by H. G. Wells
‘Mother is signalling,’ she said. ‘We must go down.’
Kipps became polite and deferential by habit, but his mind was a tumult that had nothing to do with that.
He moved before her towards the little door that opened on the winding stairs – ‘always precede a lady down or up stairs’
– and then, on the second step, he turned resolutely. ‘But –’ he said, looking up out of the shadow, flannel clad and singularly like a man.
She looked down on him, with her hand upon the stone lintel.
He held out his hand as if to help her. ‘Can you tell me?’ he said. ‘You must know—’
‘What?’
‘If you care for me?’
She did not answer for a long time. It was as if everything in the world was drawn to the breaking-point, and in a minute must certainly break.
‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘I know.’
Abruptly, by some impalpable sign, he knew what the answer would be, and he remained still.
She bent down over him and softened to her wonderful smile.
‘Promise me,’ she insisted.
He promised with his still face.
‘If I do not hold you cheap, you will never hold yourself cheap.’
‘If you do not hold me cheap! You mean—?’
She bent down quite close to him. ‘I hold you,’ she said, and then whispered, ‘dear.’
‘Me?’
She laughed aloud.
He was astonished beyond measure. He stipulated lest there might yet be some misconception. ‘You will marry me?’
She was laughing, inundated by the sense of bountiful power, of possession and success. He looked quite a nice little man to have. ‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘What else could I mean?’ and, ‘Yes.’
He felt as a praying hermit might have felt, snatched from the midst of his quiet devotions, his modest sackcloth and ashes, and hurled neck and crop over the glittering gates of Paradise, smack among the iridescent wings, the bright-eyed Cherubim. 7 He felt like some lowly and righteous man dynamited into Bliss…
His hand tightened on the rope that steadies one upon the stairs of stone. He was for kissing her hand and did not.
He said not a word more. He turned about, and, with something very like a scared expression on his face, led the way into the obscurity of their descent… .
§3
Everyone seemed to understand. Nothing was said, nothing was explained; the merest touch of the eyes sufficed. As they clustered in the castle gateway, Coote, Kipps remembered afterwards, laid hold of his arm as if by chance, and pressed it. It was quite evident he knew. His eyes, his nose, shone with benevolent congratulation; shone, too, with the sense of a good thing conducted to its climax. Mrs Walshingham, who had seemed a little fatigued by the hill, recovered, and was even obviously stirred by affection for her daughter. There was in passing a motherly caress. She asked Kipps to give her his arm in walking down the steep. Kipps in a sort of dream obeyed. He found himself trying to attend to her, and soon he was attending.
She and Kipps talked like sober responsible people and went slowly, while the others drifted down the hill together a loose little group of four. He wondered momentarily what they would talk about, and then sank into his conversation with Mrs Walshingham. He conversed, as it were, out of his superficial personality, and his inner self lay stunned in unsuspected depths within. It had an air of being an interesting and friendly talk, almost their first long talk together. Hitherto he had had a sort of fear of Mrs Walshingham as of a person possibly satirical, but she proved a soul of sense and sentiment, and Kipps, for all his abstraction, got on with her unexpectedly well. They talked a little upon scenery and the inevitable melancholy attaching to old ruins and the thought of vanished generations.
‘Perhaps they jousted here,’ said Mrs Walshingham.
‘They was up to all sorts of things,’ said Kipps; and then the two came round to Helen. She spoke of her daughter's literary ambitions. ‘She will do something, I feel sure. You know, Mr Kipps, it's a great responsibility to a mother to feel her daughter is – exceptionally clever.’
‘I dessay it is,’ said Kipps. ‘There's no mistake about that.’
She spoke, too, of her son – almost like Helen's twin – alike yet different. She made Kipps feel quite fatherly. ‘They are so quick, so artistic,’ she said, ‘so full of ideas. Almost they frighten me. One feels they need opportunities – as other people need air.’
She spoke of Helen's writing. ‘Even when she was quite a little dot she wrote verse.’
(Kipps, sensation.)
