his be’ind out so haughty. Pride! Why, ’e’s got so

much of it, ’e has to carry some of it in that there bundle there, for

fear ’e’d bust if ’e didn’t ease hisself a bit—’_E_—”

But Mr. Hoopdriver heard no more. He was hopping vigorously along the

road, in a spasmodic attempt to remount. He missed the treadle once and

swore viciously, to the keeper’s immense delight. “Nar! Nar!” said the

heath-keeper.

In another moment Mr. Hoopdriver was up, and after one terrific lurch

of the machine, the heath-keeper dropped out of earshot. Mr. Hoopdriver

would have liked to look back at his enemy, but he usually twisted

round and upset if he tried that. He had to imagine the indignant

heath-keeper telling the carter all about it. He tried to infuse as

much disdain as possible into his retreating aspect.

He drove on his sinuous way down the dip by the new mere and up the

little rise to the crest of the hill that drops into Kingston Vale; and

so remarkable is the psychology of cycling, that he rode all the

straighter and easier because the emotions the heath-keeper had aroused

relieved his mind of the constant expectation of collapse that had

previously unnerved him. To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love

affair—chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the

thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

Now you may perhaps imagine that as he rode on, his feelings towards

the heath-keeper were either vindictive or remorseful,—vindictive for

the aggravation or remorseful for his own injudicious display of ill

temper. As a matter of fact, they were nothing of the sort. A sudden, a

wonderful gratitude, possessed him. The Glory of the Holidays had

resumed its sway with a sudden accession of splendour. At the crest of

the hill he put his feet upon the footrests, and now riding moderately

straight, went, with a palpitating brake, down that excellent descent.

A new delight was in his eyes, quite over and above the pleasure of

rushing through the keen, sweet, morning air. He reached out his thumb

and twanged his bell out of sheer happiness.

“‘He’s a bloomin’ Dook—he is!’” said Mr. Hoopdriver to himself, in a

soft undertone, as he went soaring down the hill, and again, “‘He’s a

bloomin’ Dook!”’ He opened his mouth in a silent laugh. It was having a

decent cut did it. His social superiority had been so evident that even

a man like that noticed it. No more Manchester Department for ten days!

Out of Manchester, a Man. The draper Hoopdriver, the Hand, had vanished

from existence. Instead was a gentleman, a man of pleasure, with a

five-pound note, two sovereigns, and some silver at various convenient

points of his person. At any rate as good as a Dook, if not precisely

in the peerage. Involuntarily at the thought of his funds Hoopdriver’s

right hand left the handle and sought his breast pocket, to be

immediately recalled by a violent swoop of the machine towards the

cemetery. Whirroo! Just missed that half-brick! Mischievous brutes

there were in the world to put such a thing in the road. Some blooming

’Arry or other! Ought to prosecute a few of these roughs, and the rest

would know better. That must be the buckle of the wallet was rattling

on the mud-guard. How cheerfully the wheels buzzed!

The cemetery was very silent and peaceful, but the Vale was waking, and

windows rattled and squeaked up, and a white dog came out of one of the

houses and yelped at him. He got off, rather breathless, at the foot of

Kingston Hill, and pushed up. Halfway up, an early milk chariot rattled

by him; two dirty men with bundles came hurrying down. Hoopdriver felt

sure they were burglars, carrying home the swag.

It was up Kingston Hill that he first noticed a peculiar feeling, a

slight tightness at his knees; but he noticed, too, at the top that he

rode straighter than he did before. The pleasure of riding straight

blotted out these first intimations of fatigue. A man on horseback

appeared; Hoopdriver, in a tumult of soul at his own temerity, passed

him. Then down the hill into Kingston, with the screw hammer, behind in

the wallet, rattling against the oil can. He passed, without

misadventure, a fruiterer’s van and a sluggish cartload of bricks. And

in Kingston Hoopdriver, with the most exquisite sensations, saw the

shutters half removed from a draper’s shop, and two yawning youths, in

dusty old black jackets and with dirty white comforters about their

necks, clearing up the planks and boxes and wrappers in the window,

preparatory to dressing it out. Even so had Hoopdriver been on the

previous day. But now, was he not a bloomin’ Dook, palpably in the

sight of common men? Then round the corner to the right—bell banged

furiously—and so along the road to Surbiton.

Whoop for Freedom and Adventure! Every now and then a house with an

expression of sleepy surprise would open its eye as he passed, and to

the right of him for a mile or so the weltering Thames flashed and

glittered. Talk of your _joie de vivre!_ Albeit with a certain cramping

sensation about the knees and calves slowly forcing itself upon his

attention.

V.

THE SHAMEFUL EPISODE OF THE YOUNG LADY IN GREY

Now you must understand that Mr. Hoopdriver was not one of your fast

young men. If he had been King Lemuel, he could not have profited more

by his mother’s instructions. He regarded the feminine sex as something

to bow to and smirk at from a safe distance. Years of the intimate

remoteness of a counter leave their mark upon a man. It was an

adventure for him to take one of the Young Ladies of the establishment

to church on a Sunday. Few modern young men could have merited less the

epithet “Dorg.” But I have thought at times that his machine may have

had something of the blade in its metal. Decidedly it was a machine

with a past. Mr. Hoopdriver had bought it second-hand from Hare’s in

Putney, and Hare said it had had several owners. Second-hand was

scarcely the word for it, and Hare was mildly puzzled that he should be

selling such an antiquity. He said it was perfectly sound, if a little

old-fashioned, but he was absolutely silent about its moral character.

It may even have begun its career with a poet, say, in his glorious

youth. It may have been the bicycle of a Really Bad Man. No one who has

ever ridden a cycle of any kind but will witness that the things are

unaccountably prone to pick up bad habits—and keep them.

It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent

emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an

absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver’s

experience went. It “showed off”—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a

track like one of Beardsley’s feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that

his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant.

The Young Lady in Grey was also riding a bicycle. She was dressed in a

beautiful bluish-gray, and the sun behind her drew her outline in gold

and left the rest in shadow. Hoopdriver was dimly aware that she was

young, rather slender, dark, and with a bright colour and bright eyes.

Strange doubts possessed him as to the nature of her nether costume. He

had heard of such things of course. French, perhaps. Her handles

glittered; a jet of sunlight splashed off her bell blindingly. She was

approaching the high road along an affluent from the villas of

Surbiton. The roads converged slantingly. She was travelling at about

the same pace as Mr. Hoopdriver. The appearances pointed to a meeting

at the fork of the roads.

Hoopdriver was seized with a horrible conflict of doubts. By contrast

with her he rode disgracefully. Had he not better get off at once and

pretend something was wrong with his treadle? Yet even the end of

getting off was an uncertainty. That last occasion on Putney Heath! On

the other hand, what would happen if he kept on? To go very slow seemed

the abnegation of his manhood. To crawl after a mere schoolgirl!

Besides, she was not riding very fast. On the other hand, to thrust

himself in front of her, consuming the road in his tendril-like

advance, seemed an incivility—greed. He would leave her such a very

little. His business training made him prone to bow and step aside. If

only one could take one’s hands off the handles, one might pass with a

silent elevation of the hat, of course. But even that was a little

suggestive of a funeral.

Meanwhile the roads converged. She was looking at him. She was flushed,

a little thin, and had very bright eyes. Her red lips fell apart. She

may have been riding hard, but it looked uncommonly like a faint smile.

And the things were—yes!—_rationals!_ Suddenly an impulse to bolt from

the situation became clamorous. Mr. Hoopdriver pedalled convulsively,

intending to pass her. He jerked against some tin thing on the road,

and it flew up between front wheel and mud-guard. He twisted round

towards her. Had the machine a devil?

At that supreme moment it came across him that he would have done wiser

to dismount. He gave a frantic ‘whoop’ and tried to get round, then, as

he seemed falling over, he pulled the handles straight again and to the

left by an instinctive motion, and shot behind her hind wheel, missing

her by a hair’s breadth. The pavement kerb awaited him. He tried to

recover, and found himself jumped up on the pavement and riding

squarely at a neat wooden paling. He struck this with a terrific impact

and shot forward off his saddle into a clumsy entanglement. Then he

began to tumble over sideways, and completed the entire figure in a

sitting position on the gravel, with his feet between the fork and the

stay of the machine. The concussion on the gravel shook his entire

being. He remained in that position, wishing that he had broken his

neck, wishing even more heartily that he had never been born. The glory

of life had departed. Bloomin’ Dook, indeed! These unwomanly women!

There was a soft whirr, the click of a brake, two footfalls, and the

Young Lady in Grey stood holding her machine. She had turned round and

come back to him. The warm sunlight now was in her face. “Are you

hurt?” she said. She had a pretty, clear, girlish voice. She was really

very young—quite a girl, in fact. And rode so well! It was a bitter

draught.

Mr. Hoopdriver stood up at once. “Not a bit,” he said, a little

ruefully. He became painfully aware that large patches of gravel

scarcely improve the appearance of a Norfolk suit. “I’m very sorry

indeed—”

“It’s my fault,” she said, interrupting and so saving him on the very

verge of calling her ‘Miss.’ (He knew ‘Miss’ was wrong, but it was

deep-seated habit with him.) “I tried to pass you on the wrong side.”

Her face and eyes seemed all alive. “It’s my place to be sorry.”

“But it was my steering—”

“I ought to have seen you were a Novice”—with a touch of superiority.

“But you rode so straight coming along there!”

She really was—dashed pretty. Mr. Hoopdriver’s feelings passed the

nadir. When he spoke again there was the faintest flavour of the

aristocratic in his voice.

“It’s my first ride, as a matter of fact. But that’s no excuse for my

ah! blundering—”

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

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

manly.

