by H. G. Wells
He took to these new interests with a quite natural and personal zest. He became initiated into the mysteries of ‘flirting’ and – at a slightly later stage and with some leading hints from Pearce, who was of a communicative disposition in these matters – of the milder forms of ‘spooning.’27 Very soon he was engaged. Before two years were out he had been engaged six times, and was beginning to be rather a desperate28 fellow, so far as he could make out. Desperate, but quite gentlemanly, be it understood, and without let or hindrance to the fact that he was in four brief lessons ‘prepared’ by a distant-mannered and gloomy young curate, and ‘confirmed’ a member of the Established Church.
The engagements in drapery establishments do not necessarily involve a subsequent marriage. They are essentially more refined, less coarsely practical, and altogether less binding than the engagements of the vulgar rich. These young ladies do not like not to be engaged, it is so unnatural, and Mr Kipps was as easy to get engaged to as one could wish. There are, from the young lady's point of view, many conveniences in being engaged. You get an escort for church and walks, and so forth. It is not quite the thing to walk abroad with a ‘feller,’ much more to ‘spoon’ with him, when he is neither one's fiancé nor an adopted brother; it is considered either a little fast or else as savouring of the ‘walking-out’ habits of the servant girls. Now, such is the sweetness of human charity, that the shop young lady in England has just the same horror of doing anything that savours of the servant girl as the lady journalist, let us say, has of anything savouring of the shop-girl, or the really quite nice young lady has of anything savouring of any sort of girl who has gone down into the economic battlefield to earn herself a living…. But the very deepest of these affairs was still among the shallow places of love, at best it was paddling where it is decreed that men must sink or swim. Of the deep and dangerous places, and of the huge buoyant lift of its waves, he tasted nothing. Affairs of clothes and vanities they were, jealousies about a thing said, flatteries and mutual boastings, climaxes in the answering grasp of hands, the temerarious29 use of Christian names, culminations in a walk, or a near confidence, or a little pressure more or less. Close sitting on a seat after twilight with some little fondling was, indeed, the boldest of lover's adventures, the utmost limit of his enterprises in the service of that stark Great Lady who is daughter of Uranus and the sea.30 The ‘young ladies’ who reigned in his heart came and went like people in an omnibus; there was the vehicle, so to speak, upon the road, and they entered and left it without any cataclysm of emotion. For all that, this development of the sex interest was continuously very interesting to Kipps, and kept him going as much as anything through all these servile years….
§ 6
For a tailpiece to this chapter one may vignette a specimen minute.
It is a bright Sunday afternoon; the scene is a secluded little seat halfway down the front of the Leas, and Kipps is four years older than when he parted from Ann. There is a quite perceptible down upon his upper lip, and his costume is just as tremendous a ‘mash’ as lies within his means. His collar is so high that it scars his inaggressive jaw-bone, and his hat has a curly brim, his tie shows taste, his trousers are modestly brilliant, and his boots have light cloth uppers and button at the side. He jabs at the gravel before him with a cheap cane and glances sideways at Flo Bates, the young lady from the cash desk. She is wearing a brilliant blouse and a gaily trimmed hat. There is an air of fashion about her that might disappear under the analysis of a woman of the world, but which is quite sufficient to make Kipps very proud to be distinguished as her particular ‘feller,’ and to be allowed at temperate intervals to use her Christian name.
The conversation is light and gay in the modern style, and Flo keeps on smiling, good temper being her special charm.
‘Ye see, you don’ mean what I mean,’ he is saying.
‘Well, what do you mean?’
‘Not what you mean!’
‘Well, tell me.’
‘Ah! That's another story.’
Pause. They look meaningly at one another.
‘You are a one for being roundabout,’ says the lady.
‘Well, you're not so plain, you know.’
‘Not plain?’
‘No.’
‘You don't mean to say I'm roundabout?’
‘No. I mean to say— Though—’ Pause.
