Part 1 (1/2)

Kipps.

by H. G. Wells.

BOOK I

THE MAKING OF KIPPS

CHAPTER I

THE LITTLE SHOP AT NEW ROMNEY

--1

Until he was nearly arrived at adolescence it did not become clear to Kipps how it was that he was under the care of an aunt and uncle instead of having a father and mother like other boys. Yet he had vague memories of a somewhere else that was not New Romney--of a dim room, a window looking down on white buildings--and of a some one else who talked to forgotten people, and who was his mother. He could not recall her features very distinctly, but he remembered with extreme definition a white dress she wore, with a pattern of little sprigs of flowers and little bows of ribbon upon it, and a girdle of straight-ribbed white ribbon about the waist. Linked with this, he knew not how, were clouded half-obliterated recollections of scenes in which there was weeping, weeping in which he was inscrutably moved to join. Some terrible tall man with a loud voice played a part in these scenes, and either before or after them there were impressions of looking for interminable periods out of the windows of railway trains in the company of these two people....

He knew, though he could not remember that he had ever been told, that a certain faded, wistful face, that looked at him from a plush and gilt framed daguerreotype above the mantel of the ”sitting-room,” was the face of his mother. But that knowledge did not touch his dim memories with any elucidation. In that photograph she was a girlish figure, leaning against a photographer's stile, and with all the self-conscious shrinking natural to that position. She had curly hair and a face far younger and prettier than any other mother in his experience. She swung a Dolly Varden hat by the string, and looked with obedient respectful eyes on the photographer-gentleman who had commanded the pose. She was very slight and pretty. But the phantom mother that haunted his memory so elusively was not like that, though he could not remember how she differed. Perhaps she was older, or a little less shrinking, or, it may be, only dressed in a different way....

It is clear she handed him over to his aunt and uncle at New Romney with explicit directions and a certain endowment. One gathers she had something of that fine sense of social distinctions that subsequently played so large a part in Kipps' career. He was not to go to a ”common”

school, she provided, but to a certain seminary in Hastings that was not only a ”middle-cla.s.s academy,” with mortar boards and every evidence of a higher social tone, but also remarkably cheap. She seems to have been animated by the desire to do her best for Kipps, even at a certain sacrifice of herself, as though Kipps were in some way a superior sort of person. She sent pocket-money to him from time to time for a year or more after Hastings had begun for him, but her face he never saw in the days of his lucid memory.

His aunt and uncle were already high on the hill of life when first he came to them. They had married for comfort in the evening or at any rate in the late afternoon of their days. They were at first no more than vague figures in the background of proximate realities, such realities as familiar chairs and tables, quiet to ride and drive, the newel of the staircase, kitchen furniture, pieces of firewood, the boiler tap, old newspapers, the cat, the High Street, the back yard and the flat fields that are always so near in that little town. He knew all the stones in the yard individually, the creeper in the corner, the dustbin and the mossy wall, better than many men know the faces of their wives. There was a corner under the ironing-board which by means of a shawl could, under propitious G.o.ds, be made a very decent cubby-house, a corner that served him for several years as the indisputable hub of the world; and the stringy places in the carpet, the knots upon the dresser, and the several corners of the rag hearthrug his uncle had made, became essential parts of his mental foundations. The shop he did not know so thoroughly--it was a forbidden region to him; yet somehow he managed to know it very well.

His aunt and uncle were, as it were, the immediate G.o.ds of this world; and, like the G.o.ds of the world of old, occasionally descended right into it, with arbitrary injunctions and disproportionate punishments.

