Kipps by H. G. Wells (distant reading txt) 📕

rich. These young ladies do not like not to be engaged⁠—it is so unnatural; and Mr. Kipps was as easy to get engaged to as one could wish. There are, from the young lady’s point of view, many conveniences in being engaged. You get an escort for church and walks and so forth. It is not quite the thing to walk abroad with a “feller,” much more to “spoon” with him, when he is neither one’s fiancé nor an adopted brother; it is considered either a little fast, or else as savouring of the “walking-out” habits of the servant girls. Now, such is the sweetness of human charity, that the shop young lady in England has just the same horror of doing anything that savours of the servant girl as the lady journalist, let us say, has of anything savouring of the shop girl, or the really quite nice young lady has of anything savouring of any sort of girl who has gone down into the economic battlefield to earn herself a living.⁠ ⁠… But the very deepest of these affairs was still among the shallow places of love; at best it was paddling where it is decreed that men must sink or swim. Of the deep and dangerous places, and of the huge buoyant lift of its waves, he tasted nothing. Affairs of clothes and vanities they were, jealousies about a thing said, flatteries and mutual boastings, climaxes in the answering grasp of hands, the temerarious use of Christian names, culminations in a walk, or a near confidence, or a little pressure more or less. Close-sitting on a seat after twilight, with some little fondling, was indeed the boldest of a lover’s adventures, the utmost limit of his enterprises in the service of that stark Great Lady, who is daughter of Uranus and the sea. The “young ladies” who reigned in his heart came and went like people in an omnibus: there was the vehicle, so to speak, upon the road, and they entered and left it without any cataclysm of emotion. For all that, this development of the sex interest was continuously very interesting to Kipps, and kept him going as much as anything through all these servile years.

For a tailpiece to this chapter one may vignette one of those little affairs.

It is a bright Sunday afternoon; the scene is a secluded little seat halfway down the front of the Leas, and Kipps is four years older than when he parted from Ann. There is a quite perceptible down upon his upper lip, and his costume is just as tremendous a “mash” as lies within his means. His collar is so high that it scars his inaggressive jawbone, and his hat has a curly brim, his tie shows taste, his trousers are modestly brilliant, and his boots have light cloth uppers and button at the side. He jabs at the gravel before him with a cheap cane, and glances sideways at Flo Bates, the young lady from the cash desk. She is wearing a brilliant blouse and a gaily trimmed hat. There is an air of fashion about her that might disappear under the analysis of a woman of the world, but which is quite sufficient to make Kipps very proud to be distinguished as her particular “feller,” and to be allowed at temperate intervals to use her Christian name.

The conversation is light and gay in the modern style, and Flo keeps on smiling, good temper being her special charm.

“Ye see, you don’ mean what I mean,” he is saying.

“Well, what do you mean?”

“Not what you mean!”

“Well, tell me.”

“Ah! That’s another story.”

Pause. They look meaningly at one another.

“You are a one for being roundabout,” says the lady.

“Well, you’re not so plain, you know.”

“Not plain?”

“No.”

“You don’t mean to say I’m roundabout?”

“No. I mean to say⁠ ⁠… though⁠—”

Pause.

“Well?”

“You’re not a bit plain⁠—you’re” (his voice jumps up to a squeak) “pretty. See?”

“Oh, get out!” her voice lifts also⁠—with pleasure.

She strikes at him with her glove, then glances suddenly at a ring upon her finger. Her smile disappears momentarily. Another pause. Eyes meet and the smile returns.

“I wish I knew⁠—” says Kipps.

“Knew⁠—?”

“Where you got that ring.”

She lifts the hand with the ring until her eyes just show (very prettily) over it. “You’d just like to know,” she says slowly, and smiles still more brightly with the sense of successful effect.

“I dessay I could guess.”

“I dessay you couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t I?”

“No!”

“Guess it in three.”

“Not the name.”

“Ah!”

“Ah!”

“Well, anyhow lemme look at it.”

He looks at it. Pause. Giggles, slight struggle, and a slap on Kipps’ coatsleeve. A passerby appears down the path, and she hastily withdraws her hand.

She glances at the face of the approaching man. They maintain a bashful silence until he has passed.

III The Woodcarving Class

Though these services to Venus Epipontia, the seaside Venus, and these studies in the art of dress, did much to distract his thoughts and mitigate his earlier miseries, it would be mere optimism to present Kipps as altogether happy. A vague dissatisfaction with life drifted about him and every now and again enveloped him like a sea fog. During these periods it was greyly evident that there was something, something vital in life, lacking. For no earthly reason that Kipps could discover, he was haunted by a suspicion that life was going wrong or had already gone wrong in some irrevocable way. The ripening self-consciousness of adolescence developed this into a clearly felt insufficiency. It was all very well to carry gloves, open doors, never say “Miss” to a girl, and walk “outside,” but were there not other things, conceivably even deeper things, before the complete thing was attained? For example, certain matters of knowledge. He perceived great bogs of ignorance about him, fumbling traps, where other people, it was alleged, real gentlemen and ladies, for example, and the clergy, had knowledge and assurance, bogs which it was sometimes difficult to elude. A girl arrived in the millinery department who could, she said, speak French and German. She snubbed