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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On the holy ground,
How the hosts of Mid-i-an
Prowl and prowl around?
Christian, up and smai-it them…
But these were but gleams. For the rest, Religion, Nationality, Passion, Finance, Politics, much more so those cardinal issues Birth and Death, the True Gentleman skirted about, and became facially rigid towards, and ceased to speak, and panted and blew.
‘One doesn’t talk of that sort of thing,’ Coote would say, with a gesture of the knuckly hand.
‘O’ course,’ Kipps would reply, with an equal significance.
Profundities. Deep, as it were, blowing to deep.
One does not talk, but on the other hand one is punctilious to do. Action speaks. Kipps—in spite of the fact that the Walshinghams were more than a little lax—Kipps, who had formerly flitted Sunday after Sunday from one Folkestone church to another, had now a sitting of his own, paid for duly, at Saint Stylites. There he was to be seen, always at the surplice evening service, and sometimes of a morning, dressed with a sober precision, and with an eye on Coote in the chancel. No difficulties now about finding the place in his book. He became a communicant again—he had lapsed soon after his confirmation when the young lady in the costume-room who was his adopted sister left the Emporium—and he would sometimes go round to the Vestry for Coote, after the service. One evening he was introduced to the Hon. and Rev. Densmore, He was much too confused to say anything, and the noble cleric had nothing to say, but they were introduced…
No! You must not imagine that the national ideal of a gentleman is without its ‘serious side,’ without even its stern and uncompromising side. The imagination, no doubt, refuses to see Coote displaying extraordinary refinements of courage upon the stricken field, but in the walks of peace there is sometimes sore need of sternness. Charitable as one may be, one must admit there are people who do things—impossible things; people who place themselves ‘out of it’ in countless ways; people, moreover, who are by a sort of predestination out of it from the beginning; and against these Society has invented a terrible protection for its Cootery—the Cut. The cut is no joke for any one. It is excommunication. You may be cut by an individual, you may be cut by a set, or you may be— and this is so tragic that beautiful romances have been written about it—‘Cut by the Country.’ One figures Coote discharging this last duty and cutting somebody .—Coote, erect and pale, never speaking, going past with eyes of pitiless slate, lower jaw protruding a little, face pursed up and cold and stiff…
It never dawned upon Kipps that he could one day have to face this terrible front, to be to Coote not only as one dead, but as one gone more than a stage or so in decay, cut and passed, banned and outcast for ever. It never dawned upon either of them.
Yet so it was to be!
One cannot hide any longer that all this fine progress of Kipps is doomed to end in collapse. So far, indeed, you have seen him ascend. You have seen him becoming more refined and careful day by day, more carefully dressed, less clumsy in the uses of social life. You have seen the gulf widening between himself and his former low associates. I have brought you at last to the vision of him, faultlessly dressed and posed, in an atmosphere of candlelight and chanting, in his own sitting, his own sitting! in one of the most fashionable churches in Folkestone… I have refrained from the lightest touch upon the tragic note that must now creep into my tale. Yet the net of his low connections has been about his feet, and, moreover, there was something interwoven in his being…
1
ONE day Kipps set out upon his newly mastered bicycle to New Romney, to break the news of his engagement to his uncle and aunt—positively. He was now a finished cyclist, but as yet an unseasoned one; the south-west wind, even in its summer guise, as one meets it in the Marsh, is the equivalent of a reasonable hill, and ever and again he got off and refreshed himself by a spell of walking. He was walking just outside New Romney preparatory to his triumphal entry (one hand off), when abruptly he came upon Ann Pornick.
It chanced he was thinking about her at the time. He had been thinking curious things; whether, after all, the atmosphere of New Romney and the Marsh had not some difference, some faint impalpable quality that was missing in the great and fashionable world of Folkestone behind there on the hill. Here there was a homeliness, a familiarity. He had noted as he passed that old Mr. Clifferdown’s gate had been mended with a fresh piece of string. In Folkestone he didn’t take notice, and he didn’t care if they built three hundred houses. Come to think of it, that was odd. It was fine and grand to have twelve hundred a year; it was fine to go about on trams and omnibuses and think not a person on board was as rich as oneself; it was fine to buy and order this and that and never have any work to do, and to be engaged to a girl distantly related to the Earl of Beaupr��s; but yet there had been a zest in the old time out here, a rare zest in the holidays, in sunlight, on the sea beach, and in the High Street, that failed from these new things. He thought of those bright windows of holiday that had seemed so glorious to him in the retrospect from his apprentice days. It was strange that now, amidst his present splendours, they were glorious still!
All those things were over now—perhaps that was it! Something had happened to the world, and the old light had been turned out. He himself was changed, and Sid was changed, terribly changed, and Ann, no doubt, was changed.
He thought of her with the hair blown about her flushed cheeks as they stood together after their race…
Certainly she must be changed, and all the magic she had been fraught with to the very hem of her short petticoats gone, no doubt, for ever. And as he thought that, or before and while he thought it—for he came to all these things in his own vague and stumbling way—he looked up, and there was Ann!
