His beautiful modesty awakened nothing but benevolence in the mind of Chester Coote.
"If I had someone like you," said Kipps, "that I knew regular like——"
From that point their course ran swift and easy. "If I could be of any use to you," said Coote....
"But you're so busy and all that."
"Not too busy. You know, your case is a very interesting one. It was partly that made me speak to you and draw you out. Here you are with all this money and no experience, a spirited young chap——"
"That's jest it," said Kipps.
"I thought I'd see what you were made of, and I must confess I've rarely talked to anyone that I've found quite so interesting as you have been——"
"I seem able to say things to you like somehow," said Kipps.
"I'm glad. I'm tremendously glad."
"I want a Friend. That's it—straight."
"My dear chap, if I——"
"Yes, but——"
"I want a Friend, too."
"Reely?"
"Yes. You know, my dear Kipps—if I may call you that."
"Go on," said Kipps.
"I'm rather a lonely dog myself. This to-night——. I've not had anyone I've spoken to so freely of my Work for months."
"No?"
"You. And, my dear chap, if I can do anything to guide or help you——"
Coote displayed all his teeth in a kindly tremulous smile and his eyes were shiny. "Shake 'ands," said Kipps, deeply moved, and he and Coote rose and clasped with mutual emotion.
"It's reely too good of you," said Kipps.
"Whatever I can do I will," said Coote.
And so their compact was made. From that moment they were Friends, intimate, confidential, high-thinking, sotto voce friends. All the rest of their talk (and it inclined to be interminable) was an expansion of that. For that night Kipps wallowed in self-abandonment and Coote behaved as one who had received a great trust. That sinister passion for pedagoguery to which the Good Intentioned are so fatally liable, that passion of infinite presumption that permits one weak human being to arrogate the direction of another weak human being's affairs, had Coote in its grip. He was to be a sort of lay confessor and director of Kipps, he was to help Kipps in a thousand ways, he was in fact to chaperon Kipps into the higher and better sort of English life. He was to tell him his faults, advise him about the right thing to do——
"It's all these things I don't know," said Kipps. "I don't know, for instance, what's the right sort of dress to wear—I don't even know if I'm dressed right now——"
"All these things"—Coote stuck out his lips and nodded rapidly to show he understood—"Trust me for that," he said, "trust me."
As the evening wore on Coote's manner changed, became more and more the manner of a proprietor. He began to take up his rôle, to survey Kipps with a new, with a critical affection. It was evident the thing fell in with his ideas. "It will be awfully interesting," he said. "You know, Kipps, you're really good stuff." (Every sentence now he said "Kipps" or "my dear Kipps" with a curiously authoritative intonation.)
"I know," said Kipps, "only there's such a lot of things I don't seem to be up to some'ow. That's where the trouble comes in."
They talked and talked, and now Kipps was talking freely. They rambled over all sorts of things. Among others Kipps' character was dealt with at length. Kipps gave valuable lights on it. "When I'm reely excited," he said, "I don't seem to care what I do. I'm like that." And again, "I don't like to do anything under'and. I must speak out...."
He picked a piece of cotton from his knee, the fire grimaced behind his back, and his shadow on the wall and ceiling was disrespectfully convulsed.
§3
Kipps went to bed at last with an impression of important things settled, and he lay awake for quite a long time. He felt he was lucky. He had known—in fact Buggins and Carshot and Pierce had made it very clear indeed—that his status in life had changed and that stupendous adaptations had to be achieved, but how they were to be effected had driven that adaptation into the incredible. Here in the simplest, easiest way was the adapter. The thing had become possible. Not of course easy, but possible.
There was much to learn, sheer intellectual toil, methods of address, bowing, an enormous complexity of laws. One broken, you are an outcast. How, for example, would one encounter Lady Punnet? It was quite possible some day he might really have to do that. Coote might introduce him. "Lord!" he said aloud to the darkness between grinning and dismay. He figured himself going into the Emporium to buy a tie, for example, and there in the face of Buggins, Carshot, Pierce and the rest of them, meeting "my friend, Lady Punnet!" It might not end with Lady Punnet! His imagination plunged and bolted with him, galloped, took wings and soared to romantic, to poetical altitudes....
Suppose some day one met Royalty. By accident, say! He soared to that! After all,—twelve hundred a year is a lift, a tremendous lift. How did one address Royalty? "Your Majesty's Goodness," it will be, no doubt—something like that—and on the knees. He became impersonal. Over a thousand a year made him an Esquire, didn't it? He thought that was it. In which case, wouldn't he have to be presented at Court? Velvet cycling breeches like you wear cycling, and a sword! What a curious place a court must be! Kneeling and bowing, and what was it Miss Mergle used to talk about? Of course!—ladies with long trains walking about backward. Everybody walked about backward at court, he knew, when not actually on their knees. Perhaps, though, some people regular stood up to the King! Talked to him, just as one might talk to Buggins, say. Cheek of course! Dukes, it might be, did that—by permission? Millionnaires?...
From such thoughts this free citizen of our Crowned Republic passed insensibly into dreams, turgid dreams of that vast ascent which constitutes the true-born Briton's social scheme, which terminates with retrogressive progression and a bending back.
§4
The next morning he came down to breakfast looking grave—a man with much before him in the world....
Kipps made a very special thing of his breakfast. Daily once hopeless dreams came true then. It had been customary in the Emporium to supplement Shalford's generous, indeed unlimited, supply of bread and butter-substitute, by private purchases, and this had given Kipps very broad, artistic conceptions of what the meal might be. Now there would be a cutlet or so or a mutton chop—this splendour Buggins had reported from the great London clubs—haddock, kipper, whiting or fish-balls, eggs, boiled or scrambled, or eggs and bacon, kidney also frequently and sometimes liver. Amidst a garland of such themes, sausages, black and white puddings, bubble-and-squeak, fried cabbage and scallops came and went. Always as camp followers came potted meat in all varieties, cold bacon, German sausage, brawn, marmalade and two sorts of jam, and when he had finished these he would sit among his plates and smoke a cigarette and look at all these dishes crowded round him with a beatific approval. It was his principal meal. He was sitting with his cigarette regarding his apartment with that complacency begotten of a generous plan of feeding successfully realized, when newspapers and post arrived.
There were several things by the post, tradesmen's circulars and cards and two pathetic begging letters—his luck had got into the papers—and there was a letter from a literary man and a book to enforce his request for 10/—to put down Socialism. The book made it very clear that prompt action on the part of property owners was becoming urgent, if property was to last out the year. Kipps dipped in it and was seriously perturbed. And there was a letter from old Kipps saying it was difficult to leave the shop and come over and see him again just yet, but that he had been to a sale at Lydd the previous day and bought a few good old books and things it would be difficult to find the equal of in Folkestone. "They don't know the value of these things out here," wrote old Kipps, "but you may depend upon it they are valuable," and a brief financial statement followed. "There is an engraving someone might come along and offer you a lot of money for one of these days. Depend upon it, these old things are about the best investment you could make...."
