Kipps - H. G. Wells (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📗

a desperate and manly treatment of what was, after all, a creditable injury.

‘It ought to be tied up,’ said the lodging-house keeper, holding her chisel upright in her hand. ‘It’s a bad cut to bleed like that.’

‘We must tie it up,’ said the freckled girl, and hesitated in front of Kipps. ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ she said.

‘I dunno ‘ow I managed not to bring one,’ said Kipps. ‘I—Not ‘aving a cold, I suppose some ‘ow I didn’t think—!’

He checked a further flow of blood.

The girl with the freckles caught Miss Walshingham’s eye and held it for a moment. Both glanced at Kipps’ injury. The boy with the gift, who had reappeared with a chastened expression from some noisy pursuit beneath his desk, made the neglected motions of one who proffers shyly. Miss Walshingham, under the spell of the freckled girl’s eye, produced a handkerchief. The voice of the maiden lady could be heard in the background: ‘I’ve been through all the technical education Ambulance classes twice, and I know you go so if it’s a vein, and so if it’s an artery—at least you go so for one, and so for the other, whichever it may be—but…’

‘If you will give me your hand,’ said the freckled girl; and proceeded, with Miss Walshingham’s assistance, to bandage Kipps in a most businesslike way. Yes, they actually bandaged Kipps. They pulled up his cuffs—happily they were not a very frayed pair—and held his wrist and wrapped the soft handkerchief round it, and tightened the knot together. And Miss Walshingham’s face, the face of that almost divine Over-human came close to the face of Kipps.

‘We’re not hurting you, are we?’ she said.

‘Not a bit,’ said Kipps, as he would have said if they had been sawing his arm off.

‘We’re not experts, you know,’ said the freckled girl.

‘I’m sure it’s a dreadful cut,’ said Miss Walshingham.

‘It ain’t much, reely,’ said Kipps; ‘and you’re taking a lot of trouble. I’m sorry I broke that window. I can’t think what I could have been doing.’

‘It isn’t so much the cut at the time, it’s the poisoning afterwards,’ came the voice of the maiden lady.

‘Of course, I’m quite willing to pay for the window,’ panted Kipps opulently.

‘We must make it just as tight as possible to stop the bleeding,’ said the freckled girl.

‘I don’t think it’s much, reely,’ said Kipps. ‘I’m awful sorry I broke that window, though.’

Tut your finger on the knot, dear,’ said the freckled girl.

‘Eh?’ said Kipps. ‘I mean—’

Both the young ladies became very intent on the knot, and Mr. Kipps was very red and very intent upon the two young ladies.

‘Mortified, and had to be sawn off,’ said the maiden lady.

‘Sawn off,’ said the lodging-house keeper.

‘Sawn right off,’ said the maiden lady, and jabbed at her mangled design.

‘There,’ said the freckled girl, ‘I think that ought to do. You’re sure it’s not too tight?’

‘Not a bit,’ said Kipps.

He met Miss Walshingham’s eyes and smiled to show how little he cared for wounds and pain. ‘It’s only a little cut,’ he added.

The maiden lady appeared as an addition to their group. ‘You should have washed the wound, dear,’ she said. ‘I was just telling Miss Collis—’ She peered through her glasses at the bandage. ‘That doesn’t look quite right,’ she remarked critically. ‘You should have taken the ambulance classes. But I suppose it will have to do. Are you hurting?’

‘Not a bit,’ said Kipps; and smiled at them all with the air of a brave soldier in hospital.

‘I’m sure it must hurt,’ said Miss Walshingham.

‘Anyhow, you’re a very good patient,’ said the girl with the freckles.

Mr. Kipps became bright pink. ‘I’m only sorry I broke the window—that’s all,’ he said. ‘But who would have thought it was going to break like that?’

Pause.

‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to go on carving to-night,’ said Miss Walshingham.

‘I’ll try,’ said Kipps. ‘It reely doesn’t hurt—not anything to matter.’

Presently Miss Walshingham came to him as he carved heroically with his hand bandaged in her handkerchief. There was a touch of novel interest in her eyes. ‘I’m afraid you’re not getting on very fast,’ she said.

The freckled girl looked up and regarded Miss Walshingham.

‘I’m doing a little, anyhow,’ said Kipps. ‘I don’t want to waste any time. A feller like me hasn’t much time to spare.’

It struck the girls that there was a quality of modest disavowal about that ‘feller like me.’ It gave them a light into this obscure person, and Miss Walshingham ventured to commend his work as ‘promising’ and to ask whether he meant to follow it up. Kipps didn’t ‘altogether know’—‘things depended on so much,’ but if he was in Folkestone next winter he certainly should. It did not occur to Miss Walshingham at the time to ask why his progress in art depended upon his presence in Folkestone. There were some more questions and answers— they continued to talk to him for a little time even when Mr. Chester Coote had come into the room—and when at last the conversation had died out, it dawned upon Kipps just how much his cut wrist had done for him…

He went to sleep that night revising that conversation for the twentieth time, treasuring this and expanding that, and inserting things he might have said to Miss Walshingham— things he might still say about himself—in relation, more or less explicit, to her. He wasn’t quite sure if he wouldn’t like his arm to mortify a bit, which would make him interesting, or to heal up absolutely, which would show the exceptional purity of his blood…

4

The affair of the broken window happened late in April, and the class came to an end in May. In that interval there were several small incidents and great developments of emotion. I have done Kipps no justice if I have made it seem that his face was unsightly. It was, as the freckled girl pointed out to Helen Walshingham, an ‘interesting’ face, and that aspect of him which presented chiefly erratic hair and glowing ears ceased to prevail.

