H G Wells Omnibus, page 440
“Ju think,” he began abruptly, removing a meditative cigarette from his mouth, “that a draper’s shopman IS a decent citizen?”
“Why not?”
“When he puts people off with what they don’t quite want, for instance?”
“Need he do that?”
“Salesmanship,” said Hoopdriver. “Wouldn’t get a crib if he didn’t.—It’s no good your arguing. It’s not a particularly honest nor a particularly useful trade; it’s not very high up ; there’s no freedom and no leisure—seven to eight-thirty every day in the week; don’t leave much edge to live on, does it?—real workmen laugh at us and educated chaps like bank clerks and solicitors’ clerks look down on us. You look respectable outside, and inside you are packed in dormitories like convicts, fed on bread and butter and bullied like slaves. You’re just superior enough to feel that you’re not superior. Without capital there’s no prospects; one draper in a hundred don’t even earn enough to marry on; and if he DOES marry, his G.V. can just use him to black boots if he likes, and he daren’t put his back up. That’s drapery! And you tell me to be contented. Would YOU be contented if you was a shop girl?”
She did not answer. She looked at him with distress in her brown eyes, and he remained gloomily in possession of the field.
Presently he spoke. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and stopped.
She turned her face, resting her cheek on the palm of her hand. There was a light in her eyes that made the expression of them tender. Mr. Hoopdriver had not looked in her face while he had talked. He had regarded the grass, and pointed his remarks with redknuckled hands held open and palms upwards. Now they hung limply over his knees.
“Well?” she said.
“I was thinking it this morning,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“Yes?”
“Of course it’s silly.” “Well?”
“It’s like this. I’m twenty-three, about. I had my schooling all right to fifteen, say. Well, that leaves me eight years behind.—Is it too late? I wasn’t so backward. I did algebra, and Latin up to auxiliary verbs, and French genders. I got a kind of grounding.”
“And now you mean, should you go on working?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “That’s it. You can’t do much at drapery without capital, you know. But if I could get really educated. I’ve thought sometimes… “
“Why not? said the Young Lady in Grey.
Mr. Hoopdriver was surprised to see it in that light. “You think?” he said. “Of course. You are a Man. You are free—” She warmed. “I wish I were you to have the chance of that struggle.”
“Am I Man ENOUGH?” said Mr. Hoopdriver aloud, but addressing himself. “There’s that eight years,” he said to her.
“You can make it up. What you call educated men—They’re not going on. You can catch them. They are quite satisfied. Playing golf, and thinking of clever things to say to women like my stepmother, and dining out. You’re in front of them already in one thing. They think they know everything. You don’t. And they know such little things.”
“Lord!” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “How you encourage a fellow!”
“If I could only help you,” she said, and left an eloquent hiatus. He became pensive again.
“It’s pretty evident you don’t think much of a draper,” he said abruptly.
Another interval. “Hundreds of men,” she said, “have come from the very lowest ranks of life. There was Burns, a ploughman; and Hugh Miller, a stonemason; and plenty of others. Dodsley was a footman—”
“But drapers! We’re too sort of shabby genteel to rise. Our coats and cuffs might get crumpled—”
“Wasn’t there a Clarke who wrote theology? He was a draper.”
“There was one started a sewing cotton, the only one I ever heard tell of.”
“Have you ever read ‘Hearts Insurgent’?”
“Never,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. He did not wait for her context, but suddenly broke out with an account of his literary requirements. “The fact is—I’ve read precious little. One don’t get much of a chance, situated as I am. We have a library at business, and I’ve gone through that. Most Besant I’ve read, and a lot of Mrs. Braddon’s and Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli—and, well—a Ouida or so. They’re good stories, of course, and first-class writers, but they didn’t seem to have much to do with me. But there’s heaps of books one hears talked about, I HAVEN’T read.”
“Don’t you read any other books but novels?”
“Scarcely ever. One gets tired after business, and you can’t get the books. I have been to some extension lectures, of course, ‘Lizabethan Dramatists,’ it was, but it seemed a little high-flown, you know. And I went and did wood-carving at the same place. But it didn’t seem leading nowhere, and I cut my thumb and chucked it.”
He made a depressing spectacle, with his face anxious and his hands limp. “It makes me sick,” he said, “to think how I’ve been fooled with. My old schoolmaster ought to have a juiced HIDING. He’s a thief. He pretended to undertake to make a man of me, and be’s stole twenty-three years of my life, filled me up with scraps and sweepings. Here I am! I don’t KNOW anything, and I can’t DO anything, and all the learning time is over.”
“Is it?” she said ; but he did not seem to hear her. “My o’ people didn’t know any better, and went and paid thirty pounds premium—thirty pounds down to have me made THIS. The G.V. promised to teach me the trade, and he never taught me anything but to be a Hand. It’s the way they do with draper’s apprentices. If every swindler was locked up—well, you’d have nowhere to buy tape and cotton. It’s all very well to bring up Burns and those chaps, but I’m not that make. Yet I’m not such muck that I might not have been better—with teaching. I wonder what the chaps who sneer and laugh at such as me would be if they’d been fooled about as I’ve been. At twenty-three—it’s a long start.”
