by H. G. Wells
He rested on his hat and stick and looked appreciatively out of the window, and she glanced at him for one swift moment. A suggestion that might have come from the Art of Conversing came into his head. ‘Have you a garden?’ he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only a little one,’ she said, and then, ‘Perhaps you would like to see it.’
‘I like gardening,’ said Kipps, with memories of a pennyworth of nasturtiums he had once trained over his uncle's dustbin.
She led the way with a certain relief.
They emerged through a four-seasons' coloured glass door to a little iron verandah, that led by iron steps to a minute walled garden. There was just room for a patch of turf and a flower-bed; one sturdy variegated Euonymus grew in the corner. But the early June flowers, the big narcissus, snow upon the mountains,12 and a fine show of yellow wallflowers, shone gay.
‘That's our garden,’ said Helen. ‘It's not a very big one, is it?’
‘I like it,’ said Kipps.
‘It's small,’ she said, ‘but this is the day of small things.’
Kipps didn't follow that.
‘If you were writing when I came,’ he remarked, ‘I'm interrupting you.’
She turned round with her back to the railing and rested leaning on her hands. ‘I had finished,’ she said. ‘I couldn't get on.’
‘Were you making up something?’ asked Kipps.
There was a little interval before she smiled. ‘I try – quite vainly – to write stories,’ she said. ‘One must do something. I don't know whether I shall ever do any good – at that – anyhow. It seems so hopeless. And, of course – one must study the popular taste. But now my brother has gone to London – I get a lot of leisure.’
‘I seen your brother, 'aven't I?’
‘He came to the class once or twice. Very probably you have. He's gone to London to pass his examinations and become a solicitor. And then I suppose he'll have a chance. Not much, perhaps, even then. But he's luckier than I am.’
‘You got your classes and things.’
‘They ought to satisfy me. But they don't. I suppose I'm ambitious. We both are. And we hadn't much of a spring board.’ She glanced over her shoulder at the cramped little garden with an air of reference in her gesture.
‘I should think you could do anything if you wanted to?’ said Kipps.
‘As a matter of fact, I can't do anything I want to.’
‘You done a good deal.’
‘What?’
‘Well, didn't you pass one of these here University things?’
‘Oh, I matriculated!’
‘I should think I was no end of a swell if I did – I know that.’
‘Mr Kipps, do you know how many people matriculate into London University every year?’
‘How many, then?’
‘Between two and three thousand.’
‘Well, just think how many don't!’
Her smile came again and broke into a laugh. ‘Oh, they don't count,’ she said; and then realizing that might penetrate Kipps if he was left with it, she hurried on to, ‘The fact is, I'm a discontented person, Mr Kipps. Folkestone, you know, is a Sea Front, and it values people by sheer vulgar prosperity. We're not prosperous, and we live in a back street. We have to live here because this is our house. It's a mercy we haven't to “let.”13 One feels one hasn't opportunities. If one had, I suppose one wouldn't use them. Still—’
Kipps felt he was being taken tremendously into her confidence. ‘That's jest it,’ he said.
He leant forward on his stick and said very earnestly, ‘I believe you could do anything you wanted to, if you tried.’
She threw out her hands in disavowal.
‘I know,’ said he, very sagely, and nodding his head. ‘I watched you once or twice when you were teaching that wood-carving class.’
For some reason this made her laugh – a rather pleasant laugh, and that made Kipps feel a very witty and successful person. ‘It's very evident,’ she said, ‘that you're one of those rare people who believe in me, Mr Kipps,’ to which he answered, ‘Oo, I do!’ and then suddenly they became aware of Mrs Walshingham coming along the passage. In another moment she appeared through the four-seasons' door, bonneted and ladylike and a little faded, exactly as Kipps had seen her in the shop. Kipps felt a certain apprehension at her appearance, in spite of the reassurances he had had from Coote.