They talked him over, and the freckled girl discovered there was something ‘wistful’ in his manner. They detected a ‘natural delicacy,’ and the freckled girl set herself to draw him out from that time forth. The freckled girl was nineteen, and very wise and motherly and benevolent, and really she greatly preferred drawing out Kipps to woodcarving. It was quite evident to her that Kipps was in love with Helen Walshingham, and it struck her as a queer and romantic and pathetic and extremely interesting phenomenon. And as at that time she regarded Helen as ‘simply lovely,’ it seemed only right and proper that she should assist Kipps in his modest efforts to place himself in a state of absolute abandon upon her altar.

Under her sympathetic management the position of Kipps was presently defined quite clearly. He was unhappy in his position—misunderstood. He told her he ‘didn’t seem to get on like’ with customers, and she translated this for him as ‘too sensitive.’ The discontent with his fate in life, the dreadful feeling that Education was slipping by him, troubles that time and usage were glazing over a little, revived to their old acuteness but not to their old hopelessness. As a basis for sympathy, indeed, they were even a source of pleasure.

And one day at dinner it happened that Carshot and Buggins fell talking of ‘these here writers,’ and how Dickens had been a labeller of blacking, and Thackeray ‘an artis’ who couldn’t sell a drawing,’ and how Samuel Johnson had walked to London without any boots, having thrown away his only pair ‘out of pride.’ ‘It’s Luck,’ said Buggins, ‘to a very large extent. They just happen to hit on something that catches on, and there you are!’

‘Nice easy life they have of it, too,’ said Miss Mergle. ‘Write just an hour or so, and done for the day! Almost like gentlefolks.’

‘There’s more work in it than you’d think,’ said Carshot, stooping to a mouthful.

‘I wouldn’t mind changing for all that,’ said Buggins. ‘I’d like to see one of these here authors marking off with Jimmy.’

‘I think they copy from each other a good deal,’ said Miss Mergle.

‘Even then (chup, chup, chup),’ said Carshot, ‘there’s writing it out in their own hands.’

They proceeded to enlarge upon the literary life, on its ease and dignity, on the social recognition accorded to those who led it, and on the ample gratifications their vanity achieved. ‘Pictures everywhere—never get a new suit without being photographed—almost like Royalty,’ said Miss Mergle. And all this talk impressed the imagination of Kipps very greatly. Here was a class that seemed to bridge the gulf. On the one hand essentially Low, but by fictitious circumstances capable of entering upon these levels of social superiority to which all true Englishmen aspire, these levels from which one may tip a butler, scorn a tailor, and even commune with those who lead ‘men’ into battle. ‘A’most like gentlefolks’—that was it! He brooded over these things in the afternoon, until they blossomed into daydreams. Suppose, for example, he had chanced to write a book, a well-known book, under an assumed name, and yet kept on being a draper all the time… Impossible, of course; but suppose—It made quite a long dream.

And at the next woodcarving class he let it be drawn from him that his real choice in life was to be a Nawther—‘only one doesn’t get a chance.’

After this there were times when Kipps had the pleasant sense that comes of attracting interest. He was a mute, inglorious Dickens, or at any rate something of that sort, and they were all taking him at that. The discovery of this indefinable ‘something’ in him, the development of which was now painfully restricted and impossible, did much to bridge the gulf between himself and Miss Walshingham. He was unfortunate, he was futile, but he was not ‘common’. Even now with help—? The two girls, and the freckled girl in particular, tried to ‘stir him up’ to some effort to do his imputed potentialities justice. They were still young enough to believe that to nice and niceish members of the male sex— more especially when under the stimulus of feminine encouragement—nothing is finally impossible.

The freckled girl was, I say, the stage manager of this affair, but Miss Walshingham was the presiding divinity. A touch of proprietorship came in her eyes at times when she looked at him. He was hers—unconditionally—and she knew it.

To her directly, Kipps scarcely ever made a speech. The enterprising things that he was continually devising to say to her, he usually did not say, or said, with a suitable modification, to the girl with the freckles. And one day the girl with the freckles smote him to the heart. She said to him, looking across the classroom to where her friend reached a cast from the shelf, ‘I do think Helen Walshingham is sometimes the most lovely person in the world. Look at her now!’

Kipps gasped for a moment. The moment lengthened, and she regarded him as an intelligent young surgeon might regard an operation without anaesthetics. ‘You’re right,’ he said, and then looked at her with an entire abandonment of visage.

She coloured under his glare of silent avowal, and he blushed brightly. ‘I think so, too,’ he said hoarsely, cleared his throat, and, after a meditative moment, proceeded sacramentally with his woodcarving.

‘You are wonderful,’ said the freckled girl to Miss Walshingham, apropos of nothing, as they went on their way home together. ‘He simply adores you.’

‘But, my dear, what have I done?’ said Helen.

‘That’s just it,’ said the freckled girl. ‘What have you done?’

And then