Kipps by H. G. Wells (bts books to read TXT) 📕

‘I may go back to New Romney for a bit,’ said Kipps. ‘I got an uncle and aunt there. I reely don’t know.’

Helen regarded him thoughtfully for a moment.

‘You must come and see us,’ she said, ‘before we go to Bruges.’

‘Oo, rather!’ said Kipps. ‘If I may.’

‘Yes, do,’ she said, and suddenly stood up before Kipps could formulate an inquiry when he should call.

‘You’re sure you can spare that drawing-board?’ she said to Miss Coote; and the conversation passed out of range.

And when he had said ‘Good-bye’ to Miss Walshingham, and she had repeated her invitation to call, he went upstairs again with Coote to look out certain initiatory books they had had under discussion. And then Kipps, blowing very resolutely, went back to his own place, bearing in his arm (1) Sesame and Lilies; (2) Sir George Tressady; (3) an anonymous book on Vitality that Coote particularly esteemed. And having got to his own sitting-room, he opened Sesame and Lilies and read with ruthless determination for some time.

3

Presently he leant back and gave himself up to the business of trying to imagine just exactly what Miss Walshingham could have thought of him when she saw him. Doubts about the precise effect of the gray flannel suit began to trouble him. He turned to the mirror over the mantel, and then got into a chair to study the hang of the trousers. It looked all right. Luckily she had not seen the Panama hat. He knew he had the brim turned up wrong, but he could not find out which way the brim was right. However, that she had not seen. He might, perhaps, ask at the shop where he bought it.

He meditated for a while on his reflected face—doubtful whether he liked it or not—and then got down again and flitted across to the sideboard where there lay two little books, one in a cheap magnificent cover of red and gold, and the other in green canvas. The former was called, as its cover witnessed, Manners and Rules of Good Society, by a Member of the Aristocracy, and after the cover had indulged in a band of gilded decoration, light-hearted, but natural under the circumstances, it added, ‘TWENTY-FIRST EDITION.’ The second was that admirable classic, The Art of Conversing. Kipps returned with these to his seat, placed the two before him, opened the latter with a sigh, and flattened it under his hand.

Then with knitted brows he began to read onward from a mark, his lips moving.

‘Having thus acquired possession of an idea, the little ship should not be abruptly launched into deep waters, but should be first permitted to glide gently and smoothly into the shallows; that is to say, the conversation should not be commenced by broadly and roundly stating a fact, or didactically expressing an opinion, as the subject would be thus virtually or summarily disposed of, or perhaps be met with a “Really” or “Indeed” or some equally brief monosyllabic reply. If an opposite opinion were held by the person to whom the remark were addressed, he might not, if a stranger, care to express it in the form of a direct contradiction or actual dissent. To glide imperceptibly into conversation is the object to be attained—’

At this point Mr. Kipps rubbed his fingers through his hair with an expression of some perplexity, and went back to the beginning.

4

When Kipps made his call on the Walshinghams, it all happened so differently from the Manners and Rules prescription (‘Paying Calls’) that he was quite lost from the very outset. Instead of the footman or maidservant proper in these cases, Miss Walshingham opened the door to him herself. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ she said, with one of her rare smiles.

She stood aside for him to enter the rather narrow passage.

‘I thought I’d call,’ said he, retaining his hat and stick.

She closed the door and led the way to a little drawing room, which impressed Kipps as being smaller and less emphatically coloured than that of the Cootes, and in which, at first, only a copper bowl of white poppies upon the brown tablecloth caught his particular attention.

‘You won’t think it unconventional to come in, Mr. Kipps, will you?’ she remarked. ‘Mother is out.’

‘I don’t mind,’ he said, smiling amiably, ‘if you don’t.’

She walked round the table and stood regarding him across it, with that same look between speculative curiosity and appreciation that he remembered from the last of the art-class meetings.

‘I wondered whether you would call or whether you wouldn’t before you left Folkestone.’

‘I’m not leaving Folkestone for a bit, and any’ow I should have called on you.’

‘Mother will be sorry she was out. I’ve told her about you, and she wants, I know, to meet you.’

‘I saw ‘er—if that was ‘er—in the shop,’ said Kipps.

‘Yes—you did, didn’t you?… She has gone out to make some duty calls, and I didn’t go. I had something to write. I write a little, you know.’

‘Reely,’ said Kipps.

‘It’s nothing much,’ she said, ‘and it comes to nothing.’ She glanced at a little desk near the window, on which there lay some paper. ‘One must do something.’ She broke off abruptly. ‘Have you seen our outlook?’ she asked, and walked to the window, and Kipps came and stood beside her. ‘We look on the Square. It might be worse, you know. That outporter’s truck there is horrid—and the railings, but it’s better than staring one’s social replica in the face, isn’t it? It’s pleasant in early spring—bright green laid on with a dry brush—and it’s pleasant in autumn.’

‘I like it,’ said Kipps. ‘That laylock there is pretty, isn’t it?’

‘Children come and pick it at times,’ she remarked.

‘I dessay they do,’ said Kipps.

