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

laid a friendly hand on Kipps’ arm. “I say⁠—look here! Come up to my diggings and sew it up. I’m⁠—Of course I’m to blame, and I say⁠—” his voice sank to a confidential friendliness. “Here’s a slop. Don’t let on I ran you down. Haven’t a lamp, you know. Might be a bit awkward, for me.”

Kipps looked up towards the advancing policeman. The appeal to his generosity was not misplaced. He immediately took sides with his assailant. He stood up as the representative of the law drew nearer. He assumed an air which he considered highly suggestive of an accident not having happened.

“All right,” he said, “go on!”

“Right you are,” said the cyclist promptly, and led the way, and then, apparently with some idea of deception, called over his shoulder, “I’m tremendous glad to have met you, old chap.

“It really isn’t a hundred yards,” he said after they had passed the policeman, “it’s just round the corner.”

“Of course,” said Kipps, limping slightly. “I don’t want to get a chap into trouble. Accidents will happen. Still⁠—”

“Oh! Rather! I believe you. Accidents will happen. Especially when you get me on a bicycle.” He laughed. “You aren’t the first I’ve run down not by any manner of means! I don’t think you can be hurt much either. It isn’t as though I was scorching. You didn’t see me coming. I was back pedalling like anything. Only naturally it seems to you I must have been coming fast. And I did all I could to ease off the bump as I hit you. It was just the treadle I think came against your calf. But it was All Right of you about that policeman, you know. That was a Fair Bit of All Right. Under the Circs, if you’d told him I was riding it might have been forty bob! Forty bob! I’d have had to tell ’em Time is Money. Just now for Mr. H. C.

“I shouldn’t have blamed you either, you know. Most men after a bump like that might have been spiteful. The least I can do is to stand you a needle and thread. And a clothes brush. It isn’t everyone who’d have taken it like you.

“Scorching! Why if I’d been scorching you’d have⁠—coming as we did⁠—you’d have been knocked silly.

“But I tell you, the way you caught on about that slop was something worth seeing. When I asked you, I didn’t half expect it. Bif! Right off. Cool as a cucumber. Had your line at once. I tell you that there isn’t many men would have acted as you have done, I will say that. You acted like a gentleman over that slop.”

Kipps’ first sense of injury disappeared. He limped along a pace or so behind, making depreciatory noises in response to these flattering remarks and taking stock of the very appreciative person who uttered them.

As they passed the lamps he was visible as a figure with a slight anterior plumpness, progressing buoyantly on knickerbockered legs, with quite enormous calves, legs that, contrasting with Kipps’ own narrow practice, were even exuberantly turned out at the knees and toes. A cycling cap was worn very much on one side, and from beneath it protruded carelessly straight wisps of dark red hair, and ever and again an ample nose came into momentary view round the corner. The muscular cheeks of this person and a certain generosity of chin he possessed were blue shaven and he had no moustache. His carriage was spacious and confident, his gestures up and down the narrow deserted back street they traversed, were irresistibly suggestive of ownership; a suggestion of broadly gesticulating shadows were born squatting on his feet and grew and took possession of the road and reunited at last with the shadows of the infinite, as lamp after lamp was passed. Kipps saw by the flickering light of one of them that they were in Little Fenchurch Street, and then they came round a corner sharply into a dark court and stopped at the door of a particularly ramshackle looking little house, held up between two larger ones, like a drunken man between policemen.

The cyclist propped his machine carefully against the window, produced a key and blew down it sharply. “The lock’s a bit tricky,” he said, and devoted himself for some moments to the task of opening the door. Some mechanical catastrophe ensued and the door was open.

“You’d better wait here a bit while I get the lamp,” he remarked to Kipps; “very likely it isn’t filled,” and vanished into the blackness of the passage. “Thank God for matches!” he said, and Kipps had an impression of a passage in the transitory pink flare and the bicyclist disappearing into a further room. Kipps was so much interested by these things that for the time he forgot his injuries altogether.

An interval and Kipps was dazzled by a pink shaded kerosene lamp. “You go in,” said the red-haired man, “and I’ll bring in the bike,” and for a moment Kipps was alone in the lamp-lit room. He took in rather vaguely the shabby ensemble of the little apartment, the round table covered with a torn, red, glass-stained cover on which the lamp stood, a mottled looking-glass over the fireplace reflecting this, a disused gas bracket, an extinct fire, a number of dusty postcards and memoranda stuck round the glass, a dusty, crowded paper rack on the mantel with a number of cabinet photographs, a table littered with papers and cigarette ash and a syphon of soda water. Then the cyclist reappeared and Kipps saw his blue-shaved, rather animated face and bright-reddish, brown eyes for the first time. He was a man perhaps ten years older than Kipps, but his beardless face made them in a way contemporary.

“You behaved all right about that policeman⁠—anyhow,” he repeated as he came forward.

“I don’t see ’ow else I could ’ave done,” said Kipps quite modestly. The cyclist scanned his guest for the first time and decided upon hospitable details.

“We’d better let