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

And of course Kipps promised. “Oo⁠—no!”

They went on their way in silence.

“One can’t know everybody,” said Helen in general.

“Of course,” said Kipps; “in a sort of way it was him that helped me to my money.” And he indicated in a confused manner the story of the advertisement. “I don’t like to drop ’im all at once,” he added.

Helen was silent for a space, and when she spoke she went off at a tangent. “We shall live in London⁠—soon,” she remarked. “It’s only while we are here.”

It was the first intimation she gave him of their postnuptial prospects.

“We shall have a nice little flat somewhere, not too far west, and there we shall build up a circle of our own.”

All that declining summer Kipps was the pupil lover. He made an extraordinarily open secret of his desire for self-improvement; indeed Helen had to hint once or twice that his modest frankness was excessive, and all this new circle of friends did, each after his or her manner, everything that was possible to supplement Helen’s efforts and help him to ease and skill in the more cultivated circles to which he had come. Coote was still the chief teacher, the tutor⁠—there are so many little difficulties that a man may take to another man that he would not care to propound to the woman he loves⁠—but they were all, so to speak, upon the staff. Even the freckled girl said to him once in a pleasant way, “You mustn’t say ‘contre temps,’ you must say ‘contraytom,’ ” when he borrowed that expression from Manners and Rules, and she tried at his own suggestion to give him clear ideas upon the subject of “as” and “has.” A certain confusion between these words was becoming evident, the first fruits of a lesson from Chitterlow on the aspirate. Hitherto he had discarded that dangerous letter almost altogether, but now he would pull up at words beginning with “h” and draw a sawing breath⁠—rather like a startled kitten⁠—and then aspirate with vigour.

Said Kipps one day, “As ’e?⁠—I should say, ah⁠—Has ’e? Ye know I got a lot of difficulty over them two words, which is which?”

“Well, ‘as’ is a conjunction and ‘has’ is a verb.”

“I know,” said Kipps, “but when is ‘has’ a conjunction and when is ‘as’ a verb?”

“Well,” said the freckled girl, preparing to be very lucid. “It’s has when it means one has, meaning having, but if it isn’t it’s as. As for instance one says ’e⁠—I mean he⁠—He has. But one says ‘as he has.’ ”

“I see,” said Kipps. “So I ought to say ‘as ’e?’ ”

“No, if you are asking a question you say has ’e⁠—I mean he⁠—’as he?” She blushed quite brightly, but still clung to her air of lucidity.

“I see,” said Kipps. He was about to say something further, but he desisted. “I got it much clearer now. Has ’e? Has ’e as. Yes.”

“If you remember about having.”

“Oo I will,” said Kipps.

Miss Coote specialised in Kipps’ artistic development. She had early found an opinion that he had considerable artistic sensibility, his remarks on her work had struck her as decidedly intelligent, and whenever he called around to see them she would show him some work of art, now an illustrated book, now perhaps a colour print of a Botticelli, now the Hundred Best Paintings, now “Academy Pictures,” now a German art handbook and now some magazine of furniture and design. “I know you like these things,” she used to say, and Kipps said, “Oo I do.” He soon acquired a little armoury of appreciative sayings. When presently the Walshinghams took him up to the Arts and Crafts, his deportment was intelligent in the extreme. For a time he kept a wary silence and suddenly pitched upon a colour print. “That’s rather nace,” he said to Mrs. Walshingham. “That lill’ thing. There.” He always said things like that by preference to the mother rather than the daughter unless he was perfectly sure.

He quite took to Mrs. Walshingham. He was impressed by her conspicuous tact and refinement; it seemed to him that the ladylike could go no further. She was always dressed with a delicate fussiness that was never disarranged and even a sort of faded quality about her hair and face and bearing and emotions contributed to her effect. Kipps was not a big man, and commonly he did not feel a big man, but with Mrs. Walshingham he always felt enormous and distended, as though he was a navvy who had taken some disagreeable poison which puffed him up inside his skin as a preliminary to bursting. He felt, too, as though he had been rolled in clay and his hair dressed with gum. And he felt that his voice was strident and his accent like somebody swinging a crowded pig’s pail in a free and careless manner. All this increased and enforced his respect for her. Her hand, which flitted often and again to his hand and arm, was singularly well shaped and cool. “Arthur,” she called him from the very beginning.

She did not so much positively teach and tell him as tactfully guide and infect him. Her conversation was not so much didactic as exemplary. She would say, “I do like people to do” so-and-so. She would tell him anecdotes of nice things done, of gentlemanly feats of graceful consideration; she would record her neat observations of people in trains and omnibuses; how, for example, a man had passed her change to the conductor, “quite a common man he looked,” but he had lifted his hat. She stamped Kipps so deeply with the hat-raising habit that he would uncover if he found himself in the same railway ticket office with a lady had to stand ceremoniously until the difficulties of change drove him to an apologetic provisional oblique resumption of his headgear.⁠ ⁠… And robbing these things of any air of personal application, she threw about them an abundant talk about her two children⁠—she called them her Twin Jewels