He rested on his hat and stick and looked appreciatively out of the window, and she glanced at him for one swift moment. A suggestion that might have come from The Art of Conversing came into his head. ‘Have you a garden?’ he said.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only a little one,’ she said, and then, ‘Perhaps you would like to see it.’

‘I like gardening,’ said Kipps, with memories of a penny worth of nasturtiums he had once trained over his uncle’s dustbin.

She led the way with a certain relief.

They emerged through a four-seasons’ coloured glass door to a little iron veranda, that led by iron steps to a minute walled garden. There was just room for a patch of turf and a flower-bed; one sturdy variegated Euonymus grew in the corner. But the early June flowers, the big narcissus, snow upon the mountains, and a fine show of yellow wallflowers, shone gay.

‘That’s our garden,’ said Helen. ‘It’s not a very big one, is it?’

‘I like it,’ said Kipps.

‘It’s small,’ she said, ‘but this is the day of small things.’

Kipps didn’t follow that.

‘If you were writing when I came,’ he remarked, ‘I’m interrupting you.’

She turned round with her back to the railing and rested, leaning on her hands. ‘I had finished,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get on.’

‘Were you making up something?’ asked Kipps.

There was a little interval before she smiled. ‘I try—quite vainly—to write stories,’ she said. ‘One must do something. I don’t know whether I shall ever do any good—at that—anyhow. It seems so hopeless. And, of course—one must study the popular taste. But now my brother has gone to London— I get a lot of leisure.’

‘I seen your brother, ‘aven’t I?’

‘He came to the class once or twice. Very probably you have. He’s gone to London to pass his examinations and become a solicitor. And then I suppose he’ll have a chance. Not much, perhaps, even then. But he’s luckier than I am.’

‘You got your classes and things.’

‘They ought to satisfy me. But they don’t. I suppose I’m ambitious. We both are. And we hadn’t much of a spring board.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the cramped little garden with an air of reference in her gesture.

‘I should think you could do anything if you wanted to?’ said Kipps.

‘As a matter of fact, I can’t do anything I want to.’

‘You done a good deal.’

‘What?’

‘Well, didn’t you pass one of these here University things?’

‘Oh, I matriculated!’

‘I should think I was no end of a swell if I did—I know that.’

‘Mr. Kipps, do you know how many people matriculate into London University every year?’

‘How many, then?’

‘Between two and three thousand.’

‘Well, just think how many don’t!’

Her smile came again and broke into a laugh. ‘Oh, they don’t count,’ she said; and then realising that might penetrate Kipps if he was left with it, she hurried on to, ‘The fact is, I’m a discontented person, Mr. Kipps. Folkestone, you know, is a Sea Front, and it values people by sheer vulgar prosperity. We’re not prosperous, and we live in a back street. We have to live here because this is our house. It’s a mercy we haven’t to ‘let.’ One feels one hasn’t opportunities. If one had, I suppose one wouldn’t use them. Still—’

Kipps felt he was being taken tremendously into her confidence. ‘That’s jest it,’ he said.

He leant forward on his stick and said very earnestly, ‘I believe you could do anything you wanted to, if you tried.’

She threw out her hands in disavowal.

‘I know,’ said he, very sagely, and nodding his head. ‘I watched you once or twice when you were teaching that woodcarving class.’

For some reason this made her laugh—a rather pleasant laugh, and that made Kipps feel a very witty and successful person. ‘It’s very evident,’ she said, ‘that you’re one of those rare people who believe in me, Mr. Kipps,’ to which he answered, ‘Oo, I do!’ and then suddenly they became aware of Mrs. Walshingham coming along the passage. In another moment she appeared through the four-seasons’ door, bonneted and ladylike, and a little faded, exactly as Kipps had seen her in the shop. Kipps felt a certain apprehension at her appearance, in spite of the reassurances he had had from Coote.

‘Mr. Kipps has called on us,’ said Helen; and Mrs. Walshingham said it was very, very kind of him, and added that new people didn’t call on them very much nowadays. There was nothing of the scandalised surprise Kipps had seen in the shop; she had heard, perhaps, he was a gentleman now. In the shop he had thought her rather jaded and haughty, but he had scarcely taken her hand, which responded to his touch with a friendly pressure, before he knew how mistaken he had been. She then told her daughter that someone called Mrs. Wace had been out, and turned to Kipps again to ask him if he had had tea. Kipps said he had not, and Helen moved towards some mysterious interior. ‘But, I say,’ said Kipps, ‘don’t you on my account—’

Helen vanished, and he found himself alone with Mrs. Walshingham. Which, of course, made him breathless and Boreas-looking for a moment.

‘You were one of Helen’s pupils in the woodcarving class?’ asked Mrs. Walshingham, regarding him with the quiet watchfulness proper to her position.

‘Yes,’ said Kipps; ‘that’s ‘ow I ‘ad the pleasure—’

‘She took a great interest in her woodcarving class. She is so energetic, you know, and it gives her an Outlet.’

‘I thought she taught something splendid.’

‘Every one says she did very well. Helen, I think, would do anything well that she undertook to do. She’s so very clever. And she throws herself into things so.’

She untied her bonnet-strings with a pleasant informality.

‘She had told me all about