Kipps, H. G. Wells [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

the little shop in Rendezvous Street, Folkestone. If you are fortunate to find Kipps in a good mood he may even let you know how he inherited a fortune “once.” “Run froo it,” he’ll say with a not unhappy smile. “Got another afterwards⁠—speckylating in plays. Needn’t keep this shop if I didn’t like. But it’s something to do.”⁠ ⁠…

Or he may be even more intimate. “I seen some things,” he said to me once. “Raver! Life! Why! once I⁠—I ’loped! I did⁠—reely!”

(Of course you will not tell Kipps that he is “Kipps,” or that I have put him in this book. He does not know. And you know, one never knows how people are going to take that sort of thing. I am an old and trusted customer now, and for many amiable reasons I should prefer that things remained exactly on their present footing.)

One early-closing evening in July they left the baby to the servant cousin, and Kipps took Ann for a row on the Hythe canal. It was a glorious evening, and the sun set in a mighty blaze and left a world warm, and very still. The twilight came. And there was the water, shining bright, and the sky a deepening blue, and the great trees that dipped their boughs towards the water, exactly as it had been when he paddled home with Helen, when her eyes had seemed to him like dusky stars. He had ceased from rowing and rested on his oars, and suddenly he was touched by the wonder of life, the strangeness that is a presence stood again by his side.

Out of the darknesses beneath the shallow, weedy stream of his being rose a question, a question that looked up dimly and never reached the surface. It was the question of the wonder of the beauty, the purposeless, inconsecutive beauty, that falls so strangely among the happenings and memories of life. It never reached the surface of his mind, it never took to itself substance or form, it looked up merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and sank again to nothingness.

“Artie,” said Ann.

He woke up and pulled a stroke. “What?” he said.

“Penny for your thoughts, Artie.”

He considered.

“I reely don’t think I was thinking of anything,” he said at last with a smile. “No.”

He still rested on his oars.

“I expect,” he said, “I was thinking jest what a Rum Go everything is. I expect it was something like that.”

“Queer old Artie!”

“Ain’t I? I don’t suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before.”

He reflected for just another minute. “Oo! I dunno,” he said, and roused himself to pull.

Colophon

Kipps
was published in 1905 by
H. G. Wells.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Chris Brooks,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2012 by
Charlene Taylor, Martin Pettit, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.

The cover page is adapted from
Reconciliation,
a painting completed in 1887 by
Tom Roberts.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
July 25, 2018, 7:56 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
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