Kipps

by H. G. Wells

  The bell jangled for a bit, and then gave it up and was silent. For a long long second everything was quietly attentive. Kipps was amazed to his uttermost; had he had ten times the capacity, he would still have been fully amazed. ‘It's Chit'low!’ he said at last, standing duster in hand.

  But he doubted whether it was not a dream.

  ‘Tzit!’ gasped that most extraordinary person, still in an incredibly expanded attitude, and then with a slight forward jerk of the starry split glove, ‘Bif!’

  He could say no more. The tremendous speech he had had ready vanished from his mind. Kipps stared at his facial changes, vaguely conscious of the truth of the teachings of Nisbet and Lombroso7 concerning men of genius.

  Then suddenly Chitterlow's features were convulsed, the histrionic fell from him like a garment, and he was weeping. He said something indistinct about ‘Old Kipps! Good old Kipps! Oh, old Kipps!’ and somehow he managed to mix a chuckle and a sob in the most remarkable way. He emerged from somewhere near the middle of his original attitude, a merely life-size creature. ‘My play, boohoo!’ he sobbed, clutching at his friend's arm. ‘My play, Kipps! (sob). You know?’

  ‘Well?’ cried Kipps, with his heart sinking in sympathy. ‘It ain't—?’

  ‘No,’ howled Chitterlow. ‘No. It's a Success! My dear chap! my dear boy! Oh! It's a – Bu – boohoo! – a Big Success!’ He turned away and wiped streaming tears with the back of his hand. He walked a pace or so and turned. He sat down on one of the specially designed artistic chairs of the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union and produced an exiguous lady's handkerchief, extraordinarily belaced. He choked. ‘My play,’ and covered his face here and there.

  He made an unsuccessful effort to control himself, and shrank for a space to the dimensions of a small and pathetic creature. His great nose suddenly came through a careless place in the handkerchief.

  ‘I'm knocked,’8 he said in a muffled voice, and so remained for a space – wonderful – veiled.

  He made a gallant effort to wipe his tears away. ‘I had to tell you,’ he said gulping.

  ‘Be all right in a minute,’ he added, ‘Calm!’ and sat still… .

  Kipps stared in commiseration of such success. Then he heard footsteps, and went quickly to the house doorway. ‘Jest a minute,’ he said. ‘Don't go in the shop, Ann, for a minute. It's Chitterlow. He's a bit essited. But he'll be better in a minute. It's knocked him over a bit. You see' – his voice sank to a hushed note as one who announces death – ‘’e's made a success with his play.’

  He pushed her back, lest she should see the scandal of another male's tears… .

  Soon Chitterlow felt better, but for a little while his manner was even alarmingly subdued. ‘I had to come and tell you,’ he aid. ‘I had to astonish someone. Muriel – she'll be first-rate, of course. But she's over at Dymchurch.’ He blew his nose with enormous noise, and emerged instantly, a merely garrulous optimist.

  ‘I expect she'll be precious glad.’

  ‘She doesn't know yet, my dear boy. She's at Dymchurch – with a friend. She's seen some of my first nights before… . Better out of it… . I'm going to her now. I've been up all night – talking to the Boys and all that. I'm a bit off it just for a bit. But – it Knocked ‘em. It Knocked everybody.’

  He stared at the floor and went on in a monotone. ‘They laughed a bit at the beginning – but nothing like a settled laugh – not until the second act – you know – the chap with the beetle down his neck. Little Chisholme did that bit to rights. Then they began – to rights.’ His voice warmed and increased. ‘Laughing! It made me laugh! We jumped ‘em into the third act before they had time to cool. Everybody was on it. I never saw a first night go so fast. Laugh, laugh, laugh, LAUGH, LAUGH, L A U G H, (he howled the last repetition with stupendous violence). ‘Everything they laughed at. They laughed at things that we hadn't meant to be funny – not for one moment. Bif! Bizz! Curtain. A Fair Knock Out!… I went on – but I didn't say a word. Chisholme did the patter. Shouting! It was like walking under Niagara – going across that stage. It was like never having seen an audience before… .

  ‘Then afterwards – the Boys!’

  His emotion held him for a space. ‘Dear old Boys!’ he murmured.