‘Mr Kipps has called on us,’ said Helen; and Mrs Walsh-ngham said it was very, very kind of him, and added that new people didn't call on them very much nowadays. There was nothing of the scandalized surprise Kipps had seen in the shop; she had heard, perhaps, he was a gentleman now. In the shop he had thought her rather jaded and haughty, but he had scarcely taken her hand, which responded to his touch with a friendly pressure, before he knew how mistaken he had been. She then told her daughter that someone called Mrs Wace had been out, and turned to Kipps again to ask him if he had had tea. Kipps said he had not, and Helen moved towards some mysterious interior. ‘But, I say,’ said Kipps, ‘don't you on my account—’
Helen vanished, and he found himself alone with Mrs Walshingham. Which, of course, made him breathless and Boreas-looking14 for a moment.
‘You were one of Helen's pupils in the woodcarving class?’ asked Mrs Walshingham, regarding him with the quiet watchfulness proper to her position.
‘Yes,’ said Kipps; ‘that's 'ow I 'ad the pleasure—’
‘She took a great interest in her woodcarving class. She is so energetic, you know, and it gives her an Outlet.’
‘I thought she taught something splendid.’
‘Everyone says she did very well. Helen, I think, would do anything well that she undertook to do. She's so very clever. And she throws herself into things so.’
She untied her bonnet-strings with a pleasant informality.
‘She has told me all about her class. She used to be full of it. And about your cut hand.’
‘Lor!’ said Kipps; ‘fancy telling that!’
‘Oh yes. And how brave you were!’
(Though, indeed, Helen's chief detail had been his remarkable expedient for checking bloodshed.)
Kipps became bright pink. ‘She said you didn't seem to feel it a bit.’
Kipps felt he would have to spend weeks over The Art of Conversing.
While he still hung fire, Helen returned with the apparatus for afternoon tea upon a tray.
‘Do you mind pulling out the table?’ asked Mrs Walshingham.
That again was very homelike. Kipps put down his hat and stick in the corner, and amidst an iron thunder pulled out a little rusty, green-painted, iron table, and then in the easiest manner followed Helen in to get chairs.
So soon as he had got rid of his teacup – he refused all food, of course, and they were merciful – he became wonderfully at his ease. Presently he was talking. He talked quite modestly and simply about his changed condition, and his difficulties and plans. He spread what indeed had an air of being all his simple little soul before their eyes. In a little while his clipped defective accent had become less perceptible to their ears, and they began to realize, as the girl with the freckles had long since realized, that there were passable aspects of Kipps. He confided, he submitted, and for both of them he had the realest, the most seductively flattering undertone of awe and reverence.
He remained about two hours, having forgotten how terribly incorrect it is to stay at such a length. They did not mind at all.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
ENGAGED
§1
Within two months, within a matter of three-and-fifty days, Kipps had clambered to the battlements of Heart's Desire.
It all became possible by the Walshinghams – it would seem at Coote's instigation – deciding, after all, not to spend the holidays at Bruges. Instead they remained in Folkestone, and this happy chance gave Kipps just all those opportunities of which he stood in need.
His crowning day was at Lympne, and long before the summe
r warmth began to break, while, indeed, August still flamed on high. They had organized – no one seemed to know who suggested it first – a water party on the still reaches of the old military canal at Hythe, and they were to picnic by the brick bridge, and afterwards to clamber to Lympne Castle. 1 The host of the gathering, it was understood very clearly, was Kipps.
They went a merry party. The canal was weedy, with only a few inches of water at the shallows, and so they went in three canoes. 2 Kipps had learnt to paddle – it had been his first athletic accomplishment; and his second – with the last three or four of ten private lessons still to come – was to be cycling. But Kipps did not paddle at all badly; muscles hardened by lifting pieces of cretonne could cut a respectable figure by the side of Coote's exertions, and the girl with the freckles, the girl who understood him, came in his canoe. They raced the Walshinghams, brother and sister; and Coote, in a liquefying state and blowing mightily, but still persistent, and always quite polite and considerate, toiled behind with Mrs Walshingham. She could not be expected to paddle (though, of course, she ‘offered’), and she reclined upon specially adjusted cushions under a black-and-white sunshade, and watched Kipps and her daughter, and feared at intervals that Coote was getting hot.