Old Kipps had long been addicted to sales, and his nephew's good fortune had converted what had once been but a looking and a craving—he had rarely even bid for anything in the old days except the garden tools or the kitchen gallipots or things like that, things one gets for sixpence and finds a use for—into a very active pleasure. Sage and penetrating inspection, a certain mystery of bearing, tactical bids and Purchase!—Purchase!—the old man had had a good time.
While Kipps was rereading the begging letters and wishing he had the sound, clear common sense of Buggins to help him a little, the Parcels Post brought along the box from his uncle. It was a large, insecure looking case held together by a few still loyal nails, and by what the British War Office would have recognised at once as an Army Corps of string, rags and odds and ends tied together. Kipps unpacked it with a table knife, assisted at a critical point by the poker, and found a number of books and other objects of an antique type.
There were three bound volumes of early issues of Chambers' Journal, a copy of Punch's Pocket Book for 1875, Sturm's Reflections, an early version of Gill's Geography (slightly torn), an illustrated work on Spinal Curvature, an early edition of Kirke's Human Physiology, The Scottish Chiefs and a little volume on the Language of Flowers. There was a fine steel engraving, oak-framed and with some rusty spots, done in the Colossal style and representing the Handwriting on the Wall. There were also a copper kettle, a pair of candle snuffers, a brass shoehorn, a tea caddy to lock, two decanters (one stoppered) and what was probably a portion of an eighteenth century child's rattle.
Kipps examined these objects one by one and wished he knew more about them. Turning over the pages of the Physiology again he came upon a striking plate in which a youth of agreeable profile displayed his interior in an unstinted manner to the startled eye. It was a new view of humanity altogether for Kipps, and it arrested his mind.
This anatomised figure made him forget for a space that he was "practically a gentleman" altogether, and he was still surveying its extraordinary complications when another reminder of a world quite outside those spheres of ordered gentility into which his dreams had carried him overnight, arrived (following the servant) in the person of Chitterlow.
§5
"Ul-lo!" said Kipps, rising.
"Not busy?" said Chitterlow, enveloping Kipps' hand for a moment in one of his own and tossing the yachting cap upon the monumental carved oak sideboard.
"Only a bit of reading," said Kipps.
"Reading, eh?" Chitterlow cocked the red eye at the books and other properties for a moment and then, "I've been expecting you 'round again one night."
"I been coming 'round," said Kipps. "On'y there's a chap 'ere——. I was coming 'round last night on'y I met 'im."
He walked to the hearthrug. Chitterlow drifted around the room for a time, glancing at things as he talked. "I've altered that play tremendously since I saw you," he said. "Pulled it all to pieces."
"What play's that, Chit'low?"
"The one we were talking about. You know. You said something—I don't know if you meant it—about buying half of it. Not the tragedy. I wouldn't sell my twin brother a share in that. That's my investment. That's my Serious Work. No! I mean that new farce I've been on to. Thing with the business about a beetle."
"Oo yes," said Kipps. "I remember."
"I thought you would. Said you'd take a fourth share for a hundred pounds. You know."
"I seem to remember something——"
"Well, it's all different. Every bit of it. I'll tell you. You remember what you said about a butterfly? You got confused, you know—Old Meth. Kept calling the beetle a butterfly and that set me off. I've made it quite different. Quite different. Instead of Popplewaddle—thundering good farce name that, you know; for all that it came from a Visitors' List—instead of Popplewaddle getting a beetle down his neck and rushing about, I've made him a collector—collects butterflies, and this one you know's a rare one. Comes in at window, centre." Chitterlow began to illustrate with appropriate gestures. "Pop rushes about after it. Forgets he mustn't let on he's in the house. After that——. Tells 'em. Rare butterfly, worth lots of money. Some are, you know. Everyone's on to it after that. Butterfly can't get out of room, every time it comes out to have a try, rush and scurry. Well, I've worked on that. Only——"
He came very close to Kipps. He held up one hand horizontally and tapped it in a striking and confidential manner with the fingers of the other. "Something else," he said. "That's given me a Real Ibsenish Touch—like the Wild Duck. You know that woman—I've made her lighter—and she sees it. When they're chasing the butterfly the third time, she's on! She looks. 'That's me!' she says. Bif! Pestered Butterfly. She's the Pestered Butterfly. It's legitimate. Much more legitimate than the Wild Duck—where there isn't a duck!
"Knock 'em! The very title ought to knock 'em. I've been working like a horse at it.... You'll have a gold mine in that quarter share, Kipps.... I don't mind. It's suited me to sell it, and suited you to buy. Bif!"
Chitterlow interrupted his discourse to ask, "You haven't any brandy in the house, have you? Not to drink, you know. But I want just an eggcupful to pull me steady. My liver's a bit queer.... It doesn't matter, if you haven't. Not a bit. I'm like that. Yes, whiskey'll do. Better!"
Kipps hesitated for a moment, then turned and fumbled in the cupboard of his sideboard. Presently he disinterred a bottle of whiskey and placed it on the table. Then he put out first one bottle of soda water and after the hesitation of a moment another. Chitterlow picked up the bottle and read the label. "Good old Methusaleh," he said. Kipps handed him the corkscrew and then his hand fluttered up to his mouth. "I'll have to ring now," he said, "to get glasses." He hesitated for a moment before doing so, leaning doubtfully as it were towards the bell.
When the housemaid appeared he was standing on the hearthrug with his legs wide apart, with the bearing of a desperate fellow. And after they had both had whiskeys—"You know a decent whiskey," Chitterlow remarked and took another "just to drink."—Kipps produced cigarettes and the conversation flowed again.
Chitterlow paced the room. He was, he explained, taking a day off; that was why he had come around to see Kipps. Whenever he thought of any extensive change in a play he was writing he always took a day off. In the end it saved time to do so. It prevented his starting rashly upon work that might have to be rewritten. There was no good in doing work when you might have to do it over again, none whatever.
Presently they were descending the steps by the Parade en route for the Warren, with Chitterlow doing the talking and going with a dancing drop from step to step....
