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

He would have gone in, but suddenly a new scruple came to him, that he was too well dressed for the company he could see dimly through the steam sitting at the counter and eating with a sort of nonchalant speed.

2

He was half minded to resort to a hansom and brave the terrors of the dining-room of the Royal Grand— they wouldn’t know why he had gone out really—when the only person he knew in London appeared (as the only person one does know will do in London) and slapped him on the shoulder. Kipps was hovering at a window at a few yards from the fish shop pretending to examine some really strikingly cheap pink baby-linen, and trying to settle finally about those sausages. ‘Hallo, Kipps!’ cried Sid, ‘spending the millions?’

Kipps turned and was glad to perceive no lingering vestige of the chagrin that had been so painful at New Romney. Sid looked grave and important, and he wore a quite new silk hat that gave a commercial touch to a generally socialistic costume. For the moment the sight of Sid uplifted Kipps wonderfully. He saw him as a friend and helper, and only presently did it come clearly into his mind that this was the brother of Ann.

He made amiable noises.

‘I’ve just been up this way,’ Sid explained, ‘buying a secondhand ‘namelling stove… I’m going to ‘namel myself.’

‘Lor!’ said Kipps.

‘Yes. Do me a lot of good. Let the customer choose his colour. See? What brings you up?’

Kipps had a momentary vision of his foiled uncle and aunt. ‘Jest a bit of a change,’ he said.

Sid came to a swift decision. ‘Come down to my little show. I got some one I’d like to see talking to you.’

Even then Kipps did not think of Ann in this connection.

‘Well,’ he said, trying to invent an excuse on the spur of the moment. ‘Fact is,’ he explained, ‘I was jest looking round to get a bit of lunch.’

‘Dinner we call it,’ said Sid. ‘But that’s all right. You can’t get anything to eat hereabout. If you’re not too haughty to do a bit of slumming, there’s some mutton spoiling for me now—’

The word mutton affected Kipps greatly.

‘It won’t take us ‘arf an hour,’ said Sid, and Kipps was carried.

He discovered another means of London locomotion in the Underground Railway, and recovered his self-possession in that interest. ‘You don’t mind going third?’ asked Sid; and Kipps said, ‘Nort a bit of it.’ They were silent in the train for a time, on account of strangers in the carriage, and then Sid began to explain who it was he wanted Kipps to meet. ‘It’s a chap named Masterman—do you no end of good.

‘He occupies our first-floor front room, you know. It isn’t so much for gain I let as company. We don’t want the whole ‘ouse, that’s one thing, and another is I knew the man before. Met him at our Sociological, and after a bit he said he wasn’t comfortable where he was. That’s how it came about. He’s a first-class chap—first class. Science! You should see his books!

‘Properly he’s a sort of journalist. He’s written a lot of things, but he’s been too ill lately to do very much. Poetry he’s written, all sorts. He writes for the Commonweal sometimes, and sometimes he reviews books. ‘E’s got ‘eaps of books—‘eaps. Besides selling a lot.

‘He knows a regular lot of people, and all sorts of things. He’s been a dentist, and he’s a qualified chemist, and I seen ‘im often reading German and French. Taught ‘imself. He was here—’

Sid indicated South Kensington, which had come opportunely outside the carriage windows, with a nod of his head, ‘—three years. Studying science. But you’ll see ‘im. When he really gets to talking—he pours it out.’

‘Ah!’ said Kipps, nodding sympathetically, with his two hands on his umbrella knob.

‘He’ll do big things some day,’ said Sid. ‘He’s written a book on science already. ‘ Physiography, it’s called. Elementary Physiography! Some day he’ll write an advanced—when he gets time.’

He let this soak into Kipps.

‘I can’t introduce you to lords and swells,’ he went on, ‘but I can show you a Famous Man, that’s going to be. I can do that. Leastways—Unless—’

Sid hesitated.

‘He’s got a frightful cough,’ he said.

‘He won’t care to talk to me,’ weighed Kipps.

‘That’s all right; he won’t mind. He’s fond of talking. He’d talk to any one,’ said Sid reassuringly, and added a perplexing bit of Londonised Latin.

‘He doesn’t pute anything, non alienum. You know.’

‘I know,’ said Kipps intelligently, over his umbrella knob, though of course that was altogether untrue.

3

Kipps found Sid’s shop a practical-looking establishment, stocked with the most remarkable collection of bicycles and pieces of bicycle that he had ever beheld. ‘My hiring stock,’ said Sid, with a wave to this ironmongery; ‘and there’s the best machine at a democratic price in London, The Red Flag, built by me. See?’

He indicated a graceful gray brown framework in the window. ‘And there’s my stock of accessories—store prices.

‘Go in for motors a bit,’ added Sid.

‘Mutton?’ said Kipps, not hearing him distinctly.

‘Motors, I said… ‘Owever, Mutton Department here;’ and he opened a door that had a curtain-guarded window in its upper panel, to reveal a little room with red walls and green furniture, with a white-clothed table and the generous promise of a meal. ‘Fanny!’ he shouted. ‘Here’s Art Kipps.’

