Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Wheels of Chance
XXII
And now without in the twilight behold Mr. Hoopdriver, his cheeks hot, his eye bright! His brain is in a tumult. The nervous, obsequious Hoopdriver, to whom I introduced you some days since, has undergone a wonderful change. Ever since he lost that ‘spoor’ in Chichester, he has been tormented by the most horrible visions of the shameful insults that may be happening. The strangeness of new surroundings has been working to strip off the habitual servile from him. Here was moonlight rising over the memory of a red sunset, dark shadows and glowing orange lamps, beauty somewhere mysteriously rapt away from him, tangible wrong in a brown suit and an unpleasant face, flouting him. Mr. Hoopdriver for the time, was in the world of Romance and Knight-errantry, divinely forgetful of his social position or hers; forgetting, too, for the time any of the wretched timidities that had tied him long since behind the counter in his proper place. He was angry and adventurous. It was all about him, this vivid drama he had fallen into, and it was eluding him. He was far too grimly in earnest to pick up that lost thread and make a play of it now. The man was living. He did not pose when he alighted at the coffee tavern even, nor when he made his hasty meal.
As Bechamel crossed from the Vicuna towards the esplanade, Hoopdriver, disappointed and exasperated, came hurrying round the corner from the Temperance Hotel. At the sight of Bechamel, his heart jumped, and the tension of his angry suspense exploded into, rather than gave place to, an excited activity of mind. They were at the Vicuna, and she was there now alone. It was the occasion he sought. But he would give Chance no chance against him. He went back round the corner, sat down on the seat, and watched Bechamel recede into the dimness up the esplanade, before he got up and walked into the hotel entrance. “A lady cyclist in grey,” he asked for, and followed boldly on the waiter’s heels. The door of the dining-room was opening before he felt a qualm. And then suddenly he was nearly minded to turn and run for it, and his features seemed to him to be convulsed.
She turned with a start, and looked at him with something between terror and hope in her eyes.
“Can I – have a few words – with you, alone?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, controlling his breath with difficulty. She hesitated, and then motioned the waiter to withdraw.
Mr. Hoopdriver watched the door shut. He had intended to step out into the middle of the room, fold his arms and say, “You are in trouble. I am a Friend. Trust me.” Instead of which he stood panting and then spoke with sudden familiarity, hastily, guiltily: “Look here. I don’t know what the juice is up, but I think there’s something wrong. Excuse my intruding – if it isn’t so. I’ll do anything you like to help you out of the scrape – if you’re in one. That’s my meaning, I believe. What can I do? I would do anything to help you.”
Her brow puckered, as she watched him make, with infinite emotion, this remarkable speech. “YOU!” she said. She was tumultuously weighing possibilities in her mind, and he had scarcely ceased when she had made her resolve.
She stepped a pace forward. “You are a gentleman,” she said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“Can I trust you?”
She did not wait for his assurance. “I must leave this hotel at once. Come here.”
She took his arm and led him to the window.
“You can just see the gate. It is still open. Through that are our bicycles. Go down, get them out, and I will come down to you. Dare you?
“Get your bicycle out in the road?”
“Both. Mine alone is no good. At once. Dare you?”
“Which way?”
“Go out by the front door and round. I will follow in one minute.”
“Right!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, and went.
He had to get those bicycles. Had he been told to go out and kill Bechamel he would have done it. His head was a maelstrom now. He walked out of the hotel, along the front, and into the big, black-shadowed coach yard. He looked round. There were no bicycles visible. Then a man emerged from the dark, a short man in a short, black, shiny jacket. Hoopdriver was caught. He made no attempt to turn and run for it. “I’ve been giving your machines a wipe over, sir,” said the man, recognising the suit, and touching his cap. Hoopdriver’s intelligence now was a soaring eagle; he swooped on the situation at once. “That’s right,” he said, and added, before the pause became marked, “Where is mine? I want to look at the chain.”
The man led him into an open shed, and went fumbling for a lantern. Hoopdriver moved the lady’s machine out of his way to the door, and then laid hands on the man’s machine and wheeled it out of the shed into the yard. The gate stood open and beyond was the pale road and a clump of trees black in the twilight. He stooped and examined the chain with trembling fingers. How was it to be done? Something behind the gate seemed to flutter. The man must be got rid of anyhow.
“I say,” said Hoopdriver, with an inspiration, “can you get me a screwdriver?”
The man simply walked across the shed, opened and shut a box, and came up to the kneeling Hoopdriver with a screwdriver in his hand. Hoopdriver felt himself a lost man. He took the screwdriver with a tepid “Thanks,” and incontinently had another inspiration.