They had a great walk, not a long one, but a great one. They went up by the Sanatorium, and over the East Cliff and into that queer little wilderness of slippery and tumbling clay and rock under the chalk cliffs, a wilderness of thorn and bramble, wild rose and wayfaring tree, that adds so greatly to Folkestone's charm. They traversed its intricacies and clambered up to the crest of the cliffs at last by a precipitous path that Chitterlow endowed in some mysterious way with suggestions of Alpine adventure. Every now and then he would glance aside at sea and cliffs with a fresh boyishness of imagination that brought back New Romney and the stranded wrecks to Kipps' memory; but mostly he bored on with his great obsession of plays and playwriting, and that empty absurdity that is so serious to his kind, his Art. That was a thing that needed a monstrous lot of explaining. Along they went, sometimes abreast, sometimes in single file, up the little paths, and down the little paths, and in among the bushes and out along the edge above the beach, and Kipps went along trying ever and again to get an insignificant word in edgeways, and the gestures of Chitterlow flew wide and far and his great voice rose and fell, and he said this and he said that and he biffed and banged into the circumambient Inane.
It was assumed that they were embarked upon no more trivial enterprise than the Reform of the British Stage, and Kipps found himself classed with many opulent and even royal and noble amateurs—the Honourable Thomas Norgate came in here—who had interested themselves in the practical realisation of high ideals about the Drama. Only he had a finer understanding of these things, and instead of being preyed upon by the common professional—"and they are a lot," said Chitterlow; "I haven't toured for nothing"—he would have Chitterlow. Kipps gathered few details. It was clear he had bought the quarter of a farcical comedy—practically a gold mine—and it would appear it would be a good thing to buy the half. A suggestion, or the suggestion of a suggestion, floated out that he should buy the whole play and produce it forthwith. It seemed he was to produce the play upon a royalty system of a new sort, whatever a royalty system of any sort might be. Then there was some doubt, after all, whether that farcical comedy was in itself sufficient to revolutionise the present lamentable state of the British Drama. Better perhaps for such a purpose was that tragedy—as yet unfinished—which was to display all that Chitterlow knew about women, and which was to centre about a Russian nobleman embodying the fundamental Chitterlow personality. Then it became clearer that Kipps was to produce several plays. Kipps was to produce a great number of plays. Kipps was to found a National Theatre.
It is probable that Kipps would have expressed some sort of disavowal, if he had known how to express it. Occasionally his face assumed an expression of whistling meditation, but that was as far as he got towards protest.
In the clutch of Chitterlow and the Incalculable, Kipps came round to the house in Fenchurch Street and was there made to participate in the midday meal. He came to the house, forgetting certain confidences, and was reminded of the existence of a Mrs. Chitterlow (with the finest completely untrained Contralto voice in England) by her appearance. She had an air of being older than Chitterlow, although probably she wasn't, and her hair was a reddish brown, streaked with gold. She was dressed in one of those complaisant garments that are dressing gowns or tea gowns or bathing wraps or rather original evening robes according to the exigencies of the moment—from the first Kipps was aware that she possessed a warm and rounded neck, and her well-moulded arms came and vanished from the sleeves—and she had large, expressive brown eyes that he discovered ever and again fixed in an enigmatical manner upon his own.
A simple but sufficient meal had been distributed with careless spontaneity over the little round table in the room with the photographs and looking glass, and when a plate had by Chitterlow's direction been taken from under the marmalade in the cupboard and the kitchen fork and a knife that was not loose in its handle had been found for Kipps they began and she had evidently heard of Kipps before, and he made a tumultuous repast. Chitterlow ate with quiet enormity, but it did not interfere with the flow of his talk. He introduced Kipps to his wife very briefly; made it vaguely evident that the production of the comedy was the thing chiefly settled. His reach extended over the table, and he troubled nobody. When Mrs. Chitterlow, who for a little while seemed socially self-conscious, reproved him for taking a potato with a jab of his fork, he answered, "Well, you shouldn't have married a man of Genius," and from a subsequent remark it was perfectly clear that Chitterlow's standing in this respect was made no secret of in his household.
They drank old Methusaleh and syphon soda, and there was no clearing away, they just sat among the plates and things, and Mrs. Chitterlow took her husband's tobacco pouch and made a cigarette and smoked and blew smoke and looked at Kipps with her large, brown eyes. Kipps had seen cigarettes smoked by ladies before, "for fun," but this was real smoking. It frightened him rather. He felt he must not encourage this lady—at any rate in Chitterlow's presence.
They became very cheerful after the repast, and as there was now no waste to deplore, such as one experiences in the windy, open air, Chitterlow gave his voice full vent. He fell to praising Kipps very highly and loudly. He said he had known Kipps was the right sort, he had seen it from the first, almost before he got up out of the mud on that memorable night. "You can," he said, "sometimes. That was why——" he stopped, but he seemed on the verge of explaining that it was his certainty of Kipps being the right sort had led him to confer this great Fortune upon him. He left that impression. He threw out a number of long sentences and material for sentences of a highly philosophical and incoherent character about Coincidences. It became evident he considered dramatic criticism in a perilously low condition....
About four Kipps found himself stranded, as it were, by a receding Chitterlow on a seat upon the Leas.
He was chiefly aware that Chitterlow was an overwhelming personality. He puffed his cheeks and blew.
No doubt this was seeing life, but had he particularly wanted to see life that day? In a way Chitterlow had interrupted him. The day he had designed for himself was altogether different from this. He had been going to read through a precious little volume called "Don't" that Coote had sent round for him, a book of invaluable hints, a summary of British deportment that had only the one defect of being at points a little out of date.
That reminded him he had intended to perform a difficult exercise called an Afternoon Call upon the Cootes, as a preliminary to doing it in deadly earnest upon the Walshinghams. It was no good to-day, anyhow, now.
He came back to Chitterlow. He would have to explain to Chitterlow he was taking too much for granted, he would have to do that. It was so difficult to do in Chitterlow's presence though; in his absence it was easy enough. This half share, and taking a theatre and all of it, was going too far.
The quarter share was right enough, he supposed, but even that——! A hundred pounds! What wealth is there left in the world after one has paid out a hundred pounds from it?
He had to recall that in a sense Chitterlow had indeed brought him his fortune before he could face even that.
You must not think too hardly of him. To Kipps you see there was as yet no such thing as proportion in these matters. A hundred pounds went to his horizon. A hundred pounds seemed to him just exactly as big as any other large sum of money.
CHAPTER II THE WALSHINGHAMS
§1
The Cootes live in a little house in Bouverie Square with a tangle of Virginia creeper up the verandah.
Kipps had been troubled in his mind about knocking double or single—it is these things show what a man is made of—but happily there was a bell.