“You don’t at first. Have you any sticking-plaster? If not—” She

balanced her machine against herself. She had a little side pocket, and

she whipped out a small packet of sticking-plaster with a pair of

scissors in a sheath at the side, and cut off a generous portion. He

had a wild impulse to ask her to stick it on for him. Controlled.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Machine all right?” she asked, looking past him at the prostrate

vehicle, her hands on her handle-bar. For the first time Hoopdriver did

not feel proud of his machine.

He turned and began to pick up the fallen fabric. He looked over his

shoulder, and she was gone, turned his head over the other shoulder

down the road, and she was riding off. “_Orf!_” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Well, I’m blowed!—Talk about Slap Up!” (His aristocratic refinement

rarely adorned his speech in his private soliloquies.) His mind was

whirling. One fact was clear. A most delightful and novel human being

had flashed across his horizon and was going out of his life again. The

Holiday madness was in his blood. She looked round!

At that he rushed his machine into the road, and began a hasty ascent.

Unsuccessful. Try again. Confound it, will he _never_ be able to get up

on the thing again? She will be round the corner in a minute. Once

more. Ah! Pedal! Wabble! No! Right this time! He gripped the handles

and put his head down. He would overtake her.

The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment

over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals

with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple

bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She

vanished round the corner. His effort was Titanic. What should he say

when he overtook her? That scarcely disturbed him at first. How fine

she had looked, flushed with the exertion of riding, breathing a little

fast, but elastic and active! Talk about your ladylike, homekeeping

girls with complexions like cold veal! But what should he say to her?

That was a bother. And he could not lift his cap without risking a

repetition of his previous ignominy. She was a real Young Lady. No

mistake about that! None of your blooming shop girls. (There is no

greater contempt in the world than that of shop men for shop girls,

unless it be that of shop girls for shop men.) Phew! This was work. A

certain numbness came and went at his knees.

“May I ask to whom I am indebted?” he panted to himself, trying it

over. That might do. Lucky he had a card case! A hundred a

shilling—while you wait. He was getting winded. The road was certainly

a bit uphill. He turned the corner and saw a long stretch of road, and

a grey dress vanishing. He set his teeth. Had he gained on her at all?

“Monkey on a gridiron!” yelped a small boy. Hoopdriver redoubled his

efforts. His breath became audible, his steering unsteady, his

pedalling positively ferocious. A drop of perspiration ran into his

eye, irritant as acid. The road really was uphill beyond dispute. All

his physiology began to cry out at him. A last tremendous effort

brought him to the corner and showed yet another extent of shady

roadway, empty save for a baker’s van. His front wheel suddenly

shrieked aloud. “Oh Lord!” said Hoopdriver, relaxing.

Anyhow she was not in sight. He got off unsteadily, and for a moment

his legs felt like wisps of cotton. He balanced his machine against the

grassy edge of the path and sat down panting. His hands were gnarled

with swollen veins and shaking palpably, his breath came viscid.

“I’m hardly in training yet,” he remarked. His legs had gone leaden. “I

don’t feel as though I’d had a mouthful of breakfast.” Presently he

slapped his side pocket and produced therefrom a brand-new cigarette

case and a packet of Vansittart’s Red Herring cigarettes. He filled the

case. Then his eye fell with a sudden approval on the ornamental

chequering of his new stockings. The expression in his eyes faded

slowly to abstract meditation.

“She _was_ a stunning girl,” he said. “I wonder if I shall ever set

eyes on her again. And she knew how to ride, too! Wonder what she

thought of me.”

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

of comfort.

He lit a cigarette, and sat smoking and meditating. He did not even

look up when vehicles passed. It was perhaps ten minutes before he

roused himself. “What rot it is! What’s the good of thinking such

things,” he said. “I’m only a blessed draper’s assistant.” (To be

exact, he did not say blessed. The service of a shop may polish a man’s

exterior ways, but the ’prentices’ dormitory is an indifferent school

for either manners or morals.) He stood up and began wheeling his

machine towards Esher. It was going to be a beautiful day, and the

hedges and trees and the open country were all glorious to his

town-tired eyes. But it was a little different from the elation of his

start.

“Look at the gentleman wizzer bicitle,” said a nursemaid on the path to

a personage in a perambulator. That healed him a little. “‘Gentleman

wizzer bicitle,’—‘bloomin’ Dook’—I can’t look so very seedy,” he said

to himself.

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

There was something very comforting in the track of _her_ pneumatic

running straight and steady along the road before him. It must be hers.

No other pneumatic had been along the road that morning. It was just

possible, of course, that he might see her once more—coming back.

Should he try and say something smart? He speculated what manner of

girl she might be. Probably she was one of these here New Women. He had

a persuasion the cult had been maligned. Anyhow she was a Lady. And

rich people, too! Her machine couldn’t have cost much under twenty

pounds. His mind came round and dwelt some time on her visible self.

Rational dress didn’t look a bit unwomanly. However, he disdained to be

one of your fortune-hunters. Then his thoughts drove off at a tangent.

He would certainly have to get something to eat at the next public

house.

VI.

ON THE ROAD TO RIPLEY

In the fulness of time, Mr. Hoopdriver drew near the Marquis of Granby

at Esher, and as he came under the railway arch and saw the inn in

front of him, he mounted his machine again and rode bravely up to the

doorway. Burton and biscuit and cheese he had, which, indeed, is Burton

in its proper company; and as he was eating there came a middleaged man

in a drab cycling suit, very red and moist and angry in the face, and

asked bitterly for a lemon squash. And he sat down upon the seat in the

bar and mopped his face. But scarcely had he sat down before he got up

again and stared out of the doorway.

“Damn!” said he. Then, “Damned Fool!”

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

cheese in his cheek.

The man in drab faced him. “I called myself a Damned Fool, sir. Have

you any objections?”

“Oh!—None. None,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “I thought you spoke to me. I

didn’t hear what you said.”

“To have a contemplative disposition and an energetic temperament, sir,

is hell. Hell, I tell you. A contemplative disposition and a phlegmatic

temperament, all very well. But energy and philosophy—!”

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

“There’s no hurry, sir, none whatever. I came out for exercise, gentle

exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I

get on the accursed machine, than off I go hammer and tongs; I never

look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view, get

hot, juicy, red,—like a grilled chop. Here I am, sir. Come from

Guildford in something under the hour. _why_, sir?”

Mr. Hoopdriver shook his head.

“Because I’m a damned fool, sir. Because I’ve reservoirs and reservoirs

of muscular energy, and one or other of them is always leaking. It’s a

most interesting road, birds and trees, I’ve no doubt, and wayside

flowers, and there’s nothing I should enjoy more than watching them.

But I can’t. Get me on that machine, and I have to go. Get me on

anything, and I have to go. And I don’t want to go a bit. _Why_ should

a man rush about like a rocket, all pace and fizzle? Why? It makes me

furious. I can assure you, sir, I go scorching along the road, and

cursing aloud at myself for doing it. A quiet, dignified, philosophical

man, that’s what I am—at bottom; and here I am dancing with rage and

swearing like a drunken tinker at a perfect stranger—

“But my day’s wasted. I’ve lost all that country road, and now I’m on

the fringe of London. And I might have loitered all the morning! Ugh!

Thank Heaven, sir, you have not the irritable temperament, that you are

not goaded to madness by your endogenous sneers, by the eternal

wrangling of an uncomfortable soul and body. I tell you, I lead a cat

and dog life—But what _is_ the use of talking?—It’s all of a piece!”

He tossed his head with unspeakable self-disgust, pitched the lemon

squash into his mouth, paid for it, and without any further remark

strode to the door. Mr. Hoopdriver was still wondering what to say when

his interlocutor vanished. There was a noise of a foot spurning the

gravel, and when Mr. Hoopdriver reached the doorway, the man in drab

was a score of yards Londonward. He had already gathered pace. He

pedalled with ill-suppressed anger, and his head was going down. In

another moment he flew swiftly out of sight under the railway arch, and

Mr. Hoopdriver saw him no more.

VII.

After this whirlwind Mr. Hoopdriver paid his reckoning and—being now a

little rested about the muscles of the knees—resumed his saddle and

rode on in the direction of Ripley, along an excellent but undulating

road. He was pleased to find his command over his machine already

sensibly increased. He set himself little exercises as he went along

and performed them with variable success. There was, for instance,

steering in between a couple of stones, say a foot apart, a deed of

little difficulty as far as the front wheel is concerned. But the back

wheel, not being under the sway of the human eye, is apt to take a

vicious jump over the obstacle, which sends a violent concussion all

along the spine to the skull, and will even jerk a loosely fastened hat

over the eyes, and so lead to much confusion. And again, there was

taking the hand or hands off the handlebar, a thing simple in itself,

but complex in its consequences. This particularly was a feat Mr.

Hoopdriver desired to do, for several divergent reasons; but at present

it simply led to convulsive balancings and novel and inelegant modes of

dismounting.

The human nose is, at its best, a needless excrescence. There are those

who consider it ornamental, and would regard a face deprived of its

assistance with pity or derision; but it is doubtful whether our esteem

is dictated so much by a sense of its absolute beauty as by the

vitiating effect of a universally prevalent fashion. In the case of

bicycle students, as in the young of both sexes, its inutility is

aggravated by its persistent annoyance—it requires constant attention.

Until one can ride with one hand, and search for, secure, and use a

pocket handkerchief with the other, cycling is necessarily a constant

series of descents. Nothing can be further from the author’s ambition

than a wanton realism, but Mr. Hoopdriver’s nose is a plain and salient

fact, and face it we must. And, in addition to this inconvenience,

there are flies. Until the cyclist can steer with one hand, his face is

given over to Beelzebub. Contemplative flies stroll over it, and trifle

absently with its most sensitive surfaces. The only way to dislodge

them is to shake the head forcibly and to writhe one’s features

violently. This is not only a lengthy and frequently ineffectual

method, but one exceedingly terrifying to foot passengers. And again,

sometimes the beginner rides for a space with one eye closed by

perspiration, giving him a waggish air foreign to his mood and ill

calculated to overawe the impertinent. However, you will appreciate now

the motive of Mr. Hoopdriver’s experiments. He presently attained

sufficient dexterity to slap himself smartly and violently in the face

with his right hand, without certainly overturning the machine; but his

pocket handkerchief might have been in California for any good it was

to him while he was in the saddle.

