Kipps

by H. G. Wells

  What queer encounters were possible in the world!

  Thank goodness, they were going to live in London!

  But that brought him round to Chitterlow. The Chitterlows would be coming to London too. if they didn't get money they'd come after it; they weren't the sort of people to be choked off easily, and if they did, they'd come to London to produce their play. He tried to imagine some seemly social occasion invaded by Chitterlow and his rhetoric, by his torrential thunder of self-assertion, the whole company flattened thereunder like wheat under a hurricane.

  Confound and hang Chitterlow! Yet somehow, somewhen, one would have to settle accounts with him! And there was Sid! Sid was Ann's brother. He realized with sudden horror the social indiscretion of accepting Sid's invitation to dinner.

  Sid wasn't the sort of chap one could snub or cut, and besides Ann's brother! He didn't want to cut him; it would be worse than cutting Buggins and Pearce – a sight worse. And after that lunch! It would be next thing to cutting Ann herself. And even as to Ann!

  Suppose he was with Helen or Coote!…

  ‘Oh, Blow!’ he said at last, and then viciously, ‘Blow!’ and so rose and flung away his cigarette end and pursued his reluctant dubitating 16 way towards the really quite uncongenial splendours of the Royal Grand….

  And it is vulgarly imagined that to have money is to have no troubles at all!

  §6

  Kipps endured splendour at the Royal Grand Hotel for three nights and days, and then he retreated in disorder. The Royal Grand defeated and overcame and routed Kipps not of intention, but by sheer royal grandeur, grandeur combined with an organization for his comfort carried to excess. On his return he came upon a difficulty, he had lost his circular piece of cardboard with the number of his room, and he drifted about the hall and passages in a state of perplexity for some time, until he thought all the porters and officials in gold lace caps must be watching him, and jesting to one another about him. Finally, in a quiet corner down below near the hairdresser's shop, he found a kindly-looking personage in bottle green, to whom he broached his difficulty. ‘I say,’ he said, with a pleasant smile, ‘I can't find my room nohow.’ The personage in bottle green, instead of laughing in a nasty way, as he might well have done, became extremely helpful, showed Kipps what to do, got his key, and conducted him by lift and passage to his chamber. Kipps tipped him half a crown.

  Safe in his room, Kipps pulled himself together for dinner. He had learnt enough from young Walshingham to bring his dress clothes, and now he began to assume them. Unfortunately in the excitement of his flight from his aunt and uncle he had forgotten to put in his other boots, and he was some time deciding between his purple cloth slippers with a golden marigold and the prospect of cleaning the boots he was wearing with the towel, but finally, being a little footsore, he took the slippers.

  Afterwards, when he saw the porters and waiters and the other guests catch sight of the slippers, he was sorry he had not chosen the boots. However, to make up for any want of style at that end, he had his crush hat 17 under his arm.

  He found the dining-room without excessive trouble. It was a vast and splendidly decorated place, and a number of people, evidently quite au fait, 18 were dining there at little tables lit with electric red-shaded candles, gentlemen in evening dress, and ladies with dazzling astonishing necks. Kipps had never seen evening dress in full vigour before, and he doubted his eyes. And there were also people not in evening dress, who no doubt wondered what noble family Kipps represented. There was a band in a decorated recess, and the band looked collectively at the purple slippers, and so lost any chance they may have had of a donation so far as Kipps was concerned. The chief drawback to this magnificent place was the excessive space of floor that had to be crossed before you got your purple slippers hidden under a table.

  He selected a little table – not the one where a rather impudent-looking waiter held a chair, but another – sat down, and, finding his gibus in his hand, decided after a moment of thought to rise slightly and sit on it. (It was discovered in his abandoned chair at a late hour by a supper-party and restored to him next day.)

  He put the napkin carefully on one side, selected his soup without difficulty, ‘Clear please,’ but he was rather floored by the presentation of a quite splendidly bound wine-card. He turned it over, discovered a section devoted to whiskey, and had a bright idea.

