Kipps by H. G. Wells (bts books to read TXT) 📕
The solid work varied, according to the prevailing mood of Mr. Woodrow. Sometimes that was a despondent lethargy, copy-books were distributed or sums were 'set,' or the great mystery of book-keeping was declared in being, and beneath these superficial activities lengthy conversations and interminable guessing games with marbles went on, while Mr. Woodrow sat inanimate at his desk, heedless of school affairs, staring in front of him at unseen things. At times his face was utterly inane; at times it had an expression of stagnant amazement, as if he saw before his eyes with pitiless c
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They drank old Methuselah and siphon soda, and there was no clearing away; they just sat among the plates and things, and Mrs. Chitterlow took her husband’s tobacco-pouch and made a cigarette and smoked and blew smoke, and looked at Kipps with her large brown eyes. Kipps had seen cigarettes smoked by ladies before, for fun, but this was real smoking. It frightened him rather. He felt he must not encourage this lady—at any rate in Chitterlow’s presence.
They became very cheerful after the repast, and as there was now no waste to deplore, such as one experiences in the windy open air, Chitterlow gave his voice full vent. He fell to praising Kipps very highly and loudly. He said he had known Kipps was the right sort, he had seen it from the first, almost before he got up out of the mud on that memorable night. ‘You can,’ he said, ‘sometimes. That was why—’ He stopped, but he seemed on the verge of explaining that it was his certainty of Kipps being the right sort had led him to confer this great Fortune upon him. He left that impression. He threw out a number of long sentences and material for sentences of a highly philosophical and incoherent character about Coincidences. It became evident he considered dramatic criticism in a perilously low condition…
About four Kipps found himself stranded, as it were, by a receding Chitterlow on a seat upon the Leas.
He was chiefly aware that Chitterlow was an overwhelming personality. He puffed his cheeks and blew.
No doubt this was seeing life, but had he particularly wanted to see life that day? In a way Chitterlow had interrupted him. The day he had designed for himself was altogether different from this. He had been going to read through a precious little volume called Don’t that Coote had sent round for him—a book of invaluable hints, a summary of British deportment, that had only the one defect of being at points a little out of date.
That reminded him he had intended to perform a difficult exercise called an Afternoon Call upon the Cootes, as a preliminary to doing it in deadly earnest upon the Walshinghams. It was no good to-day, anyhow, now.
He came back to Chitterlow. He would have to explain to Chitterlow he was taking too much for granted—he would have to do that. It was so difficult to do in Chitterlow’s presence, though; in his absence it was easy enough. This half-share, and taking a theatre and all of it, was going too far.
The quarter share was right enough, he supposed, but even that—! A hundred pounds! What wealth is there left in the world after one has paid out a hundred pounds from it?
He had to recall that, in a sense, Chitterlow had indeed brought him his fortune before he could face even that.
You must not think too hardly of him. To Kipps, you see, there was as yet no such thing as proportion in these matters. A hundred pounds went to his horizon. A hundred pounds seemed to him just exactly as big as any other large sum of money.
1
THE Cootes lived in a little house in Bouverie Square, with a tangle of Virginia creeper up the veranda.
Kipps had been troubled in his mind about knocking double or single—it is these things show what a man is made of— but happily there was a bell.
A queer little maid with a big cap admitted Kipps, and took him through a bead curtain and a door into a little drawing-room, with a black and gold piano, a glazed bookcase, a Moorish cosy corner, and a draped looking-glass overmantel, bright with Regent Street ornaments and photographs of various intellectual lights. A number of cards of invitation to meetings and the match list of a Band of Hope cricket club were stuck into the looking-glass frame, with Coote’s name as a Vice-President. There was a bust of Beethoven over the bookcase, and the walls were thick with conscientiously executed but carelessly selected ‘views’ in oil and water colours and gilt frames. At the end of the room, facing the light, was a portrait that struck Kipps at first as being Coote in spectacles and feminine costume, and that he afterwards decided must be Coote’s mother. Then the original appeared, and he discovered that it was Coote’s elder and only sister, who kept house for him. She wore her hair in a knob behind, and the sight of the knob suggested to Kipps an explanation for a frequent gesture of Coote’s, a patting exploratory movement to the back of his head. And then it occurred to him that this was quite an absurd idea altogether.
She said, ‘Mr. Kipps, I believe,’ and Kipps laughed pleasantly, and said, ‘That’s it!’ and then she told him that ‘Chester’ had gone down to the art school to see about sending off some drawings or other, and that he would be back soon. Then she asked Kipps if he painted, and showed him the pictures on the wall. Kipps asked her where each one was ‘of,’ and when she showed him some of the Leas slopes, he said he never would have recognised them. He said it was funny how things looked in a picture very often. ‘But they’re awfully good,’ he said. ‘Did you do them?’ He would look at them with his neck arched like a swan’s, his head back and on one side, and then suddenly peer closely into them. ‘They are good. I wish I could paint.’ ‘That’s what Chester says,’ she answered. ‘I tell him he has better things to do.’ Kipps seemed to get on very well with her.