Yet you must not think that because Mr. Hoopdriver was a little

uncomfortable, he was unhappy in the slightest degree. In the

background of his consciousness was the sense that about this time

Briggs would be half-way through his window dressing, and Gosling, the

apprentice, busy, with a chair turned down over the counter and his

ears very red, trying to roll a piece of huckaback—only those who have

rolled pieces of huckaback know quite how detestable huckaback is to

roll—and the shop would be dusty and, perhaps, the governor about and

snappy. And here was quiet and greenery, and one mucked about as the

desire took one, without a soul to see, and here was no wailing of

“Sayn,” no folding of remnants, no voice to shout, “Hoopdriver,

forward!” And once he almost ran over something wonderful, a little,

low, red beast with a yellowish tail, that went rushing across the road

before him. It was the first weasel he had ever seen in his cockney

life. There were miles of this, scores of miles of this before him,

pinewood and oak forest, purple, heathery moorland and grassy down,

lush meadows, where shining rivers wound their lazy way, villages with

square-towered, flint churches, and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns,

clean, white, country towns, long downhill stretches, where one might

ride at one’s ease (overlooking a jolt or so), and far away, at the end

of it all,—the sea.

What mattered a fly or so in the dawn of these delights? Perhaps he had

been dashed a minute by the shameful episode of the Young Lady in Grey,

and perhaps the memory of it was making itself a little lair in a

corner of his brain from which it could distress him in the retrospect

by suggesting that he looked like a fool; but for the present that

trouble was altogether in abeyance. The man in drab—evidently a

swell—had spoken to him as his equal, and the knees of his brown suit

and the chequered stockings were ever before his eyes. (Or, rather, you

could see the stockings by carrying the head a little to one side.) And

to feel, little by little, his mastery over this delightful,

treacherous machine, growing and growing! Every half-mile or so his

knees reasserted themselves, and he dismounted and sat awhile by the

roadside.

It was at a charming little place between Esher and Cobham, where a

bridge crosses a stream, that Mr. Hoopdriver came across the other

cyclist in brown. It is well to notice the fact here, although the

interview was of the slightest, because it happened that subsequently

Hoopdriver saw a great deal more of this other man in brown. The other

cyclist in brown had a machine of dazzling newness, and a punctured

pneumatic lay across his knees. He was a man of thirty or more, with a

whitish face, an aquiline nose, a lank, flaxen moustache, and very fair

hair, and he scowled at the job before him. At the sight of him Mr.

Hoopdriver pulled himself together, and rode by with the air of one

born to the wheel. “A splendid morning,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “and a

fine surface.”

“The morning and you and the surface be everlastingly damned!” said the

other man in brown as Hoopdriver receded. Hoopdriver heard the mumble

and did not distinguish the words, and he felt a pleasing sense of

having duly asserted the wide sympathy that binds all cyclists

together, of having behaved himself as becomes one of the brotherhood

of the wheel. The other man in brown watched his receding aspect.

“Greasy proletarian,” said the other man in brown, feeling a prophetic

dislike. “Got a suit of brown, the very picture of this. One would

think his sole aim in life had been to caricature me. It’s Fortune’s

way with me. Look at his insteps on the treadles! Why does Heaven make

such men?”

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

business in hand.

Mr. Hoopdriver worked up the hill towards Cobham to a point that he

felt sure was out of sight of the other man in brown, and then he

dismounted and pushed his machine; until the proximity of the village

and a proper pride drove him into the saddle again.

VIII.

Beyond Cobham came a delightful incident, delightful, that is, in its

beginning if a trifle indeterminate in the retrospect. It was perhaps

half-way between Cobham and Ripley. Mr. Hoopdriver dropped down a

little hill, where, unfenced from the road, fine mossy trees and

bracken lay on either side; and looking up he saw an open country

before him, covered with heather and set with pines, and a yellow road

running across it, and half a mile away perhaps, a little grey figure

by the wayside waving something white. “Never!” said Mr. Hoopdriver

with his hands tightening on the handles.

He resumed the treadles, staring away before him, jolted over a stone,

wabbled, recovered, and began riding faster at once, with his eyes

ahead. “It can’t be,” said Hoopdriver.

He rode his straightest, and kept his pedals spinning, albeit a limp

numbness had resumed possession of his legs. “It _can’t_ be,” he

repeated, feeling every moment more assured that it _was_. “Lord! I

don’t know even now,” said Mr. Hoopdriver (legs awhirling), and then,

“Blow my legs!”

But he kept on and drew nearer and nearer, breathing hard and gathering

flies like a flypaper. In the valley he was hidden. Then the road began

to rise, and the resistance of the pedals grew. As he crested the hill

he saw her, not a hundred yards away from him. “It’s her!” he said.

“It’s her—right enough. It’s the suit’s done it,”—which was truer even

than Mr. Hoopdriver thought. But now she was not waving her

handkerchief, she was not even looking at him. She was wheeling her

machine slowly along the road towards him, and admiring the pretty

wooded hills towards Weybridge. She might have been unaware of his

existence for all the recognition he got.

For a moment horrible doubts troubled Mr. Hoopdriver. Had that

handkerchief been a dream? Besides which he was deliquescent and

scarlet, and felt so. It must be her coquetry—the handkerchief was

indisputable. Should he ride up to her and get off, or get off and ride

up to her? It was as well she didn’t look, because he would certainly

capsize if he lifted his cap. Perhaps that was her consideration. Even

as he hesitated he was upon her. She must have heard his breathing. He

gripped the brake. Steady! His right leg waved in the air, and he came

down heavily and staggering, but erect. She turned her eyes upon him

with admirable surprise.

Mr. Hoopdriver tried to smile pleasantly, hold up his machine, raise

his cap, and bow gracefully. Indeed, he felt that he did as much. He

was a man singularly devoid of the minutiæ of self-consciousness, and

he was quite unaware of a tail of damp hair lying across his forehead,

and just clearing his eyes, and of the general disorder of his

coiffure. There was an interrogative pause.

“What can I have the pleasure—” began Mr. Hoopdriver, insinuatingly. “I

mean” (remembering his emancipation and abruptly assuming his most

aristocratic intonation), “can I be of any assistance to you?”

The Young Lady in Grey bit her lower lip and said very prettily, “None,

thank you.” She glanced away from him and made as if she would proceed.

“Oh!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, taken aback and suddenly crestfallen again.

It was so unexpected. He tried to grasp the situation. Was she

coquetting? Or had he—?

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

again.

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

cheeks deepening.

“I should not have alighted if I had not—imagined that you—er, waved

something white—” He paused.

She looked at him doubtfully. He _had_ seen it! She decided that he was

not an unredeemed rough taking advantage of a mistake, but an innocent

soul meaning well while seeking happiness. “I _did_ wave my

handkerchief,” she said. “I’m very sorry. I am expecting—a friend, a

gentleman,”—she seemed to flush pink for a minute. “He is riding a

bicycle and dressed in—in brown; and at a distance, you know—”

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

his bitter disappointment. “Certainly.”

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

“No trouble. ’Ssure you,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, mechanically and bowing

over his saddle as if it was a counter. Somehow he could not find it in

his heart to tell her that the man was beyond there with a punctured

pneumatic. He looked back along the road and tried to think of

something else to say. But the gulf in the conversation widened rapidly

and hopelessly. “There’s nothing further,” began Mr. Hoopdriver

desperately, recurring to his stock of _clichés_.

“Nothing, thank you,” she said decisively. And immediately, “This _is_

the Ripley road?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Ripley is about two miles from here.

According to the mile-stones.”

“Thank you,” she said warmly. “Thank you so much. I felt sure there was

no mistake. And I really am awfully sorry—”

“Don’t mention it,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Don’t mention it.” He

hesitated and gripped his handles to mount. “It’s me,” he said, “ought

to be sorry.” Should he say it? Was it an impertinence? Anyhow!—“Not

being the other gentleman, you know.”

He tried a quietly insinuating smile that he knew for a grin even as he

smiled it; felt she disapproved—that she despised him, was overcome

with shame at her expression, turned his back upon her, and began (very

clumsily) to mount. He did so with a horrible swerve, and went

pedalling off, riding very badly, as he was only too painfully aware.

Nevertheless, thank Heaven for the mounting! He could not see her

because it was so dangerous for him to look round, but he could imagine

her indignant and pitiless. He felt an unspeakable idiot. One had to be

so careful what one said to Young Ladies, and he’d gone and treated her

just as though she was only a Larky Girl. It was unforgivable. He

always _was_ a fool. You could tell from her manner she didn’t think

him a gentleman. One glance, and she seemed to look clear through him

and all his presence. What rot it was venturing to speak to a girl like

that! With her education she was bound to see through him at once.

How nicely she spoke too! nice clear-cut words! She made him feel what

slush his own accent was. And that last silly remark. What was it? ‘Not

being the other gentleman, you know!’ No point in it. And

‘_gentleman!_’ What _could_ she be thinking of him?

But really the Young Lady in Grey had dismissed Hoopdriver from her

thoughts almost before he had vanished round the corner. She had

thought no ill of him. His manifest awe and admiration of her had given

her not an atom of offence. But for her just now there were weightier

things to think about, things that would affect all the rest of her

life. She continued slowly walking her machine Londonward. Presently

she stopped. “Oh! Why _doesn’t_ he come?” she said, and stamped her

foot petulantly. Then, as if in answer, coming down the hill among the

trees, appeared the other man in brown, dismounted and wheeling his

machine.

