KIPPS Read online

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

  Chapter the Third

  The Wood Carving 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 certain advances, and a realization of inferiority blistered Kipps. But he tried to pass the thing off as a joke by saying, “Parlez-vous Francey,” whenever he met her and inducing the junior apprentice to say the same.

  He even made some dim half-secret experiments towards remedying the deficiencies he suspected. He spent five shillings on five serial numbers of a Home Educator and bought (and even thought of reading) a Shakespeare and a Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and the poems of Herrick from a chap who was hard up. He battled with Shakespeare all one Sunday afternoon and found the “English Literature” with which Mr. Woodrow had equipped him had vanished down some crack in his mind. He had no doubt it was very splendid stuff, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was all about. There was an occult meaning, he knew, in literature, and he had forgotten it. Moreover, he discovered one day, while taunting the junior apprentice with ignorance, that his “rivers of England” had also slipped his memory, and he laboriously restored that fabric of rote learning: “Ty’ Wear Tees ’Umber—”

  I suppose some such phase of discontent is a normal thing in every adolescence. The ripening mind seeks something upon which its will may crystallize, upon which its discursive emotions, growing more abundant with each year of life, may concentrate. For many, though not for all, it takes a religious direction, but in those particular years, the mental atmosphere of Folkestone was exceptionally free from any revivalistic disturbance that might have reached Kipps’ mental being. Sometimes they fall in love. I have known this uneasiness end in different cases in a vow to read one book (not a novel) every week, to read the Bible through in a year, to pass in the Honors division of the London Matriculation examination, to become an accomplished chemist, and never more to tell a lie. It led Kipps finally into Technical Education as we understand it in the south of England.

  It was in the last year of his apprenticeship that he had pursued his researches after that missing qualification into the Folkestone Young Men’s Association, where Mr. Chester Coote prevailed. Mr. Chester Coote was a young man of semi-independent means who inherited a share in a house agency, read Mrs. Humphry Ward, and took an interest in social work. He was a whitish-faced young man with a prominent nose, pale blue eyes, and a quivering quality in his voice. He was very active upon committees; he was very prominent and useful on all social occasions, in evidence upon platforms and upon all those semi-public occasions when the Great descend. He lived with an only sister. To Kipps and his kind in the Young Men’s Association, he read a stimulating paper on “Self-Help.” He said it was the noblest of all our distinctive English characteristics, and he was very much down upon the “over-educated” Germans. At the close, a young German hairdresser made a few commendatory remarks which developed somehow into an oration on Hanoverian politics. As he became excited he became guttural and obscure; the meeting sniggered cheerfully at such ridiculous English, and Kipps was so much amused that he forgot a private project to ask this Chester Coote how he might set about a little self-help on his own private account in such narrow margins of time as the System of Mr. Shalford spared him. But afterward, in the nighttime, it came to him again.

  It was a few months later, and after his apprenticeship was over and Mr. Shalford had with depreciatory observations taken him on as an improver at twenty pounds a year, that this question was revived by a casual article on Technical Education in a morning paper that a commercial traveler had left behind him. It played the role of the word in season. Something in the nature of conversion, a faint sort of concentration of purpose, really occurred in him then. The article was written with penetrating vehemence, and it stimulated him to the pitch of inquiring about the local science and art classes; and after he had told everybody in the shop about it and taken the advice of all who supported his desperate resolution, he joined. At first, he attended the class in freehand, that being the subject taught on early closing night; and he had already made some progress in that extraordinary routine of reproducing freehand “copies” which for two generations had passed with English people for instruction in art when the dates of the classes were changed. Thereby just as the March winds were blowing, he was precipitated into the wood carving class, and his mind diverted first to this useful and broadening pursuit and then to its teacher.

  2

  The class in wood carving was an extremely select class, conducted at that time by a young lady named Walshingham; and as this young lady was destined by fortune to teach Kipps a great deal more than wood carving, it will be well if the reader gets the picture of her correctly in mind. She was only a year or so older than he was; she had a pale, intellectual face, dark grey eyes, and black hair, which she wore over her forehead in an original and striking way that she had adopted from a picture by Rossetti in the South Kensington Museum. She was slender, so that without ungainliness she had an effect of being tall, and her hands were shapely and white when they came into contrast with hands much exercised in rolling and blocking. She dressed in those loose and pleasant forms and those soft and tempered shades that arose in England in the socialistic-aesthetic epoch and remained to this day among us as the badge of those who read Turgenev’s novels, scorn current fiction, and think on higher planes. I think she was as beautiful as most beautiful people, and to Kipps she was altogether beautiful. She had, Kipps learned, matriculated at London University, an astounding feat to his imagination, and the masterly way in which she demonstrated how to prod and worry honest pieces of wood into useless and unedifying patterns in relief extorted his utmost admiration.

