by H. G. Wells
They had bought that hat one day when they had gone to see the shops in Bond Street. Kipps had looked at the passers-by, and it had suddenly occurred to him that Ann was dowdy. He had noted the hat of a very proud-looking lady passing in an electric brougham, 2 and had resolved to get Ann the nearest thing to that.
The railway porters perceived some subtle incongruity in Ann, so did the knot of cabmen in the station doorway, the two golfers, and the lady with daughters, who had also got out of the train. And Kipps, a little pale, blowing a little, not in complete possession of himself, knew that they noticed her and him. And Ann— It is hard to say just what Ann observed of these things.
‘'Ere!’ said Kipps to a cabman, and regretted too late a vanished ‘H.’
‘I got a trunk up there,’ he said to a ticket-inspector, ‘marked A.K.’
‘Ask a porter,’ said the inspector, turning his back.
‘Demn!’ said Kipps, not altogether inaudibly.
§ 2
It is all very well to sit in the sunshine and talk of the house you will have, and another altogether to achieve it. We English – all the world indeed to-day – live in a strange atmosphere of neglected great issues, of insistent, triumphant petty things; we are given up to the fine littlenesses of intercourse; table manners and small correctitudes are the substance of our lives. You do not escape these things for long, even by so catastrophic a proceeding as flying to London with a young lady of no wealth and inferior social position. The mists of noble emotion swirl and pass, and there you are, divorced from all your deities, and grazing in the meadows under the Argus eyes 3 of the social system, the innumerable mean judgments you feel raining upon you, upon your clothes and bearing, upon your pretensions and movements.
Our world to-day is a meanly conceived one – it is only an added meanness to conceal that fact. For one consequence, it has very few nice little houses. Such things do not come for the asking; they are not to be bought with money during ignoble times. Its houses are built on the ground of monstrously rich, shabbily extortionate landowners, by poor, parsimonious, greedy people in a mood of elbowing competition. What can you expect from such ridiculous conditions? To go house-hunting is to spy out the nakedness of this pretentious world, to see what our civilization amounts to when you take away curtains and flounces and carpets, and all the fluster and distraction of people and fittings. It is to see mean plans meanly executed for mean ends, the conventions torn aside, the secrets stripped, the substance underlying all such Chester Cootery, soiled and worn and left.
So you see our poor dear Kippses going to and fro, in Hythe, in Sandgate, in Ashford, and Canterbury and Deal and Dover – at last even in Folkestone – with ‘orders to view,’ pink and green and white and yellow orders to view, and labelled keys in Kipps' hand, and frowns and perplexity upon their faces…
They did not clearly know what they wanted, but whatever it was they saw, they knew they did not want that. Always they found a confusing multitude of houses they could not take, and none they could. Their dreams began to turn mainly on empty, abandoned-looking rooms, with unfaded patches of paper to mark the place of vanished pictures, and doors that had lost their keys. They saw rooms floored with boards that yawned apart and were splintered, skirtings eloquent of the industrious mouse, kitchens with a dead black-beetle 4 in the empty cupboard, and a hideous variety of coal-holes and dark cupboards under the stairs. They stuck their little heads through roof trap-doors, and gazed at disorganized ball-taps, at the black filthiness of unstopped 5 roofs. There were occasions when it seemed to them that they must be the victims of an elaborate conspiracy of house-agents, so bleak and cheerless is a second-hand empty house in comparison with the humblest of inhabited dwellings.
Commonly the houses were too big. They had huge windows that demanded vast curtains in mitigation, countless bedrooms, acreage of stone steps to be cleaned, kitchens that made Ann protest. She had come so far towards a proper conception of Kipps' social position as to admit the prospect of one servant. ‘But lor!’ she would say, ‘you'd want a man-servant in this 'ouse.’ When the houses were not too big, then they were almost always the product of speculative building, of that multitudinous hasty building for the extravagant swarm of new births that was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century. 6 The new houses Ann refused as damp, and even the youngest of those that had been in use showed remarkable signs of a sickly constitution – the plaster flaked away, the floors gaped, the paper moulded and peeled, the doors dropped, the bricks were scaled, and the railings rusted; Nature, in the form of spiders, earwigs, cockroaches, mice, rats, fungi, and remarkable smells, was already fighting her way back… .