She was seven years older, and greatly altered; yet for the moment it seemed to him that she had not changed at all. ‘Ann!’ he said; and she, with a lifting note, ‘It’s Art Kipps!’
Then he became aware of changes—improvements. She was as pretty as she had promised to be, her blue eyes as dark as his memory of them, and with a quick, high colour; but now Kipps by several inches was the taller again. She was dressed in a simple gray dress, that showed her very clearly as a straight and healthy little woman, and her hat was Sunday-fied, with pink flowers. She looked soft and warm and welcoming. Her face was alight to Kipps with her artless gladness at their encounter.
‘It’s Art Kipps!’ she said.
‘Rather’ said Kipps.
‘You got your holidays?’
It flashed upon Kipps that Sid had not told her of his great fortune. Much regretful meditation upon Sid’s behaviour had convinced him that he himself was to blame for exasperating boastfulness in that affair, and this time he took care not to err in that direction. So he erred in the other.
‘I’m taking a bit of a ‘oliday,’ he said.
‘So’m I,’ said Ann.
‘You been for a walk?’ asked Kipps.
Ann showed him a bunch of wayside flowers.
‘It’s a long time since I seen you, Ann. Why, ‘ow long must it be? Seven—eight years nearly.’
‘It don’t do to count,’ said Ann.
‘It don’t look like it,’ said Kipps, with the slightest emphasis.
‘You got a moustache,’ said Ann, smelling her flowers and looking at him over them, not without admiration.
Kipps blushed—
Presently they came to the bifurcation of the roads.
‘I’m going down this way to mother’s cottage,’ said Ann.
‘I’ll come a bit your way, if I may.’
In New Romney social distinctions that are primary realities in Folkestone are absolutely non-existent, and it seemed quite permissible for him to walk with Ann, for all that she was no more than a servant. They talked with remarkable ease to one another, they slipped into a vein of intimate reminiscence in the easiest manner. In a little while Kipps was amazed to find Ann and himself at this,—
‘You r’member that half-sixpence? What we cut togevver?’
‘Yes?’
‘I got it still.’
She hesitated. ‘Funny, wasn’t it?’ she said, and then, ‘You got yours, Artie?’
‘Rather,’ said Kipps. ‘What do you think?’ and wondered in his heart of hearts why he had never looked at that sixpence for so long.
Ann smiled at him frankly.
‘I didn’t expect you’d keep it,’ she said. ‘I thought often—it was silly to keep mine.
‘Besides,’ she reflected, ‘it didn’t mean anything really.’
She glanced at him as she spoke and met his eye.
‘Oh, didn’t it! said Kipps, a little late with his response, and realising his infidelity to Helen even as he spoke.
‘It didn’t mean much anyhow,’ said Ann. ‘You still in the drapery?’
‘I’m living at Folkestone,’ began Kipps, and decided that that sufficed. ‘Didn’t Sid tell you he met me?’
‘No! Here?’
‘Yes. The other day. ‘Bout a week or more ago.’
‘That was before I came.’
‘Ah, that was it,’ said Kipps.
‘E’s got on,’ said Ann. ‘Got ‘is own shop now, Artie.’
”E tole me.’
They found themselves outside Muggett’s cottages. ‘You’re going in?’ said Kipps.
‘I s’pose so,’ said Ann.
They both hung upon the pause. Ann took a plunge.
‘D’you often come to New Romney?’ she asked.
‘I ride over a bit at times,’ said Kipps.
Another pause. Ann held out her hand.
‘I’m glad I seen you,’ she said.
Extraordinary impulses arose in neglected parts of Kipps’ being. ‘Ann,’ he said, and stopped.
‘Yes,’ said she, and was bright to him.
They looked at one another.
All, and more than all, of those first emotions of his adolescence had come back to him. Her presence banished a multitude of countervailing considerations. It was Ann more than ever. She stood breathing close to him with her soft-looking lips a little apart and gladness in her eyes.
‘I’m awful glad to see you again,’ he said; ‘it brings back old times.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
Another pause. He would have liked to have had a long talk to her, to have gone for a walk with her or something, to have drawn nearer to her in any conceivable way, and above all to have had some more of the appreciation that shone in her eyes, but a vestige of Folkestone, still clinging to him, told him it ‘wouldn’t do.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be getting on,’ and turned away reluctantly, with a will under compulsion—
When he looked back from the corner she was still at the gate. She was perhaps a little disconcerted by his retreat. He felt that. He hesitated for a moment, half turned, stood, and suddenly did great things with his hat. That hat! The wonderful hat of our civilisation!…
In another minute he was engaged in a singularly absentminded conversation with his uncle about the usual topics.
His uncle was very anxious to buy him a few upright clocks as an investment for subsequent sale. And there were also some very nice globes, one terrestrial and the other celestial, in a shop at Lydd that would look well in a drawing-room, and inevitably increase
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