IX.

HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WAS HAUNTED

As Mr. Hoopdriver rode swaggering along the Ripley road, it came to

him, with an unwarrantable sense of comfort, that he had seen the last

of the Young Lady in Grey. But the ill-concealed bladery of the

machine, the present machinery of Fate, the _deus ex machina_, so to

speak, was against him. The bicycle, torn from this attractive young

woman, grew heavier and heavier, and continually more unsteady. It

seemed a choice between stopping at Ripley or dying in the flower of

his days. He went into the Unicorn, after propping his machine outside

the door, and, as he cooled down and smoked his Red Herring cigarette

while the cold meat was getting ready, he saw from the window the Young

Lady in Grey and the other man in brown, entering Ripley.

They filled him with apprehension by looking at the house which

sheltered him, but the sight of his bicycle, propped in a drunk and

incapable attitude against the doorway, humping its rackety mud-guard

and leering at them with its darkened lantern eye, drove them away—so

it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver—to the spacious swallow of the Golden

Dragon. The young lady was riding very slowly, but the other man in

brown had a bad puncture and was wheeling his machine. Mr. Hoopdriver

noted his flaxen moustache, his aquiline nose, his rather bent

shoulders, with a sudden, vivid dislike.

The maid at the Unicorn is naturally a pleasant girl, but she is jaded

by the incessant incidence of cyclists, and Hoopdriver’s mind, even as

he conversed with her in that cultivated voice of his—of the weather,

of the distance from London, and of the excellence of the Ripley

road—wandered to the incomparable freshness and brilliance of the Young

Lady in Grey. As he sat at meat he kept turning his head to the window

to see what signs there were of that person, but the face of the Golden

Dragon displayed no appreciation of the delightful morsel it had

swallowed. As an incidental consequence of this distraction, Mr.

Hoopdriver was for a minute greatly inconvenienced by a mouthful of

mustard. After he had called for his reckoning he went, his courage

being high with meat and mustard, to the door, intending to stand, with

his legs wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets, and stare boldly

across the road. But just then the other man in brown appeared in the

gateway of the Golden Dragon yard—it is one of those delightful inns

that date from the coaching days—wheeling his punctured machine. He was

taking it to Flambeau’s, the repairer’s. He looked up and saw

Hoopdriver, stared for a minute, and then scowled darkly.

But Hoopdriver remained stoutly in the doorway until the other man in

brown had disappeared into Flambeau’s. Then he glanced momentarily at

the Golden Dragon, puckered his mouth into a whistle of unconcern, and

proceeded to wheel his machine into the road until a sufficient margin

for mounting was secured.

Now, at that time, I say, Hoopdriver was rather desirous than not of

seeing no more of the Young Lady in Grey. The other man in brown he

guessed was her brother, albeit that person was of a pallid fairness,

differing essentially from her rich colouring; and, besides, he felt he

had made a hopeless fool of himself. But the afternoon was against him,

intolerably hot, especially on the top of his head, and the virtue had

gone out of his legs to digest his cold meat, and altogether his ride

to Guildford was exceedingly intermittent. At times he would walk, at

times lounge by the wayside, and every public house, in spite of Briggs

and a sentiment of economy, meant a lemonade and a dash of bitter. (For

that is the experience of all those who go on wheels, that drinking

begets thirst, even more than thirst begets drinking, until at last the

man who yields becomes a hell unto himself, a hell in which the fire

dieth not, and the thirst is not quenched.) Until a pennyworth of acrid

green apples turned the current that threatened to carry him away. Ever

and again a cycle, or a party of cyclists, would go by, with glittering

wheels and softly running chains, and on each occasion, to save his

self-respect, Mr. Hoopdriver descended and feigned some trouble with

his saddle. Each time he descended with less trepidation.

He did not reach Guildford until nearly four o’clock, and then he was

so much exhausted that he decided to put up there for the night, at the

Yellow Hammer Coffee Tavern. And after he had cooled a space and

refreshed himself with tea and bread and butter and jam,—the tea he

drank noisily out of the saucer,—he went out to loiter away the rest of

the afternoon. Guildford is an altogether charming old town, famous, so

he learnt from a Guide Book, as the scene of Master Tupper’s great

historical novel of Stephen Langton, and it has a delightful castle,

all set about with geraniums and brass plates commemorating the

gentlemen who put them up, and its Guildhall is a Tudor building, very

pleasant to see, and in the afternoon the shops are busy and the people

going to and fro make the pavements look bright and prosperous. It was

nice to peep in the windows and see the heads of the men and girls in

the drapers’ shops, busy as busy, serving away. The High Street runs

down at an angle of seventy degrees to the horizon (so it seemed to Mr.

Hoopdriver, whose feeling for gradients was unnaturally exalted), and

it brought his heart into his mouth to see a cyclist ride down it, like

a fly crawling down a window pane. The man hadn’t even a brake. He

visited the castle early in the evening and paid his twopence to ascend

the Keep.

At the top, from the cage, he looked down over the clustering red roofs

of the town and the tower of the church, and then going to the southern

side sat down and lit a Red Herring cigarette, and stared away south

over the old bramble-bearing, fern-beset ruin, at the waves of blue

upland that rose, one behind another, across the Weald, to the lazy

altitudes of Hindhead and Butser. His pale grey eyes were full of

complacency and pleasurable anticipation. Tomorrow he would go riding

across that wide valley.

He did not notice any one else had come up the Keep after him until he

heard a soft voice behind him saying: “Well, _Miss Beaumont_, here’s

the view.” Something in the accent pointed to a jest in the name.

“It’s a dear old town, brother George,” answered another voice that

sounded familiar enough, and turning his head, Mr. Hoopdriver saw the

other man in brown and the Young Lady in Grey, with their backs towards

him. She turned her smiling profile towards Hoopdriver. “Only, you

know, brothers don’t call their sisters—”

She glanced over her shoulder and saw Hoopdriver. “Damn!” said the

other man in brown, quite audibly, starting as he followed her glance.

Mr. Hoopdriver, with a fine air of indifference, resumed the Weald.

“Beautiful old town, isn’t it?” said the other man in brown, after a

quite perceptible pause.

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

Another pause began.

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

Then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived clearly that he was in the way, and

decided to retreat. It was just his luck of course that he should

stumble at the head of the steps and vanish with indignity. This was

the third time that he’d seen _him_, and the fourth time _her_. And of

course he was too big a fat-head to raise his cap to her! He thought of

that at the foot of the Keep. Apparently they aimed at the South Coast

just as he did. He’d get up betimes the next day and hurry off to avoid

her—them, that is. It never occurred to Mr. Hoopdriver that Miss

Beaumont and her brother might do exactly the same thing, and that

evening, at least, the peculiarity of a brother calling his sister

“Miss Beaumont” did not recur to him. He was much too preoccupied with

an analysis of his own share of these encounters. He found it hard to

be altogether satisfied about the figure he had cut, revise his

memories as he would.

Once more quite unintentionally he stumbled upon these two people. It

was about seven o’clock. He stopped outside a linen draper’s and peered

over the goods in the window at the assistants in torment. He could

have spent a whole day happily at that. He told himself that he was

trying to see how they dressed out the brass lines over their counters,

in a purely professional spirit, but down at the very bottom of his

heart he knew better. The customers were a secondary consideration, and

it was only after the lapse of perhaps a minute that he perceived that

among them was—the Young Lady in Grey! He turned away from the window

at once, and saw the other man in brown standing at the edge of the

pavement and regarding him with a very curious expression of face.

There came into Mr. Hoopdriver’s head the curious problem whether he

was to be regarded as a nuisance haunting these people, or whether they

were to be regarded as a nuisance haunting him. He abandoned the

solution at last in despair, quite unable to decide upon the course he

should take at the next encounter, whether he should scowl savagely at

the couple or assume an attitude eloquent of apology and propitiation.

X.

THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER’S HEART

Mr. Hoopdriver was (in the days of this story) a poet, though he had

never written a line of verse. Or perhaps romancer will describe him

better. Like I know not how many of those who do the fetching and

carrying of life,—a great number of them certainly,—his real life was

absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as

such people do in Mr. Gissing’s novels, he would probably have come by

way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what

he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always

decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes, and poses,

deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions; his experiences

were mere material for a romantic superstructure. If some power had

given Hoopdriver the ‘giftie’ Burns invoked, ‘to see oursels as ithers

see us,’ he would probably have given it away to some one else at the

very earliest opportunity. His entire life, you must understand, was

not a continuous romance, but a series of short stories linked only by

the general resemblance of their hero, a brown-haired young fellow

commonly, with blue eyes and a fair moustache, graceful rather than

strong, sharp and resolute rather than clever (cp., as the scientific

books say, p. 2). Invariably this person possessed an iron will. The

stories fluctuated indefinitely. The smoking of a cigarette converted

Hoopdriver’s hero into something entirely worldly, subtly rakish, with

a humorous twinkle in the eye and some gallant sinning in the

background. You should have seen Mr. Hoopdriver promenading the

brilliant gardens at Earl’s Court on an early-closing night. His

meaning glances! (I dare not give the meaning.) Such an influence as

the eloquence of a revivalist preacher would suffice to divert the

story into absolutely different channels, make him a white-soured hero,

a man still pure, walking untainted and brave and helpful through miry

ways. The appearance of some daintily gloved frockcoated gentleman with

buttonhole and eyeglass complete, gallantly attendant in the rear of

customers, served again to start visions of a simplicity essentially

Cromwell-like, of sturdy plainness, of a strong, silent man going

righteously through the world. This day there had predominated a fine

leisurely person immaculately clothed, and riding on an unexceptional

machine, a mysterious person—quite unostentatious, but with accidental

self-revelation of something over the common, even a “bloomin’ Dook,”

it might be incognito, on the tour of the South Coast.

