Kipps

by H. G. Wells

  Mrs Walshingham bowed stiffly and a little awkwardly.

  He remained holding the door open for some seconds after they had passed out, then rushed suddenly to the back of the ‘costume' window to watch them go down the street. His hands tightened on the window-rack as he stared. Her mother appeared to be asking discreet questions. Helen's bearing suggested the offhand replies of a person who found the world a satisfactory place to live in. ‘Really, Mumsie, you cannot expect me to cut my own students dead,’ she was, in fact, saying….

  They vanished round Henderson's corner.

  Gone! And he would never see her again – never!

  It was as though someone had struck his heart with a whip. Never! Never! Never! And she didn't know! He turned back from the window, and the department, with its two apprentices, was impossible. The whole glaring world was insupportable.

  He hesitated, and made a rush, head down, for the cellar that was his Manchester warehouse. Rogers asked him a question that he pretended not to hear.

  The Manchester warehouse was a small cellar apart from the general basement of the building, and dimly lit by a small gas flare. He did not turn that up, but rushed for the darkest corner, where, on the lowest shelf, the Sale window-tickets were stored. He drew out the box of these with trembling hands and upset them on the floor, and so having made himself a justifiable excuse for being on the ground with his head well in the dark, he could let his poor bursting little heart have its way with him for a space.

  And there he remained until the cry of ‘Kipps! Forward!’ summoned him once more to face the world.

  CHAPTER THE SIXTH

  THE UNEXPECTED

  §1

  Now in the slack of that same day, after the midday dinner and before the coming of the afternoon customers, this disastrous Chitterlow descended upon Kipps with the most amazing coincidence in the world. He did not call formally, entering and demanding Kipps, but privately, in a confidential and mysterious manner.

  Kipps was first aware of him as a dark object bobbing about excitedly outside the hosiery window. He was stooping and craning and peering in the endeavour to see into the interior between and over the socks and stockings. Then he transferred his attention to the door, and after a hovering scrutiny, tried the baby-linen display. His movements and gestures suggested a suppressed excitement.

  Seen by daylight, Chitterlow was not nearly such a magnificent figure as he had been by the subdued nocturnal lightings and beneath the glamour of his own interpretation. The lines were the same, indeed, but the texture was different. There was a quality about the yachting cap, an indefinable finality of dustiness, a shiny finish on all the salient surfaces of the reefer coat. The red hair and the profile, though still forcible and fine, were less in the quality of Michelangelo1 and more in that of the merely picturesque. But it was a bright brown eye still that sought amidst the interstices of the baby-linen.

  Kipps was by no means anxious to interview Chitterlow again. If he had felt sure that Chitterlow would not enter the shop, he would have hid in the warehouse until the danger was past, but he had no idea of Chitterlow's limitations. He decided to keep up the shop in the shadows until Chitterlow reached the side window of the Manchester department, and then to go outside as if to inspect the condition of the window and explain to him that things were unfavourable to immediate intercourse. He might tell him he had already lost his situation….

  ‘Ullo, Chit'low,’ he said, emerging.

  ‘Very man I want to see,’ said Chitterlow, shaking with vigour. ‘Very man I want to see.’ He laid a hand on Kipps' arm. ‘How old are you, Kipps?’

  ‘One and twenty,’ said Kipps. ‘Why?’

  ‘Talk about coincidences! And your name, now? Wait a minute.’ He held out a finger. ‘Is it Arthur?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kipps.

  ‘You're the man,’ said Chitterlow.

  ‘What man?’

  ‘It's about the thickest coincidence I ever struck,’ said Chitterlow, plunging his extensive hand into his breast-coat pocket. ‘Half a jiff’2 and I'll tell you your mother's Christian name.’ He laughed and struggled with his coat for a space, produced a washing-book3 and two pencils, which he deposited in his side pocket; then in one capacious handful, a bent but by no means finally disabled cigar, the rubber proboscis of a bicycle pump, some twine and a lady's purse, and finally a small pocket-book, and from this, after dropping and recovering several visiting-cards, he extracted a carelessly torn piece of newspaper. ‘Euphemia,’4 he read, and brought his face close to Kipps‘. ‘Eh?’ He laughed noisily. ‘It's about as fair a Bit of All Right as anyone could have – outside a coincidence play. Don't say her name wasn't Euphemia, Kipps, and spoil the whole blessed show.’