A queer little maid, with a big cap, admitted Kipps and took him through a bead curtain and a door into a little drawing-room, with a black and gold piano, a glazed bookcase, a Moorish cosy corner and a draped looking glass over-mantel bright with Regent Street ornaments and photographs of various intellectual lights. A number of cards of invitation to meetings and the match list of a Band of Hope cricket club were stuck into the looking glass frame with Coote's name as a Vice-President. There was a bust of Beethoven over the bookcase and the walls were thick with conscientiously executed but carelessly selected "views" in oil and water colours and gilt frames. At the end of the room facing the light was a portrait that struck Kipps at first as being Coote in spectacles and feminine costume and that he afterwards decided must be Coote's mother. Then the original appeared and he discovered that it was Coote's elder and only sister who kept house for him. She wore her hair in a knob behind, and the sight of the knob suggested to Kipps an explanation for a frequent gesture of Coote's, a patting exploratory movement to the back of his head. And then it occurred to him that this was quite an absurd idea altogether.
She said "Mr. Kipps, I believe," and Kipps laughed pleasantly and said, "That's it!" and then she told him that "Chester" had gone down to the art school to see about sending off some drawings or other and that he would be back soon. Then she asked Kipps if he painted, and showed him the pictures on the wall. Kipps asked her where each one was "of," and when she showed him some of the Leas slopes he said he never would have recognised them. He said it was funny how things looked in a picture very often. "But they're awfully good," he said. "Did you do them?" He would look at them with his neck arched like a swan's, his head back and on one side and then suddenly peer closely into them. "They are good. I wish I could paint." "That's what Chester says," she answered. "I tell him he has better things to do." Kipps seemed to get on very well with her.
Then Coote came in and they left her and went upstairs together and had a good talk about reading and the Rules of Life. Or rather Coote talked, and the praises of thought and reading were in his mouth....
You must figure Coote's study, a little bedroom put to studious uses, and over the mantel an array of things he had been led to believe indicative of culture and refinement, an autotype of Rossetti's "Annunciation," an autotype of Watt's "Minotaur," a Swiss carved pipe with many joints and a photograph of Amiens Cathedral (these two the spoils of travel), a phrenological bust and some broken fossils from the Warren. A rotating bookshelf carried the Encyclopædia Britannica (tenth edition), and on the top of it a large official looking, age grubby, envelope bearing the mystic words, "On His Majesty's Service," a number or so of the "Bookman," and a box of cigarettes were lying. A table under the window bore a little microscope, some dust in a saucer, some grimy glass slips and broken cover glasses, for Coote had "gone in for" biology a little. The longer side of the room was given over to bookshelves, neatly edged with pinked American cloth, and with an array of books—no worse an array of books than you find in any public library; an almost haphazard accumulation of obsolete classics, contemporary successes, the Hundred Best Books (including Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year") old school books, directories, the Times Atlas, Ruskin in bulk, Tennyson complete in one volume, Longfellow, Charles Kingsley, Smiles and Mrs. Humphry Ward, a guide book or so, several medical pamphlets, odd magazine numbers, and much indescribable rubbish—in fact a compendium of the contemporary British mind. And in front of this array stood Kipps, ill-taught and untrained, respectful, awestricken and, for a moment at any rate, willing to learn, while Coote, the exemplary Coote, talked to him like a bishop of reading and the virtue in books.
"Nothing enlarges the mind," said Coote, "like Travel and Books.... And they're both so easy nowadays, and so cheap!"
"I've often wanted to 'ave a good go in at reading," Kipps replied.
"You'd hardly believe," Coote said, "how much you can get out of books. Provided you avoid trashy reading, that is. You ought to make a rule, Kipps, and read one Serious Book a week. Of course, we can Learn even from Novels, Nace Novels that is, but it isn't the same thing as serious reading. I made a rule, One Serious Book and One Novel—no more. There's some of the serious books I've been reading lately—on that table; Sartor Resartus—Mrs. Twaddletome's Pond Life, the Scottish Chiefs, Life and Letters of Dean Farrar...."
§2
There came at last the sound of a gong and Kipps descended to tea in that state of nervous apprehension at the difficulties of eating and drinking that his Aunt's knuckle rappings had implanted in him forever. Over Coote's shoulder he became aware of a fourth person in the Moorish cosy corner, and he turned, leaving incomplete something incoherent he was saying to Miss Coote about his modest respect and desire for literature to discover this fourth person was Miss Helen Walshingham, hatless and looking very much at home.
She rose at once with an extended hand to meet his hesitation.
"You're stopping in Folkestone, Mr. Kipps?"
"'Ere on a bit of business," said Kipps. "I thought you was away in Bruges."
"That's later," said Miss Walshingham. "We're stopping until my brother's holiday begins and we're trying to let our house. Where are you staying in Folkestone?"
"I got a 'ouse of mine—on the Leas."
"I've heard all about your good fortune—this afternoon."
"Isn't it a Go!" said Kips. "I 'aven't nearly got to believe its reely 'appened yet. When that Mr. Bean told me of it you could 'ave knocked me down with a feather.... It's a tremenjous change for me."
He discovered Miss Coote was asking him whether he took milk and sugar. "I don't mind," said Kipps. "Just as you like."
Coote became active handing tea and bread and butter. It was thinly cut, and the bread was rather new, and the half of the slice that Kipps took fell upon the floor. He had been holding it by the edge, for he was not used to this migratory method of taking tea without plates or table. This little incident ruled him out of the conversation for a time, and when he came to attend to it again they were talking about something or other prodigious—a performer of some sort—that was coming, called, it seemed, "Padrooski." So Kipps, who had quietly dropped into a chair, ate his bread and butter, said "No, thenk you" to any more, and by this discreet restraint got more freedom with his cup and saucer.
Apart from the confusion natural to tea, he was in a state of tremulous excitement on account of the presence of Miss Walshingham. He glanced from Miss Coote to her brother and then at Helen. He regarded her over the top of his cup as he drank. Here she was, solid and real. It was wonderful. He remarked, as he had done at times before, the easy flow of the dark hair back from her brow over her ears, the shapeliness of the white hands that came out from her simple white cuffs, the delicate pencilling of her brow.
Presently she turned her face to him almost suddenly, and smiled with the easiest assurance of friendship.
"You will go, I suppose," she said, and added, "to the Recital."
"If I'm in Folkestone I shall," said Kipps, clearing away a little hoarseness. "I don't know much about music, but what I do know I like."
"I'm sure you'll like Paderewski," she said.
"If you do," he said, "I dessay I shall."
He found Coote very kindly taking his cup.
"Do you think of living in Folkestone?" asked Miss Coote, in a tone of proprietorship, from the hearthrug.
"No," said Kipps, "that's jest it—I hardly know." He also said that he wanted to look around a bit before doing anything. "There's so much to consider," said Coote, smoothing the back of his head.