  At first, when Kipps had learned he was to be taught by a “girl,” he was inclined to resent it, the more so as Buggins had recently been very strong on the gross injustice of feminine employment. “We have to keep wives,” said Buggins (though, as a matter of fact, he did not keep even one), “and how are we to do it with a lot of girls coming in to take the work out of our mouths?” Afterward, Kipps, in conjunction with Pearce, looked at it from another point of view, and thought it would be rather a “lark.” Finally, when he saw her and saw her teaching, and coming nearer to him with an impressive deliberation, he was breathless with awe and the quality of her dark, slender femininity.

  The class consisted of two girls and a maiden lady of riper years, friends of Miss Walshingham’s, and anxious rather to support her in an interesting experiment than to become really expert woodcarvers; an oldish young man with spectacles and a black beard, who never spoke to anyone, and who was evidently too shortsighted to see his work as a whole; a small boy who was understood to have a “gift” for wood carving; and a lodging-house keeper who “took classes” every winter, she told Mr. Kipps, as though they were a toni
c, and “found they did her good.” And occasionally Mr. Chester Coote—refined and gentlemanly—would come into the class, with or without papers, ostensibly on committee business, but in reality, to talk to the less attractive one of the two girl students; and sometimes a brother of Miss Walshingham’s, a slender, dark young man with a pale face, and fluctuating resemblances to the young Napoleon, would arrive just at the end of the class-time to see his sister home.

  All these personages impressed Kipps with a sense of inferiority that, in the case of Miss Walshingham, became positively abysmal. The ideas and knowledge they appeared to have, their personal capacity and freedom, opened a new world to his imagination. These people came and went, with a sense of absolute assurance, against an overwhelming background of plaster casts, diagrams and tables, benches and a blackboard—a background that seemed to him to be saturated with recondite knowledge and the occult and jealously guarded tips and secrets that constitute Art and the Higher Life. They went home, he imagined, to homes where the piano was played with distinction and freedom, and books littered the tables, and foreign languages were habitually used. They had complicated meals, no doubt—with serviettes. They “knew etiquette,” and how to avoid all the errors for which Kipps bought penny manuals, “What to Avoid,” “Common Errors in Speaking,” and the like. He knew nothing about it all—nothing whatever; he was a creature of the outer darkness blinking in an unsuspected light.

  He heard them speak easily and freely to one another of examinations, of books and paintings, of “last year’s Academy”—a little contemptuously; and once, just at the end of the class-time, Mr. Chester Coote and young Walshingham and the two girls argued about something or other called, he fancied, “Vagner” or “Vargner”—they seemed to say it both ways—and which presently shaped itself more definitely as the name of a man who made up music. (Carshot and Buggins weren’t in it with them.) Young Walshingham, it appeared, said something or other that was an “epigram,” and they all applauded him. Kipps, I say, felt himself a creature of outer darkness, an inexcusable intruder in an altitudinous world. When the epigram happened, he, first of all, smiled, to pretend he understood, and instantly suppressed the smile to show he did not listen. Then he became extremely hot and uncomfortable, though nobody had noticed either phase.

  It was clear his only chance of concealing his bottomless baseness was to hold his tongue, and meanwhile, he chipped with earnest care and abased his soul before the very shadow of Miss Walshingham. She used to come and direct and advise him, with, he felt, an effort to conceal the scorn she had for him; and, indeed, it is true that at first, she thought of him chiefly as the clumsy young man with the red ears.

  And as soon as he emerged from the first effect of pure and awe-stricken humility—he was greatly helped to emerge from that condition to a perception of human equality by the need the lodging-house keeper was under to talk while she worked, and as she didn’t like Miss Walshingham and her friends very much, and the young man with spectacles was deaf, she naturally talked to Kipps—he perceived that he was in a state of adoration for Miss Walshingham that it seemed almost a blasphemous familiarity to speak of as being in love.

  This state, you must understand, had nothing to do with “flirting” or “spooning” and that superficial passion that flashes from eye to eye upon the Leas and pier—absolutely nothing. That he knew from the first. Her rather pallid, intelligent young face, beneath those somber clouds of hair, put her in a class apart; towards her, the thought of “attentions” paled and vanished. To approach such a being, to perform sacrifices and to perish obviously for her, seemed the limit he might aspire to, he or any man. For if his love was abasement, at any rate, it had this much of manliness, that it covered all his sex. It had not yet come to Kipps to acknowledge any man as his better in his heart of hearts. When one does that, the game is played, and one grows old indeed.

  The rest of his sentimental interests vanished altogether in this great illumination. He meditated about her when he was blocking cretonne; her image was before his eyes at teatime, and blotted out the more immediate faces, and made him silent and preoccupied, and so careless in his bearing that the junior apprentice, sitting beside him, mocked at and parodied his enormous bites of bread and butter unreproved. He became conspicuously less popular on the “fancy” side; the “costumes” was chilly with him and the “millinery” cutting. But he did not care. An intermittent correspondence with Flo Bates, that had gone on since she left Mr. Shalford’s desk for a position at Tunbridge “nearer home,” and which had roused Kipps in its earlier stages to unparalleled heights of epistolatory effort, died out altogether by reason of his neglect. He heard with scarcely a pang that, as a consequence, perhaps of his neglect, Flo was “carrying on with a chap who managed a farm.”