  ‘Whose name – Euphemia?’ asked Kipps.

  ‘Your mother's.’

  ‘Lemme see what it says on the paper.’

  Chitterlow handed him the fragment and turned away. ‘You may say what you like,’ he said, addressing a vast deep laugh to the street generally.

  Kipps attempted to read. ‘WADDY or KIPPS. If Arthur Waddy or Arthur Kipps, the son of Margaret Euphemia Kipps, who—’

  Chitterlow's finger swept over the print. ‘I went down the column, and every blessed name that seemed to fit my play I took. I don't believe in made-up names. As I told you. I'm all with Zola5 in that. Documents whenever you can. I like ‘em hot and real. See? Who was Waddy?’

  ‘Never heard his name.’

  ‘Not Waddy?’

  ‘No!’

  Kipps tried to read again, and abandoned the attempt. ‘What does it mean?’ he said. ‘I don't understand.’

  ‘It means,’ said Chitterlow, with a momentary note of lucid exposition, ‘so far as I can make out, that you're going to strike it Rich. Never mind about the Waddy – that's a detail. What does it usually mean? You'll hear of something to your advantage – very well. I took that newspaper up to get my names by the merest chance. Directly I saw it again and read that – I knew it was you. I believe in coincidences. People say they don't happen. I say they do. Everything's a coincidence. Seen properly. Here you are. Here's one! Incredible? Not a bit of it! See? It's you! Kipps! Waddy be damned! It's a Mascot. There's luck in my play. Bif! You're there. I'm there. Fair in it! Snap!’ And he discharged his fingers like a pistol. ‘Never you mind about the “Waddy.”’

  ‘Eh?’ said Kipps, with a nervous eye on Chitterlow's fingers.

  ‘You're all right,’ said Chitterlow, ‘you may bet the seat of your only breeches on that! Don't you worry about the Waddy – that's as clear as day. You're about as right side up as a billiard ball… whatever you do. Don't stand there gaping, man! Read the paper if you don't believe me. Read it!’

  He shook it under Kipps' nose.

  Kipps became aware of the second apprentice watching them from the shop. His air of perplexity gave place to a more confident bearing.

  ‘— “who was born at East Grinstead.” I certainly was born there. I've ‘eard my Aunt say—’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Chitterlow, taking hold of one edge of the paper and bringing his face close alongside Kipps‘.

  ‘“—on September the first, eighteen hundred and seventy-eight6—”’

  ‘That's all right,’ said Chitterlow. ‘It's all, all right, and all you have to do is to write to Watson and Bean and get it—’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘Whatever it is.’

  Kipps sought his moustache. ‘You'd write?’ he asked.

  ‘Ra-ther.’

  ‘But what d‘you think it is?’

  ‘That's the fun of it!’ said Chitterlow, taking three steps in some as yet uninvented dance. ‘That's where the joke comes in. It may be anything – it may be a million. If so! Where does little Harry come in? Eh?’

  Kipps was trembling slightly. ‘But—’ he said, and thought. ‘If you was me—’ he began. ‘About that Waddy—?’

  He glanced up and saw the second apprentice disappear with amazing swi
ftness from behind the goods in the window.

  ‘What?’ asked Chitterlow, but he never had an answer.

  ‘Lor! There's the guv‘nor!’ said Kipps, and made a prompt dive for the door.

  He dashed in, only to discover that Shalford, with the junior apprentice in attendance, had come to mark off remnants of Kipps' cotton dresses, and was demanding him. ‘Hullo, Kipps,’ he said, ‘outside—?’

  ‘Seein’ if the window was straight, Sir,’ said Kipps.

  ‘Umph!’ said Shalford.

  For a space Kipps was too busily employed to think at all of Chitterlow or the crumpled bit of paper in his trouser pocket. He was, however, painfully aware of a suddenly disconnected excitement at large in the street. There came one awful moment when Chitterlow's nose loomed interrogatively over the ground glass of the department door, and his bright little red-brown eye sought for the reason of Kipps' disappearance, and then it became evident that he saw the high light of Shalford's baldness, and grasped the situation and went away. And then Kipps (with that advertisement in his pocket) was able to come back to the business in hand.