And the plan was invariably inconvenient, invariably. All the houses they saw had a common quality for which she could find no word, but for which the proper word is ‘incivility.’ They build these 'ouses,’ she said, 'as though girls wasn't 'uman beings.’ Sid's social democracy had got into her blood, perhaps, and anyhow they went about discovering the most remarkable inconsiderateness in the contemporary house. ‘There's kitching stairs to go up, Artie!’ Ann would say. ‘Some poor girl's got to go up and down, up and down, and be tired out, jest because they haven't the sense to leave enough space to give their steps a proper rise – and no water upstairs anywhere – every drop got to be carried! It's 'ouses like this wear girls out.
‘It's 'aving 'ouses built by men, I believe, makes all the work and trouble,’ said Ann….
The Kippses, you see, thought they were looking for a reasonably simple little contemporary house, but indeed they were looking either for dreamland or 1975 A.D., or thereabouts, and it hadn't come.
§ 3
But it was a foolish thing of Kipps to begin building a house. 7
He did that out of an extraordinary animosity for house-agents he had conceived.
Everybody hates house-agents, just as everybody loves sailors. It is, no doubt, a very wicked and unjust hatred, but the business of a novelist is not ethical principle, but facts. Everybody hates house-agents because they have everybody at a disadvantage. All other callings have a certain amount of give and take, the house-agent simply takes. All other callings want you; your solicitor is afraid you may change him, your doctor cannot go too far, your novelist – if only you knew it – is mutely abject towards your unspoken wishes; and as for your tradespeople, milkmen will fight outside your front door for you, and greengrocers call in tears if you discard them suddenly; but who ever heard of a house-agent struggling to serve anyone? You want a house; you go to him; you, dishevelled and angry from travel, anxious, inquiring; he calm, clean, inactive, reticent, quietly doing nothing. You beg him to reduce rents, whitewash ceilings, produce other houses, combine the summerhouse of No. 6 with the conservatory of No. 4 – much he cares! You want to dispose of a house; then he is just the same – rene, indifferent. On one occasion I remember he was picking his teeth all the time he answered me. Competition is a mockery among house-agents; they are all alike; you cannot wound them by going to the opposite office, you cannot dismiss them, you can at most dismiss yourself. They are invulnerably placed behind mahogany and brass, too far usually even for a sudden swift lunge with an umbrella; to throw away the keys they lend you instead of returning them is larceny, and punishable as such….
It was a house-agent in Dover who finally decided Kipps to build. Kipps, with a certain faltering in his voice, had delivered his ultimatum – no basement, not more than eight rooms, hot and cold water upstairs, coal-cellar in the house, but with intervening doors to keep dust from the scullery and so forth. He stood blowing. ‘You'll have to build a house,’ said the house-agent, sighing wearily, ‘if you want all that.’ It was rather for the sake of effective answer than with any intention at the time that Kipps mumbled, ‘That's about what I shall do this goes on.’
Whereupon the house-agent smiled. He smiled!
When Kipps came to turn the thing over in his mind, he was surprised to find quite a considerable intention
had germinated and was growing up in him. After all, lots of people have built houses. How could there be so many if they hadn't? Suppose he ‘reely’ did! Then he would go to the house-agent and say, ‘'Ere, while you been getting me a sootable 'ouse, blowed if I 'aven't built one!’ Go round to all of them – all the house-agents in Folkestone, in Dover, Ashford, Canterbury, Margate, Ramsgate, saying that—! Perhaps then they might be sorry. It was in the small hours that he awoke to a realization that he had made up his mind in the matter.
‘Ann,’ he said, ‘Ann,’ and also used the sharp of his elbow.
Ann was at last awakened to the pitch of an indistinct inquiry what was the matter.
‘I'm going to build a house, Ann.’
‘Eh?’ said Ann, suddenly, as if awake.
‘Build a house.’
Ann said something incoherent about he'd better wait until he morning before he did anything of the sort, and immediately with a fine trustfulness went fast asleep again.