  His word multiplied, his importance increased. In a little while he was restored to something of his old self. He was enormously excited. He seemed unable to sit down anywhere. He came into the breakfast-room so soon as Kipps was sure of him, shook hands with Mrs Kipps parenthetically, sat down and immediately got up again. He went to the bassinet9 in the corner and looked absent-mindedly at Kipps junior, and said he was glad if only for the youngster's sake. He immediately resumed the thread of his discourse…. He drank a cup of coffee noisily and walked up and down the room talking, while they attempted breakfast amidst the gale of his excitement. The infant slept marvellously through it all.

  ‘You won't mind my not sitting down, Mrs Kipps – I couldn't sit down for anyone, or I'd do it for you. It's you I'm thinking of more than anyone, you and Muriel, and all Old Pals and Good Friends. It means wealth, it means money – hundreds and thousands…. If you'd heard ‘em, you'd know.’

  He was silent through a portentous moment, while topics battled for him, and finally he burst and talked of them all together. It was like the rush of water when a dam bursts and washes out a fair-sized provincial town; all sorts of things floated along on the swirl. For example, he was discussing his future behaviour. ‘I'm glad it's come now. Not before. I've had my lesson. I shall be very discreet now, trust me. We've learnt the value of money.’ He discussed the possibility of a country house, of taking a Martello tower as a swimming-box (as one might say a shooting-box), of living in Venice because of its artistic associations and scenic possibilities, of a flat in Westminster or a house in the West End. He also raised the question of giving up smoking and drinking, and what classes of drink were especially noxious to a man of his constitution. But discourses on all this did not prevent a parenthetical computation of the probable profits on the supposition of a thousand nights here and in America, nor did it ignore the share Kipps was to have, nor the gladness with which Chitterlow would pay that share, nor the surprise and regret with which he had learnt, through an indirect source which awakened many associations, of the turpitude of young Walshingham, nor the distaste Chitterlow had always felt for young Walshingham, and men of his type. An excursus upon Napoleon had got into the torrent somehow, and kept bobbing up and down. The whole thing was thrown into the form of a single complex sentence, with parenthetical and subordinate clauses fitting one into the other like Chinese boxes, and from first to last it never even had an air of approaching anything in the remotest degree partaking of the nature of a full stop.

  Into this deluge came the Daily News, like the gleam of light in Watts' picture,10 the waters were assuaged while its sheet was opened, and it had a column, a whole column, of praise. Chitterlow held the paper, and Kipps read over his left hand, and Ann under his right. It made the affair more real to Kipps; it seemed even to confirm Chitterlow against lurking doubts he had been concealing. But it took him away. He departed in a whirl, to secure a copy of every morning paper, every blessed rag there is, and take them all to Dymchurch and Muriel forthwith. It had been the send-off the Boys had given him that had prevented his doing as much at Charing Cross – let alone that he only caught it by the skin of his teeth…. Besides which, the bookstall wasn't open. His white face, lit by a vast excitement, bid them a tremendous farewell, and he departed through the sunlight, with his buoyant walk, buoyant almost to the tottering pitch. His hair, as one got it sunlit in the street, seemed to have grown in the night.

  They saw him stop a newsboy.

  ‘Every blessed rag,’ floated to them on the notes of that gorgeous voice.

  The newsboy too had happened on luck. Something like a faint cheer from the newsboy came down the air to terminate that transaction.

  Chitterlow went on his way swinging a great
budget of papers, a figure of merited success. The newsboy recovered from his emotion with a jerk, examined something in his hand again, transferred it to his pocket, watched Chitterlow for a space, and then in a sort of hushed silence resumed his daily routine… .

  Ann and Kipps regarded that receding happiness in silence, until it vanished round the bend of the road.

  ‘I am glad,’ said Ann at last, speaking with a little sigh.

  ‘So'm I,’ said Kipps, with emphasis. ‘For if ever a feller ‘as worked and waited – it's ‘im….’

  They went back through the shop rather thoughtfully, and, after a peep at the sleeping baby, resumed their interrupted breakfast. ‘If ever a feller ‘as worked and waited, it's ‘im,’ said Kipps, cutting bread.

  ‘Very likely it's true,’ said Ann, a little wistfully.

  ‘What's true?’

  ‘About all that money coming.’

  Kipps meditated. ‘I don't see why it shouldn't be,’ he decided, and handed Ann a piece of bread on the tip of his knife.

  ‘But we'll keep on the shop,’ he said, after an interval for further reflection, ‘all the same…. I ‘aven't much trust in money after the things we've seen.’