"I may go back to New Romney for a bit," said Kipps. "I got an Uncle and Aunt there. I reely don't know."
Helen regarded him thoughtfully for a moment.
"You must come and see us," she said, "before we go to Bruges."
"Oo, rather!" said Kipps. "If I may."
"Yes, do," she said, and suddenly stood up before Kipps could formulate an enquiry when he should call.
"You're sure you can spare that drawing board?" she said to Miss Coote, and the conversation passed out of range.
And when he had said "Good-bye" to Miss Walshingham and she had repeated her invitation to call, he went upstairs again with Coote to look out certain initiatory books they had had under discussion. And then Kipps, blowing very resolutely, went back to his own place, bearing in his arm (1) Sesame and Lilies, (2) Sir George Tressady, (3) an anonymous book on "Vitality" that Coote particularly esteemed. And, having got to his own sitting-room, he opened Sesame and Lilies and read it with ruthless determination for some time.
§3
Presently he leant back and gave himself up to the business of trying to imagine just exactly what Miss Walshingham could have thought of him when she saw him. Doubts about the precise effect of the grey flannel suit began to trouble him. He turned to the mirror over the mantel, and then got into a chair to study the hang of the trousers. It looked all right. Luckily, she had not seen the Panama hat. He knew that he had the brim turned up wrong, but he could not find out which way the brim was right. However, that she had not seen. He might perhaps ask at the shop where he bought it.
He meditated for awhile on his reflected face—doubtful whether he liked it or not—and then got down again and flitted across to the sideboard where there lay two little books, one in a cheap, magnificent cover of red and gold, and the other in green canvas. The former was called, as its cover witnessed, "Manners and Rules of Good Society, by a Member of the Aristocracy," and after the cover had indulged in a band of gilded decoration, light-hearted but natural under the circumstances, it added "TWENTY-FIRST EDITION." The second was that admirable classic, "The Art of Conversing." Kipps returned with these to his seat, placed the two before him, opened the latter with a sigh and flattened it under his hand.
Then with knitted brows he began to read onward from a mark, his lips moving.
"Having thus acquired possession of an idea, the little ship should not be abruptly launched into deep waters, but should be first permitted to glide gently and smoothly into the shallows, that is to say, the conversation should not be commenced by broadly and roundly stating a fact, or didactically expressing an opinion, as the subject would be thus virtually or summarily disposed of, or perhaps be met with a 'Really' or 'Indeed,' or some equally brief monosyllabic reply. If an opposite opinion were held by the person to whom the remark were addressed, he might not, if a stranger, care to express it in the form of a direct contradiction, or actual dissent. To glide imperceptibly into conversation is the object to be attained."
At this point Mr. Kipps rubbed his fingers through his hair with an expression of some perplexity and went back to the beginning.
§4
When Kipps made his call on the Walshinghams, it all happened so differently from the "Manners and Rules" prescription ("Paying Calls") that he was quite lost from the very outset. Instead of the footman or maidservant proper in these cases, Miss Walshingham opened the door to him herself. "I'm so glad you've come," she said, with one of her rare smiles.
She stood aside for him to enter the rather narrow passage.
"I thought I'd call," he said, retaining his hat and stick.
She closed the door and led the way to a little drawing-room, which impressed Kipps as being smaller and less emphatically coloured than that of the Cootes, and in which at first only a copper bowl of white poppies upon the brown tablecloth caught his particular attention.
"You won't think it unconventional to come in, Mr. Kipps, will you?" she remarked. "Mother is out."
"I don't mind," he said, smiling amiably, "if you don't."
She walked around the table and stood regarding him across it, with that same look between speculative curiosity and appreciation that he remembered from the last of the art class meetings.
"I wondered whether you would call or whether you wouldn't before you left Folkestone."
"I'm not leaving Folkestone for a bit, and any'ow, I should have called on you."
"Mother will be sorry she was out. I've told her about you, and she wants, I know, to meet you."
"I saw 'er—if that was 'er—in the shop," said Kipps.
"Yes—you did, didn't you!... She has gone out to make some duty calls, and I didn't go. I had something to write. I write a little, you know."
"Reely!" said Kipps.
"It's nothing much," she said, "and it comes to nothing." She glanced at a little desk near the window, on which there lay some paper. "One must do something." She broke off abruptly. "Have you seen our outlook?" she asked and walked to the window, and Kipps came and stood beside her. "We look on the Square. It might be worse, you know. That outporter's truck there is horrid—and the railings, but it's better than staring one's social replica in the face, isn't it? It's pleasant in early spring—bright green, laid on with a dry brush—and it's pleasant in autumn."
"I like it," said Kipps. "That laylock there is pretty, isn't it?"
"Children come and pick it at times," she remarked.
"I dessay they do," said Kipps.
He rested on his hat and stick and looked appreciatively out of the window, and she glanced at him for one swift moment. A suggestion that might have come from the Art of Conversing came into his head. "Have you a garden?" he said.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Only a little one," she said, and then, "perhaps you would like to see it."
"I like gardenin'," said Kipps, with memories of a pennyworth of nasturtiums he had once trained over his uncle's dustbin.
She led the way with a certain relief.
They emerged through a four seasons coloured glass door to a little iron verandah that led by iron steps to a minute walled garden. There was just room for a patch of turf and a flower-bed; one sturdy variegated Euonymus grew in the corner. But the early June flowers, the big narcissus, snow upon the mountains, and a fine show of yellow wallflowers shone gay.
"That's our garden," said Helen. "It's not a very big one, is it?"
"I like it," said Kipps.
"It's small," she said, "but this is the day of small things."
Kipps didn't follow that.
"If you were writing when I came," he remarked, "I'm interrupting you."
She turned round with her back to the railing and rested, leaning on her hands. "I had finished," she said. "I couldn't get on."
"Were you making up something?" asked Kipps.
There was a little interval before she smiled. "I try—quite vainly—to write stories," she said. "One must do something. I don't know whether I shall ever do any good—at that—anyhow. It seems so hopeless. And, of course, one must study the popular taste. But, now my brother has gone to London, I get a lot of leisure."
"I seen your brother, 'aven't I?"
"He came to the class once or twice. Very probably you have. He's gone to London to pass his examinations and become a solicitor. And then, I suppose, he'll have a chance. Not much, perhaps, even then. But he's luckier than I am."
"You got your classes and things."
"They ought to satisfy me. But they don't. I suppose I'm ambitious. We both are. And we hadn't much of a springboard." She glanced over his shoulder at the cramped little garden with an air of reference in her gesture.
"I should think you could do anything if you wanted to," said Kipps.
"As a matter of fact I can't do anything I want to."
"You done a good deal."
"What?"