‘Well?’
‘You're not a bit plain – you're’ (his voice jumps up to a squeak) ‘pretty. See?’
‘Oh, get out!’ – her voice lifts also – with pleasure.
She strikes him with her glove, then glances suddenly at a ring upon her finger. Her smile disappears momentarily. Another pause. Eyes meet and the smile returns.
‘I wish I knew—’ says Kipps.
‘Knew—?’
‘Where you got that ring.’
She lifts the hand with the ring until her eyes just show (very prettily) over it. ‘You'd just like to know,’ she says slowly, and smiles still more brightly with the sense of successful effect.
‘I dessay I could guess.’
‘I dessay you couldn't.’
‘Couldn't I?’
‘No!’
‘Guess it in three.’
‘Not the name.’
‘Ah!’
‘Ah!’
‘Well, anyhow, lemme look at it.’
He looks at it. Pause. Giggles, slight struggle, and a slap on Kipps' coat-sleeve. A passer-by appears down the path and she hastily withdraws her hand.
She glances at the face of the approaching man. They maintain a bashful silence until he has passed….
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE WOODCARVING CLASS
§ 1
Though these services to Venus Epipontia, 1 and these studies in the art of dress, did much to distract his thoughts and mitigate his earlier miseries, it would be mere optimism to present Kipps as altogether happy. A vague dissatisfaction with life drifted about him, and every now and again enveloped him like a sea-fog. During these periods it was greyly evident that there was something, something vital in life, lacking. For no earthly reason that Kipps could discover, he was haunted by a suspicion that life was going wrong, or had already gone wrong in some irrevocable way. The ripening self-consciousness of adolescence developed this into a clearly felt insufficiency. It was all very well to carry gloves, open doors, never say ‘Miss’ to a girl, and walk ‘outside,’ but were there not other things, conceivably even deeper things, before the complete thing was attained? For example, certain matters of knowledge. He perceived great bogs of ignorance about him, fumbling traps, where other people, it was alleged, real gentlemen and ladies, for example, and the clergy, had knowledge and assurance, bogs which it was sometimes difficult to elude. A girl arrived in the millinery department who could, she said, speak French and German. She snubbed certain advances, and a realization of inferiority blistered Kipps. But he tried to pass the thing off as a joke by saying ‘Parlez-vous Francey’ 2 whenever he met her, and inducing the junior apprentice to say the same.
He even made some dim half-secret experiments towards remedying the deficiencies he suspected. He spent five shillings on five serial numbers of a Home Educator, 3 and bought (and even thought of reading) a Shakespeare and a Bacon's Advancement of Learning, and the poems of Herrick 4 from a chap who was hard up. He battled with Shakespeare all one Sunday afternoon, and found the ‘English Literature,’ with which Mr Woodrow had equipped him, had vanished down some crack in his mind. He had no doubt it was very splendid stuff, but he couldn't quite make out what it was all about. There was an occult meaning, he knew, in literature, and he had forgotten it. Moreover, he discovered one day, while taunting the junior apprentice with ignorance, that his ‘rivers of England’ had also slipped his memory, and he laboriously restored that fabric of role learning: ‘Ty Wear Tees’ Umber 5 —’
I suppose some such phase of discontent is a normal thing in every adolescence. The ripening mind seeks somet
hing upon which its will may crystallize, upon which its discursive emotions, growing more abundant with each year of life, may concentrate. For many, though not for all, it takes a religious direction; but in those particular years the mental atmosphere of Folkestone was exceptionally free from any revivalistic 6 disturbance that might have reached Kipps' mental being. Sometimes they fall in love. I have known this uneasiness end in different cases in a vow to read one book (not a novel) every week, to read the Bible through in a year, to pass in the Honours division of the London Matriculation examination, 7 to become an accomplished chemist, and never more to tell a lie. It led Kipps finally into Technical Education, 8 as we understand it in the south of England.