  ‘'Ere,’ he said to the waiter, with an encouraging movement of the head; and then in a confidential manner, ‘You 'aven't any Old Methuselah Three Stars, 'ave you?’

  The waiter went away to inquire, and Kipps went on with his soup with an enhanced self-respect. Finally, Old Methuselah being unattainable, he ordered a claret from about the middle of the list. ‘Let's 'ave some of this,’ he said. He knew claret was a good sort of wine.

  ‘A half bottle?’ said the waiter.

  ‘Right you are,’ said Kipps.

  He felt he was getting on. He leant back after his soup, a man of the world, and then slowly brought his eyes round to the ladies in evening dress on his right… .

  He couldn't have thought it!

  They were scorchers. Jest a bit of black velvet over the shoulders!

  He looked again. One of them was laughing with a glass of wine half raised – wicked-looking woman she was; the other, the black velvet one, was eating bits of bread with nervous quickness and talking fast.

  He wished old Buggins could see them.

  He found a waiter regarding him and blushed deeply. He did not look again for some time, and became confused about his knife and fork over the fish. Presently he remarked a lady in pink to the left of him eating the fish with an entirely different implement.

  It was over the vol au vent 19 that he began to go to pieces. He took a knife to it; then saw the lady in pink was using a fork only, and hastily put down his knife, with a considerable amount of rich creaminess on the blade, upon the cloth. Then he found that a fork in his inexperienced hand was an instrument of chase rather than capture. His ears became violently red, and then he looked up to discover the lady in pink glancing at him, and then smiling, as she spoke to the man beside her.

  He hated the lady in pink very much.

  He stabbed a large piece of the vol au vent at last, and was too glad of his luck not to make a mouthful of it. But it was an extensive fragment, and pieces escaped him. Shirt-front! ‘Desh it!’ he said, and had resort to his spoon. His waiter went and spoke to two other waiters, no doubt jeering at him. He became very fierce suddenly. “Ere!’ he said, gesticulating; and then, ‘Clear this away!’

  The entire dinner-party on his right, the party of the ladies in advanced evening dress, looked at him…. He felt that everyone was watching him and making fun of him, and the injustice of this angered him. After all, they had had every advantage he hadn't. And then, when they got him there doing his best, what must they do but glance and sneer and nudge one another. He tried to catch them at it, and then took refuge in a second glass of wine.

  Suddenly and extraordinarily he found himself a Socialist. He did not care how close it was to the lean years when all these things would end.

  Mutton came with peas. He arrested the hand of the waiter. ‘No peas,’ he said. He knew something of the danger and difficulty of eating peas. Then, when the peas went away, he was embittered again…. Echoes of Masterman's burning rhetoric began to reverberate in his mind. Nice lot of people these were to laugh at anyone! Women half undressed— It was that made him so beastly uncomfortable. How could one eat one's dinner with people about him like that? Nice lot they were. He was glad he wasn't one of them anyhow. Yes, they might look. He resolved, if they looked at him again, he would ask one of the men who he was staring at. His perturbed and angry face would have concerned anyone. The band, by an unfortunate accident, was playing truculent military music. The mental change Kipps underwent was, in its way, what psychologists call a conversion. 20 In a few moments all Kipps' ideals were changed. He who had been ‘practically a
gentleman,’ the sedulous pupil of Coote, the punctilious raiser of hats, was instantly a rebel, an outcast, the hater of everything ‘stuck up,’ the foe of Society and the social order of to-day. Here they were among the profits of their robbery, these people who might do anything with the world….

  ‘No thenks,’ he said to a dish.

  He addressed a scornful eye at the shoulders of the lady to his left.

  Presently he was refusing another dish. He didn't like it – fussed-up food! Probably cooked by some foreigner. He finished up his wine and his bread… .

  ‘No, thenks.’

  ‘No, thenks.’…

  He discovered the eye of a diner fixed curiously upon his flushed face. He responded with a glare. Couldn't he go without things if he liked?

  ‘What's this?’ said Kipps, to a great green cone.

  ‘Ice,’ said the waiter.

  ‘I'll 'ave some,’ said Kipps.

