The Wheels of Chance

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

XX. THE PURSUIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXI. AT BOGNOR

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

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

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

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

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

“The last train for anywhere leaves at 7.42.”

“I will appeal to the police – ”

“You don’t know them.”

“I will tell these hotel people.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?”

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

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

“No,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love!” said she.

“Yes – love.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused.

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

“I WON’T” she said, stamping her foot.

“Well, well – ”

“Oh! leave me alone. Let me think – ”

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

“Oh, go – go.”

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

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

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

XXII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.

“Can I trust you?”

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

She took his arm and led him to the window.

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

“Get your bicycle out in the road?”

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

“Which way?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I say,” he said again.

“Well?”

“This is miles too big.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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