The H.G. Wells Reader by John Huntington Page B

time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual place by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of a man.

from
The Wheels of Chance
(1895)
    In the cheerful comedy
, The Wheels of Chance,
written immediately after
The Time Machine,
Wells gives a realistic and contemporary reading of the class differences that so much structure the middle part of the earlier novel. The naive and optimistic drapers assistant, Mr. Hoopdriver, represents a version of the man Wells would have become had his mother had her way. In the course of a bicycling holiday (Wells himself loved to tour the countryside on the newly invented bicycle) our hero meets an upper class young woman, Jessie Milton. She has become entangled with a scoundrel, Bechamel, who pretending to help her run away from her hated stepmother, actually intends to seduce her. Mr. Hoopdriver, infatuated with Jessie and acutely conscious of their social difference, tries to rescue her. Much of the comedy comes from the good-natured misunderstandings that these two young people have of each other. Jessie declares, “I am resolved to Live my Own Life,” and Mr. Hoopdriver, who from his youth has worked for a living, has no idea what she is talking about, though he admires her assurance. Jessie, on her side, misinterprets the fawning and deferential manners of a store clerk, which Mr. Hoopdriver cannot shake, as those of “a colonial.” The selection comes from the middle of the novel after Mr. Hoopdriver has ridden off with Jessie. They are traveling incognito as brother and sister. Mr. Hoopdriver, ashamed of his name, has given Jessie a false one, but he has also forgotten it
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C HAPTER XXVIII
T HE D EPARTURE FROM C HICHESTER
    He caused his ‘sister’ to be called repeatedly, and when she came down, explained with a humorous smile his legal relationship to the bicycle in the yard. ‘Might be disagreeable, y’ know.’ His anxiety was obvious enough. ‘Very well,’ she said (quite friendly); ‘hurry breakfast, and we’ll ride out. I want to talk things over with you.’ The girl seemed more beautiful than ever after the night’s sleep; her hair in comely dark waves from her forehead, her ungauntleted finger-tips pink and cool. And how decided she was! Breakfast was a nervous ceremony, conversation fraternal but thin; the waiter overawed him, and he was cowed by a multiplicity of forks. But she called him ‘Chris.’ They discussed their route over his six-penny county map for the sake of talking, but avoided a decision in the presence of the attendant. The five-pound note was changed for the bill, and through Hoopdriver’s determination to be quite the gentleman, the waiter and chambermaid got half a crown each, and the ostler a florin. “Olidays,’ said the ostler to himself, without gratitude. The public mounting of the bicycles in the street was a moment of trepidation. A policeman actually stopped and watched them from the opposite kerb. Suppose him to come across and ask: ‘Is that your bicycle, sir?’ Fight? Or drop and run?It was time of bewildering apprehension, too, going through the streets of the town, so that a milk-cart barely escaped destruction under Mr. Hoopdriver’s chancy wheel. That recalled him to a sense of erratic steering, and he