"Well, didn't you pass one of these here University things?"
"Oh! I matriculated!"
"I should think I was no end of a swell if I did, I know that."
"Mr. Kipps, do you know how many people matriculate into London University every year?"
"How many then?"
"Between two and three thousand."
"Well, just think how many don't!"
Her smile came again, and broke into a laugh. "Oh, they don't count," she said, and then, realising that might penetrate Kipps if he was left with it, she hurried on to, "The fact is, I'm a discontented person, Mr. Kipps. Folkestone, you know, is a Sea Front, and it values people by sheer vulgar prosperity. We're not prosperous, and we live in a back street. We have to live here because this is our house. It's a mercy we haven't to 'let.' One feels one hasn't opportunities. If one had, I suppose one wouldn't use them. Still——"
Kipps felt he was being taken tremendously into her confidence. "That's jest it," he said, very sagely.
He leant forward on his stick and said, very earnestly, "I believe you could do anything you wanted to, if you tried."
She threw out her hands in disavowal.
"I know," said he, very sagely and nodding his head. "I watched you once or twice when you were teaching that wood-carving class."
For some reason this made her laugh—a rather pleasant laugh, and that made Kipps feel a very witty and successful person. "It's very evident," she said, "that you're one of those rare people who believe in me, Mr. Kipps," to which he answered, "Oo, I do!" and then suddenly they became aware of Mrs. Walshingham coming along the passage. In another moment she appeared through the four seasons door, bonneted and ladylike, and a little faded, exactly as Kipps had seen her in the shop. Kipps felt a certain apprehension at her appearance, in spite of the reassurances he had had from Coote.
"Mr. Kipps has called on us," said Helen, and Mrs. Walshingham said it was very kind of him, and added that new people didn't call on them very much nowadays. There was nothing of the scandalised surprise Kipps had seen in the shop; she had heard, perhaps, he was a gentleman now. In the shop he had thought her rather jaded and haughty, but he had scarcely taken her hand, which responded to his touch with a friendly pressure, before he knew how mistaken he had been. She then told her daughter that someone called Mrs. Wace had been out, and turned to Kipps again to ask him if he had had tea. Kipps said he had not, and Helen moved towards some mysterious interior. "But I say," said Kipps; "don't you on my account——!"
Helen vanished, and he found himself alone with Mrs. Walshingham, which, of course, made him breathless and Boreas-looking for a moment.
"You were one of Helen's pupils in the wood-carving class?" asked Mrs. Walshingham, regarding him with the quiet watchfulness proper to her position.
"Yes," said Kipps, "that's 'ow I 'ad the pleasure——"
"She took a great interest in her wood-carving class. She is so energetic, you know, and it gives her an Outlet."
"I thought she taught something splendid."
"Everyone says she did very well. Helen, I think, would do anything well that she undertook to do. She's so very clever. And she throws herself into things so."
She untied her bonnet strings with a pleasant informality.
"She has told me all about her class. She used to be full of it. And about your cut hand."
"Lor'!" said Kipps; "fancy, telling that!"
"Oh, yes! And how brave you were."
(Though, indeed, Helen's chief detail had been his remarkable expedient for checking bloodshed.)
Kipps became bright pink. "She said you didn't seem to feel it a bit."
Kipps felt he would have to spend weeks over "The Art of Conversing."
While he still hung fire Helen returned with the apparatus for afternoon tea upon a tray.
"Do you mind pulling out the table?" asked Mrs. Walshingham.
That, again, was very homelike. Kipps put down his hat and stick in the corner and, amidst an iron thunder, pulled out a little, rusty, green-painted table, and then in the easiest manner followed Helen in to get chairs.
So soon as he had got rid of his teacup—he refused all food, of course, and they were merciful—he became wonderfully at his ease. Presently he was talking. He talked quite modestly and simply about his changed condition and his difficulties and plans. He spread what indeed had an air of being all his simple little soul before his eyes. In a little while his clipped, defective accent had become less perceptible to their ears, and they began to realise, as the girl with the freckles had long since realised, that there were passable aspects of Kipps. He confided, he submitted, and for both of them he had the realest, the most seductively flattering undertone of awe and reverence.
He stopped about two hours, having forgotten how terribly incorrect it is to stay at such a length. They did not mind at all.
CHAPTER III ENGAGED
§1
Within two months, within a matter of three and fifty days, Kipps had clambered to the battlements of Heart's Desire.
It all became possible by the Walshinghams—it would seem at Coote's instigation—deciding, after all, not to spend the holidays at Bruges. Instead, they remained in Folkestone, and this happy chance gave Kipps just all these opportunities of which he stood in need.
His crowning day was at Lympne, and long before the summer warmth began to break, while indeed August still flamed on high. They had organized—no one seemed to know who suggested it first—a water party on the still reaches of the old military canal at Hythe, the canal that was to have stopped Napoleon if the sea failed us, and they were to picnic by the brick bridge, and afterwards to clamber to Lympne Castle. The host of the gathering, it was understood very clearly, was Kipps.
They went, a merry party. The canal was weedy, with only a few inches of water at the shallows, and so they went in three Canadian canoes. Kipps had learned to paddle—it had been his first athletic accomplishment, and his second—with the last three or four of ten private lessons still to come—was to be cycling. But Kipps did not paddle at all badly; muscles hardened by lifting pieces of cretonne could cut a respectable figure by the side of Coote's executions, and the girl with the freckles, the girl who understood him, came in his canoe. They raced the Walshinghams, brother and sister; and Coote, in a liquefying state and blowing mightily, but still persistent and always quite polite and considerate, toiled behind with Mrs. Walshingham. She could not be expected to paddle (though, of course, she "offered") and she reclined upon specially adjusted cushions under a black and white sunshade and watched Kipps and her daughter, and feared at intervals that Coote was getting hot.
They were all more or less in holiday costume, the eyes of the girls looked out under the shade of wide-brimmed hats; even the freckled girl was unexpectedly pretty, and Helen, swinging sunlit to her paddle, gave Kipps, almost for the first time, the suggestion of a graceful body. Kipps was arrayed in the completest boating costume, and when his fashionable Panama was discarded and his hair blown into disorder he became, in his white flannels, as sightly as most young men. His complexion was a notable asset.
Things favoured him, the day favoured him, everyone favoured him. Young Walshingham, the girl with the freckles, Coote and Mrs. Walshingham, were playing up to him in the most benevolent way, and between the landing place and Lympne, Fortune, to crown their efforts, had placed a small, convenient field entirely at the disposal of an adolescent bull. Not a big, real, resolute bull, but, on the other hand, no calf; a young bull, in the same stage of emotional development as Kipps, "standing where the two rivers meet." Detachedly our party drifted towards him.