Then Coote came in, and they left her and went upstairs together, and had a good talk about reading and the rules of Life. Or rather Coote talked, and the praises of thought and reading were in his mouth…
You must figure Coote’s study, a little bedroom put to studious uses, and over the mantel an array of things he had been led to believe indicative of culture and refinement—an autotype of Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation,’ an autotype of Watts’s ‘Minotaur,’ a Swiss carved pipe with many joints, and a photograph of Amiens Cathedral (these two the spoils of travel), a phrenological bust, and some broken fossils from the Warren. A rotating bookshelf carried the Encyclopaedia Britannica (tenth edition), and on the top of it a large official-looking, age-grubby envelope, bearing the mystic words, ‘On His Majesty’s Service,’ a number or so of the Bookman, and a box of cigarettes were lying. A table under the window bore a little microscope, some dust in a saucer, some grimy glass slips, and broken cover glasses, for Coote had ‘gone in for’ biology a little. The longer side of the room was given over to bookshelves, neatly edged with pinked American cloth, and with an array of books—no worse an array of books than you find in any public library; an almost haphazard accumulation of obsolete classics, contemporary successes, the Hundred Best Books (including Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year), old school-books, directories, the Times Atlas, Ruskin in bulk, Tennyson complete in one volume, Longfellow, Charles Kingsley, Smiles, a guide-book or so, several medical pamphlets, odd magazine numbers, and much indescribable rubbish—in fact a compendium of the contemporary British mind. And in front of this array stood Kipps, ill-taught and untrained, respectful, awe-stricken, and, for the moment at any rate, willing to learn, while Coote, the exemplary Coote, talked to him of reading and the virtue in books.
‘Nothing enlarges the mind,’ said Coote, ‘like Travel and Books… And they’re both so easy nowadays, and so cheap!’
‘I’ve often wanted to ‘ave a good go in at reading,’ Kipps replied.
‘You’d hardly believe,’ Coote said, ‘how much you can get out of books. Provided you avoid trashy reading, that is. You ought to make a rule, Kipps, and read one Serious Book a week. Of course we can Learn even from Novels, Nace Novels, that is, but it isn’t the same thing as serious reading. I made a rule, One Serious Book and One Novel—no more. There’s some of the Serious Books I’ve been reading lately— on that table: Sartor Resartus, Mrs. Twaddletome’s Pond Life, The Scottish Chiefs, Life and Letters of Dean Farrar…’
2
There came at last the sound of a gong, and Kipps descended to tea in that state of nervous apprehension at the difficulties of eating and drinking that his aunt’s knuckle rappings had implanted in him for ever. Over Coote’s shoulder he became aware of a fourth person in the Moorish cosy corner, and he turned, leaving incomplete something incoherent he was saying to Miss Coote about his modest respect and desire for literature, to discover this fourth person was Miss Helen Walshingham, hatless, and looking very much at home.
She rose at once with an extended hand to meet his hesitation.
‘You’re stopping in Folkestone, Mr. Kipps?’
‘ ‘Ere on a bit of business,’ said Kipps. ‘I thought you was away in Bruges.’
‘That’s later,’ said Miss Walshingham. ‘We’re stopping until my brother’s holiday begins, and we’re trying to let our house. Where are you staying in Folkestone?’
‘I got a ‘ouse of mine—on the Leas.’
‘I’ve heard all about your good fortune—this afternoon.’
‘Isn’t it a Go!’ said Kipps. ‘I ‘aven’t nearly got to believe it’s reely ‘appened yet. When that Mr. Bean told me of it, you could ‘ave knocked me down with a feather. It’s a tremenjous change for me.’
He discovered Miss Coote was asking him whether he took milk and sugar. ‘I don’t mind,’ said Kipps. ‘Jest as you like.’
Coote became active, handing tea and bread-and-butter. It was thinly cut, and the bread was rather new, and the half of the slice that Kipps took fell upon the floor. He had been holding it by the edge, for he was not used to this migratory method of taking tea without plates or table. This little incident ruled him out of the conversation for a time, and when he came to attend to it again, they were talking about something or other prodigious—a performer of some sort—that was coming, called, it seemed, ‘Padrooski!’ So Kipps, who had dropped quietly into a chair, ate his bread-and-butter, said ‘no, thank you’ to any more, and by this discreet restraint got more freedom with his cup and saucer.
Apart from the confusion natural to tea, he was in a state of tremulous excitement on account of the presence of Miss Walshingham. He glanced from Miss Coote to her brother, and then at Helen. He regarded her over the top of his cup as he drank. Here she was, solid and real. It was wonderful. He remarked, as he had done at times before, the easy flow of the dark hair back from her brow over her ears, the shapeliness of the white hands that came out from her simple white cuffs, the delicate pencilling of her brow.
Presently she turned her face to him almost suddenly, and smiled with the easiest assurance of friendship.
‘You will go, I suppose?’ she said, and added ‘to the Recital.’
‘If I’m in Folkestone I shall,’ said Kipps, clearing away a little hoarseness. ‘I don’t know much about music, but what I do know I like.’
‘I’m sure you’ll like Paderewski,’ she said.
‘If you do,’ he said, ‘I dessay I shall.’
He found Coote very kindly taking his cup.
‘Do you think of living in Folkestone?’ asked Miss Coote in a tone of proprietorship from the hearthrug.
‘No,’ said Kipps. “That’s jest it—I hardly know.’ He also said that he wanted to look
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