They were all more or less in holiday costume; the eyes of the girls looked out under the shade of wide-brimmed hats; even the freckled girl was unexpectedly pretty, and Helen, swinging sunlit to her paddle, gave Kipps, almost for the first time, the suggestion of a graceful body. Kipps was arrayed in the completest boating costume, and when his fashionable Panama was discarded and his hair blown into disorder, he became, in his white flannels, as sightly as most young men. His complexion was a notable asset.
Things favoured him, the day favoured him, everyone favoured him. Young Walshingham, the girl with the freckles, Coote, and Mrs Walshingham, were playing up to him in the most benevolent way, and between the landing-place and Lympne, Fortune, to crown their efforts, had placed a small convenient field entirely at the disposal of an adolescent bull. Not a big, real, resolute bull, but, on the other hand, no calf; a young bull, at the same stage of emotional development as Kipps, ‘where the brook and river meet.’ 3 Detachedly our party drifted towards him.
When they landed, young Walshingham, with the simple directness of a brother, abandoned his sister to Kipps and secured the freckled girl, leaving Coote to carry Mrs Walshingham's light wool wrap. He started at once in order to put an effectual distance between himself and his companion on the one hand, and a certain pervasive chaperonage that went with Coote, on the other. Young Walshingham, I think I have said, was dark, with a Napoleonic profile, and it was natural for him therefore to be a bold thinker and an epigrammatic speaker, and he had long ago discovered great possibilities of appreciation in the freckled girl. He was in a very happy frame that day because he had just been entrusted with the management of Kipps' affairs (old Bean inexplicably dismissed), and that was not a bad beginning for a solicitor of only a few months' standing; and, moreover, he had been reading Nietzsche, and he thought that in all probability he was the Non-Moral Overman referred to by that writer. He wore fairly large-sized hats. He wanted to expand the theme of the Non-Moral Overman in the ear of the freckled girl, to say it over, so to speak, and in order to seclude his exposition they went aside from the direct path and trespassed through a coppice, avoiding the youthful bull. They escaped to these higher themes but narrowly, for Coote and Mrs Walshingham, subtle chaperones both, and each indisposed, for excellent reasons, to encumber Kipps and Helen, were hot upon their heels. These two kept the direct route to the stile of the bull's field, and the sight of the animal at once awakened Coote's innate aversion to brutality in any shape or form. He said the stiles were too high, and that they could do better by going round by the hedge, and Mrs Walshingham, nothing loth, agreed.
This left the way clear for Kipps and Helen, and they encountered the bull. Helen did not observe the bull; Kipps did; but that afternoon, at any rate, he was equal to facing a lion. And the bull really came at them. It was not an affair of the bull-ring exactly, no desperate rushes and gorings, but he came; he regarded them with a large, wicked, bluish eye, opened a mouth below his moistly glistening nose, and booed, at any rate, if he did not exactly bellow, and he shook his head wickedly, and showed that tossing was in his mind. Helen was frightened, without any loss of dignity, and Kipps went extremely white. But he was perfectly calm, and he seemed to her to have lost the last vestiges of his accent and his social shakiness. He directed her to walk quietly towards the stile and made an oblique advance towards the bull.
‘You be orf!’ he said….
When Helen was well over the stile, Kipps withdrew in good order. He got over the stile under cover of a feint, and the thing was done – a small thing, no doubt, but just enough to remove from Helen's mind an incorrect deduction, that a man who was so terribly afraid of a teacup as Kipps must necessarily be abjectly afraid of everything else in the world. In her moment of reaction she went, perhaps, too far in the opposite direction. Hitherto Kipps had always had a certain flimsiness of effect for her. Now suddenly he was discovered solid. He was discovered possible in many new ways. Here, after all, was the sort of back a woman can get behind!…
As they went past the turf-crowned mass of Portus Lemanus, 4 up the steep slopes towards the castle on the crest, the thing was almost manifest in her eyes.