But Kipps lay awake for a long while building his house, and in the morning at breakfast he made his meaning clear. He had smarted under the indignities of house-agents long enough, and this seemed to promise revenge – a fine revenge. ‘And, you know, we might reely make rather a nice little 'ouse out of it like we want.’
So resolved, it became possible for them to take a house for a year, with a basement, no service lift, blackleading to do everywhere, no water upstairs, no bathroom, vast sash windows to be cleaned from the sill, stone steps with a twist and open to the rain, into the coal-cellar, insufficient cupboards, unpaved path to the dustbin, no fireplace to the servant's bedroom, no end of splintery wood to scrub – in fact, a very typical English middle-class house. And having added to this house some furniture, and a languid young person with unauthentic golden hair named Gwendolen, who was engaged to a sergeant-major and had formerly been in an hotel, having ‘moved in’ and spent some sleepless nights, varied by nocturnal explorations in search of burglars, because of the strangeness of being in a house for which they were personally responsible, Kipps settled down for a time and turned himself with considerable resolution to the project of building a home.
§ 4
At first Kipps gathered advice, finding an initial difficulty in how to begin. He went into a builder's shop at Seabrook one day and told the lady in charge that he wanted a house built. He was breathless, but quite determined, and he was prepared to give his order there and then; but she temporized with him, and said her husband was out, and he left without giving his name. Also he went and talked to a man in a cart, who was pointed out to him by a workman as the builder of a new house near Saltwood, but he found him first sceptical, and then overpoweringly sarcastic. ‘I suppose you build a 'ouse every 'oliday,’ he said, and turned from Kipps with every symptom of contempt.
Afterwards Carshot told alarming stories about builders, and shook Kipps' expressed resolution a good deal, and then Pearce raised the question whether one ought to go in the first instance to a builder at all, and not rather to an architect. Pearce knew a man at Ashford whose brother was an architect, and as it is always better in these matters to get someone you know, the Kippses decided, before Pearce had gone, and Carshot's warnings had resumed their sway, to apply to him. They did so rather dubiously.
The architect, who was brother of Pearce's friend, appeared as a small, alert individual with a black bag and a cylindrical silk hat, and he sat at the dining-room table, with his hat and his bag exactly equidistant right and left of him, and maintained a demeanour of impressive woodenness, while Kipps, on the hearthrug, with a quaking sense of gigantic enterprise, vacillated answers to his inquiries. Ann held a watching brief for herself, in a position she had chosen as suitable to the occasion, beside the corner of the carved oak sideboard. They felt, in a sense, at bay.
The architect began by asking for the site, and seemed a little discomposed to discover this had still to be found. ‘I thought of building just anywhere,’ said Kipps. ‘I 'aven't made up my mind about that yet.’ The architect remarked that he would have preferred to see the site in order to know where to put what he called his 'ugly side,’ but it was quite possible, of course, to plan a house ‘in the air,’ on the level, ‘simply with back and front assumed’ – if they would like to do that. Kipps flushed slightly, and secretly hoping it would make no great difference in the fees, said a little doubtfully that he thought that would be all right.
The architect then marked off, as it were, the first section of his subject, with a single dry cough, opened his bag, took out a spring tape measure, some hard biscuits, a metal flask, a new pair of dogskin gloves, a clockwork motor-car partially wrapped in paper, a bunch of violets, a paper of small brass screws, and finally a large distended notebook; he replaced the other objects carefully, opened his notebook, put a pencil to his lips and said, ‘And what accommodation will you require?’ To which Ann, who had followed his every movement with the closest attention and a deepening dread, replied with the violent suddenness of one who has lain in wait, ‘Cubbuds!’
‘Anyhow,’ she added, catching her husband's eye.
The architect wrote it down.
‘And how many rooms?’ he said, coming to secondary matters.
The young people regarded one another. It was dreadfully like giving an order.
‘How many bedrooms, for example?’ asked the architect.
‘One?’ suggested Kipps, inclined now to minimize at any cost.
‘There's Gwendolen!’ said Ann.
‘Visitors, perhaps,’ said the architect; and temperately, ‘You never know.’