  §7

  That was two years ago, and, as the whole world knows, the Pestered Butterfly is running still. It was true. It has made the fortune of a once declining little theatre in the Strand; night after night the great beetle scene draws happy tears from a house packed to repletion, and Kipps – for all that Chitterlow is not what one might call a business man – is almost as rich as he was in the beginning. People in Australia, people in Lancashire, Scotland, Ireland, in New Orleans, in Jamaica, in New York and Montreal, have crowded through doorways to Kipps' enrichment, lured by the hitherto unsuspected humours of the entomological11 drama. Wealth rises like an exhalation all over our little planet, and condenses, or at least some of it does, in the pockets of Kipps.

  ‘It's rum,’ said Kipps.

  He sat in the little kitchen out behind the bookshop and philosophized and smiled while Ann gave Arthur Waddy Kipps his evening tub before the fire. Kipps was always present at this ceremony, unless customers prevented; there was something in the mixture of the odours of tobacco, soap, and domesticity that charmed him unspeakably.

  ‘Chuckerdee, o' man,’ he said affably, wagging his pipe at his son, and thought incidentally, after the manner of all parents, that very few children could have so straight and clean a body.

  ‘Dadda's got a cheque,’ said Arthur Waddy Kipps, emerging for a moment from the towel.

  “E gets ‘old of everything,’ said Ann. ‘You can't say a word—’

  ‘Dadda got a cheque,’ this marvellous child repeated.

  ‘Yes, o' man, I got a cheque. And it's got to go into a bank for you, against when you got to go to school. See? So's you'll grow up knowing your way about a bit.’

  ‘Dadda's got a cheque,’ said the wonder son, and then gave his mind to making mighty splashes with his foot. Every time he splashed, laughter overcame him, and he had to be held up for fear he should tumble out of the tub in his merriment. Finally he was towelled to his toe-tips, wrapped up in warm flannel, and kissed and carried off to bed by Ann's cousin and lady help, Emma. And then after Ann had carried away the bath into the scullery, she returned to find her husband with his pipe extinct and the cheque still in his hand.

  ‘Two fousand pounds,’ he said. ‘It's dashed rum. Wot ‘ave I done to get two fousand pounds, Ann?’

  ‘What ‘aven't you – not to?’ said Ann.

  He reflected upon this view of the case.

  ‘I shan't never give up this shop,’ he said at last.

  ‘We're very ‘appy ‘ere,’ said Ann.

  ‘Not if I ‘ad fifty fousand pounds.’

  ‘No fear,’ said Ann.

  ‘You got a shop,’ said Kipps, ‘and you come along in a year's time and there it is. But money – look ‘ow it comes and goes! There's no sense in money. You may kill yourself trying to get it, and then it comes when you aren't looking. There's my ‘riginal money! Where is it now? Gone! And it's took young Walshingham with it, and ‘e's gone too. It's like playing skittles. Long comes the ball, right and left you fly, and there it is rolling away and not changed a bit. No sense in it. ‘E's gone, and she's gone – gone off with that chap Revel, that sat with me at dinner. Merried man! And Chit'low rich! Lor! – what a fine place that Gerrik Club12 is to be sure, where I ‘ad lunch wiv' ‘im! Better‘n any ‘otel. Footmen in powder they got – not waiters, Ann, – footmen! ‘E's rich and me rich – in a sort of way… . Don't seem much sense in it, Ann – 'owever you look at it.’ He shook his head.

  ‘I know one thing,’ said Kipps.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I'm going to put it in jest as many different banks as I can. See? Fifty 'ere, fifty there. 'Posit. I'm not going to 'nvest it – no fear.’

  ‘It's only frowing money away,’ said Ann.

  ‘I'm ‘arf a mind to bury some of it under the shop. Only I expect one ’ud always be coming down at nights to make sure it was there…. I don't seem to trust anyone – not with money.’ He put the cheque on the table corner and smiled and tapped his pipe on the grate, with his eyes on that wonderful document. ‘S'pose old Bean started orf,’ he reflected…. ‘One thing, –’e is a bit lame.’

  ‘’E wouldn't,’ said Ann; ‘not 'im.’

  ‘I was only joking like.’ He stood up, put his pipe among the candlesticks on the mantel, took up the cheque and began folding it carefully to put it back in his pocket-book.

  A little bell jangled.

  ‘Shop!’ said Kipps. ‘That's right. Keep a shop and the shop'll keep you. That's ‘ow I look at it, Ann.’

  He drove his pocket-book securely into his breast pocket before he opened the living-room door….

