Kipps by H. G. Wells (distant reading txt) 📕

quite frequently⁠—about their gifts, their temperaments, their ambition, their need of opportunity. They needed opportunity, she would say, as other people needed air.⁠ ⁠…

In his conversations with her Kipps always assumed, and she seemed to assume, that she was to join that home in London Helen foreshadowed, but he was surprised one day to gather that this was not to be the case. “It wouldn’t do,” said Helen, with decision. “We want to make a circle of our own.”

“But won’t she be a bit lonely down here?” asked Kipps.

“There’s the Waces, and Mrs. Prebble and Mrs. Bindon Botting and⁠—lots of people she knows.” And Helen dismissed this possibility.⁠ ⁠…

Young Walshingham’s share in the educational syndicate was smaller. But he shone out when they went to London on that Arts and Crafts expedition. Then this rising man of affairs showed Kipps how to buy the more theatrical weeklies for consumption in the train, how to buy and what to buy in the way of cigarettes with gold tips and shilling cigars, and how to order hock for lunch and sparkling Moselle for dinner, how to calculate the fare of a hansom cab⁠—penny a minute while he goes⁠—how to look intelligently at an hotel tape, and how to sit still in a train like a thoughtful man instead of talking like a fool and giving yourself away. And he, too, would glance at the good time coming when they were to be in London for good and all.

That prospect expanded and developed particulars. It presently took up a large part of Helen’s conversation. Her conversations with Kipps were never of a grossly sentimental sort; there was a shyness of speech in that matter with both of them, but these new adumbrations were at least as interesting and not so directly disagreeable as the clear-cut intimations of personal defect that for a time had so greatly chastened Kipps’ delight in her presence. The future presented itself with an almost perfect frankness as a joint campaign of Mrs. Walshingham’s Twin Jewels upon the Great World, with Kipps in the capacity of baggage and supply. They would still be dreadfully poor, of course⁠—this amazed Kipps, but he said nothing⁠—until “Brudderkins” began to succeed, but if they were clever and lucky they might do a great deal.

When Helen spoke of London a brooding look, as of one who contemplates a distant country, came into her eyes. Already it seemed they had the nucleus of a set. Brudderkins was a member of the Theatrical Judges, an excellent and influential little club of journalists and literary people, and he knew Shimer and Stargate and Whiffle, of the “Red Dragon,” and besides these were the Revels. They knew the Revels quite well. Sidney Revel before his rapid rise to prominence as a writer of epigrammatic essays that were quite above the ordinary public, had been an assistant master at one of the best Folkestone schools, Brudderkins had brought him home to tea several times, and it was he had first suggested Helen should try and write. “It’s perfectly easy,” Sidney had said. He had been writing occasional things for the evening papers, and for the weekly reviews even at that time. Then he had gone up to London and had almost unavoidedly become a dramatic critic. Those brilliant essays had followed, and then “Red Hearts a-Beating,” the romance that had made him. It was a tale of spirited adventure, full of youth and beauty and naive passion and generous devotion, bold, as the Bookman said, and frank in places, but never in the slightest degree morbid. He had met and married an American widow with quite a lot of money, and they had made a very distinct place for themselves, Kipps learnt, in the literary and artistic society of London. Helen seemed to dwell on the Revels a great deal; it was her exemplary story, and when she spoke of Sidney⁠—she often called him Sidney⁠—she would become thoughtful. She spoke most of him naturally because she had still to meet Mrs. Revel.⁠ ⁠… Certainly they would be in the world in no time, even if the distant connection with the Beaupres family came to nothing.

Kipps gathered that with his marriage and the movement to London they were to undergo that subtle change of name Coote had first adumbrated. They were to become “Cuyps,” Mr. and Mrs. Cuyps. Or, was it Cuyp?

“It’ll be rum at first,” said Kipps. “I dessay I shall soon get into it.”⁠ ⁠…

So in their several ways they all contributed to enlarge and refine and exercise the intelligence of Kipps. And behind all these other influences, and, as it were, presiding over and correcting these influences, was Kipps’ nearest friend, Coote, a sort of master of the ceremonies. You figure his face, blowing slightly with solicitude, his slate coloured, projecting but not unkindly eye intent upon our hero. The thing he thought was going off admirably. He studied Kipps’ character immensely. He would discuss him with his sister, with Mrs. Walshingham, with the freckled girl, with anyone who would stand it. “He is an interesting character,” he would say, “likable⁠—a sort of gentleman by instinct. He takes to all these things. He improves every day. He’ll soon get sang froid. We took him up just in time. He wants now⁠—well⁠—. Next year, perhaps, if there is a good Extension Literature course, he might go in for it. He wants to go in for something like that.”

“He’s going in for his bicycle now,” said Mrs. Walshingham.

“That’s all right for summer,” said Coote, “but he wants to go in for some serious, intellectual interest, something to take him out of himself a little more. Savoir faire and self-forgetfulness is more than half the secret of sangfroid.”

The world as Coote presented it was in part an endorsement, in part an amplification and in part a rectification of the world of Kipps, the world that derived from the old couple in New Romney and had been developed in the Emporium; the world, in fact, of common British life. There was