You must not think that there was any _telling_ of these stories of

this life-long series by Mr. Hoopdriver. He never dreamt that they were

known to a soul. If it were not for the trouble, I would, I think, go

back and rewrite this section from the beginning, expunging the

statements that Hoopdriver was a poet and a romancer, and saying

instead that he was a playwright and acted his own plays. He was not

only the sole performer, but the entire audience, and the entertainment

kept him almost continuously happy. Yet even that playwright comparison

scarcely expresses all the facts of the case. After all, very many of

his dreams never got acted at all, possibly indeed, most of them, the

dreams of a solitary walk for instance, or of a tramcar ride, the

dreams dreamt behind the counter while trade was slack and mechanical

foldings and rollings occupied his muscles. Most of them were little

dramatic situations, crucial dialogues, the return of Mr. Hoopdriver to

his native village, for instance, in a well-cut holiday suit and natty

gloves, the unheard asides of the rival neighbours, the delight of the

old ‘mater,’ the intelligence—“A ten-pound rise all at once from

Antrobus, mater. Whad d’yer think of that?” or again, the first

whispering of love, dainty and witty and tender, to the girl he served

a few days ago with sateen, or a gallant rescue of generalised beauty

in distress from truculent insult or ravening dog.

So many people do this—and you never suspect it. You see a tattered lad

selling matches in the street, and you think there is nothing between

him and the bleakness of immensity, between him and utter abasement,

but a few tattered rags and a feeble musculature. And all unseen by you

a host of heaven-sent fatuities swathes him about, even, maybe, as they

swathe you about. Many men have never seen their own profiles or the

backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has

been invented. They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate

scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so,

indeed, it is with all of us who go on living. Self-deception is the

anaesthetic of life, while God is carving out our beings.

But to return from this general vivisection to Mr. Hoopdriver’s

imaginings. You see now how external our view has been; we have had but

the slightest transitory glimpses of the drama within, of how the

things looked in the magic mirror of Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind. On the road

to Guildford and during his encounters with his haunting

fellow-cyclists the drama had presented chiefly the quiet gentleman to

whom we have alluded, but at Guildford, under more varied stimuli, he

burgeoned out more variously. There was the house agent’s window, for

instance, set him upon a charming little comedy. He would go in, make

inquires about that thirty-pound house, get the key possibly and go

over it—the thing would stimulate the clerk’s curiosity immensely. He

searched his mind for a reason for this proceeding and discovered that

he was a dynamiter needing privacy. Upon that theory he procured the

key, explored the house carefully, said darkly that it might suit his

special needs, but that there were _others_ to consult. The clerk,

however, did not understand the allusion, and merely pitied him as one

who had married young and paired himself to a stronger mind than his

own.

This proceeding in some occult way led to the purchase of a note-book

and pencil, and that started the conception of an artist taking notes.

That was a little game Mr. Hoopdriver had, in congenial company, played

in his still younger days—to the infinite annoyance of quite a number

of respectable excursionists at Hastings. In early days Mr. Hoopdriver

had been, as his mother proudly boasted, a ‘bit of a drawer,’ but a

conscientious and normally stupid schoolmaster perceived the incipient

talent and had nipped it in the bud by a series of lessons in art.

However, our principal character figured about quite happily in old

corners of Guildford, and once the other man in brown, looking out of

the bay window of the Earl of Kent, saw him standing in a corner by a

gateway, note-book in hand, busily sketching the Earl’s imposing

features. At which sight the other man in brown started back from the

centre of the window, so as to be hidden from him, and crouching

slightly, watched him intently through the interstices of the lace

curtains.

XI.

OMISSIONS

Now the rest of the acts of Mr. Hoopdriver in Guildford, on the great

opening day of his holidays, are not to be detailed here. How he

wandered about the old town in the dusk, and up to the Hogsback to see

the little lamps below and the little stars above come out one after

another; how he returned through the yellow-lit streets to the Yellow

Hammer Coffee Tavern and supped bravely in the commercial room—a Man

among Men; how he joined in the talk about flying-machines and the

possibilities of electricity, witnessing that flying-machines were

“dead certain to come,” and that electricity was “wonderful,

wonderful”; how he went and watched the billiard playing and said,

“Left ’em” several times with an oracular air; how he fell a-yawning;

and how he got out his cycling map and studied it intently,—are things

that find no mention here. Nor will I enlarge upon his going into the

writing-room, and marking the road from London to Guildford with a

fine, bright line of the reddest of red ink. In his little cyclist

hand-book there is a diary, and in the diary there is an entry of these

things—it is there to this day, and I cannot do better than reproduce

it here to witness that this book is indeed a true one, and no lying

fable written to while away an hour.

At last he fell a-yawning so much that very reluctantly indeed he set

about finishing this great and splendid day. (Alas! that all days must

end at last! ) He got his candle in the hall from a friendly

waiting-maid, and passed upward—whither a modest novelist, who writes

for the family circle, dare not follow. Yet I may tell you that he

knelt down at his bedside, happy and drowsy, and said, “Our Father

‘chartin’ heaven,” even as he had learnt it by rote from his mother

nearly twenty years ago. And anon when his breathing had become deep

and regular, we may creep into his bedroom and catch him at his dreams.

He is lying upon his left side, with his arm under the pillow. It is

dark, and he is hidden; but if you could have seen his face, sleeping

there in the darkness, I think you would have perceived, in spite of

that treasured, thin, and straggling moustache, in spite of your memory

of the coarse words he had used that day, that the man before you was,

after all, only a little child asleep.

XII.

THE DREAMS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER

In spite of the drawn blinds and the darkness, you have just seen Mr.

Hoopdriver’s face peaceful in its beauty sleep in the little, plain

bedroom at the very top of the Yellow Hammer Coffee Tavern at

Guildford. That was before midnight. As the night progressed he was

disturbed by dreams.

After your first day of cycling one dream is inevitable. A memory of

motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they

seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that

change and grow; you ride down steeples and staircases and over

precipices; you hover in horrible suspense over inhabited towns, vainly

seeking for a brake your hand cannot find, to save you from a headlong

fall; you plunge into weltering rivers, and rush helplessly at

monstrous obstacles. Anon Mr. Hoopdriver found himself riding out of

the darkness of non-existence, pedalling Ezekiel’s Wheels across the

Weald of Surrey, jolting over the hills and smashing villages in his

course, while the other man in brown cursed and swore at him and

shouted to stop his career. There was the Putney heath-keeper, too, and

the man in drab raging at him. He felt an awful fool, a—what was it?—a

juggins, ah!—a Juggernaut. The villages went off one after another with

a soft, squashing noise. He did not see the Young Lady in Grey, but he

knew she was looking at his back. He dared not look round. Where the

devil was the brake? It must have fallen off. And the bell? Right in

front of him was Guildford. He tried to shout and warn the town to get

out of the way, but his voice was gone as well. Nearer, nearer! it was

fearful! and in another moment the houses were cracking like nuts and

the blood of the inhabitants squirting this way and that. The streets

were black with people running. Right under his wheels he saw the Young

Lady in Grey. A feeling of horror came upon Mr. Hoopdriver; he flung

himself sideways to descend, forgetting how high he was, and forthwith

he began falling; falling, falling.

He woke up, turned over, saw the new moon on the window, wondered a

little, and went to sleep again.

This second dream went back into the first somehow, and the other man

in brown came threatening and shouting towards him. He grew uglier and

uglier as he approached, and his expression was intolerably evil. He

came and looked close into Mr. Hoopdriver’s eyes and then receded to an

incredible distance. His face seemed to be luminous. “_Miss Beaumont_,”

he said, and splashed up a spray of suspicion. Some one began letting

off fireworks, chiefly Catherine wheels, down the shop, though Mr.

Hoopdriver knew it was against the rules. For it seemed that the place

they were in was a vast shop, and then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived that

the other man in brown was the shop-walker, differing from most

shop-walkers in the fact that he was lit from within as a Chinese

lantern might be. And the customer Mr. Hoopdriver was going to serve

was the Young Lady in Grey. Curious he hadn’t noticed it before. She

was in grey as usual,—rationals,—and she had her bicycle leaning

against the counter. She smiled quite frankly at him, just as she had

done when she had apologised for stopping him. And her form, as she

leant towards him, was full of a sinuous grace he had never noticed

before. “What can I have the pleasure?” said Mr. Hoopdriver at once,

and she said, “The Ripley road.” So he got out the Ripley road and

unrolled it and showed it to her, and she said that would do very

nicely, and kept on looking at him and smiling, and he began measuring

off eight miles by means of the yard measure on the counter, eight

miles being a dress length, a rational dress length, that is; and then

the other man in brown came up and wanted to interfere, and said Mr.

Hoopdriver was a cad, besides measuring it off too slowly. And as Mr.

Hoopdriver began to measure faster, the other man in brown said the

Young Lady in Grey had been there long enough, and that he WAS her

brother, or else she would not be travelling with him, and he suddenly

whipped his arm about her waist and made off with her. It occurred to

Mr. Hoopdriver even at the moment that this was scarcely brotherly

behaviour. Of course it wasn’t! The sight of the other man gripping her

so familiarly enraged him frightfully; he leapt over the counter

forthwith and gave chase. They ran round the shop and up an iron

staircase into the Keep, and so out upon the Ripley road. For some time

they kept dodging in and out of a wayside hotel with two front doors

and an inn yard. The other man could not run very fast because he had

hold of the Young Lady in Grey, but Mr. Hoopdriver was hampered by the

absurd behaviour of his legs. They would not stretch out; they would

keep going round and round as if they were on the treadles of a wheel,

so that he made the smallest steps conceivable. This dream came to no

crisis. The chase seemed to last an interminable time, and all kinds of

people, heath-keepers, shopmen, policemen, the old man in the Keep, the

angry man in drab, the barmaid at the Unicorn, men with

flying-machines, people playing billiards in the doorways, silly,

headless figures, stupid cocks and hens encumbered with parcels and

umbrellas and waterproofs, people carrying bedroom candles, and

such-like riffraff, kept getting in his way and annoying him, although

he sounded his electric bell, and said, “Wonderful, wonderful!” at

every corner....