“I say,” he said again.
“Well?”
“This is miles too big.”
The man lit the lantern, brought it up to Hoopdriver and put it down on the ground. “Want a smaller screwdriver?” he said.
Hoopdriver had his handkerchief out and sneezed a prompt ATICHEW. It is the orthodox thing when you wish to avoid recognition. “As small as you have,” he said, out of his pocket handkerchief.
“I ain’t got none smaller than that,” said the ostler.
“Won’t do, really,” said Hoopdriver, still wallowing in his handkerchief.
“I’ll see wot they got in the ‘ouse, if you like, sir,” said the man. “If you would,” said Hoopdriver. And as the man’s heavily nailed boots went clattering down the yard, Hoopdriver stood up, took a noiseless step to the lady’s machine, laid trembling hands on its handle and saddle, and prepared for a rush.
The scullery door opened momentarily and sent a beam of warm, yellow light up the road, shut again behind the man, and forthwith Hoopdriver rushed the machines towards the gate. A dark grey form came fluttering to meet him. “Give me this,” she said, “and bring yours.”
He passed the thing to her, touched her hand in the darkness, ran back, seized Bechamel’s machine, and followed.
The yellow light of the scullery door suddenly flashed upon the cobbles again. It was too late now to do anything but escape. He heard the ostler shout behind him, and came into the road. She was up and dim already. He got into the saddle without a blunder. In a moment the ostler was in the gateway with a full-throated “HI! sir! That ain’t allowed;” and Hoopdriver was overtaking the Young Lady in Grey. For some moments the earth seemed alive with shouts of, “Stop ‘em!” and the shadows with ambuscades of police. The road swept round, and they were riding out of sight of the hotel, and behind dark hedges, side by side.
She was weeping with excitement as he overtook her. “Brave,” she said, “brave!” and he ceased to feel like a hunted thief. He looked over his shoulder and about him, and saw that they were already out of Bognor – for the Vicuna stands at the very westernmost extremity of the sea front – and riding on a fair wide road.
XXIII
The ostler (being a fool) rushed violently down the road vociferating after them. Then he returned panting to the Vicuna Hotel, and finding a group of men outside the entrance, who wanted to know what was UP, stopped to give them the cream of the adventure. That gave the fugitives five minutes. Then pushing breathlessly into the bar, he had to make it clear to the barmaid what the matter was, and the ‘gov’nor’ being out, they spent some more precious time wondering ‘what – EVER’ was to be done! in which the two customers returning from outside joined with animation. There were also moral remarks and other irrelevant contributions. There were conflicting ideas of telling the police and pursuing the flying couple on a horse. That made ten minutes. Then Stephen, the waiter, who had shown Hoopdriver up, came down and lit wonderful lights and started quite a fresh discussion by the simple question “WHICH?” That turned ten minutes into a quarter of an hour. And in the midst of this discussion, making a sudden and awestricken silence, appeared Bechamel in the hall beyond the bar, walked with a resolute air to the foot of the staircase, and passed out of sight. You conceive the backward pitch of that exceptionally shaped cranium? Incredulous eyes stared into one another’s in the bar, as his paces, muffled by the stair carpet, went up to the landing, turned, reached the passage and walked into the dining-room overhead.
“It wasn’t that one at all, miss,” said the ostler, “I’d SWEAR”
“Well, that’s Mr. Beaumont,” said the barmaid, “ – anyhow.”
Their conversation hung comatose in the air, switched up by Bechamel. They listened together. His feet stopped. Turned. Went out of the diningroom. Down the passage to the bedroom. Stopped again.
“Poor chap!” said the barmaid. “She’s a wicked woman!”
“Sssh!” said Stephen.
After a pause Bechamel went back to the dining-room. They heard a chair creak under him. Interlude of conversational eyebrows.
“I’m going up,” said Stephen, “to break the melancholy news to him.”
Bechamel looked up from a week-old newspaper as, without knocking, Stephen entered. Bechamel’s face suggested a different expectation. “Beg pardon, sir,” said Stephen, with a diplomatic cough.
“Well?” said Bechamel, wondering suddenly if Jessie had kept some of her threats. If so, he was in for an explanation. But he had it ready. She was a monomaniac. “Leave me alone with her,” he would say; “I know how to calm her.”
“Mrs. Beaumont,” said Stephen.
“WELL?”
“Has gone.”
He rose with a fine surprise. “Gone!” he said with a half laugh.
“Gone, sir. On her bicycle.”
“On her bicycle! Why?”
“She went, sir, with Another Gentleman.”
