The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll — John Shaqi
The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling IdyllWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Cycling -- Fiction; England -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
This second dream went back into the first somehow, and the other man
in brown came threatening and shouting towards him. He grew uglier and
uglier as he approached, and his expression was intolerably evil. He
came and looked close into Mr. Hoopdriver’s eyes and then receded to an
incredible distance. His face seemed to be luminous. “_Miss Beaumont_,”
he said, and splashed up a spray of suspicion. Some one began letting
off fireworks, chiefly Catherine wheels, down the shop, though Mr.
Hoopdriver knew it was against the rules. For it seemed that the place
they were in was a vast shop, and then Mr. Hoopdriver perceived that
the other man in brown was the shop-walker, differing from most
shop-walkers in the fact that he was lit from within as a Chinese
lantern might be. And the customer Mr. Hoopdriver was going to serve
was the Young Lady in Grey. Curious he hadn’t noticed it before. She
was in grey as usual,—rationals,—and she had her bicycle leaning
against the counter. She smiled quite frankly at him, just as she had
done when she had apologised for stopping him. And her form, as she
leant towards him, was full of a sinuous grace he had never noticed
before. “What can I have the pleasure?” said Mr. Hoopdriver at once,
and she said, “The Ripley road.” So he got out the Ripley road and
unrolled it and showed it to her, and she said that would do very
nicely, and kept on looking at him and smiling, and he began measuring
off eight miles by means of the yard measure on the counter, eight
miles being a dress length, a rational dress length, that is; and then
the other man in brown came up and wanted to interfere, and said Mr.
Hoopdriver was a cad, besides measuring it off too slowly. And as Mr.
Hoopdriver began to measure faster, the other man in brown said the
Young Lady in Grey had been there long enough, and that he WAS her
brother, or else she would not be travelling with him, and he suddenly
whipped his arm about her waist and made off with her. It occurred to
Mr. Hoopdriver even at the moment that this was scarcely brotherly
behaviour. Of course it wasn’t! The sight of the other man gripping her
so familiarly enraged him frightfully; he leapt over the counter
forthwith and gave chase. They ran round the shop and up an iron
staircase into the Keep, and so out upon the Ripley road. For some time
they kept dodging in and out of a wayside hotel with two front doors
and an inn yard. The other man could not run very fast because he had
hold of the Young Lady in Grey, but Mr. Hoopdriver was hampered by the
absurd behaviour of his legs. They would not stretch out; they would
keep going round and round as if they were on the treadles of a wheel,
so that he made the smallest steps conceivable. This dream came to no
crisis. The chase seemed to last an interminable time, and all kinds of
people, heath-keepers, shopmen, policemen, the old man in the Keep, the
angry man in drab, the barmaid at the Unicorn, men with
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