‘Her father had just the same tastes—’ Mrs Walshingham turned a little beam of half-pathetic reminiscence on the past. ‘He was more artist than business man. That was the trouble…. He was misled by his partner, and when the crash came everyone blamed him…. Well, it doesn't do to dwell on horrid things… especially to-day. There are bright days, Mr Kipps, and dark days. And mine have not always been bright.’
Kipps presented a face of Coote-like sympathy.
She diverged to talk of flowers, and Kipps' mind was filled with the picture of Helen bending down towards him in the Keep….
They spread the tea under the trees before the little inn, and at a certain moment Kipps became aware that everyone in the party was simultaneously and furtively glancing at him. There might have been a certain tension had it not been first of all for Coote and his tact, and afterwards for a number of wasps. Coote was resolved to make this memorable day pass off well, and displayed an almost boisterous sense of fun. Then young Walshingham began talking of the Roman remains below Lympne, intending to lead up to the Overman. ‘These old Roman chaps—’ he said; and then the wasps arrived. They killed three in the jam alone.
Kipps killed wasps, as it were in a dream, and handed things to the wrong people, and maintained a thin surface of ordinary intelligence with the utmost difficulty. At times he became aware – aware with an extraordinary vividness – of Helen. Helen was carefully not looking at him, and behaving with amazing coolness and ease. But just for that one time there was the faintest suggestion of pink beneath the ivory of her cheeks….
Tacitly the others conceded to Kipps the right to paddle back with Helen; he helped her into the canoe and took his paddle, and, paddling slowly, dropped behind the others. And now his inner self stirred again. He said nothing to her. How could he ever say anything to her again? She spoke to him at rare intervals about reflections and flowers and the trees, and he nodded in reply. But his mind moved very slowly forward now from the point at which it had fallen stunned in the Lympne Keep, moving forward to the beginnings of realization. As yet he did not say even in the recesses of his heart that she was his! But he perceived that the goddess had come from her altar, amazingly, and had taken him by the hand!
The sky was a vast splendour, and then close to them were the dark protecting trees, and the shining, smooth still water. He was an erect black outline to her; he plied his paddle with no unskilful gesture; the water broke to snaky silver and glittered far behind his strokes. Indeed, he did not seem so bad to her. Youth calls to youth the wide world through, and her soul rose in triumph over his subjection. And behind him was money and opportunity, freedom and London, a great background of seductively indistinct hopes. To him her face was a warm dimness. In truth he could not see her eyes, but it seemed to his love-witched brain he did, and that they shone out at him like dusky stars.
All the world that evening was no more than a shadowy frame of darkling sky and water and dipping boughs about Helen. He seemed to see through things with an extraordinary clearness; she was revealed to him certainly, as the cause and essence of it all.
He was, indeed, at his Heart's Desire. It was one of those times when there seems to be no future, when Time has stopped and we are at the end. Kipps that evening could not have imagined a to-morrow; all that his imagination had pointed towards was attained. His mind stood still, and took the moments as they came.
§ 4
About nine that night Coote came round to Kipps' new apartment in the Upper Sandgate Road – the house on the Leas had been let furnished and Kipps made an effort towards realization. He was discovered sitting at the open window and without a lamp – quite still. Coote was deeply moved, and he pressed Kipps' palm and laid a knobby white hand on his shoulder, and displayed the sort of tenderness becoming in a crisis. Kipps, too, was moved that night, and treated Coote like a very dear brother.
‘She's splendid,’ said Coote, coming to it abruptly.
‘Isn't she?’ said Kipps.
‘I couldn't help noticing her face,’ said Coote…. ‘You know, my dear Kipps, this is better than a legacy.’
‘I don't deserve it,’ said Kipps.
‘You can't say that.’
‘I don't. I can't ‘ardly believe it. I can't believe it at all. No!’
There followed an expressive stillness.
‘It's wonderful,’ said Kipps. ‘It takes me like that.’
Coote made a faint blowing noise, and so again they came for a time on silence.
‘And it began – before your money?’
‘When I was in 'er class,’ said Kipps, solemnly.
Coote, speaking out of a darkness which he was illuminating strangely with efforts to strike a match, said it was beautiful. He could not have wished Kipps a better fortune… .
