Part 36

“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 he’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.

XXXVII. 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?”