XIII.

HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WENT TO HASLEMERE

There was some little delay in getting Mr. Hoopdriver’s breakfast, so

that after all he was not free to start out of Guildford until just

upon the stroke of nine. He wheeled his machine from the High Street in

some perplexity. He did not know whether this young lady, who had

seized hold of his imagination so strongly, and her unfriendly and

possibly menacing brother, were ahead of him or even now breakfasting

somewhere in Guildford. In the former case he might loiter as he chose;

in the latter he must hurry, and possibly take refuge in branch roads.

It occurred to him as being in some obscure way strategic, that he

would leave Guildford not by the obvious Portsmouth road, but by the

road running through Shalford. Along this pleasant shady way he felt

sufficiently secure to resume his exercises in riding with one hand off

the handles, and in staring over his shoulder. He came over once or

twice, but fell on his foot each time, and perceived that he was

improving. Before he got to Bramley a specious byway snapped him up,

ran with him for half a mile or more, and dropped him as a terrier

drops a walkingstick, upon the Portsmouth again, a couple of miles from

Godalming. He entered Godalming on his feet, for the road through that

delightful town is beyond dispute the vilest in the world, a mere

tumult of road metal, a way of peaks and precipices, and, after a

successful experiment with cider at the Woolpack, he pushed on to

Milford.

All this time he was acutely aware of the existence of the Young Lady

in Grey and her companion in brown, as a child in the dark is of

Bogies. Sometimes he could hear their pneumatics stealing upon him from

behind, and looking round saw a long stretch of vacant road. Once he

saw far ahead of him a glittering wheel, but it proved to be a

workingman riding to destruction on a very tall ordinary. And he felt a

curious, vague uneasiness about that Young Lady in Grey, for which he

was altogether unable to account. Now that he was awake he had

forgotten that accentuated Miss Beaumont that had been quite clear in

his dream. But the curious dream conviction, that the girl was not

really the man’s sister, would not let itself be forgotten. Why, for

instance, should a man want to be alone with his sister on the top of a

tower? At Milford his bicycle made, so to speak, an ass of itself. A

finger-post suddenly jumped out at him, vainly indicating an abrupt

turn to the right, and Mr. Hoopdriver would have slowed up and read the

inscription, but no!—the bicycle would not let him. The road dropped a

little into Milford, and the thing shied, put down its head and bolted,

and Mr. Hoopdriver only thought of the brake when the fingerpost was

passed. Then to have recovered the point of intersection would have

meant dismounting. For as yet there was no road wide enough for Mr.

Hoopdriver to turn in. So he went on his way—or to be precise, he did

exactly the opposite thing. The road to the right was the Portsmouth

road, and this he was on went to Haslemere and Midhurst. By that error

it came about that he once more came upon his fellow travellers of

yesterday, coming on them suddenly, without the slightest preliminary

announcement and when they least expected it, under the Southwestern

Railway arch. “It’s horrible,” said a girlish voice; “it’s

brutal—cowardly—” And stopped.

His expression, as he shot out from the archway at them, may have been

something between a grin of recognition and a scowl of annoyance at

himself for the unintentional intrusion. But disconcerted as he was, he

was yet able to appreciate something of the peculiarity of their mutual

attitudes. The bicycles were lying by the roadside, and the two riders

stood face to face. The other man in brown’s attitude, as it flashed

upon Hoopdriver, was a deliberate pose; he twirled his moustache and

smiled faintly, and he was conscientiously looking amused. And the girl

stood rigid, her arms straight by her side, her handkerchief clenched

in her hand, and her face was flushed, with the faintest touch of red

upon her eyelids. She seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver’s sense to be indignant.

But that was the impression of a second. A mask of surprised

recognition fell across this revelation of emotion as she turned her

head towards him, and the pose of the other man in brown vanished too

in a momentary astonishment. And then he had passed them, and was

riding on towards Haslemere to make what he could of the swift picture

that had photographed itself on his brain.

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

“They were having a row.”

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

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

“_Why?_”

The impulse to interfere leapt suddenly into Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind. He

grasped his brake, descended, and stood looking hesitatingly back. They

still stood by the railway bridge, and it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver’s

fancy that she was stamping her foot. He hesitated, then turned his

bicycle round, mounted, and rode back towards them, gripping his

courage firmly lest it should slip away and leave him ridiculous. “I’ll

offer ’im a screw ’ammer,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. Then, with a wave of

fierce emotion, he saw that the girl was crying. In another moment they

heard him and turned in surprise. Certainly she had been crying; her

eyes were swimming in tears, and the other man in brown looked

exceedingly disconcerted. Mr. Hoopdriver descended and stood over his

machine.

“Nothing wrong, I hope?” he said, looking the other man in brown

squarely in the face. “No accident?”

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

thanks.”

“But,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, with a great effort, “the young lady is

crying. I thought perhaps—”

The Young Lady in Grey started, gave Hoopdriver one swift glance, and

covered one eye with her handkerchief. “It’s this speck,” she said.

“This speck of dust in my eye.”

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

her eye.”

There was a pause. The young lady busied herself with her eye. “I

believe it’s out,” she said. The other man in brown made movements

indicating commiserating curiosity concerning the alleged fly. Mr.

Hoopdriver—the word is his own—stood flabber-gastered. He had all the

intuition of the simple-minded. He knew there was no fly. But the

ground was suddenly cut from his feet. There is a limit to

knighterrantry—dragons and false knights are all very well, but flies!

Fictitious flies! Whatever the trouble was, it was evidently not his

affair. He felt he had made a fool of himself again. He would have

mumbled some sort of apology; but the other man in brown gave him no

time, turned on him abruptly, even fiercely. “I hope,” he said, “that

your curiosity is satisfied?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Then we won’t detain you.”

And, ignominiously, Mr. Hoopdriver turned his machine about, struggled

upon it, and resumed the road southward. And when he learnt that he was

not on the Portsmouth road, it was impossible to turn and go back, for

that would be to face his shame again, and so he had to ride on by

Brook Street up the hill to Haslemere. And away to the right the

Portsmouth road mocked at him and made off to its fastnesses amid the

sunlit green and purple masses of Hindhead, where Mr. Grant Allen

writes his Hill Top Novels day by day.

The sun shone, and the wide blue hill views and pleasant valleys one

saw on either hand from the sandscarred roadway, even the sides of the

road itself set about with grey heather scrub and prickly masses of

gorse, and pine trees with their year’s growth still bright green,

against the darkened needles of the previous years, were fresh and

delightful to Mr. Hoopdriver’s eyes But the brightness of the day and

the day-old sense of freedom fought an uphill fight against his

intolerable vexation at that abominable encounter, and had still to win

it when he reached Haslemere. A great brown shadow, a monstrous hatred

of the other man in brown, possessed him. He had conceived the

brilliant idea of abandoning Portsmouth, or at least giving up the

straight way to his fellow-wayfarers, and of striking out boldly to the

left, eastward. He did not dare to stop at any of the inviting

public-houses in the main street of Haslemere, but turned up a side way

and found a little beer-shop, the Good Hope, wherein to refresh

himself. And there he ate and gossipped condescendingly with an aged

labourer, assuming the while for his own private enjoyment the

attributes of a Lost Heir, and afterwards mounted and rode on towards

Northchapel, a place which a number of finger-posts conspired to boom,

but which some insidious turning prevented him from attaining.

XIV.

HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER REACHED MIDHURST

It was one of my uncle’s profoundest remarks that human beings are the

only unreasonable creatures. This observation was so far justified by

Mr. Hoopdriver that, after spending the morning tortuously avoiding the

other man in brown and the Young Lady in Grey, he spent a considerable

part of the afternoon in thinking about the Young Lady in Grey, and

contemplating in an optimistic spirit the possibilities of seeing her

again. Memory and imagination played round her, so that his course was

largely determined by the windings of the road he traversed. Of one

general proposition he was absolutely convinced. “There’s something

Juicy wrong with ’em,” said he—once even aloud. But what it was he

could not imagine. He recapitulated the facts. “Miss Beaumont—brother

and sister—and the stoppage to quarrel and weep—” it was perplexing

material for a young man of small experience. There was no exertion he

hated so much as inference, and after a time he gave up any attempt to

get at the realities of the case, and let his imagination go free.

Should he ever see her again? Suppose he did—with that other chap not

about. The vision he found pleasantest was an encounter with her, an

unexpected encounter at the annual Dancing Class ‘Do’ at the Putney

Assembly Rooms. Somehow they would drift together, and he would dance

with her again and again. It was a pleasant vision, for you must

understand that Mr. Hoopdriver danced uncommonly well. Or again, in the

shop, a sudden radiance in the doorway, and she is bowed towards the

Manchester counter. And then to lean over that counter and murmur,

seemingly _àpropos_ of the goods under discussion, “I have not

forgotten that morning on the Portsmouth road,” and lower, “I never

shall forget.”