  He became aware that Shalford had asked a question. ‘Yessir, nosir, rightsir. I'm sorting up zephyrs7 to-morrow, Sir,’ said Kipps.

  Presently he had a moment to himself again, and, taking up a safe position behind a newly unpacked pile of summer lace curtains, he straightened out the piece of paper and re-perused it. It was a little perplexing. That ‘Arthur Waddy or Arthur Kipps’ – did that imply two persons or one? He would ask Pearce or Buggins. Only —

  It had always been impressed upon him that there was something demanding secrecy about his mother.

  ‘Don't you answer no questions about your mother,’ his aunt had been wont to say. ‘Tell them you don't know, whatever it is they ask you.’

  ‘Now, this—?’

  Kipps' face became portentously careful, and he tugged at his moustache, such as it was, hard.

  He had always represented his father as being a ‘gentleman farmer.’ ‘It didn't pay,’ he used to say, with a picture in his own mind of a penny magazine aristocrat prematurely worn out by worry. ‘I'm a Norfan, both sides,’ he would explain, with the air of one who had seen trouble. He said he lived with his uncle and aunt, but he did not say that they kept a toy-shop, and to tell anyone that his uncle had been a butler – a servant! – would have seemed the maddest of indiscretions. Almost all the assistants in the Emporium were equally reticent and vague, so great is their horror of ‘Lowness' of any sort. To ask about this ‘Waddy or Kipps' would upset all these little fictions. He was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about his real status in the world (he was not, as a matter of fact, perfectly clear about anything), but he knew that there was a quality about his status that was – detrimental.

  Under the circumstances—?

  It occurred to him that it would save a lot of trouble to destroy the advertisement there and then.

  In which case he would have to explain to Chitterlow!

  ‘Eng!’8 said Mr Kipps.

  ‘Kipps!’ cried Carshot, who was shopwalking. ‘Kipps Forward!’

  He thrust back the crumpled paper into his pocket, and sallied forth to the customer.

  ‘I want,’ said the customer, looking vaguely about her through glasses, ‘a little bit of something to cover a little stool I have. Anything would do – a remnant or anything.’

  The matter of the advertisement remained in abeyance for half an hour, and at the end the little stool was still a candidate for covering, and Kipps had a thoroughly representative collection of the textile fabrics in his department to clear away. He was so angry about the little stool that the crumpled advertisement lay for a space in his pocket, absolutely forgotten.

  § 2

  Kipps sat on his tin box under the gas-bracket that evening, and looked up the name Euphemia, and learnt what it meant in the Inquire Within About Everything9 that constituted Buggins' reference library. He hoped Buggins, according to his habit, would ask him what he was looking for, but Buggins was busy turning out his week's washing. ‘Two collars,’ said Buggins, ‘half pair socks, two dickeys.10 Shirt?…. M'm. There ought to be another collar somewhere.’

  ‘Euphemia,’ said Kipps at last, unable altogether to keep to himself this suspicion of a high origin that floated so delightfully about him. ‘Eu-phemia; it isn't a name common people would give to a girl, is it?’

  ‘It isn't the name any decent people would give to a girl,’ said Buggins, ‘common or not.’

  ‘Lor!’ said Kipps. ‘Why?’

  ‘It's giving girls names like that,’ said Buggins, ‘that nine times out of ten makes ‘em go wrong. It unsettles ‘em. If ever I was to have a girl, if ever I was to have a dozen girls, I'd call ‘em all Jane. Every one of ‘em. You couldn't have a better name than that. Euphemia indeed! What next?… Good Lord!… That isn't one of my collars there, is it, under your bed?’

  Kipps got him the collar.

  ‘I don't see no great ‘arm in Euphemia,’ he said as he did so.

  After that he became restless. ‘I'm a good mind to write that letter,’ he said; and then, finding Buggins preoccupied wrapping his washing up in the ‘1/2 sox,’ added to himself, ‘a thundering good mind.’

  So he got his penny bottle of ink, borrowed the pen from Buggins, and with no very serious difficulty in spelling or composition, did as he had resolved.

  He came back into the bedroom about an hour afterwards, a little out of breath and pale. ‘Where you been?’ said Buggins, who was now reading the Daily World Manager, which came to him in rotation from Carshot.