This time Bechamel was really startled. “An – other Gentlemen! WHO?”
“Another gentleman in brown, sir. Went into the yard, sir, got out the two bicycles, sir, and went off, sir – about twenty minutes ago.”
Bechamel stood with his eyes round and his knuckle on his hips. Stephen, watching him with immense enjoyment, speculated whether this abandoned husband would weep or curse, or rush off at once in furious pursuit. But as yet he seemed merely stunned.
“Brown clothes?” he said. “And fairish?”
“A little like yourself, sir – in the dark. The ostler, sir, Jim Duke – ”
Bechamel laughed awry. Then, with infinite fervour, he said – But let us put in blank cartridge – he said, “ – !”
“I might have thought!”
He flung himself into the armchair.
“Damn her,” said Bechamel, for all the world like a common man. “I’ll chuck this infernal business! They’ve gone, eigh?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, let ‘em GO,” said Bechamel, making a memorable saying. “Let ‘em GO. Who cares? And I wish him luck. And bring me some Bourbon as fast as you can, there’s a good chap. I’ll take that, and then I’ll have another look round Bognor before I turn in.”
Stephen was too surprised to say anything but “Bourbon, sir?”
“Go on,” said Bechamel. “Damn you!”
Stephen’s sympathies changed at once. “Yessir,” he murmured, fumbling for the door handle, and left the room, marvelling. Bechamel, having in this way satisfied his sense of appearances, and comported himself as a Pagan should, so soon as the waiter’s footsteps had passed, vented the cream of his feelings in a stream of blasphemous indecency. Whether his wife or HER stepmother had sent the detective, SHE had evidently gone off with him, and that little business was over. And he was here, stranded and sold, an ass, and as it were, the son of many generations of asses. And his only ray of hope was that it seemed more probable, after all, that the girl had escaped through her stepmother. In which case the business might be hushed up yet, and the evil hour of explanation with his wife indefinitely postponed. Then abruptly the image of that lithe figure in grey knickerbockers went frisking across his mind again, and he reverted to his blasphemies. He started up in a gusty frenzy with a vague idea of pursuit, and incontinently sat down again with a concussion that stirred the bar below to its depths. He banged the arms of the chair with his fist, and swore again. “Of all the accursed fools that were ever spawned,” he was chanting, “I, Bechamel – ” when with an abrupt tap and prompt opening of the door, Stephen entered with the Bourbon.
XXIV. THE MOONLIGHT RIDE
And so the twenty minutes’ law passed into an infinity. We leave the wicked Bechamel clothing himself with cursing as with a garment, – the wretched creature has already sufficiently sullied our modest but truthful pages, – we leave the eager little group in the bar of the Vicuna Hotel, we leave all Bognor as we have left all Chichester and Midhurst and Haslemere and Guildford and Ripley and Putney, and follow this dear fool of a Hoopdriver of ours and his Young Lady in Grey out upon the moonlight road. How they rode! How their hearts beat together and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation and every noise pursuit! For all that flight Mr. Hoopdriver was in the world of Romance. Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were not lit, Hoopdriver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion of a hero born. Had Bechamel arisen in the way with rapiers for a duel, Hoopdriver had fought as one to whom Agincourt was a reality and drapery a dream. It was Rescue, Elopement, Glory! And she by the side of him! He had seen her face in shadow, with the morning sunlight tangled in her hair, he had seen her sympathetic with that warm light in her face, he had seen her troubled and her eyes bright with tears. But what light is there lighting a face like hers, to compare with the soft glamour of the midsummer moon?
The road turned northward, going round through the outskirts of Bognor, in one place dark and heavy under a thick growth of trees, then amidst villas again, some warm and lamplit, some white and sleeping in the moonlight; then between hedges, over which they saw broad wan meadows shrouded in a low-lying mist. They scarcely heeded whither they rode at first, being only anxious to get away, turning once westward when the spire of Chichester cathedral rose suddenly near them out of the dewy night, pale and intricate and high. They rode, speaking little, just a rare word now and then, at a turning, at a footfall, at a roughness in the road.
She seemed to be too intent upon escape to give much thought to him, but after the first tumult of the adventure, as flight passed into mere steady ridin@@ his mind became an enormous appreciation of the position. The night was a warm white silence save for the subtile running of their chains. He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her ankles gracefully ruling the treadles. Now the road turned westward, and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly over her hair and touched her brow and cheek.