It was in the last year of his apprenticeship that he had pursued his researches after that missing qualification into the Folkestone Young Men's Association, where Mr Chester Coote prevailed. Mr Chester Coote was a young man of semi-independent means, who inherited a share in a house agency, read Mrs Humphry Ward, 9 and took an interest in social work. He was a whitish-faced young man, with a prominent nose, pale blue eyes, and a quivering quality in his voice. He was very active upon committees; he was very prominent and useful on all social occasions, in evidence upon platforms, and upon all those semi-public occasions when the Great descend. He lived with an only sister. To Kipps and his kind in the Young Men's Association he read a stimulating paper on ‘Self-Help.’ 10 He said it was the noblest of all our distinctive English characteristics, and he was very much down upon the ‘over-educated’ Germans. At the close a young German hairdresser made a few commendatory remarks which developed somehow into an oration on Hanoverian politics. 11 As he became excited he became guttural and obscure; the meeting sniggered cheerfully at such ridiculous English, and Kipps was so much amused that he forgot a private project to ask this Chester Coote how he might set about a little Self-Help on his own private account in such narrow margins of time as the System of Mr Shalford spared him. But afterwards in the night-time it came to him again.
It was a few months later, and after his apprenticeship was over, and Mr Shalford had with depreciatory observations taken him on as an Improver 12 at twenty pounds a year, that this question was revived by a casual article on Technical Education in a morning paper that a commercial traveller left behind him. It played the rôle of the word in season. 13 Something in the nature of conversion, a faint sort of concentration of purpose, really occurred in him then. The article was written with penetrating vehemence, and it stimulated him to the pitch of inquiring about the local Science and Art Classes; and after he had told everybody in the shop about it, and taken the advice of all who supported his desperate resolution, he joined. At first he attended the class in Freehand, 14 that being the subject taught on early closing night, and he had already made some progress in that extraordinary routine of reproducing freehand copies, which for two generations has passed with English people for instruction in art, when the dates of the classes were changed. Thereby, just as the March winds were blowing, he was precipitated into the Woodcarving class, and his mind diverted first to this useful and broadening pursuit, and then to its teacher.
§ 2
The class in woodcarving was an extremely select class, conducted at that time by a young lady named Walshingham; and as this young lady was destined by Fortune to teach Kipps a great deal more than woodcarving, it will be well if the reader gets the picture of her correctly in mind. She was only a year or so older than he was, she had a pale intellectual face, dark grey eyes and black hair, which she wore over her forehead in an original and striking way that she had adapted from a picture by Rossetti in the South Kensington Museum. 15 She was slender so that without ungainliness she had an effect of being tall, and her hands were shapely and white when they came into contrast with hands much exercised in rolling and blocking. She dressed in those loose and pleasant forms and those soft and tempered shades that arose in England in the socialistic-aesthetic epoch, and remain to this day among us as the badge of those who read Turgenev's novels, 16 scorn current fiction, and think on higher planes. I think she was as beautiful as most beautiful people, and to Kipps she was altogether beautiful. She had, Kipps learnt, matriculated at London University, an astounding feat to his imagination, and the masterly way in which she demonstrated how to prod and worry honest pieces of wood into useless and unedifying patterns in relief, extorted his utmost admiration.
At first when Kipps had learnt he was to be taught by a ‘girl,’ he was inclined to resent it, the more so as Buggins had recently been very strong on the gross injustice of feminine employment. ‘We have to keep wives,’ said Buggins (though, as a matter of fact, he did not keep even one), ‘and how are we to do it with a lot of girls coming in to take the work out of our mouths?’ Afterwards Kipps, in conjunction with Pearce, looked at it from another point of view, and thought it would be rather a ‘lark.’ Finally, when he saw her, and saw her teaching and coming nearer to him with an impressive deliberation, he was breathless with awe and the quality of her dark slender femininity.