  He seized fork and spoon and assailed the bombe. 21 It cut rather stiffly. ‘Come up!’ said Kipps, with concentrated bitterness, and the truncated summit of the bombe flew off suddenly, travelling eastward with remarkable velocity. Flop, it went upon the floor a yard away, and for a while time seemed empty.

  At the adjacent table they were laughing altogether.

  Shy the rest of the bombe at them?

  Flight?

  At any rate, a dignified withdrawal.

  ‘No!’ said Kipps, ‘no more,’ arresting the polite attempt of the waiter to serve him with another piece. He had a vague idea he might carry off the affair as though he meant the ice to go on the floor – not liking ice, for example, and being annoyed at the badness of his dinner. He put both hands on the table, thrust back his chair, disengaged a purple slipper from his napkin, and rose. He stepped carefully over the prostrate ice, kicked the napkin under the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and marched out – shaking the dust of the place as it were from his feet. 22 He left behind him a melting fragment of ice upon the floor, his gibus hat, warm and compressed in his chair, and, in addition, every social ambition he had ever entertained in the world.

  § 7

  Kipps went back to Folkestone in time for the Anagram Tea. But you must not imagine that the change of heart that came to him in the dining-room of the Royal Grand Hotel involved any change of attitude towards this promised social and intellectual treat. He went back because the Royal Grand was too much for him.

  Outwardly calm, or at most a little flushed and ruffled, inwardly Kipps was a horrible, tormented battleground of scruples, doubts, shames, and self-assertions during that three days of silent, desperate grappling with the big hotel. He did not intend the monstrosity should beat him without a struggle; but at last he had sullenly to admit himself overcome. The odds were terrific. On the one hand himself – with, among other things, only one pair of boots; on the other a vast wilderness of rooms, covering several acres, and with over a thousand people, staff and visitors, all chiefly occupied in looking queerly at Kipps, in laughing at him behind his back, in watching for difficult corners at which to confront and perplex him and inflict humiliations upon him. For example, the hotel scored over its electric light. After the dinner the chambermaid, a hard, unsympathetic young woman with a superior manner, was summoned by a bell Kipps had rung under the impression the button was the electric-light switch. ‘Look 'ere,’ said Kipps, rubbing a shin that had suffered during his search in the dark, ‘why aren't there any candles or matches?’ The hotel explained and scored heavily.

  ‘It isn't everyone is up to these things,’ said Kipps.

  ‘No, it isn't,’ said the chambermaid with ill-concealed scorn, and slammed the door at him.

  ‘S'pose I ought to have tipped her,’ said Kipps.

  After that Kipps cleaned his boots with a pocket-handkerchief and went for a long walk, and got home in a hansom; but the hotel scored again by his not putting out his boots, and so having to clean them again in the morning. The hotel also snubbed him by bringing him hot water when he was fully dressed and looking surprised at his collar, but he got a breakfast, I must admit, with scarcely any difficulty.

  After that the hotel scored heavily by the fact that there are twenty-four hours in the day and Kipps had nothing to do in any of them. He was a little footsore from his previous day's pedestrianism, and he could make up his mind for no long excursions. He flitted in and out of the hotel several times, and it was the polite porter who touched his hat every time that first set Kipps tipping.

  ‘What ‘e wants is a tip,’ said Kipps.

  So at the next opportunity he gave the man an unexpected shilling, and, having once put his hand in his pocket, there was no reason why he should not go on. He bought a newspaper at the bookstall and tipped the boy the rest of the shilling, and then went up by the lift and tipped the man sixpence, leaving his newspaper inadvertently in the lift. He met his chambermaid in the passage and gave her half a crown. He resolved to demonstrate his position to the entire establishment in this way. He didn't like the place; he disapproved of it politically, socially, morally; but he resolved no taint of meanness should disfigure his sojourn in its luxurious halls. He went down by the lift (tipping again), and, being accosted by a waiter with his gibus, tipped the finder half a crown. He had a vague sense that he was making a flank movement upon the hotel and buying over its staff. They would regard him as a ‘character’; they would get to like him. He found his stock of small silver diminishing and replenished it at a desk in the hall. He tipped a man in bottle green, who looked like the man who had shown him his room the day before; and then he saw a visitor eyeing him, and doubted whether he was in this instance doing right. Finally he went out and took chance buses to their destinations, and wandered a little in remote wonderful suburbs, and returned. He lunched at a chop-house in Islington, and found himself back in the Royal Grand, now unmistakably footsore and London-weary, about three. He was attracted to the drawing-room by a neat placard about afternoon tea.