At Northchapel Mr. Hoopdriver consulted his map and took counsel and

weighed his course of action. Petworth seemed a possible resting-place,

or Pullborough; Midhurst seemed too near, and any place over the Downs

beyond, too far, and so he meandered towards Petworth, posing himself

perpetually and loitering, gathering wild flowers and wondering why

they had no names—for he had never heard of any—dropping them furtively

at the sight of a stranger, and generally ‘mucking about.’ There were

purple vetches in the hedges, meadowsweet, honeysuckle, belated

brambles—but the dog-roses had already gone; there were green and red

blackberries, stellarias, and dandelions, and in another place white

dead nettles, traveller’s-joy, clinging bedstraw, grasses flowering,

white campions, and ragged robins. One cornfield was glorious with

poppies, bright scarlet and purple white, and the blue corn-flowers

were beginning. In the lanes the trees met overhead, and the wisps of

hay still hung to the straggling hedges. In one of the main roads he

steered a perilous passage through a dozen surly dun oxen. Here and

there were little cottages, and picturesque beer-houses with the vivid

brewers’ boards of blue and scarlet, and once a broad green and a

church, and an expanse of some hundred houses or so. Then he came to a

pebbly rivulet that emerged between clumps of sedge loosestrife and

forget-me-nots under an arch of trees, and rippled across the road, and

there he dismounted, longing to take off shoes and stockings—those

stylish chequered stockings were now all dimmed with dust—and paddle

his lean legs in the chuckling cheerful water. But instead he sat in a

manly attitude, smoking a cigarette, for fear lest the Young Lady in

Grey should come glittering round the corner. For the flavour of the

Young Lady in Grey was present through it all, mixing with the flowers

and all the delight of it, a touch that made this second day quite

different from the first, an undertone of expectation, anxiety, and

something like regret that would not be ignored.

It was only late in the long evening that, quite abruptly, he began to

repent, vividly and decidedly, having fled these two people. He was

getting hungry, and that has a curious effect upon the emotional

colouring of our minds. The man was a sinister brute, Hoopdriver saw in

a flash of inspiration, and the girl—she was in some serious trouble.

And he who might have helped her had taken his first impulse as

decisive—and bolted. This new view of it depressed him dreadfully. What

might not be happening to her now? He thought again of her tears.

Surely it was merely his duty, seeing the trouble afoot, to keep his

eye upon it.

He began riding fast to get quit of such selfreproaches. He found

himself in a tortuous tangle of roads, and as the dusk was coming on,

emerged, not at Petworth but at Easebourne, a mile from Midhurst. “I’m

getting hungry,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, inquiring of a gamekeeper in

Easebourne village. “Midhurst a mile, and Petworth five!—Thenks, I’ll

take Midhurst.”

He came into Midhurst by the bridge at the watermill, and up the North

Street, and a little shop flourishing cheerfully, the cheerful sign of

a teapot, and exhibiting a brilliant array of tobaccos, sweets, and

children’s toys in the window, struck his fancy. A neat, bright-eyed

little old lady made him welcome, and he was presently supping

sumptuously on sausages and tea, with a visitors’ book full of the most

humorous and flattering remarks about the little old lady, in verse and

prose, propped up against his teapot as he ate. Regular good some of

the jokes were, and rhymes that read well—even with your mouth full of

sausage. Mr. Hoopdriver formed a vague idea of drawing “something”—for

his judgment on the little old lady was already formed. He pictured the

little old lady discovering it afterwards—“My gracious! One of them

_Punch_ men,” she would say. The room had a curtained recess and a

chest of drawers, for presently it was to be his bedroom, and the day

part of it was decorated with framed Oddfellows’ certificates and

giltbacked books and portraits, and kettle-holders, and all kinds of

beautiful things made out of wool; very comfortable it was indeed. The

window was lead framed and diamond paned, and through it one saw the

corner of the vicarage and a pleasant hill crest, in dusky silhouette

against the twilight sky. And after the sausages had ceased to be, he

lit a Red Herring cigarette and went swaggering out into the twilight

street. All shadowy blue between its dark brick houses, was the street,

with a bright yellow window here and there and splashes of green and

red where the chemist’s illumination fell across the road.

XV.

AN INTERLUDE

And now let us for a space leave Mr. Hoopdriver in the dusky Midhurst

North Street, and return to the two folks beside the railway bridge

between Milford and Haslemere. She was a girl of eighteen, dark, fine

featured, with bright eyes, and a rich, swift colour under her

warm-tinted skin. Her eyes were all the brighter for the tears that

swam in them. The man was thirty three or four, fair, with a longish

nose overhanging his sandy flaxen moustache, pale blue eyes, and a head

that struck out above and behind. He stood with his feet wide apart,

his hand on his hip, in an attitude that was equally suggestive of

defiance and aggression. They had watched Hoopdriver out of sight. The

unexpected interruption had stopped the flood of her tears. He tugged

his abundant moustache and regarded her calmly. She stood with face

averted, obstinately resolved not to speak first. “Your behaviour,” he

said at last, “makes you conspicuous.”

She turned upon him, her eyes and cheeks glowing, her hands clenched.

“You unspeakable _cad_,” she said, and choked, stamped her little foot,

and stood panting.

“Unspeakable cad! My dear girl! Possible I _am_ an unspeakable cad. Who

wouldn’t be—for you?”

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

“I would do anything—”

“_Oh!_”

There was a moment’s pause. She looked squarely into his face, her eyes

alight with anger and contempt, and perhaps he flushed a little. He

stroked his moustache, and by an effort maintained his cynical calm.

“Let us be reasonable,” he said.

“Reasonable! That means all that is mean and cowardly and sensual in

the world.”

“You have always had it so—in your generalising way. But let us look at

the facts of the case—if that pleases you better.”

With an impatient gesture she motioned him to go on.

“Well,” he said,—“you’ve eloped.”

“I’ve left my home,” she corrected, with dignity. “I left my home

because it was unendurable. Because that woman—”

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

“You came with me. You pretended to be my friend. Promised to help me

to earn a living by writing. It was you who said, why shouldn’t a man

and woman be friends? And now you dare—you dare—”

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

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

“One moment. I have always thought that my little pupil was at least

clear-headed. You don’t know everything yet, you know. Listen to me for

a moment.”

“Haven’t I been listening? And you have only insulted me. You who dared

only to talk of friendship, who scarcely dared hint at anything

beyond.”

“But you took the hints, nevertheless. You knew. You _knew_. And you

did not mind. _Mind!_ You liked it. It was the fun of the whole thing

for you. That I loved you, and could not speak to you. You played with

it—”

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

“That isn’t all. I made up my mind—Well, to make the game more even.

And so I suggested to you and joined with you in this expedition of

yours, invented a sister at Midhurst—I tell you, I _haven’t_ a sister!

For one object—”

“Well?”

“To compromise you.”

She started. That was a new way of putting it. For half a minute

neither spoke. Then she began half defiantly: “Much I am compromised.

Of course—I have made a fool of myself—”

“My dear girl, you are still on the sunny side of eighteen, and you

know very little of this world. Less than you think. But you will

learn. Before you write all those novels we have talked about, you will

have to learn. And that’s one point—” He hesitated. “You started and

blushed when the man at breakfast called you Ma’am. You thought it a

funny mistake, but you did not say anything because he was young and

nervous—and besides, the thought of being my wife offended your

modesty. You didn’t care to notice it. But—you see; I gave your name as

_Mrs_. Beaumont.” He looked almost apologetic, in spite of his cynical

pose. “_Mrs_. Beaumont,” he repeated, pulling his flaxen moustache and

watching the effect.

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

slowly, at last.

He thought the time had come for an emotional attack. “Jessie,” he

said, with a sudden change of voice, “I know all this is mean, is

villanous. But do you think that I have done all this scheming, all

this subterfuge, for any other object—”

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

abruptly.

“To her?”

She winced.

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

“Anyhow, I shall leave you now.”

“Yes? And go—”

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

conventionality—”

“My dear girl, do let us be cynical. You haven’t money and you haven’t

credit. No one would take you in. It’s one of two things: go back to

your stepmother, or—trust to me.”

“How _can_ I?”

“Then you must go back to her.” He paused momentarily, to let this

consideration have its proper weight. “Jessie, I did not mean to say

the things I did. Upon my honour, I lost my head when I spoke so. If

you will, forgive me. I am a man. I could not help myself. Forgive me,

and I promise you—”

“How can I trust you?”

“Try me. I can assure you—”

She regarded him distrustfully.

“At any rate, ride on with me now. Surely we have been in the shadow of

this horrible bridge long enough.”

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

hand to her brow.

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

until one?”

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

They mounted, and rode on in silence, through the sunlight and the

heather. Both were extremely uncomfortable and disappointed. She was

pale, divided between fear and anger. She perceived she was in a

scrape, and tried in vain to think of a way of escape. Only one

tangible thing would keep in her mind, try as she would to ignore it.

That was the quite irrelevant fact that his head was singularly like an

albino cocoanut. He, too, felt thwarted. He felt that this romantic

business of seduction was, after all, unexpectedly tame. But this was

only the beginning. At any rate, every day she spent with him was a day

gained. Perhaps things looked worse than they were; that was some

consolation.

XVI.

OF THE ARTIFICIAL IN MAN, AND OF THE ZEITGEIST

You have seen these two young people—Bechamel, by-the-bye, is the man’s

name, and the girl’s is Jessie Milton—from the outside; you have heard

them talking; they ride now side by side (but not too close together,

and in an uneasy silence) towards Haslemere; and this chapter will

concern itself with those curious little council chambers inside their

skulls, where their motives are in session and their acts are

considered and passed.

But first a word concerning wigs and false teeth. Some jester,

enlarging upon the increase of bald heads and purblind people, has

deduced a wonderful future for the children of men. Man, he said, was

nowadays a hairless creature by forty or fifty, and for hair we gave

him a wig; shrivelled, and we padded him; toothless, and lo! false

teeth set in gold. Did he lose a limb, and a fine, new, artificial one

was at his disposal; get indigestion, and to hand was artificial

digestive fluid or bile or pancreatine, as the case might be.