When they landed young Walshingham, with the simple directness of a brother, abandoned his sister to Kipps and secured the freckled girl, leaving Coote to carry Mrs. Walshingham's light wool wrap. He started at once, in order to put an effectual distance between himself and his companion, on the one hand, and a certain persuasive chaperonage that went with Coote, on the other. Young Walshingham, I think I have said, was dark, with a Napoleonic profile, and it was natural for him, therefore, to be a bold thinker and an epigrammatic speaker, and he had long ago discovered great possibilities of appreciation in the freckled girl. He was in a very happy frame that day because he had just been entrusted with the management of Kipps' affairs (old Bean inexplicably dismissed), and that was not a bad beginning for a solicitor of only a few months' standing, and, moreover, he had been reading Nietzsche, and he thought that in all probability he was the Non-Moral Overman referred to by that writer. He wore fairly large-sized hats. He wanted to expand the theme of the Non-Moral Overman in the ear of the freckled girl, to say it over, so to speak, and in order to seclude his exposition they went aside from the direct path and trespassed through a coppice, avoiding the youthful bull. They escaped to these higher themes but narrowly, for Coote and Mrs. Walshingham, subtle chaperones both, and each indisposed for excellent reasons to encumber Kipps and Helen, were hot upon their heels. These two kept direct route to the stile of the bull's field, and the sight of the animal at once awakened Coote's innate aversion to brutality in any shape or form. He said the stiles were too high, and that they could do better by going around by the hedge, and Mrs. Walshingham, nothing loath, agreed.
This left the way clear for Kipps and Helen, and they encountered the bull. Helen did not observe the bull, but Kipps did; but, that afternoon at any rate, he was equal to facing a lion. And the bull really came at them. It was not an affair of the bull-ring exactly, no desperate rushes and gorings; but he came; he regarded them with a large, wicked, bluish eye, opened a mouth below his moistly glistening nose and booed, at any rate, if he did not exactly bellow, and he shook his head wickedly and showed that tossing was in his mind. Helen was frightened, without any loss of dignity, and Kipps went extremely white. But he was perfectly calm, and he seemed to her to have lost the last vestiges of his accent and his social shakiness. He directed her to walk quietly towards the stile, and made an oblique advance towards the bull.
"You be orf!" he said....
When Helen was well over the stile Kipps withdrew in good order. He got over the stile under cover of a feint, and the thing was done—a small thing, no doubt, but just enough to remove from Helen's mind an incorrect deduction that a man who was so terribly afraid of a teacup as Kipps must necessarily be abjectly afraid of everything else in the world. In her moment of reaction she went perhaps too far in the opposite direction. Hitherto Kipps had always had a certain flimsiness of effect for her. Now suddenly he was discovered solid. He was discovered possible in many new ways. Here, after all, was the sort of back a woman can get behind!...
As so these heirs of the immemorial ages went past the turf-crowned mass of Portus Lemanus up the steep slopes towards the mediæval castle on the crest the thing was also manifest in her eyes.
§2
Everyone who stays in Folkestone gets, sooner or later, to Lympne. The castle became a farmhouse long ago, and the farmhouse, itself now ripe and venerable, wears the walls of the castle as a little man wears a big man's coat. The kindliest of farm ladies entertains a perpetual stream of visitors and shows her vast mangle, and her big kitchen, and takes you out upon the sunniest little terrace garden in all the world, and you look down the sheep-dotted slopes to where, beside the canal and under the trees, the crumpled memories of Rome sleep forever. For hither to this lonely spot the galleys once came, the legions, the emperors, masters of the world. The castle is but a thing of yesterday, King Stephen's time or thereabout, in that retrospect. One climbs the pitch of perforation, and there one is lifted to the centre of far more than a hemisphere of view. Away below one's feet, almost at the bottom of the hill, the Marsh begins, and spreads and spreads in a mighty crescent that sweeps about the sea, the Marsh dotted with the church towers of forgotten mediæval towns and breaking at last into the low, blue hills of Winchelsea and Hastings; east hangs France, between the sea and the sky, and round the north, bounding the wide prospectives of farms and houses and woods, the Downs, with their hangers and chalk pits, sustain the passing shadows of the sailing clouds.
And here it was, high out of the world of everyday, and in the presence of spacious beauty, that Kipps and Helen found themselves agreeably alone. All six, it had seemed, had been coming for the Keep, but Mrs. Walshingham had hesitated at the horrid little stairs, and then suddenly felt faint, and so she and the freckled girl had remained below, walking up and down in the shadow of the house, and Coote had remembered they were all out of cigarettes, and had taken off young Walshingham into the village. There had been shouting to explain between ground and parapet, and then Helen and Kipps turned again to the view, and commended it and fell silent.
Helen sat fearlessly in an embrasure, and Kipps stood beside her.
"I've always been fond of scenery," Kipps repeated, after an interval.
Then he went off at a tangent. "D'you reely think that was right what Coote was saying?"
She looked interrogation.
"About my name?"
"Being really C-U-Y-P-S? I have my doubts. I thought at first——. What makes Mr. Coote add an S to Cuyp?"
"I dunno," said Kipps, foiled. "I was jest thinking——"
She shot one wary glance at him and then turned her eyes to the sea.
Kipps was out for a space. He had intended to lead from this question to the general question of surnames and change of names; it had seemed a light and witty way of saying something he had in mind, and suddenly he perceived that this was an unutterably vulgar and silly project. The hitch about that "s" had saved him. He regarded her profile for a moment, framed in weather-beaten stone, and backed by the blue elements.
He dropped the question of his name out of existence and spoke again of the view. "When I see scenery, and things that are beautiful, it makes me feel——"
She looked at him suddenly, and saw him fumbling for his words.
"Silly like," he said.
She took him in with her glance, the old look of proprietorship it was, touched with a certain warmth. She spoke in a voice as unambiguous as her eyes. "You needn't," she said. "You know, Mr. Kipps, you hold yourself too cheap."
Her eyes and words smote him with amazement. He stared at her like a man who awakens. She looked down.
"You mean——" he said; and then, "don't you hold me cheap?"
She glanced up again and shook her head.
"But—for instance—you don't think of me—as an equal like."
"Why not?"
"Oo! But reely——"
His heart beat very fast.
"If I thought," he said, and then, "you know so much."
"That's nothing," she said.
Then, for a long time, as it seemed to them, both kept silence, a silence that said and accomplished many things.
"I know what I am," he said, at length.... "If I thought it was possible.... If I thought you.... I believe I could do anything——"
He stopped, and she sat downcast and strikingly still.