  But whether indeed it is the bookshop that keeps Kipps, or whether it is Kipps who keeps the bookshop, is just one of those commercial mysteries people of my unarithmetical temperament are never able to solve. They do very well, the dears, anyhow, thank Heaven!

  The bookshop of Kipps is on the left-hand side of the Hythe High Street coming from Folkestone, between the yard of the livery-stable and the shop window full of old silver and suchlike things – it is quite easy to find – and there you may see him for yourself and speak to him and buy this book of him if you like. He has it in stock I know. Very delicately I've seen to that. His name is not Kipps, of course, you must understand that; but everything else is exactly as I have told you. You can talk to him about books, about politics, about going to Boulogne, about life, and the ups and downs of life. Perhaps he will quote you Buggins – from whom, by-the-by, one can now buy everything a gentleman's warbrobe should contain at the little shop in Rendezvous Street, Folkestone. If you are fortunate to find Kipps in a good mood, he may even let you know how he inherited a fortune ‘once.’ ‘Run froo it' he'll say with a not unhappy smile. ‘Got another afterwards – speckylating in plays. Needn't keep this shop if I didn't like. But it's something to do….’

  Or he may be even more intimate. ‘I seen some things,’ he said to me once. ‘Raver! Life! Why, once I – I loped! I did – reely!’

  (Of course you will not tell Kipps that he is ‘Kipps,’ or that I have put him in this book. He hasn't the remotest suspicion of that. And, you know, you never can tell how people are going to take that sort of thing. I am an old and trusted customer now, and for many amiable reasons I should prefer that things remained exactly on their present footing.)

  §8

  One early-closing evening in July they left the baby to the servant cousin, and Kipps took Ann for a row on the Hythe canal. The sun set in a mighty blaze, and left a world warm, and very still. The twilight came. And there was the water, shining bright, and the sky a deepening blue, and the great trees that dipped their boughs towards the water, exactly as it had been when he paddled home with Helen, when her eyes had seemed to him like dusky stars. He had ceased from rowing and reste
d on his oars, and suddenly he was touched by the wonder of life – the strangeness that is a presence stood again by his side.

  Out of the darknesses beneath the shallow weedy stream of his being rose a question, a question that looked up dimly and never reached the surface. It was the question of the wonder of the beauty, the purposeless, inconsecutive beauty, that falls so strangely among the happenings and memories of life. It never reached the surface of his mind, it never took to itself substance or form; it looked up merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and sank again into nothingness.

  ‘Artie,’ said Ann.

  He woke up and pulled a stroke. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts, Artie.’

  He considered.

  ‘I reely don't think I was thinking of anything,’ he said at last, with a smile. ‘No.’

  He still rested on his oars.

  ‘I expect,’ he said, ‘I was thinking jest what a Rum Go everything is. I expect it was something like that.’

  ‘Queer old Artie!’

  ‘Ain't I? I don't suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before.’

  He reflected for just another minute.

  ‘Oo! – I dunno,’ he said at last, and roused himself to pull.

  THE END

  Appendix

  PREFACE TO VOLUME VIII OF THE ATLANTIC EDITION

  Kipps was written in 1903–04. It is only a fragment of a much larger and more ambitious design. The original title was The Wealth of Mr Waddy. A whole introductory book was written before Kipps himself came upon the scene. It was put aside, and I am afraid destroyed. I seem to remember it as a quite amusing story, but my utmost efforts have failed to unearth the manuscript of those abandoned chapters.1 They told of Mr Waddy's declining years and how he was adopted as an uncle by an enterprising young lady, the cousin of his housekeeper, who subsequently became Mrs Chitterlow. Mr Waddy made many wills and most of them were burned by Mr Chitterlow. They were painful reading for Chitterlow, for Mr Waddy was very outspoken in his wills. Every one of them did Chitterlow burn until only the Kipps will was left – and that Chitterlow had to make the best of. And after Kipps had been ruined by young Mr Walshingham, there were to have been the adventures of young Mr Walshingham as a fugitive in France. But it became clear to the writer by the time he had brought Kipps and Chitterlow together that he had planned his task upon too colossal a scale. There was no way of serializing so vast a book as he had in hand and no way of publishing it that held out any hope of fair payment for the work that remained for him to do. Now books are meant to be read, and there is no interest in writing them unless you believe they will get to readers. So Kipps was clipped off short to the dimensions of a practicable book. The book had a mild success in England and America; its publishers betrayed no enthusiasm about it – and then it went on selling. It had sold, up to the date of writing this preface, about a quarter of a million of copies in various editions, and it still sells and sells.