He looked up with a wintry smile, a sadder and wiser Hoopdriver indeed than him of the glorious imaginings. “It’s YOU done this,” he said. “You’re real. And it sets me thinking what I really am, and what I might have been. Suppose it was all different—”
“MAKE it different.”
“How?”
“WORK. Stop playing at life. Face it like a man.”
“Ah!” said Hoopdriver, glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes. “And even then—”
“No! It’s not much good. I’m beginning too late.”
And there, in blankly thoughtful silence, that conversation ended.
Chapter 37
In the New Forest
At Ringwood they lunched, and Jessie met with a disappointment. There was no letter for her at the post office. Opposite the hotel, The Chequered Career, was a machine shop with a conspicuously second-hand Marlborough Club tandem tricycle displayed in the window, together with the announcement that bicycles and tricycles were on hire within. The establishment was impressed on Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind by the proprietor’s action in coming across the road and narrowly inspecting their machines. His action revived a number of disagreeable impressions, but, happily, came to nothing. While they were still lunching, a tall clergyman, with a heated face, entered the room and sat down at the table next to theirs. He was in a kind of holiday costume; that is to say, he had a more than usually high collar, fastened behind and rather the worse for the weather, and his long-tail coat had been replaced by a black jacket of quite remarkable brevity. He had faded brown shoes on his feet, his trouser legs were grey with dust, and he wore a hat of piebald straw in the place of the customary soft felt. He was evidently socially inclined.
“A most charming day, sir,” he said, in a ringing tenor.
“Charming,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, over a portion of pie.
“You are, I perceive, cycling through this delightful country,” said the clergyman.
“Touring,” explained Mr. Hoopdriver. “I can imagine that, with a properly oiled machine, there can be no easier nor pleasanter way of seeing the country.”
“No,” said Mr. Hoopdriver; “it isn’t half a bad. way of getting about.”
“For a young and newly married couple, a tandem bicycle must be, I should imagine, a delightful bond.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, reddening a little.
“Do you ride a tandem?”
“No—we’re separate,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“The motion through the air is indisputably of a very exhilarating description.” With that decision, the clergyman turned to give his orders to the attendant, in a firm, authoritative voice, for a cup of tea, two gelatine lozenges, bread and butter, salad, and pie to follow. “The gelatine lozenges I must have. I require them to precipitate the tannin in my tea,” he remarked to the room at large, and folding his hands, remained for some time with his chin thereon, staring fixedly at a little picture over Mr. Hoopdriver’s head.
“I myself am a cyclist,” said the clergyman, descending suddenly upon Mr. Hoopdriver.
“Indeed!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, attacking the moustache. “What machine, may I ask?”
“I have recently become possessed of a tricycle. A bicycle is, I regret to say, considered too—how shall I put it? —flippant by my parishioners. So I have a tricycle. I have just been hauling it hither.”
“Hauling!” said Jessie, surprised.
“With a shoe lace. And partly carrying it on my back.”
The pause was unexpected. Jessie had some trouble with a crumb. Mr. Hoopdriver’s face passed through several phases of surprise. Then he saw the explanation. “Had an accident?”
“I can hardly call it an accident. The wheels suddenly refused to go round. I found myself about five miles from here with an absolutely immobile machine.”
“Ow!” said Mr. Hoopdriver, trying to seem intelligent, and Jessie glanced at this insane person.
“It appears,” said the clergyman, satisfied with the effect he had created, “that my man carefully washed out the bearings with paraffin, and let the machine dry without oiling it again. The consequence was that they became heated to a considerable temperature and jammed. Even at the outset the machine ran stiffly as well as noisily, and I, being inclined to ascribe this stiffness to my own lassitude, merely redoubled my exertions.”
“‘Ot work all round,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“You could scarcely put it more appropriately. It is my rule of life to do whatever I find to do with all my might. I believe, indeed, that the bearings became red hot. Finally one of the wheels jammed together. A side wheel it was, so that its stoppage necessitated an inversion of the entire apparatus,—an inversion in which I participated.”
“Meaning, that you went over?” said Mr. Hoopdriver, suddenly much amused.
“Precisely. And not brooking my defeat, I suffered repeatedly. You may understand, perhaps, a natural impatience. I expostulated—playfully, of course. Happily the road was not overlooked. Finally, the entire apparatus became rigid, and I abandoned the unequal contest. For all practical purposes the tricycle was no better than a heavy chair without castors. It was a case of hauling or carrying.”
The clergyman’s nutriment appeared in the doorway.
“Five miles,” said the clergyman. He began at once to eat bread and butter vigorously. “Happily,” he said, “I am an eupeptic, energetic sort of person on principle. I would all men were likewise.”
“It’s the best way,” agreed Mr. Hoopdriver, and the conversation gave precedence to bread and butter.
“Gelatine,” said the clergyman, presently, stirring his tea thoughtfully, “precipitates the tannin in one’s tea and renders it easy of digestion.”
“That’s a useful sort of thing to know,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
“You are altogether welcome,” said the clergyman, biting generously at two pieces of bread and butter folded together.