"Miss Walshingham," he said, "is it possible that you ... could care for me enough to—to 'elp me? Miss Walshingham, do you care for me at all?"
It seemed she was never going to answer. She looked up at him. "I think," she said, "you are the most generous—look at what you have done for my brother—the most generous and the most modest of men. And this afternoon—I thought you were the bravest."
She turned her head, glanced down, waved her hand to someone on the terrace below, and stood up.
"Mother is signalling," she said. "We must go down."
Kipps became polite and deferential by habit, but his mind was a tumult that had nothing to do with that.
He moved before her towards the little door that opened on the winding stairs—"always precede a lady down or up stairs"—and then on the second step he turned resolutely. "But," he said, looking up out of the shadow, flannel-clad and singularly like a man.
She looked down on him, with her hand upon the stone lintel.
He held out his hand as if to help her. "Can you tell me?" he said. "You must know——"
"What?"
"If you care for me?"
She did not answer for a long time. It was as if everything in the world had drawn to the breaking point, and in a minute must certainly break.
"Yes," she said, at last, "I know."
Abruptly, by some impalpable sign, he knew what the answer would be, and he remained still.
She bent down over him and softened to her wonderful smile.
"Promise me," she insisted.
He promised with his still face.
"If I do not hold you cheap, you will never hold yourself cheap——"
"If you do not hold me cheap, you mean?"
She bent down quite close beside him. "I hold you," she said, and then whispered, "dear."
"Me?"
She laughed aloud.
He was astonished beyond measure. He stipulated, lest there might be some misconception, "You will marry me?"
She was laughing, inundated by the sense of bountiful power, of possession and success. He looked quite a nice little man to have. "Yes," she laughed. "What else could I mean?" and, "Yes."
He felt as a praying hermit might have felt, snatched from the midst of his quiet devotions, his modest sackcloth and ashes, and hurled neck and crop over the glittering gates of Paradise, smack among the iridescent wings, the bright-eyed Cherubim. He felt like some lowly and righteous man dynamited into Bliss....
His hand tightened upon the rope that steadies one upon the stairs of stone. He was for kissing her hand and did not.
He said not a word more. He turned about, and with something very like a scared expression on his face led the way into the obscurity of their descent.
§3
Everyone seemed to understand. Nothing was said, nothing was explained, the merest touch of the eyes sufficed. As they clustered in the castle gateway Coote, Kipps remembered afterwards, laid hold of his arm as if by chance and pressed it. It was quite evident he knew. His eyes, his nose, shone with benevolent congratulations, shone, too, with the sense of a good thing conducted to its climax. Mrs. Walshingham, who had seemed a little fatigued by the hill, recovered, and was even obviously stirred by affection for her daughter. There was, in passing, a motherly caress. She asked Kipps to give her his arm in walking down the steep. Kipps in a sort of dream obeyed. He found himself trying to attend to her, and soon he was attending.
She and Kipps talked like sober, responsible people and went slowly, while the others drifted down the hill together, a loose little group of four. He wondered momentarily what they would talk about and then sank into his conversation with Mrs. Walshingham. He conversed, as it were, out of his superficial personality, and his inner self lay stunned in unsuspected depths within. It had an air of being an interesting and friendly talk, almost their first long talk together. Hitherto he had had a sort of fear of Mrs. Walshingham, as of a person possibly satirical, but she proved a soul of sense and sentiment, and Kipps, for all of his abstraction, got on with her unexpectedly well. They talked a little upon scenery and the inevitable melancholy attaching to the old ruins and the thought of vanished generations.
"Perhaps they jousted here," said Mrs. Walshingham.
"They was up to all sorts of things," said Kipps, and then the two came round to Helen. She spoke of her daughter's literary ambitions. "She will do something, I feel sure. You know, Mr. Kipps, it's a great responsibility to a mother to feel her daughter is—exceptionally clever."
"I dessay it is," said Kipps. "There's no mistake about that."
She spoke, too, of her son—almost like Helen's twin—alike, yet different. She made Kipps feel quite fatherly. "They are so quick, so artistic," she said, "so full of ideas. Almost they frighten me. One feels they need opportunities—as other people need air."
She spoke of Helen's writing. "Even when she was quite a little dot she wrote verse."
(Kipps, sensation.)
"Her father had just the same tastes——" Mrs. Walshingham turned a little beam of half-pathetic reminiscence on the past. "He was more artist than business man. That was the trouble.... He was misled by his partner, and when the crash came everyone blamed him.... Well, it doesn't do to dwell on horrid things—especially to-day. There are bright days, Mr. Kipps, and dark days. And mine have not always been bright."
Kipps presented a face of Coote-like sympathy.
She diverged to talk of flowers, and Kipps' mind was filled with the picture of Helen bending down towards him in the Keep....
They spread the tea under the trees before the little inn, and at a certain moment Kipps became aware that everyone in the party was simultaneously and furtively glancing at him. There might have been a certain tension had it not been first of all for Coote and his tact, and afterwards for a number of wasps. Coote was resolved to make this memorable day pass off well, and displayed an almost boisterous sense of fun. Then young Walshingham began talking of the Roman remains below Lympne, intending to lead up to the Overman. "These old Roman chaps," he said, and then the wasps arrived. They killed three in the jam alone.
Kipps killed wasps, as if it were in a dream, and handed things to the wrong people, and maintained a thin surface of ordinary intelligence with the utmost difficulty. At times he became aware, aware with an extraordinary vividness, of Helen. Helen was carefully not looking at him and behaving with amazing coolness and ease. But just for that one time there was the faintest suggestion of pink beneath the ivory of her cheeks....
Tacitly the others conceded to Kipps the right to paddle back with Helen; he helped her into the canoe and took his paddle, and, paddling slowly, dropped behind the others. And now his inner self stirred again. He said nothing to her. How could he ever say anything to her again? She spoke to him at rare intervals about reflections and the flowers and the trees, and he nodded in reply. But his mind moved very slowly forward now from the point at which it had fallen stunned in the Lympne Keep, moving forward to the beginnings of realisation. As yet he did not say even in the recesses of his heart that she was his. But he perceived that the goddess had come from her altar amazingly, and had taken him by the hand!
The sky was a vast splendour, and then close to them were the dark, protecting trees and the shining, smooth, still water. He was an erect, black outline to her; he plied his paddle with no unskilful gesture, the water broke to snaky silver and glittered far behind his strokes. Indeed, he did not seem bad to her. Youth calls to youth the wide world through, and her soul rose in triumph over his subjection. And behind him was money and opportunity, freedom and London, a great background of seductively indistinct hopes. To him her face was a warm dimness. In truth, he could not see her eyes, but it seemed to his love-witched brain he did and that they shone out at him like dusky stars.