Complexions, too, were replaceable, spectacles superseded an

inefficient eye-lens, and imperceptible false diaphragms were thrust

into the failing ear. So he went over our anatomies, until, at last, he

had conjured up a weird thing of shreds and patches, a simulacrum, an

artificial body of a man, with but a doubtful germ of living flesh

lurking somewhere in his recesses. To that, he held, we were coming.

How far such odd substitution for the body is possible need not concern

us now. But the devil, speaking by the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling,

hath it that in the case of one Tomlinson, the thing, so far as the

soul is concerned, has already been accomplished. Time was when men had

simple souls, desires as natural as their eyes, a little reasonable

philanthropy, a little reasonable philoprogenitiveness, hunger, and a

taste for good living, a decent, personal vanity, a healthy, satisfying

pugnacity, and so forth. But now we are taught and disciplined for

years and years, and thereafter we read and read for all the time some

strenuous, nerve-destroying business permits. Pedagogic hypnotists,

pulpit and platform hypnotists, book-writing hypnotists,

newspaper-writing hypnotists, are at us all. This sugar you are eating,

they tell us, is ink, and forthwith we reject it with infinite disgust.

This black draught of unrequited toil is True Happiness, and down it

goes with every symptom of pleasure. This Ibsen, they say, is dull past

believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon! they

interrupt, but this Ibsen is deep and delightful, and we vie with one

another in an excess of entertainment. And when we open the heads of

these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the

surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a

zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway’s feast of fine,

confused thinking. The girl is resolute to Live Her Own Life, a phrase

you may have heard before, and the man has a pretty perverted ambition

to be a cynical artistic person of the very calmest description. He is

hoping for the awakening of Passion in her, among other things. He

knows Passion ought to awaken, from the text-books he has studied. He

knows she admires his genius, but he is unaware that she does not

admire his head. He is quite a distinguished art critic in London, and

he met her at that celebrated lady novelist’s, her stepmother, and here

you have them well embarked upon the Adventure. Both are in the first

stage of repentance, which consists, as you have probably found for

yourself, in setting your teeth hard and saying’ “I _will_ go on.”

Things, you see, have jarred a little, and they ride on their way

together with a certain aloofness of manner that promises ill for the

orthodox development of the Adventure. He perceives he was too

precipitate. But he feels his honour is involved, and meditates the

development of a new attack. And the girl? She is unawakened. Her

motives are bookish, written by a haphazard syndicate of authors,

novelists, and biographers, on her white inexperience. An artificial

oversoul she is, that may presently break down and reveal a human being

beneath it. She is still in that schoolgirl phase when a talkative old

man is more interesting than a tongue-tied young one, and when to be an

eminent mathematician, say, or to edit a daily paper, seems as fine an

ambition as any girl need aspire to. Bechamel was to have helped her to

attain that in the most expeditious manner, and here he is beside her,

talking enigmatical phrases about passion, looking at her with the

oddest expression, and once, and that was his gravest offence, offering

to kiss her. At any rate he has apologised. She still scarcely

realises, you see, the scrape she has got into.

XVII.

THE ENCOUNTER AT MIDHURST

We left Mr. Hoopdriver at the door of the little tea, toy, and tobacco

shop. You must not think that a strain is put on coincidence when I

tell you that next door to Mrs. Wardor’s—that was the name of the

bright-eyed, little old lady with whom Mr. Hoopdriver had stopped—is

the Angel Hotel, and in the Angel Hotel, on the night that Mr.

Hoopdriver reached Midhurst, were ‘Mr.’ and ‘Miss’ Beaumont, our

Bechamel and Jessie Milton. Indeed, it was a highly probable thing; for

if one goes through Guildford, the choice of southward roads is

limited; you may go by Petersfield to Portsmouth, or by Midhurst to

Chichester, in addition to which highways there is nothing for it but

minor roadways to Petworth or Pulborough, and cross-cuts Brightonward.

And coming to Midhurst from the north, the Angel’s entrance lies

yawning to engulf your highly respectable cyclists, while Mrs. Wardor’s

genial teapot is equally attractive to those who weigh their means in

little scales. But to people unfamiliar with the Sussex roads—and such

were the three persons of this story—the convergence did not appear to

be so inevitable.

Bechamel, tightening his chain in the Angel yard after dinner, was the

first to be aware of their reunion. He saw Hoopdriver walk slowly

across the gateway, his head enhaloed in cigarette smoke, and pass out

of sight up the street. Incontinently a mass of cloudy uneasiness, that

had been partly dispelled during the day, reappeared and concentrated

rapidly into definite suspicion. He put his screw hammer into his

pocket and walked through the archway into the street, to settle the

business forthwith, for he prided himself on his decision. Hoopdriver

was merely promenading, and they met face to face.

At the sight of his adversary, something between disgust and laughter

seized Mr. Hoopdriver and for a moment destroyed his animosity. “’Ere

we are again!” he said, laughing insincerely in a sudden outbreak at

the perversity of chance.

The other man in brown stopped short in Mr. Hoopdriver’s way, staring.

Then his face assumed an expression of dangerous civility. “Is it any

information to you,” he said, with immense politeness, “when I remark

that you are following us?”

Mr. Hoopdriver, for some occult reason, resisted his characteristic

impulse to apologise. He wanted to annoy the other man in brown, and a

sentence that had come into his head in a previous rehearsal cropped up

appropriately. “Since when,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, catching his breath,

yet bringing the question out valiantly, nevertheless,—“since when ’ave

you purchased the county of Sussex?”

“May I point out,” said the other man in brown, “that I object—we

object not only to your proximity to us. To be frank—you appear to be

following us—with an object.”

“You can always,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, “turn round if you don’t like

it, and go back the way you came.”

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

“Did you?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, quite at sea, but rising pluckily to

the unknown occasion. What was the man driving at?

“I see,” said the other man. “I see. I half suspected—” His manner

changed abruptly to a quality suspiciously friendly. “Yes—a word with

you. You will, I hope, give me ten minutes.”

Wonderful things were dawning on Mr. Hoopdriver. What did the other man

take him for? Here at last was reality! He hesitated. Then he thought

of an admirable phrase. “You ’ave some communication—”

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

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

“This way, then,” said the other man in brown, and they walked slowly

down the North Street towards the Grammar School. There was, perhaps,

thirty seconds’ silence. The other man stroked his moustache nervously.

Mr. Hoopdriver’s dramatic instincts were now fully awake. He did not

quite understand in what _rôle_ he was cast, but it was evidently

something dark and mysterious. Doctor Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, and

Alexander Dumas were well within Mr. Hoopdriver’s range of reading, and

he had not read them for nothing.

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

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

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

“Set me _on_ this business?”

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

this job?”

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

“Quite sure?” The other man in brown glanced meaningly down at his

hand, and Mr. Hoopdriver, following him mechanically, saw a yellow

milled edge glittering in the twilight. Now your shop assistant is just

above the tip-receiving class, and only just above it—so that he is

acutely sensitive on the point.

Mr. Hoopdriver flushed hotly, and his eyes were angry as he met those

of the other man in brown. “Stow it!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, stopping and

facing the tempter.

“What!” said the other man in brown, surprised. “Eigh?” And so saying

he stowed it in his breeches pocket.

“D’yer think I’m to be bribed?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, whose imagination

was rapidly expanding the situation. “By Gosh! I’d follow you now—”

“My dear sir,” said the other man in brown, “I beg your pardon. I

misunderstood you. I really beg your pardon. Let us walk on. In your

profession—”

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

“Well, really, you know. There are detectives of an inferior

description—watchers. The whole class. Private Inquiry—I did not

realise—I really trust you will overlook what was, after all—you must

admit—a natural indiscretion. Men of honour are not so common in the

world—in any profession.”

It was lucky for Mr. Hoopdriver that in Midhurst they do not light the

lamps in the summer time, or the one they were passing had betrayed

him. As it was, he had to snatch suddenly at his moustache and tug

fiercely at it, to conceal the furious tumult of exultation, the

passion of laughter, that came boiling up. Detective! Even in the

shadow Bechamel saw that a laugh was stifled, but he put it down to the

fact that the phrase “men of honour” amused his interlocutor. “He’ll

come round yet,” said Bechamel to himself. “He’s simply holding out for

a fiver.” He coughed.

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

“Don’t you? I do.”

“Prompt,” said Bechamel, appreciatively. “Now here’s the thing I want

to put to you—the kernel of the whole business. You need not answer if

you don’t want to. There’s no harm done in my telling you what I want

to know. Are you employed to watch me—or Miss Milton?”

“I’m not the leaky sort,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, keeping the secret he

did not know with immense enjoyment. Miss Milton! That was her name.

Perhaps he’d tell some more. “It’s no good pumping. Is that all you’re

after?” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

Bechamel respected himself for his diplomatic gifts. He tried to catch

a remark by throwing out a confidence. “I take it there are two people

concerned in watching this affair.”

“Who’s the other?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, calmly, but controlling with

enormous internal tension his self-appreciation. “Who’s the other?” was

really brilliant, he thought.

“There’s my wife and _her_ stepmother.”

“And you want to know which it is?”

“Yes,” said Bechamel.

“Well—arst ’em!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, his exultation getting the better

of him, and with a pretty consciousness of repartee. “Arst ’em both.”

Bechamel turned impatiently. Then he made a last effort. “I’d give a

five-pound note to know just the precise state of affairs,” he said.

“I told you to stow that,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, in a threatening tone.

And added with perfect truth and a magnificent mystery, “You don’t

quite understand who you’re dealing with. But you will!” He spoke with

such conviction that he half believed that that defective office of his

in London—Baker Street, in fact—really existed.