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

flannel and the straw hat that had followed Kipps’ payment in advance for his course in elocution, his hands were deep in his side-pockets and animated the corners of his jacket, and his attentive gaze at the passing loungers, the faint smile under his boldly drawn nose, showed him engaged in studying character—no doubt for some forthcoming play.

‘What HO!’ said he, at the sight of Kipps, and swept off the straw hat with so ample a clutch of his great flat hand that it suggested to Helen’s startled mind a conjurer about to palm a halfpenny.

”Ello, Chitt’low,’ said Kipps, a little awkwardly, and not saluting.

Chitterlow hesitated. ‘Half a mo’, my boy,’ he said, and arrested Kipps by extending a large hand over his chest. ‘Excuse me, my dear,’ he said, bowing like his Russian count by way of apology to Helen, and with a smile that would have killed at a hundred yards. He effected a semi-confidential grouping of himself and Kipps, while Helen stood in white amazement.

‘About that play,’ he said.

”Ow about it?’ asked Kipps, acutely aware of Helen.

‘It’s all right,’ said Chitterlow. ‘There’s a strong smell of syndicate in the air, I may tell you. Strong.’

‘That’s aw right,’ said Kipps.

‘You needn’t tell everybody,’ said Chitterlow, with a transitory confidential hand to his mouth, which pointed the application of the ‘everybody’ just a trifle too strongly. ‘But I think it’s coming off. However—I mustn’t detain you now. So long. You’ll come round, eh?’

‘Right you are,’ said Kipps.

‘To-night?’

‘At eight.’

And then, and more in the manner of a Russian prince than any common count, Chitterlow bowed and withdrew. Just for a moment he allowed a conquering eye to challenge Helen’s, and noted her for a girl of quality…

There was a silence between our lovers for a space.

‘That,’ said Kipps, with an allusive movement of the head, ‘was Chitt’low.’

‘Is he—a friend of yours?’

‘In a way… You see, I met Mm. Leastways ‘e met me. Run into me with a bicycle, ‘e did, and so we got talking together.’

He tried to appear at his ease. The young lady scrutinised his profile.

‘What is he?’

”E’s a Nacter chap,’ said Kipps. ‘Leastways ‘e writes plays.’

‘And sells them?’

‘Partly.’

‘Whom to.’

‘Different people. Shares he sells—It’s all right, reely—

‘I meant to tell you about him before.’

Helen looked over her shoulder to catch a view of Chitterlow’s retreating aspect. It did not compel her complete confidence.

She turned to her lover, and said in a tone of quiet authority, ‘You must tell me all about Chitterlow. Now.’

The explanation began…

The School Play came almost as a relief to Kipps. In the flusterment of going in he could almost forget, for a time, his Laocoon struggle to explain, and in the intervals he did his best to keep forgetting. But Helen, with a gentle insistence, resumed the explanation of Chitterlow as they returned towards Folkestone.

Chitterlow was confoundedly difficult to explain. You could hardly imagine!

There was an almost motherly anxiety in Helen’s manner, blended with the resolution of a schoolmistress to get to the bottom of the affair. Kipps’ ears were soon quite brightly red.

‘Have you seen one of his plays?’

”E’s tole me about one.’

‘But on the stage.’

‘No. He ‘asn’t ‘ad any on the stage yet. That’s all coming…’

‘Promise me,’ she said in conclusion, ‘you won’t do anything without consulting me.’

And, of course, Kipps promised. ‘Oo no!’

They went on their way in silence.

‘One can’t know everybody,’ said Helen in general.

‘Of course,’ said Kipps, ‘in a sort of way it was him that helped me to my money.’ And he indicated in a confused manner the story of the advertisement. ‘I don’t like to drop ‘im all at once,’ he added.

Helen was silent for a space, and when she spoke she went off at a tangent. ‘We shall live in London—soon,’ she remarked. ‘It’s only while we are here.’

It was the first intimation she gave him of their postnuptial prospects.

‘We shall have a nice little flat somewhere, not too far west, and there we shall build up a circle of our own.’

