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

Mutton came with peas. He arrested the hand of the waiter. “No peas,” he said. He knew something of the difficulty and danger of eating peas. Then, when the peas went away again he was embittered again.⁠ ⁠… Echoes of Masterman’s burning rhetoric began to reverberate in his mind. Nice lot of people these were to laugh at anyone! Women half undressed. It was that made him so beastly uncomfortable. How could one eat one’s dinner with people about him like that? Nice lot they were. He was glad he wasn’t one of them, anyhow. Yes, they might look. He resolved if they looked at him again he would ask one of the men who he was staring at. His perturbed and angry face would have concerned anyone. The band by an unfortunate accident was playing truculent military music. The mental change Kipps underwent was, in its way, what psychologists call a conversion. In a few moments all Kipps’ ideals were changed. He who had been “practically a gentleman,” the sedulous pupil of Coote, the punctilious raiser of hats, was instantly a rebel, an outcast, the hater of everything “stuck up,” the foe of Society and the social order of today. Here they were among the profits of their robbery, these people who might do anything with the world.⁠ ⁠…

“No, thenks,” he said to a dish.

He addressed a scornful eye at the shoulders of the lady to his left.

Presently he was refusing another dish. He didn’t like it⁠—fussed up food! Probably cooked by some foreigner. He finished up his wine and his bread.

“No, thenks.”

“No, thenks.”⁠ ⁠…

He discovered the eye of a diner fixed curiously upon his flushed face. He responded with a glare. Couldn’t he go without things if he liked?

“What’s this?” said Kipps to a great green cone.

“Ice,” said the waiter.

“I’ll ’ave some,” said Kipps.

He seized a fork and spoon and assailed the bombe. It cut rather stiffly. “Come up!” said Kipps, with concentrated bitterness, and the truncated summit of the bombe flew off suddenly, travelling eastward with remarkable velocity. Flop, it went upon the floor a yard away, and for awhile time seemed empty.

At the adjacent table they were laughing together.

Shy the rest of the bombe at them?

Flight?

At any rate a dignified withdrawal.

“No!” said Kipps, “no more,” arresting the polite attempt of the waiter to serve him with another piece. He had a vague idea he might carry off the affair as though he had meant the ice to go on the floor⁠—not liking ice, for example, and being annoyed at the badness of his dinner. He put both hands on the table, thrust back his chair, disengaged a purple slipper from his napkin, and rose. He stepped carefully over the prostrate ice, kicked the napkin under the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and marched out⁠—shaking the dust of the place, as it were, from his feet. He left behind him a melting fragment of ice upon the floor, his gibus hat, warm and compressed in his chair, and in addition every social ambition he had ever entertained in the world.

Kipps went back to Folkestone in time for the Anagram Tea. But you must not imagine that the change of heart that came to him in the dining-room of the Royal Grand Hotel involved any change of attitude toward this promised social and intellectual treat. He went back because the Royal Grand was too much for him.

Outwardly calm, or at most a little flushed and ruffled, inwardly Kipps was a horrible, tormented battleground of scruples, doubts, shames and self-assertions during that three days of silent, desperate grappling with the big hotel. He did not intend the monstrosity should beat him without a struggle, but at last he had sullenly to admit himself overcome. The odds were terrific. On the one hand himself⁠—with, among other things, only one pair of boots; on the other a vast wilderness of rooms, covering several acres, and with over a thousand people, staff and visitors, all chiefly occupied in looking queerly at Kipps, in laughing at him behind his back, in watching for difficult corners at which to confront and perplex him, and inflict humiliations upon him. For example, the hotel scored over its electric light. After the dinner the chambermaid, a hard, unsympathetic young woman with a superior manner, was summoned by a bell Kipps had rung under the impression the button was the electric light switch. “Look ’ere,” said Kipps, rubbing a shin that had suffered during his search in the dark, “why aren’t there any candles or matches?” The hotel explained and scored heavily.

“It isn’t everyone is up to these things,” said Kipps.

“No, it isn’t,” said the chambermaid, with ill-concealed scorn, and slammed the door at him.

“S’pose I ought to have tipped her,” said Kipps.

After that Kipps cleaned his boots with a pocket-handkerchief and went for a long walk and got home in a hansom, but the hotel scored again by his not putting out his boots and so having to clean them again in the morning. The hotel also snubbed him by bringing him hot water when he was fully dressed and looking surprised at his collar, but he got a breakfast, I must admit, with scarcely any difficulty.

After that the hotel scored heavily by the fact that there are twenty-four hours in the day and Kipps had nothing to do in any of them. He was a little footsore from his previous day’s pedestrianism, and he could make up his mind for no long excursions. He flitted in and out of the hotel several times, and it was the polite porter who touched his hat every time that first set Kipps tipping.

“What ’e wants is a tip,” said Kipps.

So at the next opportunity he gave the man an unexpected shilling, and having once put his hand in his pocket, there was no reason why he should not go on. He bought a newspaper at the bookstall and tipped the boy the rest of the shilling, and then went