The class consisted of two girls and a maiden lady of riper years, friends of Miss Walshingham's, and anxious rather to support her in an interesting experiment than to become really expert woodcarvers; an oldish young man with spectacles and a black beard, who never spoke to anyone, and who was evidently too short-sighted to see his work as a whole; a small boy, who was understood to have a ‘gift’ for woodcarving; and a lodging-house keeper, who ‘took classes’ every winter, she told Mr Kipps, as though they were a tonic, and ‘found they did her good.’ And occasionally Mr Chester Coote refined and gentlemanly – would come into the class, with or without papers, ostensibly on committee business, but in reality to talk to the less attractive of the two girl-students, and sometimes a brother of Miss Walshingham's, a slender dark young man with a pale face and fluctuating resemblances to the young Napoleon, would arrive just at the end of the class-time to see his sister home.
All these personages impressed Kipps with a sense of inferiority that in the case of Miss Walshingham became positively abysmal. The ideas and knowledge they appeared to have, their personal capacity and freedom, opened a new world to his imagination. These people came and went with a sense of absolute assurance, against an overwhelming background of plaster casts, diagrams and tables, benches and a blackboard, a background that seemed to him to be saturated with recondite knowledge and the occult and jealously guarded tips and secrets that constitute Art and the Higher Life. They went home, he imagined, to homes where the piano was played with distinction and freedom, and books littered the tables and foreign languages were habitually used. They had complicated meals no doubt. They ‘knew etiquette,’ and how to avoid all the errors for which Kipps bought penny manuals – ‘What to Avoid,’ ‘Common Errors in Speaking,’ and the like. He knew nothing about it all, nothing whatever; he was a creature of the outer darkness blinking in an unsuspected light.
He heard them speak easily and freely to one another of examinations, of books and paintings, of ‘last year's Academy’ – a little contemptuously – and once, just at the end of the class-time, Mr Chester Coote and young Walshingham and the two girls argued about something or other called, he fancied, ‘Vagner,’ or ‘Vargner’ 17 – they seemed to say it both ways – and which presently shaped itself more definitely as the name of a man who made up music. (Carshot and Buggins weren't in it with them.) Young Walshingham, it appeared, said something or other that was an ‘epigram,’ 18 and they all applauded him. Kipps, I say, felt himself a creature of outer darkness, an inexcusable intruder in an altitudinous world. When the epigram happened he first of all smiled to pretend he understood, and instantly suppressed the smile to show he did not listen. Then he became extremely hot and uncomfortable, though nobody had noticed either phase.
It was clear his only chance of concealing his bottomless baseness was to hold his tongue, and meanwhile he chipped with earnest care and abased his soul before the very shadow of Miss Walshingham.
She used to come and direct and advise him, with, he felt, an effort to conceal the scorn she had for him, and indeed it is true that at first she thought of him chiefly as the clumsy young man with the red ears.
And as soon as he emerged from the first effect of pure and awe-stricken humility – he was greatly helped to emerge from that condition to a perception of human equality by the need the lodging-house keeper was under to talk while she worked, and as she didn't like Miss Walshingham and her friends very much, and the young man with spectacles was deaf, she naturally talked to Kipps – he perceived that he was in a state of adoration for Miss Walshingham that it seemed almost a blasphemous familiarity to speak of as being in love.
This state, you must understand, had nothing to do with ‘flirting’ or ‘spooning’ and that superficial passion that flashes from eye to eye upon the Leas and Pier – absolutely nothing. That he knew from the first. Her rather pallid, intellectual young face beneath those sombre clouds of hair put her in a class apart; towards her the thought of ‘attentions’ paled and vanished. To approach such a being, to perform sacrifices, and to perish obviously for her, seemed the limit he might aspire to, he or any man. For if his love was abasement, at any rate it had this much of manliness that it covered all his sex. It had not yet come to Kipps to acknowledge any man as his better in his heart of hearts. When one does that the game is played, and one grows old indeed.