There is a magic quality in moonshine; it touches all that is sweet and beautiful, and the rest of the night is hidden. It has created the fairies, whom the sunlight kills, and fairyland rises again in our hearts at the sight of it, the voices of the filmy route, and their faint, soul-piercing melodies. By the moonlight every man, dull clod though he be by day, tastes something of Endymion, takes something of the youth and strength of Enidymion, and sees the dear white goddess shining at him from his Lady’s eyes. The firm substantial daylight things become ghostly and elusive, the hills beyond are a sea of unsubstantial texture, the world a visible spirit, the spiritual within us rises out of its darkness, loses something of its weight and body, and swims up towards heaven. This road that was a mere rutted white dust, hot underfoot, blinding to the eye, is now a soft grey silence, with the glitter of a crystal grain set starlike in its silver here and there. Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the mother of the silence, she who has spiritualised the world, alone save for two attendant steady shining stars. And in silence under her benign influence, under the benediction of her light, rode our two wanderers side by side through the transfigured and transfiguring night.
Nowhere was the moon shining quite so brightly as in Mr. Hoopdriver’s skull. At the turnings of the road he made his decisions with an air of profound promptitude (and quite haphazard). “The Right,” he would say. Or again “The Left,” as one who knew. So it was that in the space of an hour they came abruptly down a little lane, full tilt upon the sea. Grey beach to the right of them and to the left, and a little white cottage fast asleep inland of a sleeping fishing-boat. “Hullo!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, sotto voce. They dismounted abruptly. Stunted oaks and thorns rose out of the haze of moonlight that was tangled in the hedge on either side.
“You are safe,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, sweeping off his cap with an air and bowing courtly.
“Where are we?”
“SAFE.”
“But WHERE?”
“Chichester Harbour.” He waved his arm seaward as though it was a goal.
“Do you think they will follow us?”
“We have turned and turned again.”
It seemed to Hoopdriver that he heard her sob. She stood dimly there, holding her machine, and he, holding his, could go no nearer to her to see if she sobbed for weeping or for want of breath. “What are we to do now?” her voice asked.
“Are you tired?” he asked.
“I will do what has to be done.”
The two black figures in the broken light were silent for a space. “Do you know,” she said, “I am not afraid of you. I am sure you are honest to me. And I do not even know your name!”
He was taken with a sudden shame of his homely patronymic. “It’s an ugly name,” he said. “But you are right in trusting me. I would – I would do anything for you… This is nothing.”
She caught at her breath. She did not care to ask why. But compared with Bechamel! – “We take each other on trust,” she said. “Do you want to know – how things are with me?”
“That man,” she went on, after the assent of his listening silence, “promised to help and protect me. I was unhappy at home – never mind why. A stepmother – Idle, unoccupied, hindered, cramped, that is enough, perhaps. Then he came into my life, and talked to me of art and literature, and set my brain on fire. I wanted to come out into the world, to be a human being – not a thing in a hutch. And he – ”
“I know,” said Hoopdriver.
“And now here I am – ”
“I will do anything,” said Hoopdriver.
She thought. “You cannot imagine my stepmother. No! I could not describe her – ”
“I am entirely at your service. I will help you with all my power.”
“I have lost an Illusion and found a Knight-errant.” She spoke of Bechamel as the Illusion.
Mr. Hoopdriver felt flattered. But he had no adequate answer.
“I’m thinking,” he said, full of a rapture of protective responsibility, “what we had best be doing. You are tired, you know. And we can’t wander all night – after the day we’ve had.”
“That was Chichester we were near?” she asked.
“If,” he meditated, with a tremble in his voice, “you would make ME your brother, MISS BEAUMONT.”
“Yes?”
“We could stop there together – ”
She took a minute to answer. “I am going to light these lamps,” said Hoopdriver. He bent down to his own, and struck a match on his shoe. She looked at his face in its light, grave and intent. How could she ever have thought him common or absurd?
“But you must tell me your name – brother,” she said,
“Er – Carrington,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, after a momentary pause. Who would be Hoopdriver on a night like this?
“But the Christian name?”
“Christian name? MY Christian name. Well – Chris.” He snapped his lamp and stood up. “If you will hold my machine, I will light yours,” he said.
She came round obediently and took his machine, and for a moment they stood face to face. “My name, brother Chris,” she said, “is Jessie.”
He looked into her eyes, and his excitement seemed arrested. “JESSIE,” he repeated slowly. The mute emotion of his face affected her strangely. She had to speak. “It’s not such a very wonderful name, is it?” she said, with a laugh to break the intensity.
He opened his mouth and shut it again, and, with a sudden wincing of his features, abruptly turned and bent down to open the lantern in front of her machine. She looked down at him, almost kneeling in front of her, with an unreasonable approbation in her eyes. It was, as I have indicated, the hour and season of the full moon.
