Kipps H. G. Wells (best thriller novels to read .txt) 📖

the Kippses decided, before Pierce had gone, and Carshot’s warning had resumed their sway, to apply to him. They did so⁠—rather dubiously.

The architect who was brother of Pierce’s friend appeared as a small, alert individual with a black bag and a cylindrical silk hat, and he sat at the dining-room table, with his hat and his bag exactly equidistant right and left of him, and maintained a demeanour of impressive woodenness, while Kipps on the hearthrug, with a quaking sense of gigantic enterprise, vacillated answers to his enquiries. Ann held a watching brief for herself, in a position she had chosen as suitable to the occasion beside the corner of the carved oak sideboard. They felt, in a sense, at bay.

The architect began by asking for the site, and seemed a little discomposed to discover this had still to be found. “I thought of building just anywhere,” said Kipps. “I ’aven’t made up my mind about that yet.” The architect remarked that he would have preferred to see the site in order to know where to put what he called his “ugly side,” but it was quite possible of course to plan a house “in the air,” on the level, “simply with back and front assumed”⁠—if they would like to do that. Kipps flushed slightly, and secretly hoping it would make no great difference in the fees, said a little doubtfully that he thought that would be all right.

The architect then marked off as it were the first section of his subject, with a single dry cough, opened his bag, took out a spring tape measure, some hard biscuits, a metal flask, a new pair of dogskin gloves, a clockwork motorcar partially wrapped in paper, a bunch of violets, a paper of small brass screws, and finally a large, distended notebook; he replaced the other objects carefully, opened his notebook, put a pencil to his lips and said: “And what accommodation will you require?” To which Ann, who had followed his every movement with the closest attention and a deepening dread, replied with the violent suddenness of one who has long lain in wait, “Cubbuds!”

“Anyhow,” she added, catching her husband’s eye.

The architect wrote it down.

“And how many rooms?” he said, coming to secondary matters.

The young people regarded one another. It was dreadfully like giving an order.

“How many bedrooms, for example?” asked the architect.

“One?” suggested Kipps, inclined now to minimise at any cost.

“There’s Gwendolen,” said Ann.

“Visitors perhaps,” said the architect, and temperately, “You never know.”

“Two, p’raps?” said Kipps. “We don’t want no more than a little ’ouse, you know.”

“But the merest shooting-box⁠—,” said the architect.

They got to six; he beat them steadily from bedroom to bedroom, the word “nursery” played across their imaginative skies⁠—he mentioned it as the remotest possibility⁠—and then six being reluctantly conceded, Ann came forward to the table, sat down and delivered herself of one of her prepared conditions: “ ’Ot and cold water,” she said, “laid on to each room⁠—any’ow.”

It was an idea long since acquired from Sid.

“Yes,” said Kipps, on the hearthrug, “ ’Ot and cold water laid on to each bedroom⁠—we’ve settled on that.”

It was the first intimation to the architect that he had to deal with a couple of exceptional originality, and as he had spent the previous afternoon in finding three large houses in The Builder, which he intended to combine into an original and copyright design of his own, he naturally struggled against these novel requirements. He enlarged on the extreme expensiveness of plumbing, on the extreme expensiveness of everything not already arranged for in his scheme, and only when Ann declared she’d as soon not have the house as not have her requirements, and Kipps, blenching the while, had said he didn’t mind what a thing cost him so long as he got what he wanted, did he allow a kindred originality of his own to appear beneath the acquired professionalism of his methods. He dismissed their previous talk with his paragraphic cough. “Of course,” he said, “if you don’t mind being unconventional⁠—”

He explained that he had been thinking of a Queen Anne style of architecture (Ann directly she heard her name shook her head at Kipps in an aside) so far as the exterior went. For his own part, he said, he liked to have the exterior of a house in a style, not priggishly in a style, but mixed, with one style uppermost, and the gables and dormers and casements of the Queen Anne style, with a little rough cast and sham timbering here and there and perhaps a bit of an overhang diversified a house and made it interesting. The advantages of what he called a Queen Anne style was that it had such a variety of features.⁠ ⁠… Still, if they were prepared to be unconventional it could be done. A number of houses were now built in the unconventional style and were often very pretty. In the unconventional style one frequently had what perhaps he might call Internal Features, for example, an Old English oak staircase and gallery. White roughcast and green paint were a good deal favoured in houses of this type.

He indicated that this excursus on style was finished by a momentary use of his cough, and reopened his notebook, which he had closed to wave about in a moment of descriptive enthusiasm while expatiating on the unbridled wealth of External Features associated with Queen Anne. “Six bedrooms,” he said, moistening his pencil. “One with barred windows suitable for a nursery if required.”

Kipps endorsed this huskily and reluctantly.

There followed a most interesting discussion upon house building, in which Kipps played a minor part. They passed from bedrooms to the kitchen and scullery, and there Ann displayed an intelligent exactingness that won the expressed admiration of the architect. They were particularly novel upon the position of the coal cellar, which Ann held to be altogether too low in the ordinary house, necessitating much heavy carrying. They dismissed as impracticable the idea of having coal cellar and kitchen at