‘Two p'r'aps?’ said Kipps. ‘We don't want no more than a little 'ouse, you know.’
‘But the merest shooting-box—’ said the architect….
They got to six, he beat them steadily from bedroom to bedroom, the word ‘nursery’ played across their imaginative skies – he mentioned it as the remotest possibility – and then six being reluctantly conceded, Ann came forward to the table, sat down, and delivered herself of one of her prepared conditions. ‘'Ot and cold water,’ she said, ‘laid on to each room any'ow.’
It was an idea long since acquired from Sid.
‘Yes,’ said Kipps, on the hearthrug, ‘'ot and cold water laid on to each bedroom – we've settled on that.’
It was the first intimation to the architect that he had to deal with a couple of exceptional originality, and as he had spent the previous afternoon in finding three large houses in The Builder, which he intended to combine into an original and copyright design of his own, he naturally struggled against these novel requirements. He enlarged on the extreme expensiveness of plumbing, on the extreme expensiveness of everything not already arranged for in his scheme, and only when Ann declared she'd as soon not have the house as not have her requirements, and Kipps, blenching the while, had said he didn't mind what a thing cost him so long as he got what he wanted, did he allow a kindred originality of his own to appear beneath the acquired professionalism of his methods. He dismissed their previous talk with his paragraphic cough. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if you don't mind being unconventional—’
He explained that he had been thinking of a Queen Anne style 8 of architecture (Ann, directly she heard her name, shook her head at Kipps in an aside) so far as the exterior went. For his own part, he said, he liked to have the exterior of a house in a style, not priggishly in a style, but mixed, with one style uppermost, and the gables and dormers and casements of the Queen Anne style, with a little roughcast and sham timbering here and there, and perhaps a bit of an overhang, diversified a house and made it interesting. The advantages of what he called a Queen Anne style was that it had such a variety of features…. Still, if they were prepared to be unconventional, it could be done. A number of houses were now built in the unconventional style, and were often very pretty. In the unconventional style one frequently had what perhaps he might call Internal Features – for example, an old English oak staircase and gallery. White roughc
ast and green paint were a good deal favoured in houses of this type.
He indicated that this excursus on style was finished by a momentary use of his cough, and reopened his notebook, which he had closed to wave about in a moment of descriptive enthusiasm while expatiating on the unbridled wealth of External Features associated with Queen Anne. ‘Six bedrooms,’ he said, moistening his pencil. ‘One with barred windows, suitable for a nursery if required.’
Kipps endorsed this huskily and reluctantly.
There followed a most interesting discussion upon house-building, in which Kipps played a minor part. They passed from bedrooms to the kitchen and scullery, and there Ann displayed an intelligent exactingness that won the expressed admiration of the architect. They were particularly novel upon the position of the coal-cellar, which Ann held to be altogether too low in the ordinary house, necessitating much heavy carrying. They dismissed as impracticable the idea of having coal-cellar and kitchen at the top of the house, because that would involve carrying all the coal through the house, and therewith much subsequent cleaning, and for a time they dealt with a conception of a coal-cellar on the ground floor with a light staircase running up outside to an exterior shoot. 9 ‘It might be made a Feature,’ said the architect a little doubtfully, jotting down a note of it. ‘It would be apt to get black, you know.’
Thence they passed to the alternative of service lifts, and then, by an inspiration of the architect's, to the possibilities of gas-heating. Kipps did a complicated verbal fugue on the theme, ‘gas-heating heats the air,’ with variable aspirates; he became very red, and was lost to the discussion altogether for a time, though his lips kept silently moving.
Subsequently the architect wrote to say that he found in his notebook very full and explicit directions for bow windows to all rooms, for bedrooms, for water supply, lift, height of stairs and absence of twists therein, for a well-ventilated kitchen twenty feet square, with two dressers and a large box window-seat, for scullery and outhouses and offices, but nothing whatever about drawing-room, dining-room, library, or study, or approximate cost, and he awaited further instructions. He presumed there would be a breakfast-room, dining-room, drawing-room, and study for Mr Kipps – at least that was his conception – and the young couple discussed this matter long and ardently.