He lit a cigarette, and Kipps was moved to do the same, with a sacramental expression.
Presently speech flowed more freely.
Coote began to praise Helen, and her mother and brother; he talked of when ‘it’ might be; he presented the thing as concrete and credible. ‘It's a county family, 8 you know,’ he said. ‘She is connected, you know, with the Beauprés family – you know Lord Beauprés.’
‘No!’ said Kipps, ‘reely!’
‘Distantly, of course,’ said Coote. ‘Still—’
He smiled a smile that glimmered in the twilight.
‘It's too much,’ said Kipps, overcome. ‘It's so all like that.’
Coote exhaled. For a time Kipps listened to Helen's praises and matured a point of view.
‘I say, Coote,’ he said. ‘What ought I to do now?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Coote.
‘I mean about calling on 'er and all that.’
He reflected. ‘Naturally I want to do it all right.’
‘Of course,’ said Coote.
‘It would be awful to go and do something now – all wrong.’
Coote's cigarette glowed as he meditated. ‘You must call, of course,’ he decided. ‘You'll have to speak to Mrs Walshingham.’
‘’Ow?’ said Kipps.
‘Tell her you mean to marry her daughter.’
‘I dessay she knows,’ said Kipps, with defensive penetration.
Coote's head was visible, shaking itself judicially.
‘Then there's the ring,’ said Kipps. ‘What 'ave I to do about that?’
‘What ring do you mean?’
‘’Ngagement Ring. There isn't anything at all about that in Manners and Rules of Good Society – not a word.’
‘Of course you must get something – tasteful. Yes.’
‘What sort of ring?’
‘Something nace. They'll show you in the shop.’
‘O' course. I s'pose I got to take it to 'er, eh? Put it on 'er finger.’
‘Oh no! Send it. Much better.’
‘Ah!’ said Kipps for the first time with a note of relief.
‘Then 'ow about this call? – on Mrs Walshingham I mean. 'Ow ought one to go?’
‘Rather a ceremonial occasion,’ reflected Coote.
‘Wadyer mean? Frock-coat?’
‘I think so,’ said Coote, with discrimination.
‘Light trousers, and all that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rose?’
‘I think it might run to a buttonhole.’
The curtain that hung over the future became less opaque to the eyes of Kipps. To-morrow, and then other days, became perceptible at least as existing. Frock-coat, silk hat, and a rose! With a certain solemnity he contemplated himself in the process of slow transformation into an English gentleman, Arthur Cuyps, frock-coated on occasions of ceremony, the familiar acquaintance of Lady Punnet, the recognized wooer of a distant connection of the Earl of Beauprés.
Something like awe at the magnitude of his own fortunes came upon him. He felt the world was opening out like a magic flower in a transformation scene at the touch of this wand of gold. And Helen, nestling beautiful in the red heart of the flower. Only ten weeks ago he had been no more than the shabbiest of improvers and shamefully dismissed for dissipation, the mere soil-buried seed, as it were, of these glories. He resolved the engagement ring should be of expressively excessive quality and appearance, in fact the very best they had.
‘Ought I to send 'er flowers?’ he speculated.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Coote. ‘Though, of course, it's an attention.’…
Kipps meditated on flowers.
‘When you see her,’ said Coote, ‘you'll have to ask her to name the day.’
Kipps started. ‘That won't be just yet a bit, will it?’
‘Don't know any reason for delay.’
‘Oo, but – a year say.’
‘Rather a long taime,’ said Coote.
‘Is it?’ said Kipps, turning his head sharply. ‘But—’
There was quite a long pause.
‘I say!’ he said at last, and in an altered voice, ‘you'll 'ave to 'elp me about the wedding.’
‘Only too happy!’ said Coote.
‘O' course,’ said Kipps, ‘I didn't think—’ He changed his line of thought. ‘Coote,’ he asked, ‘wot's a “tate-eh-tate” 9 ?’
‘A “tate-ah-tay,”’ said Coote, improvingly, ‘is a conversation alone together.’
