“Nice easy life they have of it, too,” said Miss Mergle. “Write just an hour or so, and done for the day! Almost like gentlefolks.”
“There’s more work in it than you’d think,” said Carshot, stooping to a mouthful.
“I wouldn’t mind changing, for all that,” said Buggins. “I’d like to see one of these here authors marking off with Jimmy.”
“I think they copy from each other a good deal,” said Miss Mergle.
“Even then (chup, chup, chup),” said Carshot, “there’s writing it out in their own hands.”
They proceeded to enlarge upon the literary life, on its ease and dignity, on the social recognition accorded to those who led it, and on the ample gratifications their vanity achieved. “Pictures everywhere—never get a new suit without being photographed—almost like Royalty,” said Miss Mergle.
And all this talk impressed the imagination of Kipps very greatly. Here was a class that seemed to bridge the gulf. On the one hand essentially Low, but by factitious circumstances capable of entering upon those levels of social superiority to which all true Englishmen aspire, those levels from which one may tip a butler, scorn a tailor, and even commune with those who lead “men” into battle. “Almost like gentlefolks”—that was it! He brooded over these things in the afternoon, until they blossomed into daydreams. Suppose, for example, he had chanced to write a book, a well-known book, under an assumed name, and yet kept on being a draper all the time. … Impossible, of course, but suppose—it made quite a long dream.
And at the next woodcarving class he let it be drawn from him that his real choice in life was to be a Nawther—“only one doesn’t get a chance.”
After that there were times when Kipps had that pleasant sense that comes of attracting interest. He was a mute, inglorious Dickens, or at any rate something of that sort, and they were all taking him at that. The discovery of this indefinable “something in” him, the development of which was now painfully restricted and impossible, did much to bridge the gulf between himself and Miss Walshingham. He was unfortunate, he was futile, but he was not “common.” Even now with help … ? The two girls, and the freckled girl in particular, tried to “stir him up” to some effort to do his imputed potentialities justice. They were still young enough to believe that to nice and niceish members of the male sex—more especially when under the stimulus of feminine encouragement—nothing is finally impossible.
The freckled girl was, I say, the stage manager of this affair, but Miss Walshingham was the presiding divinity. A touch of proprietorship came in her eyes at times when she looked at him. He was hers—unconditionally—and she knew it.
To her directly Kipps scarcely ever made a speech. The enterprising things that he was continually devising to say to her, he usually did not say, or he said them in a suitably modified form to the girl with the freckles. And one day the girl with the freckles smote him to the heart. She said to him, with the faintest indication of her head across the classroom to where her friend reached a cast from the shelf, “I do think Helen Walshingham is sometimes the most lovely person in the world. Look at her now!”
Kipps gasped for a moment. The moment lengthened, and she regarded him as an intelligent young surgeon might regard an operation without anaesthetics.
“You’re right,” he said, and then looked at her with an entire abandonment of visage.
She coloured under his glare of silent avowal, and he blushed brightly.
“I think so, too,” he said hoarsely, cleared his throat, and after a meditative moment proceeded sacramentally with his woodcarving.
“You are wonderful,” said the freckled girl to Miss Walshingham, apropos of nothing, as they went on their way home together. “He simply adores you.”
“But, my dear, what have I done?” said Helen.
“That’s just it,” said the freckled girl. “What have you done?”
And then with a terrible swiftness came the last class of the course, to terminate this relationship altogether. Kipps was careless of dates, and the thing came upon him with an effect of abrupt surprise. Just as his petals were expanding so hopefully, “Finis,” and the thing was at an end. But Kipps did not fully appreciate that the end was indeed and really and truly the end, until he was back in the Emporium after the end was over.
The end began practically in the middle of the last class, when the freckled girl broached the topic of terminations. She developed the question of just how he was going on after the class ended. She hoped he would stick to certain resolutions of self-improvement he had breathed. She said quite honestly that he owed it to himself to develop his possibilities. He expressed firm resolve, but dwelt on difficulties. He had no books. She instructed him how to get books from the public library. He was to get a form of application for a ticket signed by a ratepayer; and he said “of course,” when she said Mr. Shalford would do that, though all the time he knew perfectly well it would “never do” to ask Mr. Shalford for anything of the sort. She explained that she was going to North Wales for the summer, information he received without immediate regret. At intervals he expressed his intention of going on with woodcarving when the summer was over, and once he added “If—”
She considered herself extremely delicate not to press for the completion of that “if—”
After that talk there was an interval of languid woodcarving and watching Miss Walshingham.
Then presently there came a bustle of packing, a great ceremony of handshaking all round by Miss Collis and the maiden lady of ripe years, and then Kipps found himself outside the classroom, on the landing with his two friends. It seemed to him he had only just learnt that this was the last
