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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Kipps shook his head. ‘I—’ he began.
‘I am,’ said Sid. ‘Married these two years, and got a nipper. Proper little chap.’
Kipps got his word in at last. ‘I got engaged day before yesterday,’ he said.
‘Ah!’ said Sid airily. ‘That’s all right. Who’s the fortunate lady!’
Kipps tried to speak in an off-hand way. He stuck his hands in his pockets as he spoke. ‘She’s a solicitor’s daughter,’ he said, ‘in Folkestone. Rather’r nice set. County family. Related to the Earl of Beaupr��s—’
‘Steady on!’ cried Sid.
‘You see, I’ve ‘ad a bit of luck, Sid. Been lef money.’
Sid’s eye travelled instinctively to mark Kipps’ garments. ‘How much?’ he asked.
”Bout twelve ‘undred a year,’ said Kipps, more off-handedly than ever.
‘Lord!’ said Sid, with a note of positive dismay, and stepped back a pace or two.
‘My granfaver it was,’ said Kipps, trying hard to be calm and simple. ”Ardly knew I ‘ad a granfaver. And then bang! When o’ Bean, the solicitor, told me of it, you could ‘ave knocked me down—’
‘Ow much?’ demanded Sid, with a sharp note in his voice.
Twelve ‘undred pound a year—proximately, that is…’
Sid’s attempt at genial unenvious congratulation did not last a minute. He shook hands with an unreal heartiness, and said he was jolly glad. ‘It’s a blooming stroke of Luck,’ he said.
‘It’s a blooming’ stroke of Luck,’ he repeated, ‘that’s what it is,’ with the smile fading from his face. ‘Of course, better you ‘ave it than me, o’ chap. So I don’t envy you, anyhow. I couldn’t keep it if I did ‘ave it.’
‘Ow’s that?’ said Kipps, a little hipped by Sid’s patent chagrin.
‘I’m a Socialist, you see,’ said Sid. ‘I don’t ‘old with Wealth. What is Wealth? Labour robbed out of the poor. At most it’s only yours in trust. Leastways, that’s ‘ow I should take it.’
He reflected. The Present distribution of Wealth,’ he said, and stopped.
Then he let himself go, with unmasked bitterness. ‘It’s no sense at all. It’s jest damn foolishness. Who’s going to work and care in a muddle like this? Here first you do—something anyhow—of the world’s work and it pays you hardly anything, and then it invites you to do nothing, nothing whatever, and pays you twelve hundred pounds a year. Who’s going to respect laws and customs when they come to damn silliness like that?’
He repeated, ‘Twelve hundred pounds a year!’
At the sight of Kipps’ face he relented slightly.
‘It’s not you I’m thinking of, o’ man; it’s the system. Better you than most people. Still—’
He laid both hands on the gate and repeated to himself, ‘Twelve ‘undred a year—Gee-whiz, Kipps! You’ll be a swell!’
‘I shan’t,’ said Kipps, with imperfect conviction. ‘No fear.’
‘You can’t ‘ave money like that and not swell out. You’ll soon be too big to speak to—‘ow do they put it?—a mere mechanic like me.’
‘No fear, Siddee,’ said Kipps, with conviction. ‘I ain’t that sort.’
‘Ah!’ said Sid, with a sort of unwilling scepticism, ‘money’ll be too much for you. Besides—you’re caught by a swell already.’
”Ow d’yer mean?’
‘That girl you’re going to marry. Masterman says—’
‘Oo’s Masterman?’
‘Rare good chap, I know—takes my first-floor front room. Masterman says it’s always the wife pitches the key. Always. There’s no social differences—till women come in.’
‘Ah!’ said Kipps profoundly. ‘You don’t know.’
Sid shook his head. ‘Fancy!’ he reflected, ‘Art Kipps!… Twelve ‘Undred a Year!’
Kipps tried to bridge that opening gulf. ‘Remember the Hurons, Sid?’
‘Rather,’ said Sid.
‘Remember that wreck?’
‘I can smell it now—sort of sour smell.’
Kipps was silent for a moment, with reminiscent eyes on Sid’s still troubled face.
‘I say, Sid, ‘ow’s Ann?’
‘She’s all right,’ said Sid.
‘Where is she now?’
‘In a place… Ashford.’
‘Oh!’
Sid’s face had became a shade sulkier than before.
‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘we don’t get on very well together. I don’t hold with service. We’re common people, I suppose, but I don’t like it. I don’t see why a sister of mine should wait at other people’s tables. No. Not even if they got Twelve ‘Undred a Year.’
Kipps tried to change the point of application. ‘Remember ‘ow you came out once when we were racing here?… She didn’t run bad for a girl.’
And his own words raised an image brighter than he could have supposed, so bright it seemed to breathe before him, and did not fade altogether, even when he was back in Folkestone an hour or so later.
But Sid was not to be deflected from that other rankling theme by any reminiscences of Ann.
‘I wonder what you will do with all that money,’ he speculated. ‘I wonder if you will do any good at all. I wonder what you could do. You should hear Masterman. He’d tell you things. Suppose it came to me; what should I do? It’s no good giving it back to the State as things are. Start an Owenite profit-sharing factory perhaps. Or a new Socialist paper. We want a new Socialist paper.’
He tried to drown his personal chagrin in elaborate exemplary suggestions…
3
‘I must be gettin’ on to my motor,’ said Kipps at last, having to a large extent heard him out.