And, unhappily, one rose to their Olympian level at meals. Then one had to say one's ”grace,” hold one's spoon and fork in mad, unnatural ways called ”properly,” and refrain from eating even nice sweet things ”too fast.” If he ”gobbled” there was trouble, and at the slightest _abandon_ with knife, fork, and spoon, his aunt rapped his knuckles, albeit his uncle always finished up his gravy with his knife. Sometimes, moreover, his uncle would come, pipe in hand, out of a sedentary remoteness in the most disconcerting way, when a little boy was doing the most natural and attractive things, with ”Drat and drabbit that young rascal! What's he a-doing of now?” And his aunt would appear at door or window to interrupt interesting conversation with children who were upon unknown grounds considered ”low” and undesirable, and call him in. The pleasantest little noises, however softly you did them,--drumming on tea-trays, trumpeting your fists, whistling on keys, ringing chimes with a couple of pails, or playing tunes on the window-panes,--brought down the G.o.ds in anger. Yet what noise is fainter than your finger on the window--gently done? Sometimes, however, these G.o.ds gave him broken toys out of the shop, and then one loved them better--for the shop they kept was, among other things, a toy shop. (The other things included books to read and books to give away and local photographs; it had some pretensions also to be a china shop, and the fascia spoke of gla.s.s; it was also a stationer's shop with a touch of haberdashery about it, and in the windows and odd corners were mats and terra-cotta dishes, and milking-stools for painting; and there was a hint of picture-frames, and fire-screens, and fis.h.i.+ng tackle, and air-guns, and bathing suits, and tents: various things, indeed, but all cruelly attractive to a small boy's fingers.) Once his aunt gave him a trumpet if he would _promise_ faithfully not to blow it, and afterwards took it away again. And his aunt made him say his Catechism and something she certainly called the ”Colic for the Day” every Sunday in the year.

As the two grew old while he grew up, and as his impression of them modified insensibly from year to year, it seemed to him at last that they had always been as they were when, in his adolescent days, his impression of things grew fixed. His aunt he thought of as always lean, rather worried-looking, and p.r.o.ne to a certain obliquity of cap, and his uncle ma.s.sive, many-chinned, and careless about his b.u.t.tons. They neither visited nor received visitors. They were always very suspicious about their neighbours and other people generally; they feared the ”low”

and they hated and despised the ”stuck-up,” and so they ”kept themselves _to_ themselves,” according to the English ideal. Consequently little Kipps had no playmates, except through the sin of disobedience. By inherent nature he had a sociable disposition. When he was in the High Street he made a point of saying ”h.e.l.lo!” to pa.s.sing cyclists, and he would put his tongue out at the Quodling children whenever their nursemaid was not looking. And he began a friends.h.i.+p with Sid p.o.r.nick, the son of the haberdasher next door, that, with wide intermissions, was destined to last his lifetime through.

p.o.r.nick, the haberdasher, I may say at once, was, according to old Kipps, a ”blaring jacka.s.s”; he was a teetotaller, a ”nyar, nyar, 'im-singing Methodis',” and altogether distasteful and detrimental, he and his together, to true Kipps ideals, so far as little Kipps could gather them. This p.o.r.nick certainly possessed an enormous voice, and he annoyed old Kipps greatly by calling, ”You--Arn” and ”Siddee,” up and down his house. He annoyed old Kipps by private choral services on Sunday, all his family ”nyar, nyar-ing”; and by mushroom culture; by behaving as though the pilaster between the two shops was common property; by making a noise of hammering in the afternoon, when old Kipps wanted to be quiet after his midday meal; by going up and down uncarpeted stairs in his boots; by having a black beard; by attempting to be friendly; and by--all that sort of thing. In fact, he annoyed old Kipps. He annoyed him especially with his shop doormat. Old Kipps never beat his mat, preferring to let sleeping dust lie; and, seeking a motive for a foolish proceeding, he held that p.o.r.nick waited until there was a suitable wind in order that the dust disengaged in that operation might defile his neighbour's shop. These issues would frequently develop into loud and vehement quarrels, and on one occasion came so near to violence as to be subsequently described by p.o.r.nick (who read his newspaper) as a ”Disgraceful Fracka.s.s.” On that occasion he certainly went into his own shop with extreme celerity.

But it was through one of these quarrels that the friends.h.i.+p of little Kipps and Sid p.o.r.nick came about. The two small boys found themselves one day looking through the gate at the doctor's goats together; they exchanged a few contradictions about which goat could fight which, and then young Kipps was moved to remark that Sid's father was a ”blaring jacka.s.s.” Sid said he wasn't, and Kipps repeated that he was, and quoted his authority. Then Sid, flying off at a tangent rather alarmingly, said he could fight young Kipps with one hand, an a.s.sertion young Kipps with a secret want of confidence denied. There were some vain repet.i.tions, and the incident might have ended there, but happily a sporting butcher boy chanced on the controversy at this stage, and insisted upon seeing fair play.