  Every Thursday, he jabbed and gouged at his wood, jabbing and gouging intersecting circles and diamond traceries, and that labored inane which our mad world calls ornament, and he watched Miss Walshingham furtively whenever she turned away. The circles, in consequence, were jabbed crooked, and his panels, losing their symmetry, became comparatively pleasing to the untrained eye—and once he jabbed his finger. He would cheerfully have jabbed all his fingers if he could have found some means of using the opening to express himself of the vague emotions that possessed him. But he shirked conversation just as earnestly as he desired it; he feared that profound general ignorance of his might appear.

  3

  There came a time when she could not open one of the classroom windows. The man with the black beard pored over his chipping heedlessly …

  It did not take Kipps a moment to grasp his opportunity. He dropped his gouge and stepped forward. “Lem me,” he said …

  He could not open the window either!

  “Oh, please don’t trouble,” she said.

  “’Sno trouble,” he gasped.

  Still, the sash stuck. He felt his manhood was at stake. He gathered himself together for a tremendous effort, and the pane broke with a snap, and he thrust his hand into the void beyond.

  “There!” said Miss Walshingham, and the glass fell ringing into the courtyard below.

  Then Kipps made to bring his hand back and felt the keen touch of the edge of the broken glass at his wrist. He turned dolefully. “I’m tremendously sorry,” he said in answer to the accusation in Miss Walshingham’s eyes. “I didn’t think it would break like that”—as if he had expected it to break in some quite different and entirely more satisfactory manner. The boy with the gift of wood carving, having stared at Kipps’ face for a moment, became involved in a Laocoon struggle with a giggle.

  “You’ve cut your wrist,” said one of the girl friends, standing up and pointing. She was a pleasant-faced, greatly freckled girl, with a helpful disposition, and she said, “You’ve cut your wrist,” as brightly as if she had been a trained nurse.

  Kipps looked down and saw a swift line of scarlet rush down his hand. He perceived the other man student regarding this with magnified eyes. “You have cut your wrist,” said Miss Walshingham, and Kipps regarded his damage with greater interest.

  “He’s cut his wrist,” said the maiden lady to the lodging-house keeper, and seemed in doubt what a lady should do. “It’s—” she hesitated at the word “bleeding,” and nodded to the lodging-house keeper instead.

  “Dreadfully,” said the maiden lady, and tried to look and tried not to look at the same time.

  “Of course he’s cut his wrist,” said the lodging-house keeper, momentarily quite annoyed at Kipps; and the other young lady, who thought Kipps rather common, went on quietly with her woodcutting with an air of its being the proper thing to do—though nobody else seemed to know it.

  “You must tie it up,” said Miss Walshingham.

  “We must tie it up,” said the freckled girl.

  “I ’adn’t the slightest idea that window was going to break like that,” said Kipps, with candor. “Nort the slightest.”

  He glanced again at the blood o
n his wrist, and it seemed to him that it was on the very point of dropping on the floor of that cultured class-room. So he very neatly licked it off, feeling at the same time for his handkerchief. “Oh, don’t!” said Miss Walshingham as he did so, and the girl with the freckles made a movement of horror. The giggle got the better of the boy with the gift, and celebrated its triumph by unseemly noises; in spite of which it seemed to Kipps at the moment that the act that had made Miss Walshingham say “Oh, don’t!” was rather a desperate and manly treatment of what was after all a creditable injury.

  “It ought to be tied up,” said the lodging-house keeper, holding her chisel upright in her hand.

  “It’s a bad cut to bleed like that.”

  “We must tie it up,” said the freckled girl, and hesitated in front of Kipps. “Have you got a handkerchief?” she said.

  “I dunno ’ow I managed not to bring one,” said Kipps. “I—not ’aving a cold I suppose some’ow I didn’t think—”

  He checked a further flow of blood.

  The girl with the freckles caught Miss Walshingham’s eye and held it for a moment. Both glanced at Kipps’ injury. The boy with the gift, who had reappeared with a chastened expression from some noisy pursuit beneath his desk, made the neglected motions of one who proffers shyly. Miss Walshingham, under the spell of the freckled girl’s eye, produced a handkerchief. The voice of the maiden lady could be heard in the background. “I’ve been through all the technical education ambulance classes twice, and I know you go so if it’s a vein, and so if it’s an artery—at least you go so for one and so for the other, whichever it may be—but ...”

  “If you will give me your hand,” said the freckled girl, and proceeded with Miss Walshingham’s assistance to bandage Kipps in a most businesslike way. Yes, they actually bandaged Kipps. They pulled up his cuffs—happily, they were not a very frayed pair—and held his wrist, and wrapped the soft handkerchief round it, and tightened the knot together. And Miss Walshingham’s face, the face of that almost divine over-human, came close to the face of Kipps.