In the afternoon our two wanderers rode on at an easy pace towards Stoney Cross. Conversation languished, the topic of South Africa being in abeyance. Mr. Hoopdriver was silenced by disagreeable thoughts. He had changed the last sovereign at Ringwood. The fact had come upon him suddenly. Now too late he was reflecting upon his resources. There was twenty pounds or more in the post office savings bank in Putney, but his book was locked up in his box at the Antrobus establishment. Else this infatuated man would certainly have surreptitiously withdrawn the entire sum in order to prolong these journeyings even for a few days. As it was, the shadow of the end fell across his happiness. Strangely enough, in spite of his anxiety and the morning’s collapse, he was still in a curious emotional state that was certainly not misery. He was forgetting his imaginings and posings, forgetting himself altogether in his growing appreciation of his companion. The most tangible trouble in his mind was the necessity of breaking the matter to her.
A long stretch up hill tired them long before Stoney Cross was reached, and they dismounted and sat under the shade of a little oak tree. Near the crest the road looped on itself, so that, looking back, it sloped below them up to the right and then came towards them. About them grew a rich heather with stunted oaks on the edge of a deep ditch along the roadside, and this road was sandy; below the steepness of the hill, however, it was grey and barred with shadows, for there the trees clustered thick and tall. Mr. Hoopdriver fumbled clumsily with his cigarettes.
“There’s a thing I got to tell you,” he said, trying to be perfectly calm.
“Yes?” she said.
“I’d like to jest discuss your plans a bit, y’know.”
“I’m very unsettled,” said Jessie. “You are thinking of writing Books?”
“Or doing journalism, or teaching, or something like that.”
“And keeping yourself independent of your stepmother?”
“Yes.”
“How long’d it take now, to get anything of that sort to do?”
“I don’t know at all. I believe there are a great many women journalists and sanitary inspectors, and black-and-white artists. But I suppose it takes time. Women, you know, edit most papers nowadays, George Egerton says. I ought, I suppose, to communicate with a literary agent.”
“Of course,” said Hoopdriver, “it’s very suitable work. Not being heavy like the drapery.”
“There’s heavy brain labour, you must remember.”
“That wouldn’t hurt YOU,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, turning a compliment.
“It’s like this,” he said, ending a pause. “It’s a juiced nuisance alluding to these matters, but—we got very little more money.”
He perceived that Jessie started, though he did not look at her. “I was counting, of course, on your friend’s writing and your being able to take some action to-day.” ‘Take some action’ was a phrase he had learnt at his last ‘swop.’
“Money,” said Jessie. “I didn’t think of money.”
“Hullo! Here’s a tandem bicycle,” said Mr. Hoopdriver, abruptly, and pointing with his cigarette.
She looked, and saw two little figures emerging from among the trees at the foot of the slope. The riders were bowed sternly over their work and made a gallant but unsuccessful attempt to take the rise. The machine was evidently too highly geared for hill climbing, and presently the rearmost rider rose on his saddle and hopped off, leaving his companion to any fate he found proper. The foremost rider was a man unused to such machines and apparently undecided how to dismount. He wabbled a few yards up the hill with a long tail of machine wabbling behind him. Finally, he made an attempt to jump off as one does off a single bicycle, hit his boot against the backbone, and collapsed heavily, falling on his shoulder.
She stood up. “Dear me!” she said. “I hope he isn’t hurt.”
The second rider went to the assistance of the fallen man.
Hoopdriver stood up, too. The lank, shaky machine was lifted up and wheeled out of the way, and then the fallen rider, being assisted, got up slowly and stood rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, the rear rider, was a slender little man in grey.
“Amatoors,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
Jessie stood staring, and a veil of thought dropped over her eyes. She no longer regarded the two men who were now tinkering at the machine down below there.
“How much have you?” she said.
He thrust his right hand into his pocket and produced six coins, counted them with his left index finger, and held them out to her. “Thirteen four half,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “Every penny.”
“I have half a sovereign,” she said. “Our bill wherever we stop—” The hiatus was more eloquent than many words.
“I never thought of money coming in to stop us like this,” said Jessie.
“It’s a juiced nuisance.”
“Money,” said Jessie. “Is it possible—Surely! Conventionality! May only people of means—Live their own Lives? I never thought … “
Pause.
“Here’s some more cyclists coming,” said Mr. Hoopdriver.
The two men were both busy with their bicycle still, but now from among the trees emerged the massive bulk of a ‘Marlborough Club’ tandem, ridden by a slender woman in grey and a burly man in ù Norfolk jacket. Following close upon this came lank black figure in a piebald straw hat, riding a tricycle of antiquated pattern with two large wheels in front. The man in grey remained bowed over the bicycle, with his stomach resting on the saddle, but his companion stood up and addressed some remark to the tricycle riders. Then it seemed as if he pointed up hill to where Mr. Hoopdriver and his companion stood side by side. A still odder thing followed; the lady in grey took out her handkerchief, appeared to wave it for a moment, and then at a hasty motion from her companion the white signal vanished.