The two small boys under his pressing encouragement did at last b.u.t.ton up their jackets, square and fight an edifying drawn battle, until it seemed good to the butcher boy to go on with Mrs. Holyer's mutton. Then, according to his directions and under his experienced stage management, they shook hands and made it up. Subsequently, a little tear-stained perhaps, but flushed with the butcher boy's approval (”tough little kids”), and with cold stones down their necks as he advised, they sat side by side on the doctor's gate, projecting very much behind, staunching an honourable bloodshed, and expressing respect for one another. Each had a b.l.o.o.d.y nose and a black eye--three days later they matched to a shade--neither had given in, and, though this was tacit, neither wanted any more.

It was an excellent beginning. After this first encounter the attributes of their parents and their own relative value in battle never rose between them, and if anything was wanted to complete the warmth of their regard it was found in a joint dislike of the eldest Quodling. The eldest Quodling lisped, had a silly sort of straw hat and a large pink face (all covered over with self-satisfaction), and he went to the National School with a green baize bag--a contemptible thing to do. They called him names and threw stones at him, and when he replied by threatenings (”Look 'ere, young Art Kipth, you better _thtoppit_!”) they were moved to attack and put him to flight.

And after that they broke the head of Ann p.o.r.nick's doll, so that she went home weeping loudly--a wicked and endearing proceeding. Sid was whacked, but, as he explained, he wore a newspaper tactically adjusted during the transaction, and really it didn't hurt him at all.... And Mrs. p.o.r.nick put her head out of the shop door suddenly, and threatened Kipps as he pa.s.sed.

--2

”Cavendish Academy,” the school that had won the limited choice of Kipps' vanished mother, was established in a battered private house in the part of Hastings remotest from the sea; it was called an Academy for Young Gentlemen, and many of the young gentlemen had parents in ”India,”

and other unverifiable places. Others were the sons of credulous widows, anxious, as Kipps' mother had been, to get something a little ”superior”

to a board school education as cheaply as possible; and others again were sent to demonstrate the dignity of their parents and guardians. And of course there were boys from France.

Its ”princ.i.p.al” was a lean, long creature of indifferent digestion and temper, who proclaimed himself on a gilt-lettered board in his front garden George Garden Woodrow, F.S.Sc., letters indicating that he had paid certain guineas for a bogus diploma. A bleak white-washed outhouse const.i.tuted his schoolroom, and the scholastic quality of its carved and worn desks and forms was enhanced by a slippery blackboard and two large yellow out-of-date maps, one of Africa and the other of Wilts.h.i.+re, that he had picked up cheap at a sale. There were other maps and globes in his study, where he interviewed inquiring parents, but these his pupils never saw. And in a gla.s.s cupboard in the pa.s.sage was several s.h.i.+llingsworth of test tubes and chemicals, a tripod, a gla.s.s retort, and a damaged Bunsen burner, manifesting that the ”Scientific laboratory” mentioned in the prospectus was no idle boast.

This prospectus, which was in dignified but incorrect English, laid particular stress on the sound preparation for a commercial career given in the Academy, but the army, navy and civil service were glanced at in an ambiguous sentence. There was something vague in the prospectus about ”examinational successes”--though Woodrow, of course, disapproved of ”cram”--and a declaration that the curriculum included ”art,” ”modern foreign languages” and ”a sound technical and scientific training.” Then came insistence upon the ”moral well-being” of the pupils, and an emphatic boast of the excellence of the religious instruction, ”so often neglected nowadays even in schools of wide repute.” ”That's bound to fetch 'em,” Mr. Woodrow had remarked when he drew up the prospectus. And in conjunction with the mortarboards it certainly did. Attention was directed to the ”motherly” care of Mrs. Woodrow--in reality a small partially effaced woman with a plaintive face and a mind above cookery; and the prospectus concluded with a phrase intentionally vague, ”Fare unrestricted, and our own milk and produce.”