  ‘Out to post some letters,’ said Kipps, hanging up his hat.

  ‘Crib hunting?’

  ‘Mostly,’ said Kipps.

  ‘Rather,’ he added with a nervous laugh; ‘what else?’

  Buggins went on reading. Kipps sat on his bed and regarded the back of the Daily World Manager thoughtfully.

  ‘Buggins,’ he said at last.

  Buggins lowered his paper and looked.

  ‘I say, Buggins, what do these here advertisements mean that say so-and-so will hear of something greatly to his advantage?’

  ‘Missin' people,’ said Buggins, making to resume reading.

  ‘How d‘yer mean?’ asked Kipps. ‘Money left, and that sort of thing?’

  Buggins shook his head. ‘Debts,’ he said, ‘more often than not.’

  ‘But that ain't to his advantage.’

  ‘They put that to get ‘old of ‘em,’ said Buggins. ‘Often it's wives.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Deserted wives try and get their husbands back that way.’

  ‘I suppose it is legacies sometimes, eh? Perhaps, if someone was left a hundred pounds by someone—’

  ‘Hardly ever,’ said Buggins.

  ‘Well, ‘ow—?’ began Kipps, and hesitated.

  Buggins resumed reading. He was very much excited by a leader on Indian affairs. ‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘it won't do to give these here Blacks votes.’11

  ‘No fear,’ said Kipps.

  ‘They're different altogether,’ said Buggins. ‘They ‘aven't the sound sense of Englishmen, and they ‘aven't the character. There's a sort of tricky dishonesty about ‘em – false witness and all that – of which an Englishman has no idea. Outside their courts of law – it's a pos'tive fact, Kipps – there's witnesses waitin' to be ‘ired. Reg'lar trade. Touch their ‘ats as you go in. Englishmen ‘ave no idea, I tell you – not ord'nary Englishmen. It's in their blood. They're too timid to be honest. Too slavish. They aren't used to being free like we are, and if you gave ‘em freedom they wouldn't make a proper use of it. Now, we— Oh, Damn!’

  For the gas had suddenly gone out, and Buggins had the whole column of Society Club Chat still to read.

  Buggins could talk of nothing after that but Shalford's meanness in turning off the gas, and after being extremely satirical about their employer, undressed in the dark, hit his bare toe ag
ainst a box, and subsided, after unseemly ejaculations, into silent ill-temper

  Though Kipps tried to get to sleep before the affair of the letter he had just posted resumed possession of his mind, he could not do so. He went over the whole thing again, quite exhaustively.

  Now that his first terror was abating, he couldn't quite determine whether he was glad or sorry that he had posted that letter. If it should happen to be a hundred pounds!

  It must be a hundred pounds!

  If it was he could hold out for a year, for a couple of years even, before he got a Crib.

  Even if it was fifty pounds—!

  Buggins was already breathing regularly when Kipps spoke again. ‘Bug-gins,’ he said.

  Buggins pretended to be asleep, and thickened his regular breathing (a little too hastily) to a snore.

  ‘I say, Buggins,’ said Kipps, after an interval.

  ‘What's up now?’ said Buggins, unamiably.

  ‘S‘pose you saw an advertisement in a paper, with your name in it, see, asking you to come and see someone, like, so as to hear of something very much to your—’

  ‘Hide,’ said Buggins, shortly.

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’ d hide.’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘Goo‘-night, o' man,’ said Buggins, with convincing earnestness. Kipps lay still for a long time, then blew profoundly, turned over and stared at the other side of the dark.

  He had been a fool to post that letter!

  Lord! Hadn't he been a fool!

  § 3

  It was just five days and a half after the light had been turned out while Buggins was reading, that a young man with a white face, and eyes bright and wide open, emerged from a side road upon the Leas front. He was dressed in his best clothes, and, although the weather was fine, he carried his umbrella, just as if he had been to church. He hesitated, and turned to the right. He scanned each house narrowly as he passed it, and presently came to an abrupt stop. ‘Hughenden,’ said the gateposts in firm black letters, and the fanlight in gold repeated ‘Hughenden.’ It was a stucco house, fit to take your breath away, and its balcony was painted a beautiful sea green, enlivened with gilding. He stood looking up at it.