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 minutiae of selfconsciousness, 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. Haopdriver, 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 cliches.
“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 milestones.”
“Thank you,” she said warmly. “Thank you so much. I felt sure there was no mistake. And I really am awfully sorry — ”
“Don’t mention it,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Don’t mention it.” He hesitated and gripped his handles to mount. “It’s me,” he said, “ought to be sorry.” Should he say it? Was it an impertinence? Anyhow! — “Not being the other gentleman, you know.”
He tried a quietly insinuating smile that he knew for a grin even as he smiled 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.
HOW MR. HOOPDRIVER WAS HAUNTED
IX
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 mudguard and leering at them with its darkened lantern eye, drove them away — so it seemed to Mr. Hoopdriver — to the spacious swallow of the Golden Dragon. The young lady was riding very slowly, but the other man in brown had a bad puncture and was wheeling his machine. Mr. Hoopdriver noted his 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