  It occurred to him that the campaign of tipping upon which he had embarked was, perhaps after all, a mistake. He was confirmed in this by observing that the hotel officials were watching him, not respectfully, but with a sort of amused wonder, as if to see whom he would tip next. However, if he backed out now, they would think him an awful fool. Everyone wasn't so rich as he was. It was his way to tip. Still—

  He grew more certain the hotel had scored again.

  He pretended to be lost in thought, and so drifted by, and, having put hat and umbrella in the cloakroom, went into the drawing-room for afternoon tea.

  There he did get what for a time he held to be a point in his favour. The room was large and quiet at first, and he sat back restfully until it occurred to him that his attitude brought his extremely dusty boots too prominently into the light, so instead he sat up, and then people of the upper and upper middle classes began to come and group themselves about him and have tea likewise, and so revive the class animosities of the previous day.

  Presently a fluffy fair-haired lady came into prominent existence a few yards away. She was talking to a respectful low-voiced clergyman, whom she was possibly entertaining at tea. ‘No,’ she said; ‘dear Lady Jane wouldn't like that!’

  ‘Mumble, mumble, mumble,’ from the clergyman.

  ‘Poor dear Lady Jane was always so sensitive,’ the voice of the lady sang out clear and emphatic.

  A fat, hairless, important-looking man joined this group, took a chair and planted it firmly with its back in the face of Kipps, a thing that offended Kipps mightily. ‘Are you telling him,’ gurgled the fat, hairless man, ‘about dear Lady Jane's affliction?’ A young couple, lady brilliantly attired, and the man in a magnificently cut frock-coat, arranged themselves to the right, also with an air of exclusion towards Kipps. ‘I've told him,’ said the gentleman in a flat abundant voice. ‘My!’ said the young lady with an American smile. No doubt they all thought Kipps was out of it. A great desire to assert himself in some way surged up in h
is heart. He felt he would like to cut in on the conversation in some dramatic way. A monologue, something in the manner of Masterman? At any rate, abandoning that as impossible, he would like to appear self-centred and at ease. His eye, wandering over the black surfaces of a noble architectural mass close by, discovered a slot and an enamelled plaque of directions.

  It was some sort of musical box! 23

  It occurred to Kipps that he would like some music, that to inaugurate some would show him a man of taste and at his ease at the same time. He rose, read over a list of tunes, selected one haphazard, pressed his sixpence – it was sixpence! – home, and prepared for a confidential refined little melody.

  Considering the high social tone of the Royal Grand, it was really a very loud instrument indeed. It gave vent to three deafening brays, and so burst the dam of silence that had long pent it in. It seemed to be chiefly full of the great-uncles of trumpets, megalo-trombones, and railway brakes. It made sounds like shunting trains. It did not so much begin as blow up your counterscarp and rush forward to storm under cover of melodious shrapnel. It had not so much an air as a ricochette. The music had in short the inimitable quality of Sousa. 24 It swept down upon the friend of Lady Jane and carried away something socially striking into the eternal night of the unheard; the American girl to the left of it was borne off shrieking. ‘HIGH cockalorum Tootletootle tootle loo. HIGH cock-alorum tootle lootle loo. BUMP, bump, bump – BUMP,’ – Native American music, full of native American notes, full of the spirit of western college yells and election howls, joyous exorbitant music from the gigantic nursery of the Future, bearing the hearer along upon its torrential succession of sounds, as if he was in a cask on Niagara. 25 Whiroo! Yah, Have at you! The Strenuous Life! Yaha! Stop! A Reprieve! A Reprieve! No! Bang! Bump!