§ 2
Everyone who stays in Folkestone goes sooner or later to Lympne. The castle became a farmhouse, and the farmhouse, itself now ripe and venerable, wears the walls of the castle as a little man wears a big man's coat. The kindliest of farm ladies entertains a perpetual stream of visitors, and shows you her vast mangle and her big kitchen, and takes you out upon the sunniest little terrace-garden in all the world, and you look down the sheep-dotted slopes, to where, beside the canal and under the trees, the crumbled memories of Rome sleep for ever. 5 One climbs the Keep, up a tortuous spiral of stone, worn now to the pitch of perforation, and there one is lifted to the centre of far more than a hemisphere of view. Away below one's feet, almost at the bottom of the hill, the Marsh begins, and spreads and spreads in a mighty crescent that sweeps about the sea, the Marsh dotted with the church towers of forgotten mediaeval towns, and breaking at last into the low blue hills by Winchelsea and Hastings; east hangs France between the sea and sky; and round the north, bounding the wide perspectives of farms and houses and woods, the Downs, with their hangers and chalk-pits, sustain the passing shadows of the sailing clouds.
And here it was, high out of the world of every day, and in the presence of spacious beauty, that Kipps and Helen found themselves agreeably alone. All six, it had seemed, had been coming for the Keep; but Mrs Walshingham had hesitated at the horrid little stairs, and then suddenly felt faint, and so she and the freckled girl had remained below, walking up and down in the shadow of the house; and Coote had remembered they were all out of cigarettes, and had taken off young Walshingham into the village. There had been shouting to explain between ground and parapet, and then Helen and Kipps turned again to the view and commended it, and fell silent.
Helen sat fearlessly in an embrasure, and Kipps stood beside her.
‘I've always been fond of scenery,’ Kipps repeated, after an interval.
Then he went off at a tangent. ‘D'you reely think that was right what Coote was saying?’
She looked interrogation.
‘About my name.’
‘Being really C-U-Y-P-S? I have my doubts. I thought at first—What makes Mr Coote add an “S” to Cuyp?’ 6
‘I dunno,’ said Kipps, foiled. ‘I was jest thinking.’…
She shot one wary glance at him, and then turned her eyes to the sea.
Kipps was out for a space. He had intended to lead from this question to the general question of surnames and change of names; it had seemed a light and witty way of saying something he had in mind, and suddenly he perceived that this was an unutterably vulgar and
silly project. The hitch about that ‘S’ had saved him. He regarded her profile for a moment, framed in weather-beaten stone, and backed by the blue elements.
He dropped the question of his name out of existence, and spoke again of the view. ‘When I see scenery – and things that – that are beautiful, it makes me feel—’
She looked at him suddenly, and saw him fumbling for his words.
‘Silly like,’ he said.
She took him in with her glance, the old look of proprietorship it was, touched with a certain warmth. She spoke in a voice as unambiguous as her eyes. ‘You needn't,’ she said. ‘You know, Mr Kipps, you hold yourself too cheap.’
Her eyes and words smote him with amazement. He stared at her like a man who awakens. She looked down.
‘You mean—’ he said; and then, ‘Don't you hold me cheap?’
She glanced up again and shook her head.
‘But – for instance – you don't think of me – as an equal like.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oo! But, reely—’
His heart beat very fast.
‘If I thought—’ he said; and then, ‘You know so much.’
‘That's nothing,’ she said.
Then for a long time, as it seemed to them, both kept silence – a silence that said and accomplished many things.
‘I know what I am,’ he said at length… ‘If I thought it was possible…. If I thought you…. I believe I could do anything—’
He stopped, and she sat downcast and strikingly still.
‘Miss Walshingham,’ he said, ‘is it possible that you… could care for me enough to – to 'elp me? Miss Walshingham, do you care for me at all?’
It seemed she was never going to answer. She looked up at him. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you are the most generous – look at what you have done for my brother! – the most generous and the most modest of – men. And this afternoon – I thought you were the bravest.’
She turned her head, glanced down, waved her hand to someone on the terrace below, and stood up.