‘What! Got a motor?’
‘No,’ said Kipps apologetically. ‘Only jobbed for the day.’
”Ow much?’
‘Five pounds.’
‘Keep five families for a week! Good Lord!’ That seemed to crown Sid’s disgust.
Yet drawn by a sort of fascination, he came with Kipps and assisted at the mounting of the motor. He was pleased to note it was not the most modern of motors, but that was the only grain of comfort. Kipps mounted at once, after one violent agitation of the little shop-door to set the bell ajangle and warn his uncle and aunt. Sid assisted with the great fur-lined overcoat and examined the spectacles.
‘Good-bye, o’ chap!’ said Kipps.
‘Good-bye, o’ chap!’ said Sid.
The old people came out to say good-bye.
Old Kipps was radiant with triumph. ”Pon my sammy, Artie! I’m a goo’ mind to come with you,’ he shouted; and then, ‘I got something you might take with you!’
He dodged back into the shop and returned with the perforated engraving after Morland.
‘You stick to this, my boy,’ he said. ‘You get it repaired by some one who knows. It’s the most vallyble thing I got you so far—you take my word.’
‘Warrup!’ said the motor, and tuff, tuff, tuff, and backed and snorted, while old Kipps danced about on the pavement as if foreseeing complex catastrophes, and told the driver, ‘That’s all right.’
He waved his stout stick to his receding nephew. Then he turned to Sid. ‘Now if you could make something like that, young Pornick, you might blow a bit!’
‘I’ll make a doocid sight better than that before I done,’ said Sid, hands deep in his pockets.
‘Not you,’ said old Kipps.
The motor set up a prolonged sobbing moan and vanished round the corner. Sid stood motionless for a space, unheeding some further remark from old Kipps. The young mechanic had just discovered that to have manufactured seventeen bicycles, including orders in hand, is not so big a thing as he had supposed, and such discoveries try one’s manhood…
‘Oh, well!’ said Sid at last, and turned his face towards his mother’s cottage.
She had got a hot teacake for him, and she was a little hurt that he was dark and preoccupied as he consumed it. He had always been such a boy for teacake, and then when one went out specially and got him one—!
He did not tell her—he did not tell any one—he had seen young Kipps. He did not want to talk about Kipps for a bit to any one at all.
1
WHEN Kipps came to reflect upon his afternoon’s work, he had his first inkling of certain comprehensive incompatibilities lying about the course of true love in his particular case. He had felt without understanding the incongruity between the announcement he had failed to make and the circle of ideas of his aunt and uncle. It was this rather than the want of a specific intention that had silenced him, the perception that when he travelled from Folkestone to New Romney he travelled from an atmosphere where his engagement to Helen was sane and excellent to an atmosphere where it was only to be regarded with incredulous suspicion. Coupled and associated with this jar was his sense of the altered behaviour of Sid Pornick, the evident shock to that ancient alliance caused by the fact of his enrichment, the touch of hostility in his ‘You’ll soon be swelled too big to speak to a poor mechanic like me.’ Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth—that the path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships. This first protrusion of that fact caused a painful confusion in his mind. It was speedily to protrude in a far more serious fashion in relation to the ‘hands’ from the Emporium, and Chitterlow.
From the day at Lympne Castle his relations with Helen had entered upon a new footing. He had prayed for Helen as good souls pray for Heaven, with as little understanding of what it was he prayed for. And now that period of standing humbly in the shadows before the shrine was over, and the goddess, her veil of mystery flung aside, had come down to him and taken hold of him, a good strong firm hold, and walked by his side. She liked him. What was singular was, that very soon she had kissed him thrice, whimsically upon the brow, and he had never kissed her at all. He could not analyse his feelings, only he knew the world was wonderfully changed about them; but the truth was that, though he still worshipped and feared her, though his pride in his engagement was ridiculously vast, he loved her now no more. That subtle something, woven of the most delicate strands of self-love and tenderness and desire, had vanished imperceptibly, and was gone now for ever. But that she did not suspect in him, nor, as a matter of fact, did he.
She took him in hand in perfect good faith. She told him things about his accent; she told him things about his bearing, about his costume and his way of looking at things. She thrust the blade of her intelligence into the tenderest corners of Kipps’ secret vanity; she slashed his most intimate pride to bleeding tatters. He sought very diligently to anticipate some at least of these informing thrusts by making great use of Coote. But the unanticipated made a brave number…
She found his simple willingness a very lovable thing.
Indeed, she liked him more and more. There was a touch of motherliness in her feelings towards him. But his upbringing and his associations had been, she diagnosed, ‘awful.’ At New Romney she glanced but little—that was remote. But in her inventory—she went over him as one might go over a newly taken house, with impartial thoroughness—she discovered more proximate influences, surprising intimations of nocturnal ‘sing-songs’—she pictured it as almost shocking that Kipps should sing to the banjo—much low-grade wisdom treasured from a person called Buggins—‘Who is Buggins?’ said Helen—vague figures of indisputable vulgarity—Pearce and Carshot—and more particularly a very terrible social phenomenon—Chitterlow.
Chitterlow blazed upon them with unheralded oppressive brilliance, the first time they were abroad together.
They were going along the front of the Leas to see a school-play in Sandgate—at the last moment Mrs. Walshingham had been unable to come with them—when Chitterlow loomed up into the new world. He was wearing the suit of striped
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