Kipps by H G Wells

Author:H G Wells [Wells, H G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics
ISBN: 9781101493502
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2008-12-03T06:00:00+00:00

§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 congratulation; 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 his abstraction, got on with her unexpectedly well. They talked a little upon scenery and the inevitable melancholy attaching to 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

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