‘Lor!’ said Kipps, ‘but I thought—It says strictly we oughtn't to enjoy a tater-tay, not sit together, walk together, ride together, or meet during any part of the day. That don't leave much time for meeting, does it?’
‘The book says that?’ asked Coote.
‘I jest learnt it by 'eart before you came. I thought that was a bit rum, but I s'pose it's all right.’
‘You won't find Mrs Walshingham so strict as all that,’ said Coote. ‘I think that's a bit extreme. They'd only do that now in very strict old aristocratic families. Besides, the Walshinghams are so modern – advanced you might say. I expect you'll get plenty of chances of talking together.’
‘There's a tremendous lot to think about,’ said Kipps, blowing a profound sigh. ‘D'you mean – p'raps we might be married in a few months or so.’
‘You'll have to be,’ said Coote. ‘Why not?’…
Midnight found Kipps alone, looking a little tired, and turning over the leaves of the red-covered text-book with a studious expression. He paused for a moment at page 233, his eye caught by the words –
‘FOR AN UNCLE OR AUNT BY MARRIAGE the period is six weeks black with jet trimmings.’ 10
‘No,’ said Kipps, after a vigorous mental effort. ‘That's not it.’ The pages rustled again. He stopped and flattened out the little book decisively at the beginning of the chapter on ‘Weddings.’
He became pensive. He stared at the lamp-wick. ‘I suppose I ought to go over and tell them,’ he said at last.
§5
Kipps called on Mrs Walshingham attired in the proper costume for Ceremonial Occasions in the Day. He carried a silk hat, and he wore a deep-skirted frock-coat; his boots were patent leather, and his trousers a dark grey. He had generous white cuffs with gold links, and his grey gloves, one thumb of which had burst when he put them on, he held loosely in his hand. He carried a small umbrella, rolled to an exquisite tightness. A sense of singular correctness pervaded his being and warred with the enormity of the occasion for possession of his soul. Anon he touched his silk cravat. The world smelt of his rosebud.
He
seated himself on a newly re-covered chintz armchair, and stuck out the elbow of the arm that held his hat.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Walshingham, ‘I know everything,’ and helped him out most amazingly. She deepened the impression he had already received of her sense and refinement. She displayed an amount of tenderness that touched him.
‘This is a great thing,’ she said, ‘to a mother,’ and her hand rested for a moment on his impeccable coat-sleeve.
‘A daughter, Arthur,’ she explained, ‘is so much more than a son.’
Marriage, she said, was a lottery, and without love and toleration – there was much unhappiness. Her life had not always been bright – there had been dark days and bright days. She smiled rather sweetly. ‘This is a bright one,’ she said.
She said very kind and flattering things to Kipps, and she thanked him for his goodness to her son. (‘That wasn't anything,’ said Kipps.) And then she expanded upon the theme of her two children. ‘Both so accomplished,’ she said, ‘so clever. I call them my Twin Jewels.’
She was repeating a remark she had made at Lympne, that she always said her children needed opportunities as other people needed air, when she was abruptly arrested by the entry of Helen. They hung on a pause, Helen perhaps surprised by Kipps' week-day magnificence. Then she advanced with outstretched hand.
Both the young people were shy. ‘I jest called round,’ began Kipps, and became uncertain how to end.
‘Won't you have some tea?’ asked Helen.
She walked to the window, looked at the familiar out-porter's barrow, turned, surveyed Kipps for a moment ambiguously, said, ‘I will get some tea,’ and so departed again.
Mrs Walshingham and Kipps looked at one another, and the lady smiled indulgently. ‘You two young people mustn't be shy of each other,’ said Mrs Walshingham, which damaged Kipps considerably.
She was explaining how sensitive Helen always had been, even about quite little things, when the servant appeared with the tea-things; and then Helen followed, and, taking up a secure position behind the little bamboo tea-table, broke the ice with officious teacup clattering. Then she introduced the topic of a forthcoming open-air performance of As You Like It, 11 and steered past the worst of the awkwardness. They discussed stage illusion. ‘I mus' say,’ said Kipps, ‘I don't quite like a play in a theayter. It seems sort of unreal some'ow.’