2

All that declining summer Kipps was the pupil lover. He made an extraordinarily open secret of his desire for self-improvement; indeed Helen had to hint once or twice that his modest frankness was excessive, and all this new circle of friends did, each after his or her manner, everything that was possible to supplement Helen’s efforts and help him to ease and skill in the more cultivated circles to which he had come. Coote was still the chief teacher, the tutor—there are so many little difficulties that a man may take to another man that he would not care to propound to the woman he loves—but they were all, so to speak, upon the staff. Even the freckled girl said to him once in a pleasant way, ‘You mustn’t say ‘centre temps,’�� you must say ‘contraytom,’ ‘ when he borrowed that expression from Manners and Rules, and she tried, at his own suggestion, to give him clear ideas upon the subject of ‘as’ and ‘has.’ A certain confusion between these words was becoming evident, the first-fruits of a lesson from Chitterlow on the aspirate. Hitherto he had discarded that dangerous letter almost altogether, but now he would pull up at words beginning with ‘h’ and draw a sawing breath—rather like a startled kitten—and then aspirate with vigour.

Said Kipps one day, ‘As ‘e?—I should say, ah—Has ‘e? Ye know I got a lot of difficulty over them two words, which is which?’

‘Well, ‘as’ is a conjunction, and ‘has’ is a verb.’

‘I know,’ said Kipps, ‘but when is ‘has’ a conjunction and when is ‘as’ a verb?’

‘Well,’ said the freckled girl, preparing to be very lucid. ‘It’s has when it means one has, meaning having, but if it isn’t it’s as. As, for instance, one says ‘e—I mean he—He has. But one says—‘as he has.”

‘I see,’ said Kipps. ‘So I ought to say ”as ‘e?”

‘No, if you are asking a question you say has ‘e—I mean he—‘as he?’ She blushed quite brightly, but still clung to her air of lucidity.

‘I see,’ said Kipps. He was about to say something further, but he desisted. ‘I got it much clearer now. Has ‘e? Has ‘e as. Yes.’

‘If you remember about having.’

‘Oo, I will,’ said Kipps…

Miss Coote specialised in Kipps’ artistic development. She had early formed an opinion that he had considerable artistic sensibility; his remarks on her work had struck her as decidedly intelligent, and whenever he called round to see them she would show him some work of art—now an illustrated book, now perhaps a colour print of a Botticelli, now the Hundred Best Paintings, now ‘Academy Pictures,’ now a German art handbook and now some magazine of furniture and design. ‘I know you like these things,’ she used to say, and Kipps said, ‘Oo, I do.’ He soon acquired a little armoury of appreciative sayings. When presently the Walshinghams took him up to the Arts and Crafts, his deportment was intelligent in the extreme. For a time he kept a wary silence and suddenly pitched upon a colour print. That’s rather nace,’ he said to Mrs. Walshingham. ‘That lill’ thing. There.’ He always said things like that by preference to the mother rather than the daughter unless he was perfectly sure.

He quite took to Mrs. Walshingham. He was impressed by her conspicuous tact and refinement; it seemed to him that the ladylike could go no farther. She was always dressed with a delicate fussiness that was never disarranged, and even a sort of faded quality about her hair, and face, and bearing, and emotions, contributed to her effect. Kipps was not a big man, and commonly he did not feel a big man, but with Mrs. Walshingham he always felt enormous and distended, as though he was a navy who had taken some disagreeable poison which puffed him up inside his skin as a preliminary to bursting. He felt, too, as though he had been rolled in clay and his hair dressed with gum. And he felt that his voice was strident and his accent like somebody swinging a crowded pig’s-tail in a free and careless manner. All this increased and enforced his respect for her. Her hand, which flitted often and again to his hand and arm, was singularly well shaped and cool. ‘Arthur,’ she called him from the very beginning.

She did not so much positively teach and tell him as tactfully guide and infect him. Her conversation was not so much didactic as exemplary. She would say, ‘I do like people to do’ so and so. She would tell him anecdotes of nice things done, of gentlemanly feats of graceful consideration; she would record her neat observations of people in trains and omnibuses, how, for example, a man had passed her change to the conductor, ‘quite a common man he looked,’ but he had lifted his hat. She stamped Kipps so deeply with the hat-raising habit that he would uncover if he found himself in the same railway ticket-office with a lady, and so stand ceremoniously until the difficulties of change drove him to an apologetic provisional oblique resumption of his headgear… And robbing these things of any air of personal application, she threw about them an abundant talk about her two children—she called them her Twin Jewels 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 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 hanson 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-out 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