A bright-eyed young woman of five or six-and-twenty in a pink print appeared, a little flushed from cooking, and wiped a hand on an apron and shook hands and smiled and said it would all be ready in a minute. She went on to say she had heard of Kipps and his luck, and meanwhile Sid vanished to draw the beer, and returned with two glasses for himself and Kipps.

‘Drink that,’ said Sid; and Kipps felt all the better for it.

‘I give Mr. Masterman ‘is upstairs a hour ago,’ said Mrs. Sid. ‘I didn’t think ‘e ought to wait.’

A rapid succession of brisk movements on the part of every one and they were all four at dinner—the fourth person being Master Walt Whitman Pornick, a cheerful young gentleman of one and a half, who was given a spoon to hammer on the table with to keep him quiet, and who got ‘Kipps’ right at the first effort and kept it all through the meal, combining it first with this previous acquisition and then that. ‘Peacock Kipps,’ said Master Walt, at which there was great laughter, and also ‘More Mutton Kipps.’

‘He’s a regular oner,’ said Mrs. Sid, ‘for catching up words. You can’t say a word but what ‘e’s on to it.’

There were no serviettes and less ceremony, and Kipps thought he had never enjoyed a meal so much. Every one was a little excited by the meeting and chatting and disposed to laugh, and things went easily from the very beginning. If there was a pause, Master Walt filled it in. Mrs. Sid, who tempered her enormous admiration for Sid’s intellect and his Socialism and his severe business methods by a motherly sense of her sex and seniority, spoke of them both as ‘you boys,’ and dilated—when she was not urging Kipps to have some more of this or that—on the disparity between herself and her husband.

‘Shouldn’t ha’ thought there was a year between you,’ said Kipps; ‘you seem jest a match.’

‘I’m his match anyhow,’ said Mrs. Sid, and no epigram of young Walshingham’s was ever better received.

‘Match,’ said young Walt, coming in on the tail of the joke and getting a round for himself.

Any sense of superior fortune had long vanished from Kipps’ mind, and he found himself looking at host and hostess with enormous respect. Really old Sid was a wonderful chap, here in his own house at two-and-twenty, carving his own mutton and lording it over wife and child. No legacies needed by him! And Mrs. Sid, so kind and bright and hearty! And the child, old Sid’s child! Old Sid had jumped round a bit. It needed the sense of his fortune at the back of his mind to keep Kipps from feeling abject. He resolved he’d buy young Walt something tremendous in toys at the very first opportunity.

‘Drop more beer, Art?’

‘Right you are, old man.’

‘Cut Mr. Kipps a bit more bread, Sid.’

‘Can’t I pass you a bit?’…

Sid was all right, Sid was; there was no mistake about that.

It was growing up in his mind that Sid was the brother of Ann, but he said nothing about her, for excellent reasons. After all, Sid’s irritation at her name when they had met in New Romney seemed to show a certain separation. They didn’t tell each other much… He didn’t know how things might be between Ann and Mrs. Sid either.

Still, for all that, Sid was Ann’s brother.

The furniture of the room did not assert itself very much above the cheerful business of the table, but Kipps was impressed with the idea that it was pretty. There was a dresser at the end with a number of gay plates and a mug or so, a Labour Day poster by Walter Crane on the wall, and through the glass and over the blind of the shop door one had a glimpse of the bright-colour advertisement cards of bicycle dealers, and a shelf-ful of boxes labelled The Paragon Bell, the Scarum Bell, and The Patent Omi! Horn—

It seemed incredible that he had been in Folkestone that morning, that even now his aunt and uncle—!

B-r-r-r. It didn’t do to think of his Aunt and Uncle.

4

When Sid repeated his invitation to come and see Masterman, Kipps, now flushed with beer and Irish stew, said he didn’t mind if he did, and after a preliminary shout from Sid that was answered by a voice and a cough, the two went upstairs.

‘Masterman’s a rare one,’ said Sid over his arm and in an undertone. ‘You should hear him speak at a meeting… If he’s in form, that is.’

He rapped, and went into a large, untidy room.

‘This is Kipps,’ he said. ‘You know, the chap I told you of. With twelve ‘undred a year.’

Masterman sat gnawing an empty pipe, and as close to the fire as though it was alight and the season midwinter. Kipps concentrated upon him for a space, and only later took in something of the frowsy furniture, the little bed half behind and evidently supposed to be wholly behind a careless screen, the spittoon by the fender, the remains of a dinner on the chest of drawers, and the scattered books and papers. Masterman’s face showed him a man of forty or more, with curious hollows at the side of his forehead and about his eyes. His eyes were very bright, there was a spot of red in his cheeks, and the wiry black moustache under his short red nose had been trimmed with scissors into a sort of brush along his upper lip. His teeth were darkened ruins. His jacket collar was turned up about a knitted white neck-wrap, and his sleeves betrayed no cuffs. He did not rise to greet Kipps, but he held out a thin-wristed hand and pointed with the other to a bedroom armchair.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Sit down and make yourself at home. Will you smoke?’

Kipps said he would, and produced his store. He was about to take one, and then with a civil afterthought handed the packet first to Masterman and Sid. Masterman pretended surprise to find his pipe out before he took one.