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

her hair below the brim with the minutest piece of tape tie-up showing did not repay close examination. Mrs. “Wogdelenk” wore a sort of mumps bandage of lace, and there was another lady perfectly dazzling with beads, and jewels and bits of trimming. They were all flaps and angles and flounces⁠—these women. Not one of them looked as neat and decent a shape as Ann’s clean, trim, little figure. Echoes of Masterman woke up in him again. Ladies indeed! Here were all these chattering people, with money, with leisure, with every chance in the world, and all they could do was to crowd like this into a couple of rooms and jabber nonsense about anagrams.

“Could Cypshi really mean Cuyps?” floated like a dissolving wreath of mist across his mind.

Abruptly resolution stood armed in his heart. He was going to get out of this!

“ ’Scuse me,” he said, and began to wade neck deep through the bubbling tea party.

He was going to get out of it all!

He found himself close by Helen. “I’m orf,” he said, but she gave him the briefest glance. She did not appear to hear him. “Still, Mr. Spratlingdown, you must admit there’s a limit even to conformity,” she was saying.⁠ ⁠…

He was in a curtained archway, and Ann was before him carrying a tray supporting several small sugar bowls.

He was moved to speech. “What a Lot!” he said, and then mysteriously, “I’m engaged to her.” He indicated Helen’s new hat, and became aware of a skirt he had stepped upon.

Ann stared at him helplessly, borne past in the grip of incomprehensible imperatives.

Why shouldn’t they talk together?

He was in a small room, and then at the foot of the staircase in the hall. He heard the rustle of a dress, and what was conceivable his hostess was upon him.

“But you’re not going, Mr. Kipps?” she said.

“I must,” he said; “I got to.”

“But, Mr. Kipps!”

“I must,” he said. “I’m not well.”

“But before the guessing! Without any tea!”

Ann appeared and hovered behind him.

“I got to go,” said Kipps.

If he parleyed with her Helen might awake to his desperate attempt.

“Of course if you must go.”

“It’s something I’ve forgotten,” said Kipps, beginning to feel regrets. “Reely I must.”

Mrs. Botting turned with a certain offended dignity, and Ann in a state of flushed calm that evidently concealed much came forward to open the door.

“I’m very sorry,” he said; “I’m very sorry,” half to his hostess and half to her, and was swept past her by superior social forces⁠—like a drowning man in a millrace⁠—and into the Upper Sandgate Road. He half turned upon the step, and then slam went the door.⁠ ⁠…

He retreated along the Leas, a thing of shame and perplexity⁠—Mrs. Botting’s aggrieved astonishment uppermost in his mind.⁠ ⁠…

Something⁠—reinforced by the glances of the people he was passing⁠—pressed its way to his attention through the tumultuous disorder of his mind.

He became aware that he was still wearing his little placard with the letters “Cypshi.”

“Desh it!” he said, clutching off this abomination. In another moment its several letters, their task accomplished, were scattering gleefully before the breeze down the front of the Leas.

Kipps was dressed for Mrs. Wace’s dinner half an hour before it was time to start, and he sat waiting until Coote should come to take him around. Manners and Rules of Good Society lay before him neglected. He had read the polished prose of the member of the aristocracy, on page 96, as far as⁠—

“the acceptance of an invitation is in the eyes of diners out, a binding obligation which only ill-health, family bereavement, or some all-important reason justifies its being set on one side or otherwise evaded”⁠—

and then he had lapsed into gloomy thoughts.

That afternoon he had had a serious talk with Helen.

He had tried to express something of the change of heart that had happened to him. But to broach the real state of the matter had been altogether too terrible for him. He had sought a minor issue. “I don’t like all this Seciety,” he had said.

“But you must see people,” said Helen.

“Yes, but⁠—. It’s the sort of people you see.” He nerved himself. “I didn’t think much of that lot at the Enegram Tea.”

“You have to see all sorts of people if you want to see the world,” said Helen.

Kipps was silent for a space and a little short of breath.

“My dear Arthur,” she began, almost kindly, “I shouldn’t ask you to go to these affairs if I didn’t think it good for you, should I?”

Kipps acquiesced in silence.

“You will find the benefit of it all when we get to London. You learn to swim in a tank before you go out into the sea. These people here are good enough to learn upon. They’re stiff and rather silly and dreadfully narrow and not an idea in a dozen of them, but it really doesn’t matter at all. You’ll soon get savoir faire.”

He made to speak again, and found his powers of verbal expression lacking. Instead he blew a sigh.

“You’ll get used to it all very soon,” said Helen helpfully.⁠ ⁠…

As he sat meditating over that interview and over the vistas of London that opened before him, on the little flat, and teas and occasions and the constant presence of Brudderkins and all the bright prospect of his new and better life, and how he would never see Ann any more, the housemaid entered with a little package, a small, square envelope to “Arthur Kipps, Esquire.”

“A young woman left this, Sir,” said the housemaid, a little severely.

“Eh?” said Kipps; “what young woman?” and then suddenly began to understand.

“She looked an ordinary young woman,” said the housemaid coldly.

“Ah!” said Kipps. “That’s orlright.”

He waited till the door had closed behind the girl, staring at the envelope in his hand, and then, with a curious feeling of increasing tension, tore it open. As he did so, some quicker sense than sight or touch told him its contents. It was Ann’s half sixpence. And, besides, not a word!

Then she must have heard him⁠—!

She had kept the half sixpence all