Kipps: the Story of a Simple Soul
Copyright© 2024 by H. G. Wells
Chapter 3: 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...
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